Twenty-two years after being felled under a hail of bullets, Phoolan Devi Lives.
As a born-again heroine, the Bandit Queen crackles into life on the pages of Parini Shroff’s debut novel accompanied by a new posse of bandit queens. They are depicted shouting gaalis in a foreign tongue that will surely send the sanskari police scrambling for their veto.
It’s a Stepford Wives situation set in Kohra, a dismal village in Gujarat — a revolt by six hitherto meek women seeking retribution when they find that the government’s micro-financing schemes meant to empower them into becoming self-sufficient are only encouraging their husbands into drink and debauchery. Will they continue to channel their subservience to societal norms by observing Karva Chauth, or will they brandish their velans, or wooden rolling pins, of revolt against the entrenched patriarchy?
Acting as Lysistrata, the leader of a much earlier revolt of women from ancient Athens, is Geeta behn. Her qualification is that she’s a former brutally-abused and currently abandoned wife of her husband Ramesh. Everyone in the village presumes that she has murdered him. That gives her a certain cachet as a churel or succubus as Shroff explains in her many asides.
If you kill 20...
As bodies inexplicably pile up, the loan mela ladies are joined by Kushi, the well-to-do widow of the local don, and guardian of the burning ghats. She’s not only efficient at disposing of the recent dead without asking for death and domicile certificates, she lectures the others on the Dalit hierarchy and how the different degrees of discrimination operate in our caste-obsessed culture.
Geeta behn has a portrait of the Bandit Queen on the wall of her one-room house, as under different cultures women may have of the Virgin Mary. We get updates on the Bandit Queen’s trajectory at regular intervals when matters get out of hand. One particular line resonates, the one that the Bandit Queen’s partner explains as a reason for mayhem: “For if you kill twenty, your fame will spread; if you kill only one, they will hang you as a murderess.”
The other characters are Geeta’s best friend, Saloni, green-eyed and greedy from a childhood of deprivation; twin sisters, Priya and Preity, the latter mutilated by her acid-throwing husband; and Farah, the token Muslim whose husband drinks away all the money she gets from the government-aided loan dispensed by a suitably smooth leather-booted-and-suited sarkari servant.
It’s hard to identify any decent male in this town. There is one Karem, however, who despite being a seller of hooch is a widower who loves his four children and manages to disarm Geeta behn into his hairy arms (pun intended). And a rescue dog that Geeta behn finds tethered in the backyard of an aspiring don of the neighbouring district town where Karem goes to sell his country liquor. Geeta bhen snatches the puppy and hides it in a shoulder bag, takes it home and names it ‘Bandit’, a name that, let us add, can apply to both men and women.
The Bandit Queens
₹499
Too much Americanese
The don, Bada Bhai, a Hindu, has multiple disadvantages. He can beget a son only by a local Rabari (tribal) woman, whom his wife naturally despises. He’s compelled to add methanol to the country liquor to make it more potent but, being a decent individual, feeds it to stray dogs to make sure his customers don’t go blind. He has all the top police officers under his payroll, though apparently not a young woman ASP named Sinha.
Shroff is described as having an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and is a practising attorney. The old meme ‘ABCD’, could be amended in her case from confused desi to ‘compassionate desi’, determined to root out the plague of caste, colour, corruption, childlessness and communal hatred on the subcontinent. Add rape and repeat atrocities on the wretched of our land and you get the dismal picture that Shroff is determined to display as against the ‘India Rising’ image concealed behind feel-good slogans.
Shroff could well have become the next Naipaul with her sharp vignettes of contemporary Indian life on the margins. She, however, writes in an execrable patois of Americanese that when mouthed by the ‘Desperate Housewives of Kohra’ makes them just as vicious as the men they so efficiently dispatch into the next world.
The writer is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.
