The subaltern, the text and the critic

Reading Phoolan Devi

Bibliographic Data

ID2178427
AuthorsAnuradha Ramanujan (University of Delhi, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume44
Issue4
Pages367-378
Publication date2008-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449850802410481
OpenAlexW2092470827
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited10

Outlaw‐turned‐politician Phoolan Devi was gunned down by unknown assailants in New Delhi in July 2001. Extensive media coverage of her death traced the extraordinary evolution of this woman from extreme poverty and crime to bourgeois respectability and realpolitik. While rumours of old enemies, unsettled scores and political intrigues proliferated, her party cohorts sought to canonize her as an unwavering champion of the oppressed. This article addresses Phoolan's figuration in two narrative accounts of her life which, in very different ways, exploit and expand her iconic status in the popular imaginary. Close textual readings focus on questions of representation in life‐writing such as truth, voice, audience and authority. I analyse how (auto)biographical subjectivity located at the site of difference (illiterate, "lower" caste, third world, woman) for consumption by a national and/or global, English‐speaking readership participates in and fractures the power relationships of victim–agent and periphery–centre implicit in textual construction. I also explore how a viable feminist practice can negotiate the contradiction between its desire for alliance building across differences of class and caste and the ubiquitous risk of appropriation of marginalized subjectivities resulting from attempts to sidestep or manage difference in service to a politics of change. Keywords: autobiographytestimonialcasteagencylife‐writingPhoolan Devi Notes 1. A political party composed primarily of Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in Uttar Pradesh. 2. This term, coined by political leader Kanshi Ram, generally refers to broad alliances between "oppressed" castes defined by constitutional categories such as SCs (Scheduled Castes), STs (Scheduled Tribes) and OBCs. 3. The much‐publicized gunning down of 22 Thakur men by members of Phoolan's gang in the village of Behmai in 1981 created a national furore, compelling the Indian government to take serious steps to check the "dacoit menace" in the Chambal valley. Although Phoolan herself shot to national and international fame after this event, the extent of her involvement in the actual murders remains inconclusive. Upon her surrender in 1983, she allegedly told police that she was not at Behmai when the killings occurred and that her gang members acted independently. In fact, investigations into her murder in 2001 centred on Behmai, but her death could not be linked definitively to the massacres. Kapur's film, however, unambiguously attributes the infamous killings at Behmai to Phoolan Devi. 4. Following repeated failures by the Uttar Pradesh administration and police to capture Phoolan Devi, and under pressure to retain the powerful Thakur vote‐bank in the aftermath of Behmai, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi agreed to offer clemency to bandits willing to submit peacefully to the state. After careful negotiations with police superintendent Rajendra Chaturvedi, the state envoy responsible for executing the "voluntary surrender" of outlaws along the lines of successful operations in 1960 and 1972, Phoolan formally laid down arms before the Chief Minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh in February 1983. Afraid for her own security and that of her family in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan demanded that her family be rehabilitated and given employment in Madhya Pradesh, that all her cases be tried together in special courts in the state, and that land stolen from her father by his relatives be returned to him. She insisted that she and her gang not be given the death penalty, that they be imprisoned together without handcuffs, be released and resettled (with cultivable land and housing) in Madhya Pradesh in eight years' time. Subsequently, she held that they should be allowed to carry firearms for their personal safety. In popular perception, largely fuelled by the media, Phoolan was characterized as a calculating and ruthless negotiator. In I, Phoolan Devi she claims that she had no prior knowledge or experience of how to deal with politicians or governments and that she acted only out of concern for her family and gang members (430–31). For an analysis of the politics and spectacle of Phoolan's surrender in relation to questions of female citizenship, see Sunder Rajan, "Outlaw Woman". 5. Bandit Queen was subjected to obscenity censorship in India. For the charges levelled against the film by various interest groups, the objectives and ideological biases of the Censor Board and law courts, and the resultant deletions from screenings in India, see Gopal. 6. Sen reveals that while she awaited trial in Gwalior jail for nearly 11 years, Phoolan's doctors performed a hysterectomy on her on the pretext of removing an ovarian cyst. The doctors' rationale – "We don't want Phoolan Devi breeding more Phoolan Devis" (244) offers crucial insights into the class‐ and caste‐inflected question of civil liberties for women and of their differential access (based on their social and economic status) to self‐determination in the context of "motherhood" and the right to abortion. 7. For an elaboration of this point, see Menon. 8. Sunder Rajan's commentary on subject constitution in/through pain takes sati or widow immolation as its key frame of reference. In 1987, the shocking case of 18‐year‐old Roop Kanwar in Rajasthan triggered immense controversy in India. While women's rights activists campaigned for a ban on sati and demanded that the government punish the perpetrators, Hindu fundamentalists heralded the incident as a demonstration of cultural superiority and piety. Sunder Rajan remarks that much of the public discourse was inevitably circumscribed within unproductive Manichean oppositions between modernity/tradition, choice/coercion, suicide/murder, victim/agent, material/spiritual, etc. Tracing similar dualisms in colonial writings through the work of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Lata Mani, Sunder Rajan proposes a way out of this dilemma by "shifting the emphasis from sati‐as‐death (murder or suicide, authentic or inauthentic) to sati‐as‐burning", thereby locating her investigative focus on the gendered, embodied subject in pain (Real and Imagined 19). 9. For an understanding of individualistic paradigms of identity and identification in autobiography see, for instance, Olney

Art · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Subaltern · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Studies and History · History · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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