The true story of Phoolan Devi has eluded us. Legendary Queen of the Bandits, whose life was bastardized in a popular Indian film that she loathed, she transcended all limits of gender, low caste status, and even conventional morality to seek justice for herself, for women, and for all of her “backward” class. What was the source of her strength? Limited by the modern mindset, journalists and her biographers seem to have ignored what Phoolan herself has said about her deep devotion to Durga, the Hindu goddess of justice: “For centuries every dacoit [bandit] has honored the goddess Durga,” she told an Atlantic Monthly reporter in 1996. Within the Hindu tradition, intense devotion to a deity is often rewarded by attaining the attributes of that god or goddess. Phoolan Devi's commitment was profound: “She is what sustained me; whatever she has, I have; whatever she wants, I want. And all of the men in my gang considered me to be a reincarnation of Durga.”

Where the myth of Durga meets the legend of Phoolan Devi, a new story can be heard—one that compels us to bear witness to a divine fury that ferociously ignited in her the desire for triumph, the courage to speak the truth, and an unbridled demand for equality and justice.

The Myth of Durga

After years of austerities, Mahishasura, king of the asuras [demons], was finally granted a boon by Lord Brahma: No man or god would be able to kill him. Inflated by the enormous power that this boon gave him, Mahishasura, the fearsome buffalo demon, began to terrorize Heaven, inflamed with the desire to rule the world. For one hundred years, he waged war against the gods, invading Heaven with an army of asuras. Insane with blood lust, he wantonly killed one god after another, destroying everything in his path. Chaos and anarchy reigned. Driving the gods from Heaven so that they were left to roam on Earth as mere mortals, Mahishasura grabbed the throne.

Frightened, the gods begged the Lords Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva to put an end to Mahishasura's tyranny. Hearing their fellow gods' pleas, their faces contorted in rage and they gathered all of their power, creating an enormous glare that lit the skies. Then light issued from all of the gods, uniting in an unequaled brilliance that sent flames into every corner of Heaven. Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma called forth a feminine presence, knowing that Mahishasura's life was not protected from a female adversary. Lo, from this light emerged a woman—fully grown—gorgeous, bright yellow, with many arms. Her name was Devi Durga. Gracefully, forcefully, she rode a lion, a permanent scowl etched upon her beautiful face. Durga was born to kill.

The Story of Phoolan Devi

On a small spot of earth near one of the thousand bends in the sacred Yamuna River, there was a town large enough to have a name but too small to be found on any map of India. Living here were two brothers, born into a caste only slightly above the untouchables (the pariahs below the caste system itself): Bihari, who was sly and cunning and the father of sons, and Devidin, good-hearted but timid, the father of four girls and a boy. Immediately after the death of their father, devious Bihari confiscated the family land. With his wealth, he achieved a level of affluence that gave him influence far beyond his caste. He thereby exiled his younger illiterate brother to a world of humiliation and hunger, left to desperately scratch a living from land too exhausted to yield more than cucumbers. Devidin's wife, Mooli, continuously bemoaned their fate—robbed of their land and burdened by daughters who would need dowries that they could ill afford.

Day after day, year after year, the second daughter, Phoolan Devi—meaning “Goddess of Flowers”—watched her father grow stooped and her mother increasingly enraged as they struggled to support a too-large and too-female family. Small, dark, with a wide, flat nose like her father, Phoolan inherited her mother's anger. It glittered in her eyes, fueled her quick intelligence, and bestowed on her an uncanny confidence. One day, Phoolan convinced her older sister to accompany her to their uncle's land—land that should have been theirs. Laughing and eating raw chickpeas from the uncle's field, the girls drew the attention and ire of their much older cousin, Maiyadin. Phoolan taunted him when he demanded that the girls leave “his” land. As Maiyadin and his servant tried to forcibly remove them, Phoolan bit her cousin's hand and tripped him, watching in satisfaction as he fell in the mud, ruining his spotless white kurta. He beat her unconscious with a brick. The next day, Maiyadin brought the police. For the girls' offense, their mother and father were beaten with sticks.

