Bandit Queen

Trigger Warning: This post contains explicit descriptions of sexual assault and descriptions of images some may find disturbing.

Within the first thirty minutes of Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi is assaulted or raped five times on camera, with the implication that it happened more times than that in real life. Several of the incidents occur when she is 11 years old. Indeed, it happens twice before the opening credit sequence. The ethics of forcing a child actor to replay an assault are tricky. One hopes the intent of this film was to tell the story of this woman in such a way as to help understand why she acted as she did. The film also gives the audience reason to ask, Why haven’t more people risen up like this? In doing so, however, I fear that the film also acts as a way to curtail revolutionary action or autonomous rejection of colonial governance.

“This is a True Story.”

-Opening Title Card of Bandit Queen

“I am Phoolan Devi, you sisterfuckers!”

-Opening line of Bandit Queen

The film makes apparent one aspect of the power relationships it depicts: rape is a form of terrorism. That Devi was raped and assaulted multiple times, often depicted in front of the town and often with cold complicity on their part, demonstrates the idea of rape as a form of social control. When Shri Ram parades a naked, beaten, repeatedly raped, and still-bleeding, Devi in front of the village, he proclaims: “This is what we do to low caste goddesses,” ensuring that Devi’s humiliation intimidates those who would stand up.

The film stylizes the violence of rape in a way that both glorifies it and shows it as violent. The high sexual content of the film–only a small portion of which is explicitly consensual sexual activity–is tied to the desire and need to tell Phoolan Devi’s story. The graphic nature of some of this content reinforces the horror of what is happening to her. (This is particularly true when Babu Gujjar, who has kidnapped Devi, is raping her in a mountain range. Vikram shoots Gujjar in the head and kills him, as well as several other members of his gang, becoming the new leader. This is one of the few times that someone comes to Devi’s aid. Even so, Devi is covered in Gujjar’s blood, and is extremely disturbed by the violence that met the violence done against her.) It remains the case that Devi was still alive at the time of the film’s release, and that the explicit content that causes the film to have a gut impact also forced her to live through having her repeated assaults being played on cinema screens around the world.

When the film was released in 1994, Devi threatened self-immolation if the film was released without her seeing it. She was concerned about the way she was being portrayed, and concerned with the graphic nature of the scenes depicting her rape. “They have shown me naked to the press. People come up to me and say I look very sexy. I find this humiliating,” Devi said in a comment published in the Independent. The producer of Bandit Queen said in the same piece that he wanted to screen the film for Devi privately because, “We feel it could be traumatic for her to go through her past all over again.”

Violence begets violence. The internal frictions of the caste system become the grounds for acts of violence against an entire caste, the Rajput (the Thakur in the film), whether or not they had individually harmed her. There is a code to this violence: no women or children are harmed, harassed, or assaulted. It is the men of the clan who bare the brunt of the violence, being gunned-down en mass at a wedding party in a violent sequence that matches the violence enacted on Devi. The naked girl-child screaming as she watches the men of her village be gunned down reminds viewers of the screaming image of a young Devi being abused by her husband. Even with this act–the act that Devi was actually wanted for, above and beyond being a bandit–Devi seems not to find her emotional catharsis through this act, as Shri Ram was not in the village. Compare this scene with the scene in which Devi and Vikram return to the village where Devi’s husband lives. Seeing his child-bride grown up and recognizing her, his expression turns from rage to fear as Devi begins beating him to death with her rifle. In this case, she is attacking a specific person who abused her. In the former case, she is attacking an entire section of the caste system that was responsible for allowing her abuse. This has been cemented through the film by repeated shot sequences of people watching or pretending not to watch as Devi is abused.

Even with the clear link between past abuse at the hands of a particular caste and the retribution Devi’s gang wrought, the film’s stance on Devi’s actions and the film’s sympathies towards her remain ambiguous. There is a point to the life of Phoolan Devi, but the filmmakers seem uncertain of what that is. Our sympathies are raised and then questioned within a few scenes of each other. In some moments, it seems as though her life is being glorified, to turn her into the goddess people call her through the film, and other times it seems as though her life is a cautionary tale, capable of repressing those who might have the instinct to speak out (against colonialism, against caste) by saying: Look at this woman who spoke out in the way you want to. Look at how she was beaten and abused. This could easily happen to you as well. Thinking about the film, however, it becomes clear for me that Bandit Queen questions the responsibility of the observer, the viewer, both ithin the context of the film itself and in the meta-sense of the film itself. In viewing this film and questioning the way it depicts Devi’s life, are we perpetuating some of the same abuse she suffered in her lifetime?

Phoolan Devi died in 2001. She was shot multiple times. At the time, she was a member of the Indian Parliament. Her assassin’s trial and sentencing took place over a ten year period. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014. Several Bollywood producers and actors have expressed an interest to meet with him to discuss a sequel film, tentatively titled The End of Bandit Queen.