Sunday, August 26, 2001		Response

The apotheosis of Phoolan Devi
GS Aujla

THIS refers to Ashwani Bhatnagar’s article "Chasing a shadow" (August 5). The living enactment of the dictum "every saint has a past and every sinner a future" seems to have been cut short by the sudden assassination of Phoolan Devi. Her transformation from the foul-mouthed Phoolan to a Devi speaks for a strange apotheosis. Her childhood and early life’s unsavoury experiences fuelled in her a desire for revenge which found it bloody gratification in a massacre like the one at Behmai in which she pulled score of hapless people to avenge the injustice earlier meted out to her. Like a typical outlaw, she haunted the ravines of "Chambal" as a self-appointed gang leader, doling out natural justice in the traditional dacoit fashion.

Whether she was more ‘sinned against than sinning’ should fill up a sociologist’s thesis. A criminologist would take over from the sociologist and conclude that early social injustice provided the catalysts which turned a hapless low caste woman into a dacoit.

Her life was a mixture of myth and reality. Shekhar Kapoor’s film Bandit Queen which depicted her as a creature of circumstances and accorded to her the legitimacy of a queen of dacoits. The legend she became was as much the creation of Shekhar Kapoor as of social forces which she represented. Phoolan Devi was absolved by the public for her criminality and misdemeanour as an aftermath of the artistic presentation of her early life in Bandit Queen.

All her acts of omission and commission, after becoming a dacoit ,appear to fade into insignificance when juxtaposed against the grave indignities inflicted on her by a caste-ridden society. She gets exonerated because she is perceived as a victim of circumstances beyond her control. An anti-heroine becomes a heroine.

Democracy as a purgatorial system further helped this apotheosis. While casting their votes, the electorate in the carpet-weaving Mirazpur voted for the victorious victim. Democracy absolves the greatest sins and crimes if, in the perception of its practitioners, there is moral justification for it. There is an implied force of moral justice which displays itself at the hustings. Public memory being short, it takes very little time to transform an anti-hero into a real hero. This was the secret of Phoolan’s success story.

The manner in which the death of the Bandit Queen was received signalled the revival of the same sympathy factor for a hapless victim which had earlier exonerated in the public mind. The legend which she wove around herself during her life reached its culmination in the manner of her death.