Phoolan Devi, born a burdensome girl into a life where those of her caste were treated less well than animals, prayed to her father's favorite goddess, Durga, asking her “to show me how to slay demons as she had done, and to give me a stick too, so I could fight back.” Phoolan Devi was born for revenge.

Seeing the goddess born out of their collective brilliance, the gods rejoiced. Each god bestowed upon her his unique power and weapons. Shiva gave her a trident, called forth from his own. Vishnu gave her a discus, and Brahma gave prayer beads and the water gourd of an ascetic. From Himalaya, lord of the mountains, came the gift of the lion that was her mount. A sword and shield, impenetrable armor, a garland of snakes, jewels, lotus flowers, and much, much more were other gifts from the gods. Holding a different weapon in each of her many arms, Durga laughed defiantly.

One day, when Phoolan was about eleven, she was playing with her little sister on the mudbank by the river. Suddenly her mother came and dragged her by her hair back to the village. Her mother and other village women removed Phoolan's little-girl blouse and skirt, bathed her five times using different oils, and then slid silver bangles on her arms and rings on her toes. She was wrapped in a sari with her head covered so that she couldn't see. This was her wedding. Awkwardly walking through the ceremony, Phoolan found her tiny fingers engulfed by the large, plump, and sweaty hand of the man who would be her husband—a man over twenty years her senior whom she had seen only once before.

Her husband, Putti Lal, was supposed to wait before bringing Phoolan Devi to live with him—because she was not yet a woman. Emboldened by her family's poverty, he insisted on taking her with him immediately. And he was most likely encouraged by Maiyadin, the son of Bihari, who wanted his spirited cousin out of his way. Her mother and father protested and cried in vain. Putti Lal persisted, and despite the fact that it was against the law for Phoolan to be his wife at such a young age, her parents relented, hoping for the best. And Phoolan, having no idea why her parents were distressed, comforted them, saying she would be back soon.

She was right. Months later, her family heard that she was ill. Her father went to retrieve her and found her bone-thin, with her hair falling out in clumps, her body covered in boils, and deep racking pain in her abdomen. Putti Lal had not waited for her to grow up. He had used her in every possible way, punched her in the face when she cried out, and beat her repeatedly. And her sighs, moans, and screams did not bring a single soul to her rescue. “There was nothing I could do to stop him,” Phoolan said. “But I swore to the goddess Durga who drank the blood of demons that he would pay for the pain he caused me. . . . He had said himself that I would grow one day. So I vowed that I would survive, and I would have my revenge.”

The blood of the demons and their elephants and horses ran in rivers through Heaven as Durga and her millions destroyed them all. Mahishasura transformed into his buffalo form and trampled Durga's legions. Then he rushed toward her lion. With his horns he threw mountains into the air, while his lashing tail whipped the oceans until they overflowed. He tore the clouds of the sky with his horns and trampled the earth beneath his hooves.

By the age of sixteen, Phoolan Devi had lost battle after battle with demon after demon. When she slapped a village councilman's daughter because the girl had assaulted her mother, the councilman flayed Phoolan and her sister with a whip until they were covered in blood. When she complained about being harassed by the council leader's son, the son and a friend scaled the walls of her family home and raped her on the dirt floor in front of her parents. When she dared to seek vengeance on the council leader, her cousin Maiyadin and the council leader staged a robbery and then accused her of being part of a bandit gang. When she protested her innocence in court, the police took her into a room and gang-raped her for three days, warning her that if she told anyone, they would torture her, burn the family's house down, and destroy her family. Because she had been in prison, she was shunned for being promiscuous. Because she refused to be shamed and silenced, she was again gang-raped, this time by Thakurs (upper-caste landowners) in front of her parents, who had been beaten into passivity. Because she had been raped, the rumor spread that she was available to any man for sex, so other Thakurs came from all over the countryside, looking for her. She hid from these demons who appeared out of nowhere and who assumed that their upper caste status gave them a right to use her body as they pleased.

