It sounds good, and I might also recommend the 1995 film Bandit Queen that's based upon Phoolan Devi's life story (if you can stomach it, that is).

@Rocky_Sullivan Thanks for your reply.

By way of response, there’s so much that’s wrong with Shekhar Kapur’s ‘Bandit Queen’ that when I watch his film I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (usually the latter). And the tragedy is that people who see his film take it as the truth. And I’m not referring to a quibbling detail here and there or the kinds of things a filmmaker justifiably might do when translating a true story into a narrative feature, but about things that matter in a very fundamental way. He’s a wonderful filmmaker, but in ‘Bandit Queen’ he simply gets it wrong.

For example, he opens the film with Phoolan, still a child, being married off to a much older man. Yes, she was married off at 11, but why? Kapur never says; we just understand this to be yet another example of backward India. (Or, perhaps, her poor parents were too tempted by the bicycle being offered in exchange.) The real fact is that when Phoolan was 7 her uncle, Mayadin, stole her family’s small plot of land. And because Mayadin had money and influence with the authorities, they refused to do anything about it. This was the inciting incident, one that shaped her whole life. (In fact two people we interviewed, her brother, Shiv, and a Kanpur lawyer who is an ‘expert’ on Phoolan told us, that if Mayadin had not stolen her land, or if the authorities had helped get it back, “there would have been no Phoolan Devi, no bandit queen”.) 

The stealing of the land is the event that set her out on a struggle against injustice - which lasted her whole life. Phoolan started to speak out against Mayadin at that early age, embarrassing him publicly (this, by the way, we never see in Kapur’s movie. Mayadin is totally absent in his story. This is important because Mayadin was the man who started it all). When She discovered Mayadin cutting down and stealing her family’s neem tree, she grabbed the reins of the bullock cart hauling it away, until Mayadin’s henchmen beat her and left her laying in the dust. She retaliated that evening by throwing rocks at his house and shouting about justice. Eventually, Phoolan made herself such a thorn in his side that Mayadin forced her parents to get her married to a man who lived 100 miles away, as a way to get rid of her. That’s the reason she was married at 11.

And then what does she do? She runs away and, somehow, finds her way back home, where she keeps challenging Mayadin, until he falsely accuses her of theft and has her hauled off to jail, where she is raped by the police. Still, she would not stop trying to get the land back. She was a victim of injustice, and wasn’t prepared to accept that, no matter what.

In ‘Bandit Queen’ we see that it is the high caste village Headman who gets Baba Gujar, a notorious dacoit (“bandit”) to kidnap Phoolan. The Headman does this because Phoolan has spurned the sexual advances of his son. Completely false!  In fact, it was Mayadin who paid Baba Gujar – to kidnap Phoolan and then murder her. And the reason for that was because he had stolen Phoolan’s family’s land and Phoolan was refusing to put up with it.

So in the first part of the film Kapur frames her life story in this way and that sets the film off in a false direction, something from which it never recovers. Phoolan is established as a sexy hell raiser (one who willingly bathes topless even though she knows men are nearby gazing at her), rather than what she truly was – a young girl who faced injustice but refused to accept it.

And Kapur attributes far too much to caste. There’s no doubt it was an important factor in Phoolan’s life, but not to the paramount degree that ‘Bandit Queen’ presents it. Phoolan came from a family of low caste Mallahs (boatman caste). Kapur makes a big deal of the adolescent Phoolan being persecuted by young men and elders in her village because they are Thakurs (high caste). In fact, there are no Thakurs in her village and never were any! We have been there, we know.  (In that part of India villagers are organized by caste - 100% Thakur, 100% Mallah, etc.). Why does this matter? Because to attribute the cause of her oppression to caste is an untruthful and easy answer – the fact is that the first people who exploited and abused Phoolan, sexually or otherwise, were the richer landowners of her own village and her own caste. This is very important: class was as much part of the tragedy of her life as was caste. (This is something that, in the context of her harsh criticism of the film, Arundhati Roy, the celebrated Indian author and activist, has elaborately written about. This also makes her story more relevant to non-Indians as caste is a specifically Indian issue, but class is not, it's universal).

When we did our shoot in India we went to a very remote village and tracked down Larkhan Singh, who had been a member of Phoolan’s gang. (In fact, he was the gang’s accountant). He told us that although everyone called Phoolan a dacoit (‘bandit’), they didn’t consider themselves dacoits; they were ‘baghis’ – rebels. The distinction here is important – they didn’t see themselves as criminals, but as people who had been wronged by a corrupt society and were struggling against it. That’s what her story is really about. Kapur has Phoolan eventually surrendering because the cops have her gang on the run and she can’t get more bullets. Ridiculous! The main reason for this is because the government of India wanted to put an end to Phoolan’s saga and they offered her incentives in return for her surrender. And she accepted. Big difference! I could go on and on, scene by scene, but I’m sure you get the point.

The other way in which ‘Bandit Queen’ falls short is that it concludes with Phoolan going off to prison in 1983. That’s just half her life, and not even the most remarkable part. What happened during her 11 years in prison? (We tracked down and interviewed Munni, Phoolan’s younger sister, who missed her so much that she voluntarily went and stayed with her in jail – for nearly 2 years!)

And after 11 years in prison how, and why, does someone who can’t read, write, or count become one of the first low-caste women to be elected to India’s parliament?

What’s compelling about Phoolan’s story is her personal transformation. ‘Bandit Queen’ covers the first part of her life- from a poor helpless village girl to a female Robin Hood, but ends before the second part begins - Phoolan’s transformation into a national political figure, fighting for the rights of women and the lower classes And her assassination is still an unresolved mystery, with fingers pointing at big politicians behind the scenes.

Did you know that Phoolan saw ‘Bandit Queen’ and took the producer and director to court because she thought their portrayal of her life was so disingenuous and hypocritical? Phoolan was also very critical of the explicit way sexual violence against her was shown in the film. In an interview shortly after the film was released, she said that while watching the film she felt she was being raped a second time and when she was in the theatre covered her face in shame.

These are the reasons why we are making this film. We strongly believe that the true story of Phoolan’s life must be told as it is amazingly inspiring and poses fundamental questions about poverty, women’s rights and injustice. Unlike ‘Bandit Queen’, our film will tell Phoolan’s story in its entirety & in a genuine and factual manner.

It has been many years since I took the time to watch Shekhar Kapur's film, and so my memories of it are admittedly not all that they could be. Ostensibly, one might expect a documentary about Phoolan to take fewer liberties in portraying her life than a film like his did. Reading your post just now was inspiring, clarifying, and informative, for sure. Thank you for helping to set the record straight on the journey of an amazing person.

Many blessings to you, and I will be looking for Phoolan!