BANDIT QUEEN
A film review by Mina Kumar
Copyright 1995 Mina Kumar
Whose Life is it Anyway?
On the surface, the story is full of ironies. The low-caste outlaw woman repudiates the hagiography made by a bourgeois high-caste man for British television's Channel Four. Phoolan Devi alleges that the film is full of inaccuracies, and that he is exploiting her rapes to sell a movie. Director Shekar Kapur counter-alleges that she is disowning her past--after all, he notes in his interviews, she has married a Thakur now. BANDIT QUEEN is briefly banned in India, and becomes a cause celebre.
Shekar Kapur becomes hard to miss in the Indian media. Here he is championing the right of his art not to be censored. There he is claiming that his film is an accurate portrayal of Phoolan's life, even though the film diverges from Mala Sen's biography, which itself was pieced together from accounts Phoolan told others in prison. Kapur finally admits to India Today that there are factual errors in his film, but still avers that he has found a truth beyond mere factual truth. He knows after all that his "interpretations of what she [Phoolan Devi] was hiding behind her words" (Director's Statement) is the "True Story" (opening title of the film).
In this post-Foucauldian age, it's hard to know what to make of a film that begins with the title, "This is a true story." Kapur's true story shows Phoolan sold as a child to her first husband and brutalized by a stereotypically cruel mother-in-law. These episodes don't appear in Mala Sen's book--Phoolan Devi was married with pomp, circumstance and a dowry and her mother-in-law had died before she married. Kapur's true story also inserts extra rapes. The filmi Phoolan is raped by a Thakur, and then arrested by Thakurs for resisting sexual advances, but the real Phoolan was beaten and jailed by her cousin Maiyaddin, who had previously stolen Phoolan's father's land. In the film, the Thakurs bail Phoolan out to rape her further; in real life, her father got a Thakur friend from a near-by village to bail her out.
Maiyaddin, who had Phoolan Devi kidnapped by dacoits, does not appear in this film. Poverty and struggles over land ownership don't figure in the filmi Phoolan's life even though they are the reasons the real Phoolan turns to dacoitery. The filmi Phoolan is shown at the Behmai massacre but Phoolan Devi denies having been present, and other survivors corroborate her claim.
Kapur, and some leftist critics, defend these omissions and inventions as cutting corners to tell the larger story the oppression of low-castes and women in India. In effect, Kapur (and Sen, who wrote the screenplay) admit inserting and deleting episodes in the story of Phoolan Devi to turn a complex life into a hagiography of a martyr. Even as feminist propaganda, however, the film is unsuccessful. BANDIT QUEEN depicts gender oppression, but almost always as rape, and many, many of those. Phoolan Devi's letter to various film festivals asking them not to show BANDIT QUEEN concentrates on her shame at the depiction of her rapes, but what is even more problematic is that her life has been devolved to one long blur of rape. It certainly makes for a monotonous view of women's oppression--and one that is fixated on Phoolan's genitals to the extent that it even invents rapes for her.
BANDIT QUEEN is really not feminist at all. Antonia Fraser, in her study of female leaders in war, notes that men have historically explained away strong women by depicting them as singular--as tomboys from birth, as exceptional women who are in fact "masculine" in some way--so that their abilities cannot be extrapolated to other women. BANDIT QUEEN fits this pattern: its Phoolan calls men sister-fuckers at the age of seven and can ride a bike better than her fat (i.e., effeminate) male cousin so there need be no depiction of the kind of feminist radicalization other women could emulate. Although BANDIT QUEEN's heroine is always depicted as a singular woman--other women in the film are off making chapatis-- in real life, Vikram Mallah's previous lover also joined a gang.
The film promulgates ridiculous stereotypes. The real Phoolan Devi was a tough gang-leader charged with 48 serious crimes including 22 murders, but the filmic Phoolan, in the midst of the Behmai massacre, is mesmerized by a pair of anklets. The filmic Phoolan ignores the violence swirling around her because jewelery is apparently far more interesting to women!
During a mid-raid stop at a Kali temple, Vikram Mallah (despite Seema Biswas' appearances to the contrary) dubs Phoolan "the beautiful bandit," and this sums up the movie's basic attitude. The filmic Phoolan's only identity is as a sexual object (or subject, when she is romping around with lover Vikram). BANDIT QUEEN is not interested in Phoolan's feelings about her poverty, banditry, other gang members, family, any women friends--in any other aspect of her life.
One of therst titles in the film translates Phoolan Devi's name, "Goddess of Flowers." No one who knew Phoolan Devi would think of her in those terms--just as no one who knew a Peter would think of him as "Rock"--but Kapur has obviously conceptualized the Phoolan he is presenting in his movie as a "goddess of flowers." The sinewy dacoit from the Chambal ravines is transformed into a flower queen, just as she was in a previous movie based on her life.
The first was a conventional Hindi masala movie complete with songs and dances around trees. Though BANDIT QUEEN has no songs (a concession to Western tastes?), it is many ways just as conventional, but without any of the fringe benefits of conventional cinema. Part of the problem with BANDIT QUEEN is that it can't make up its mind what it wants to be. For a biography, the film's entry into Phoolan's mind is shaky and uneven--some scenes are from her point of view and others from a viewer's or other character's. The film in some ways tries to be realistic--the heroine is fairly unattractive, Phoolan's rapes are depicted in a restrained, unleering way--but it doesn't maintain this pose, descending into hagiography and Bollywood clich s.
Flashbacks to tortured screams during revenge sequences, first shots that heavy-handedly establish the heroine's character, a conventionally movie-star handsome hero (Nirmal Pandey, a gorgeous Sunjay Dutt) who is filmed from the bottom-up against an azure sky when he defends the heroine, a first embrace when the hero holds the heroine tight to hide her from the police, several parallels to childhood incidents (mid-shoot-out, Phoolan gives a girl anklets to keep during the girl's own during marriage as Phoolan's mother gave her earrings before her marriage), babies symbolizing lost innocence, all make an appearance in BANDIT QUEEN. Even the phallic imagery has no subtlety: hero Vikram Mallah is shown lying down with his rifle sticking traight up and quite long between his legs. Despite such Bollywoodisms, however, BANDIT QUEEN does not have the masala power of a commercial movie--no real fight sequences, beautiful songs, tense pacing, The lush cinematography and a few moving tableaus--particularly a panchayat scene where the low castes sit on their haunches and the high castes sit in chairs--leave BANDIT QUEEN as an artfully-filmed, inchoate spectacle.
If BANDIT QUEEN fails on artistic terms and on political grounds, how is it succeeding? As sleight of hand. When asked about his omissions and inventions in the plot, Kapur says, "You don't want to confuse the audience. Either you have to tell the whole tale or tell a selected tale. When you tell a selected tale, it has to have a context." The context of BANDIT QUEEN is this: Kapur has attributed Phoolan Devi's objections to the fact that she is now married to an upper-caste man, and wants to be respectable, disowning her past. He claims that he can better tell the truth about her life even if that means inventions and omissions, that he is a better voice for the oppressed than she is even though she is the low-caste woman, that he knows the meaning of her life better than she does. And people are believing him.
The Indian government has allowed the film to be released after some minor cuts. Channel Four, the producers, have paid Phoolan Devi $60,000 and she has dropped her lawsuit. The film is opening across America, complete with press packets heralding its championing of the underprivileged.
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