Phoolan Devi (1963-2001) was born to a lower-caste family in the small village of Gorha Ka Purwa, Uttar Pradesh, India. She was married at eleven, but abandoned by her husband and family. Having suffered vicious abuse from many assailants, she was finally driven to take up the life of a dacoit, or bandit. In short order, she had accumulated her own gang, with herself as the leader.
She became known as the "Bandit Queen" who fought authority with knife and gun, and was often popularly regarded as champion of the downtrodden, after the fashion of Robin Hood. She first came to national and international attention in 1981 as the leader of a gang who allegedly killed 22 high-caste Thakur men in a village of Uttar Pradesh, in what was later dubbed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. She denied any involvement in the massacre.
Pursued by the government and by various rivals, she nonetheless proved difficult to capture. The government of Indira Gandhi and the police finally made a deal with her that she and members of her gang would not face the death penalty. As a part of this arrangement, in 1983 she surrendered on a stage before a crowd of 10,000 people.
Imprisoned without trial for eleven years, she was released in 1994, after Mulayam Singh Yadav, the newly elected chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, directed lawyers for the state to withdraw all charges against her. This occurred at a time when many lower-caste Indians were organizing among themselves and becoming more politically active; Devi was thus tremendously symbolic to this group. Still a popular hero, in 1996 she was elected to Parliament as a member of the Samajwadi Party.
On July 25, 2001, she was gunned down by four men in front of her house in New Delhi.
The 1994 Indian film Bandit Queen is about her life up through her 1983 surrender. She fiercely disputed its accuracy and fought to get it banned in India.