Finally, something snapped, and Phoolan stepped beyond fear. She realized that it wasn't just the poor who lived in terror—the position of the rich and ruling classes was built on intimidation, and they, too, lived in fear. So Phoolan did what no girl—and certainly no woman—of her caste had ever dared to do: She intimidated them back. “All you had to do was frighten them! Because they used violence, you had to be violent too!” she explained. And frighten them she did. Phoolan threatened to chop Maiyadin's sister into pieces. She went to the council leader's son and told him that if, after what he had done to her, he didn't marry her, she would “cut it off.” To the Thakurs who wanted her for sex, she asked, “Would you like someone to do to [your wife and daughters] what you want to do with me?” and she threatened to shoot them, although she didn't own a rifle. No one bothered her anymore. “All it took was courage,” she said, “and the threat of violence.”

No one in the village could even imagine that Phoolan, who was born into a subservient lower caste, would dare to be so outrageously bold on her own. Rumors spread that she really was part of a bandit gang. So the powerful men in the village arranged for some bandits to take her away, to use her as they wished, and then to kill her. But by Durga's grace, Phoolan Devi was not killed by the bandits. Just as the bandit leader—an upper-caste Thakur—was going to rape her, his second-in-command, Vikram, who was lower caste like Phoolan, shot him through the head.

The gods praised Durga, offering her flowers from paradise, anointing her with perfumes, and burning incense in her honor. They bowed down before her. In Devi Durga they recognized the embodiment of all the powers of the gods. Realizing that she brought fortune to those who are good and misfortune to those who are evil, they asked her to protect the universe. Because the gods had seen her unfathomable destructiveness, they urged her to be gracious to all creation. They called her to remove fear from those in distress and to dispel suffering and poverty.

“Long live Phoolan Devi! Long live Phoolan Devi!” cried all of the villagers on Phoolan's first visit back to her village after her kidnapping. Phoolan told them all to go to hell. She had left the village in terror and returned in triumph, the second wife of dacoit leader Vikram Mallah. The villagers had already heard that she had mercilessly beaten her former husband, Putti Lal, leaving him for dead with a note, written by Vikram, pinned on him: “Warning: This is what happens to old men who marry young girls!” And they also knew that she had been involved in the murder of the man who had trumped up the robbery charges against her. The powerful men in her village now came to her on their knees. The village council leader declared that she was the reincarnation of Durga and touched her shoes with his forehead. She whipped him—just once—across his back, leaving him with his well-fed face in the mud. “Like the goddess,” she recounted, “I was driven by my hunger for justice, for revenge over demons. That is what gave me my strength. When the rich did bad things, our duty as dacoits was to make them pay.” Phoolan and Vikram spent a year bringing dacoit justice to the Chambal Valley. Vikram taught Phoolan the dacoit way of life: how to shoot a gun, kidnap the wealthy for ransom, disguise themselves as police, hold up truck convoys, and hide in the ravines and the jungle. They divided the spoils of each raid into three parts: one part for themselves to buy food and ammunition, one part for the local Brahmin at the temple for Durga and the gods, and the last for the poor to give them relief from the dual tyranny of a violently oppressive feudal caste order and the constant complaint of their empty stomachs. Songs celebrating their victories rang throughout the valleys, and the police put a price on their heads.

Then Vikram's life was cut short. Phoolan could not get him to heed the omens that Durga had sent to warn them. Shri Ram, a bandit who was once a mentor to Vikram and was a Thakur, murdered Vikram in his sleep. He then chloroformed Phoolan Devi, bound her, and took her to town after town ruled by Thakurs. “They fell on me like wolves,” Phoolan recounted. “I saw crowds of faces and I was naked in front of them. Demons came from without end from the fires of Naraka to rape me. I prayed to the gods and goddesses to help me, to let me live, to let me run through the damp fields, climb the ravines, to let me have my revenge.” Through the kindness of a Brahmin, she escaped—battered inside and out, her wrists broken, thorns embedded in her flesh, feet swollen, and haunted by her memories.

Phoolan Devi made a vow to herself: “I would be a woman no longer. Whatever I did from then on, I would do as a man would do. Evil had left its mark on me. I had survived the evil of men, and I had nothing more to lose. I was stronger than ever.” So the Bandit Queen allied herself with another bandit leader, a Muslim named Baba Mustaqeem. He gave her the pick of his men and asked them to recognize her as their brother, calling her by the masculine version of her name: Phool Singh. Mustaqeem gave her a rubber stamp that said: “PHOOLAN DEVI QUEEN OF BANDITS” to stamp onto the doors and walls of the homes in the villages that she and her gang raided. She would shout into a megaphone, “We are the friends of the poor and the sworn enemies of the rich. Vikram Mallah ki jai!” in honor of her former partner.

