Phoolan Devi was an Indian female rights activist, bandit and politician from the Samajwadi Party. Born into a poor family in rural Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan endured poverty, child marriage and had an abusive marriage before taking to a life of crime. In 2001, she was shot dead at the gates of her official bungalow in New Delhi by former rival bandits whose kinsmen had been slaughtered by her gang.
About Phoolan Devi in brief
Phoolan Devi was an Indian female rights activist, bandit and politician from the Samajwadi Party. Born into a poor family in rural Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan endured poverty, child marriage and had an abusive marriage before taking to a life of crime. In 2001, she was shot dead at the gates of her official bungalow in New Delhi by former rival bandits whose kinsmen had been slaughtered at Behmai by her gang. The 1994 film Bandit Queen is loosely based on her life until that point. She was charged with 48 crimes, including multiple murders, plunder, arson and kidnapping for ransom. She spent the next eleven years in jail, as the various charges against her were tried in court. In 1994, the state government headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav summarily withdrew all charges and she was released. She then stood for election to parliament as a candidate of the Samjwadi party and was twice elected to the Lok Sabha as the member for Mirzapur. She suffered continuous beatings and sexual abuse at the hands of her husband and was returned to her family in ‘disgrace’ In retaliation for the public and private humiliations on him, he went to the local cops and accused her of running away to marry a man named Puttilal Mallah, who was several hundred miles away and was thrice her age. When she was eleven years old, her family arranged for her to marry her husband Devi Din Mallah.
The respectful sobriquet ‘Devi’ was conferred upon her by the media and public at this point. Her family was very poor. The major asset owned by them was around 1 acre of farmland with a large but very old neem tree on it. She felt that since her father had no sons, her uncle and cousin were asserting sole claim on the family’s farmland inherited from the paternal grandfather. She confronted her much older cousin, taunted him publicly, called him a thief and repeatedly and, over a period of several weeks, showered abuse and taunts upon him. She was eventually beaten unconscious with a brick and he did not budge even when family elders tried to use force to drag them home. A few months after this incident, she went to live with her husband in the village of Ghura Ka Purwa in Jalaun District, Uttar Pradesh. She later married her husband, and they had two children. The couple had a son, who died in a car crash when he was just six years old. She also had a daughter, who later died in an accident. Her husband and daughter-in-law were killed in a road accident in the early 1990s. The family was forced to move to a new village, which was a few miles away from the original one. She had a second son, but he was killed by a stray stray bullet. She went on to marry another man who was a member of the local Mallah gang, and had several more children.
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This page is based on the article Phoolan Devi published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 04, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
