May 26, 2021 • 51 mins
Your faithful correspondent is on vacation, so please enjoy this re-release (with brand new introduction) about one of the most iconic broads we’ve ever covered. In 2018, I described it as follows: “A surreal story of abuse and revenge, one that starts in poverty and ends in power.” And then meet me back here next month for our June theme: SISTERS.
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For the rest of this episodes’ sources and links, go to the original episode page: https://www.criminalbroads.com/episodes/2018/10/3/episode-11-rebel-of-the-ravines-phoolan-devi
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a same Is it a crime loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you. Hello, listeners, Welcome back to Criminal
(00:22):
Broad's a true crime podcast about wild women on the
wrong side of the law. I'm Tory Telfer, your host,
and I am traveling for the next couple of weeks.
I'm road tripping out to my grandparents' farm in Illinois,
so to take a little break this week before we
plunge into next month, which is a theme which I'll
(00:42):
talk to you about in one second. I am re
releasing one of my old and dare I say my
most iconic episodes. I'm not saying it's iconic because I'm
so great. I'm saying it's iconic because the person we're
about to talk about her story. There's so many twists
and turns. It's oh extreme, it's so incredible. It's oh
it's a lot. When I tell people about it, just
(01:04):
like in passing in the park, they like don't know
how to react. Their face is freeze and they're like,
which part of the story, Like am I screaming? Am
I crying? Am I whooping with joy? I don't know
So this is episode eleven. It aired in oh gosh,
I think the end of twenty eighteen on Poulan Devi
The Bandit Queen. Now, if you haven't heard this episode before,
(01:27):
great welcome. If you have, but you listen to it
back in twenty eighteen, listen to it again. I just
relistened to it for the first time in ages, and
I had forgotten so much about her story, and I'm
pretty sure it holds up. This is also going to
be like a little glimpse into criminal Broad's history because
you'll hear my old theme song. I mean, it's the
same song, but it's the vintage version of it. And
(01:50):
I used to spend a lot of time trying to
find music that was at least vaguely from the country
and maybe even era that each episode took place in,
so you'll hear that. I like it. I like how
it adds to the atmosphere of the story. I just
had to stop doing it because it just took so
much time each week finding these songs. But you'll get
(02:10):
to hear that, okay, before we go into the story
next month. We have a theme. I've said this several
times now, Houston, we have a theme. The theme of
the month is sisters. The most ominous word you've ever heard, right,
you know? But I kept getting listener requests for cases
involving sisters, and so I said to myself, Tori, let's
(02:31):
do an entire month on sisters and see if we
can figure them out. So if you meet me back
here next week, we're kicking off our Sister Month with
a bang and a lot of blood, unfortunately, sorry, and
it's gonna be great. So the last thing I wanted
to tell you nothing to do with sisters, but is
very good news is I'm recording this on Thursday, so
(02:56):
like it's only been a day since last week's episode
came out, if that mean sense. It's only been twenty
four hours and we've already raised over one hundred dollars
for Lloyd Dean, who is the son of Marie Dean Arrington.
I talk about him in the last episode, but I've
corresponded with him and he has been in jail half
a century plus for a crime he committed when he
was a teenager. And I'm just so grateful you guys.
(03:18):
I'm getting little notifications on my phone every time you
venmo me with notes like for mister Dean, it's really nice.
It's really nice. I'm just happy that I have listeners
who care about these things. So thanks. I'll put my
Venmo in the show notes again this time if anyone
else wants to give to him. But anyway, thank you.
All right, without further ado, let's revisit a case of
(03:40):
Criminal Broad's past, the case of Pulan Debbi.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, is it? Is it? A prime?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Loving you Dear life heard?
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Yes, love, Hello, and welcome to Criminal Broad's, a true
crime and history podcast about wild women on the wrong
side of the law.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
My name is Tory Telfer. I am the author of
Lady Killers Deadly Women Throughout History, which is a book
about real life, historical female serial killers that you should
be able to find at your friendly local bookstore. Now,
the woman I'm here to tell you about today is
a genuine bad ass. She is someone I'm so excited
(04:45):
for you to hear about. And I know, I know,
I say I am excited about every episode, but I
really am. But this woman is special. I think she
is the most uh well, she's definitely the most badass
woman we've covered yet, because we've covered a lot of
women who are just playing bad, but she's also this
is also the most intense story I've covered yet, So
(05:05):
with that in mind, two quick things. One. Unfortunately, this
episode contains a number of instances of sexual assault, So
if that is not something you want to hear or
deal with right now, please skip ahead with my blessing
and I'll see you back here in a couple weeks
for episode twelve, which is going to be a romp
through a world that's very different than this one second.
(05:27):
Of all, one of my primary sources for this episode
was our protagonist's autobiography. Now, if you've read, if you've
ever read an autobiography, you know that they tend to
be a little bit self mythologizing. So there are so
anyway I try to keep that in mind. And also
there are places where her autobiography conflicted with her biography
(05:51):
which conflicted with her like journalistic articles written about her,
So when I tried to kind of find a middle
ground between. But I did sort of favor her autobiography
for a reason that is perhaps not the most academic,
but it was this, if there's one thing the world
owes this woman, it's to hear her voice, to let
her speak. You'll see what I mean in a minute.
(06:13):
So anyway, without further ado, let's travel to the northern
part of India in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen seventy nine,
(06:38):
just outside a rural village in northern India, police were
shocked to find a man lying on the dirt, nearly dead,
who had been beaten viciously. The man was missing teeth,
his arms and legs were broken, but what was most
notable was that his genitals had been crushed. There was
a note left on top of his bleeding body that
(07:00):
read warning, this is what happens to old men who
marry young girls. The whole scene was gruesome, ominous, frightening,
but you couldn't deny that it also had something like style.