Phoolan was heralded as the “Avenging Angel” among poor women and girls. “I punished the wicked with the same tortures they inflicted on others, because I knew the police never listened to the complaints of the poor,” she declared. “I knew there were hundreds of girls who had been forced to undergo dangerous abortions to avoid disgrace, or else throw themselves in the river or drown themselves at the bottom of a well because they were treated like prostitutes, and they were afraid. They were all afraid.” Her justice was swift and brutal: “I crushed the serpent they used to torture women. I dismembered them. It was my vengeance, and the vengeance of all women.” Her legend grew fearsome: “People of my caste heard all about it. If a mother wanted to protect her daughter, or a father his wife or his sister, they knew all they had to do was say to the rapist that Phoolan Devi would punish them. And I did.”

But Phoolan Devi would not rest until her enemy, Shri Ram, was destroyed. All of her men and those of Baba Mustaqeem knew how important this was to her—how deeply, inhumanly she had been defiled and degraded. Hearing that Shri Ram and his brother were in the Thakur village Behmai, the gangs headed into the town. What happened on that day remains a mystery. At the end of the raid, twenty-two Thakurs were shot; all but two would die. Shri Ram and his brother were not among them. Phoolan Devi was held responsible, although eyewitness reports are contradictory. She herself said that she was on the other side of the village when it happened. “What can I say?” she said. “You know how it is: If a woman does something, men have to prove themselves to be superior and therefore go further. . . . I do not believe in killing people without a positive reason, but the situation got out of control and, in the eyes of Durga Mata, I am innocent of these deaths.”

No photographs of the Bandit Queen had ever been made public. Eight thousand curious peasants, and press from around the world, came to the small town of Bhind to see Phoolan surrender on terms that she had negotiated for herself and her men with Indira Gandhi's government. For the preceding two years, Durga had whispered softly in her mind, telling her where to go, how to escape from one of the most intense dragnets ever mounted in India's history. Her enemy, Shri Ram, had been murdered—killed in a fight over a woman. Phoolan Devi stood on a platform, held her rifle over her head, and handed it to the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. She bowed to the portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Durga that had been placed on the platform at her request. It was to Durga and Gandhi that she gave herself up.

A tiny, foul-mouthed, angry woman stood before the hungry eyes of the crowd, shattering the projected fantasies of a society that worshiped Durga but refused to recognize the rage of a lower-caste woman. Where was the woman who was reported to be “nearly six feet tall,” whose wild lovemaking would be “like drinking the most delectable deadly poison?” Where was the brazen nymphomaniac who slept with men before she killed them? She was, one report said, “too dark, too short, flat-chested and rude.” She was every woman—with a vengeance. The upper-caste press devoured her. And even so, a doll in her likeness became one of the most popular toys among girls throughout India.

After “rotting” in prison for eleven years, Phoolan Devi was released in 1994 just at the time when the lower castes began to exert political power. Having kicked down the door to dignity for herself, she wanted to open it wide for others to follow. Immediately, she began forming the Eklavya Sena, an organization to teach self-defense to the poor. Twice she was elected—by adoring women—as a member of Parliament to the House of the People on a platform proclaiming the rights of girls and women. Here she discovered another world, a world that to her mind was equally, if not more, filled with crooks and thieves: “In New Delhi people are so much more duplicitous,” she told a reporter. “In Chambal . . . you can do things your way, and by the will of God.”

Just as in the valleys of the Chambal, Phoolan Devi knew when she was in danger—perhaps it was still Durga whispering warnings to her. In the summer of 2001, she told a friend that she knew her time was near. On July 25, she stepped out of her car in front of her home in Delhi and assassins pumped bullets into her head and into her chest. She died before reaching the hospital.

Let Durga hear her prayer:

Sing of my deeds
Tell of my combats
How I fought the treacherous demons
Forgive my failings
And bestow on me peace.