Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (42 page)

This is not to say that all was light, as there was surely a dark side to criminal gangs in India during this same period. The most notable malefactors were the Thuggee
,
whose principal practice was to infiltrate caravans, posing as merchants, then strike from within at the opportune moment. Strangling with a garrote was their preferred killing method. To get a number of their fighters inside the caravan, the Thugs patiently inserted new “merchants” at substantial intervals from one another, often as much as a hundred miles, to allay suspicion. Then they generally struck at predetermined ambush points where outside Thugs were lying in wait to join in the attack.
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A flavor of Frank Kitson’s pseudo gangs may be found in these Thug practices. Eventually, however, the great British administrator in India during the early nineteenth century, William Sleeman, also employed a stratagem very much like the pseudo gang concept to recruit turned Thugs to go after their fellows—a practice that also echoes George Crook’s use of friendly Apaches to track their renegade brethren. In this fashion Sleeman finally broke the Thugs.

But for all these efforts to make the roads of India safe for commerce, pilgrimage, and general travel, banditry persisted and even grew during the century between the defeat of the Thugs and the end of the British Raj. A major attempt was made to contain the threat of social banditry with the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, the first in a series of laws that sought to identify and restrict the movements of those so labeled—or stigmatized, depending on one’s point of view. Many of the tribes initially listed as “criminal” were actually being punished for having sided with the Sepoys in the rebellion of 1857 against British rule. But later versions of the law, enacted in 1911 and 1924, spread the stigma far beyond the original insurgents in expanding efforts to stamp out social banditry.

Yet the
DACOITS
persisted, their actions during this period showing a mix of “noble robber” and insurgent motivations. That they remained a force even after Indian independence in 1947, after reasons for rebellion should have been obviated, suggests that economic inequity had a lot to do with the continuance of such practices. The Indian government, faced with this intractable problem, resorted to reinstating a version of the old British law, now called the Habitual Offenders Act, which was passed in 1952 and is still on the books.

In practice this law looks quite a bit like its British predecessor, and for more than half a century it has had a pernicious effect on members of over five hundred tribal groups, a total of some sixty million Indians. Their movements are monitored and constrained, and they are subject to other restrictions that make it extremely difficult for them to make their way in the world honestly, or to slip the bonds of caste and class. By some scholarly assessments, the law actually seems to have created more
DACOITS
than there would otherwise have been.
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Into this world of the largely dispossessed, Phoolan Devi was born in August 1963. She was the daughter of a poor
DALIT
(untouchable) who nonetheless had managed to acquire about an acre of land, the centerpiece being a good timber-giving
NEEM
tree. Uttar Pradesh, the north central Indian state where Phoolan was born, is more than a quarter million square miles in size with a population, largely poor and rural, of more than 150 million. Its terrain is sculpted in part by the Chambal and Yamuna rivers, and is dominated by a nearly six-hundred-mile-long swath of mostly rough country replete with labyrinthine gorges, mazes of ravines and small connecting rivers.

This region has perhaps been best and most simply described as “strange and tortured . . . the Indian badlands.”
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In short, it is ideal country for
DACOIT
hideouts, and banditry has enjoyed a long history here. In its insurgent mode it goes back at least as far as the resistance mounted by the deposed Tomar rulers who had been driven from Delhi by the Chauhans in the twelfth century. By the sixteenth century, however,
DACOITY
had become primarily criminal in purpose, being driven now by feuds between the factions of competing Rajput princes. While guerrilla resistance to Moghul rule characterized some behavior during this period, greed came to dominate the nobler motivation. And matters stayed this way for centuries.

When Phoolan was eleven years old, so most accounts go,
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her cousin Maiyadin came to her village and, declaring himself head of the family, had the
NEEM
tree chopped down for timber sale. He would also later take the opportunity to relieve Phoolan’s father of his land. To both actions her father apparently submitted with only mild protest. Not so Phoolan, who despite her youth called Maiyadin out publicly for his act of thievery. Soon she found herself betrothed—also the doing, it seems, of her cousin—to a man more than three times her age who lived several hundred miles from her village. Married off to him, Phoolan now had her sexual awakening in the form of rape and a socialization to beatings and confinement.

Ever resistant, Phoolan was soon returned to her home village of Gorha ka Purwa, being deemed too young to fulfill her duties as wife. Three years later, in 1977, when she was returned to the same man, she bucked against his familiar abuse and was taken back home a second time. The terrible dishonor brought upon her family by her husband’s rejection was so great that no marriage alliance was possible. Phoolan recalled it as a time when her mother “would go from village to village asking, ‘Is there anyone who will marry my daughter? Even someone lame or blind?’ But there was no one.”
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Now even the young men of her own village tried to prey upon her, seeking her out as an easy target for physical and sexual abuse. In the face of these ever-present threats, Phoolan became more watchful, and much tougher.

She also rekindled her anger at Maiyadin, continuing to castigate him publicly for his acts of thievery against his own extended family. Although illiterate, it was she who argued the case brought against Maiyadin in the Allahabad High Court. She lost, but her sheer audacity enraged her cousin, whose anger had been simmering ever since the failure of his earlier attempt to dispose of her in a distant marriage. Soon after the court fight, in 1979, Maiyadin arranged her arrest for stealing small items from his home. While in jail she was beaten and raped yet again, this time by the authorities. But upon her release she was still not willing to give up her fight with Maiyadin.

