After serving ten years in prison, the suffering low-caste woman Puran Devi was released from prison in 1994. She is a legendary bandit among the Indian population, hailed as a hero by the lower classes (especially women), and hated by men of the upper caste. In 1983, a police siege forced her to surrender to the Madhya Pradesh government. She distrusted Uttar Pradesh and offered conditions of surrender to Madhya Pradesh. While serving his sentence, Puran dictated his ordeal. According to her dictation, Britain and India co-produced the film Bandit Queen, which was a huge hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994.
Puran Devi was initially opposed to the movie release of [Bandit Queen], although the film portrayed her as a tragic hero of a bandit forced to take up a gun due to abuse. When the film was made, she was still in prison. After being released from prison, she sued the film's producers in an Indian court, accusing the film of invading privacy and distorting the facts, reiterating that the Bemmai massacre was not her own crime. The Indian court banned the film on the grounds that it was riddled with lawsuits, but some people believe that the film's exposure to the serious caste discrimination and persecution of women in Indian society is the real reason for its ban.
The ban was soon lifted. Pullan settled out of court with the filmmakers, who paid her £40,000 for the adaptation and made some changes to the footage at her request. In 1996, [Bandit Queen] received official recognition - winning the Indian National Film Awards for Best Picture in Hindi and Best Actress in a Leading Role. That year, 33-year-old Puran was elected to Congress. Finally, she can stand up with dignity and advocate for women and lower castes. These two identities have made her life worse than death.
In the first frame of [Bandit Queen], the actress who played Puran Devi yelled at the camera: "I'm Puran Devi, your sister." His sharp eyes were full of grievance and resentment. From the age of 11, she was neither Puran Devi nor anyone's sister, just a low-caste woman who could ravage at will. It was not until she picked up the gun and became the leader of the bandits that the suffering that accompanied her came to an end, followed by the pursuit of the police, which was another kind of suffering that she could not live normally. At that time, she was underage, never went to school, and never received the respect of others.
The film realistically presents Puran's experience before surrendering to the government at the age of 20, and the material comes from her dictation in prison. Puran was born into a low-caste family in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1963. At the age of 11, her father sold her to a 30-year-old man as his wife for a bicycle and a cow. Unable to bear the abuse and sexual assault, she ran home. Compared with other women, in the face of the same fate, Pulan's stubbornness makes men see it as a stare - women's resistance is a threat to their privileges.
The life of Puran Devi is a mixture of legends in the gossip and slander in official reports, and the parts she tells are not always true. However, there is no doubt that many misfortunes did happen to her. Child marriage, discrimination, rape, abuse, incarceration, before the age of 16, Puran experienced these inhuman sufferings. These crimes were not the accidental acts of some wicked person, but the systematic acts of the seemingly benign villagers, the police officers who were supposed to protect her.
Later, Puran was kidnapped by bandits, and she was still greeted by rape and abuse. The second leader of the gang took pity on her and killed the leader. Pullan fell in love with him, and for the first time experienced what it was like to love and be loved. "He was the first man to treat me as a human being, not a slave or a lustful body," she said. However, the man was soon shot by the bandit leader's brother, and Pullan fell into man's hell again. After escaping from hell, Puran took the initiative to join another gang, formed his own team, and quickly became the leader. At that time, she was underage.
Pulan was forced to become a bandit, and rumors were rampant. The poor said that she robbed the rich to help the poor, punished traitors and eliminated evil, and the rich and officials said that she burned, killed, looted, and committed many evils. In 2001, Puran was shot and his bodyguards were wounded as he got out of his car in front of his home in New Delhi. There were three murderers in all, and one of them quickly turned himself in, claiming that the murder was in revenge for the 22 people who died in the Baymai massacre. The Bey Mai massacre was the most controversial event in Puran's short life, and her family and the Kshatriya caste group have been demanding her trial over the incident, but she insists that other members of the gang killed those people.
The presentation of this scene in [The Queen of Bandits] stood on Puland's standpoint: in February 1981, Puland, who had become a bandit leader, led his men in military uniforms to sack Beimai Village; she was imprisoned here by the bandits, The high caste gang-raped her, stripped her clothes and humiliated her in public; she took the men of the village together and shot several men in the legs angrily, but the murderer was not found, and the other gangsters shot them to death Kshatriya man. The incident shocked India, prompting the government to increase the police force to encircle and suppress Purang.
In reality, in February 1983, the 20-year-old Puran walked out of the gorge where he was hiding, surrendered his weapon, and bowed to the statues of Gandhi and the goddess Durga - the former is the father of Indian independence who advocated caste equality, and the latter is a Hindu religion. the demon goddess. She did not trust the state of Uttar Pradesh where she was born and demanded surrender to the Madhya Pradesh government.
At the public surrender ceremony, Pulan, in the contradictory image of a hero and a demon, stepped onto the rostrum and placed his weapon on the seated Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister in the crowd of more than 8,000 people and journalists and politicians from all over the country. , and then folded his hands to greet the supporters in the audience. Her personal misfortune as a woman has finally come to an end after years of her unrecognized resistance, while countless other women are still in precarious circumstances.
Puran is not the only female bandit in India, there are many before and after her. After her release, she devoted herself to politics and actively fought for the rights of women and lower castes until she was killed. At the same time, she has also been criticized for abuse of power.
(Originally published in the March 2022 issue of "Watching the Movie")
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