It seems that he now had her kidnapped by a largely higher-caste band of
DACOITS
. (Such gangs exist because the attraction of easy access to wealth and emotional release through violence have an appeal that goes well beyond the poor and dispossessed.) Some dispute that she was in fact kidnapped, arguing instead that, being desperately unhappy, she simply “walked away from her life.”
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However she came to this pass, Phoolan’s time among the bandits of the ravines now began.

*

Phoolan Devi’s Indian Badlands

At first it seemed that the old pattern of rape and beatings was to continue, this time in a more exotic setting, among harder men than any she had previously known. A local
DACOIT
leader, Babu Gajar, appeared to want her for himself, at least at the outset. But after three nightmare days for Phoolan, the gang’s second-in-command, Vikram Mallah, a
DALIT
among higher-caste criminals, killed Babu and took charge. He took Phoolan too, but treated her with respect, for it seems he knew of her long, determined fight against Maiyadin. Soon they were lovers, his courtship a skillful blending of small gifts and instruction in bandit fieldcraft. Phoolan proved an excellent rifle shot and quickly learned how to move with speed along the edge of rivers and streams, where traction was reasonable and no footprints were left behind for trackers.

For about a year Vikram led the gang on a series of wide-ranging exploits across Uttar and Madhya Pradesh. The favorite targets of their raids were higher-caste villages, but they also managed a few train robberies. To catch their victims by surprise and get the drop on guards, the
DACOITS
often wore police uniforms for, as Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley put it, “What villager would dare fire at an approaching group dressed as police?”
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This ruse, while employed regularly and effectively with highly prized, official (but stolen) police uniforms, was a hard one for Phoolan to participate in, given that she was only about five feet tall, and no uniform this small could be had. Not wanting to be left out of the raids, Phoolan made the necessary alterations herself and was thus able to join in the action.

After each raid or robbery, the band easily eluded their pursuers by slipping back to the ravines. Beyond the fact that their activities were criminal, Vikram and Phoolan seemed to have much in common with Garibaldi and his wife Anita, who rode and fought side by side in campaigns conducted in both the jungles of South America and the hills of central Italy. Both couples were intensely devoted to each other, finding a strong bond of love in the midst of conflict and omnipresent danger. And where Garibaldi was separated from Anita only by her death while she was fleeing with him after the fall of the Roman republic, Phoolan was to lose Vikram to assassins’ bullets.

It happened when two of the upper-caste gang members, the brothers Sri and Lala Ram, who had just returned to the ravines after serving prison time, outraged by the killing of Babu and the captaincy of a
DALIT
, shot Vikram dead in Phoolan’s arms. After this killing they took Phoolan to the village of Behmai where, according to all accounts, she was held captive for more than three weeks, gang-raped, and repeatedly beaten. Sri Ram perpetrated much of this abuse and orchestrated even more. In a psychological attempt to break her spirit, after repeated rapes and beatings her captors publicly humiliated Phoolan by sending her stark naked to fetch water from the well, in front of all the women and children of the village.

Some of the townsfolk, appalled by the way Phoolan was being treated, sought ways for her to escape. Apparently some of her
DALIT
friends, old associates of Vikram, also hovered nearby, wanting to help her. But the catalyst for the action to free her was a kind old Brahmin priest, Santosh Pandit, who used his high caste and moral presence skillfully. One night he quietly took her from the village. Phoolan was in terrible shape at the time. As Pandit recalled, “When I brought her out of there, she looked like a bag of bones and feathers.”
12
He helped her when she stumbled, but Phoolan insisted on walking out of the village for the most part on her own two feet, vowing revenge. She collapsed just outside Behmai.

After recovering from her abuse, Phoolan, still a teenager, cobbled together her own gang with the help of Man Singh, a
DACOIT
who would become her new lover. Over the next year and more they mounted repeated raids, then retreated to the ravines to elude their pursuers. When the commotion died down after each action, and the vigilance of their potential victims relaxed, they would strike once more. Raid, retreat, and raid again; this was their cycle of life—until St. Valentine’s Day 1981, when Phoolan brought her gang to Behmai in search of revenge against the Ram brothers. They were not there; still, Phoolan was in full retributive mode: she executed twenty-two villagers.

For two years after this massacre in Behmai, Phoolan and her gang were relentlessly but unsuccessfully hunted by the authorities. Their raids continued, often accompanied by quite terrible violence. Their retreats were skillful, taking full advantage of the rabbit warren of ravines that made sustained, accurate pursuit so difficult. At the height of the hunt, more than two thousand police were on the trail of Phoolan and her dozen or so gang members. But they seldom got very close, as the intelligence network she had created by bribing local politicians and policeman—which had proved so useful in helping the gang select juicy targets—also served as an early warning system against the many sweeps designed to track her down.

In some respects this phase of Phoolan’s life resembles the last years of Abd el-Kader’s resistance to the French when, even after long years of fighting, he still was able to elude capture. Just as Abd el-Kader was eventually persuaded to come in from the cold by a thoughtful Frenchman, Leon de Lamoricière, so too Phoolan was finally coaxed to surrender in February 1983, along with about a dozen of her comrades, by the police superintendent of Bhind, Rajendra Chaturvedi. It may have helped that Lala Ram had just sent Phoolan a note informing her that he had killed her principal tormentor, his brother Sri Ram, in a dispute over a woman.