This was no ordinary crime, no run of the mill
beating by a random bully or a jaded debt collector.
(07:21):
This was the work of someone longing for revenge, someone
bringing an element of almost storytelling to their violence. Someone
who clearly wanted to be heard, to be seen, to
be noticed, someone who wanted the police to know I
was here, I was here, she was here. The police
must have had at least an inkling at this point
(07:43):
of the girl who did this, there had been talk
of her a wild thing, a female demon on the loose.
She'd appear in the night, dressed like a policeman, screaming
obscenities through a megaphone, and rampage through village after village,
and then disappear again into the jungle. She was angry,
and she brought her anger, crashing down on those who'd
wronged her. In her autobiography, Pulan Devi says that she
(08:19):
was born angry because her mother was angry. She was
also born simply Pulan. The Devi, which meant goddess, was
given to her later once she'd become a folk hero.
Pulan meant flower, which was fitting because she was born
in nineteen sixty three during a flower festival. It was
a lovely origin story, but Pulan was born into serious poverty.
(08:43):
Her family lived in a tiny village in northern India
in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and they belonged to
the Mala caste, which was a subcast of the Sudras
at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Malas were
fishermen and boatmen and sometimes farmers like her father. The
cast system was is rigid, feutile, oppressive, and to be
(09:06):
born into a lower cast was to be born not
just into poverty, but into absolute powerlessness. The land where
her family lived was what her biographer Mala Sen called
bandit country, inhabited by people who have for centuries been
contemptuous of the state but remained fearful of God. Her
father owned a tiny scrap of land, but it was
(09:28):
difficult to grow much there. Pulan had vivid memories of
watching the rich men in her town eat mangoes, and
she remembered longing so badly for one that she dared
to ask for a slice and received a beating instead.
Poulan was always getting beatings from the wealthier people of
the village, who didn't like her impudent nature, and from
(09:49):
her own mother, who was furious at Pulan and her
three sisters for being girls. Boys brought in money, Girls
cost money. Girls were walking liabilities. If they didn't starve
during childhood, they might be raped during girlhood, dooming them
to a life of worthlessness. If you could manage to
get them married off, you had to pay a dowry
(10:10):
to their husband's family. You certainly wouldn't waste any time
teaching them to read. At one point, Poulan's mother raged
that she was going to throw her daughters down the
well and then fling herself down after them. The message
was clear. As a lower caste woman in rural northern India,
life was barely worth living. In contrast to her mother,
(10:31):
who vacillated between extremely loving and furiously abusive, Pulan's father
was a weak man who went through life with his
head bowed. He believed that the poor should be quiet
and subservient to the rich. But this infuriated Poulan, who
was an exceptionally brave child, born with a sense of
rebellion and justice deep inside her bones. She may have
(10:52):
been angry like her mother, but unlike her mother, she
was determined to do something about it. It didn't take
her long to realize why exactly her family was so poor.
Her uncle, her father's brother, had cheated her father out
of his inheritance, taking all of her grandfather's land and
leaving a mere scrap for Pulan's father. Because of that deception,
(11:14):
Pulan's family now had to watch her uncle and his
loathsome son, Mayadine, waltz around town drinking fresh milk, eating mangoes,
and luxuriating in a thousand and one signs of superiority.
They would harass Pulan's parents or send thugs to beat
them up for no reason. They'd even steal from their
meager stores of grain. Her father just kept his head down, subservient,
(11:38):
but not Pulan. When she was only ten, she convinced
her quiet older sister to come and sit with her
smack dab in the middle of her horrible cousin's chickpea fields.
This was their land, Pulan argued, sitting down and beginning
to pluck plump chickpeas right off the plants. When Mayodine
came running over screaming at them to leave, Poulan refused,
saying that this was their land. In response, Maadine beat
(12:02):
her over the head with a brick until she blacked out,
and then complained to the authorities and made sure her
parents were beaten for good measure. This didn't stop Poulan,
who tried to drag him off to court, and then
attacked him when he cut down their only tree, a
valuable old neme tree, in retaliation. It was no use,
though she only succeeded in destroying her own reputation. Now,
(12:24):
in the eyes of the village, she was a dangerous,
headstrong girl. She was only eleven by that point, but
she had to be married off as soon as possible.
Poulan was so young that during her wedding ceremony she
(12:48):
remembers thinking that after the ceremony she'd run outside and
play with her little sister. Her husband was so foreign
to her that she didn't even register what husband meant.
All she knew was that here this creepy, graying, thirty
year old widower named Pouti Laul who was undergoing some
sort of ceremony with her. Afterwards, the women kept telling
(13:09):
her that she was a married woman now and the
time for playing was over now. Her parents had made
an agreement with Pouti Law that he wouldn't bring her
to live with him, and that he certainly wouldn't touch
her until she was of age. But after the ceremony,
Pouti Lau reneged on his promises immediately and dragged Pulan
off as her mother sobbed. It was in Puti Laul's house,
(13:32):
miles from home, that Poulan's first terrible violations happened. He
told her that they were going to play a game
and that he'd teach her how married people were supposed
to behave He then showed her what she called his serpent.
Even though his fellow villagers and even his own father
told him weakly that she was too young, no one
(13:53):
stepped in to protect her. After about a year, she
managed to escape him, But ironically, in her home village,
being a failed wife was more of a social taboo
than being an abused child bride. Poulan had been an
outsider in her village when she tried to take on
her much older cousin. She was now even more of
a fallen woman. But that's not all. It seemed like
(14:13):
there was something about her that the powerful men of
her village just didn't like. She wouldn't bow to them,
She wouldn't shut up when they wanted her to shut
up when they tried to beat her into silence. She
wouldn't crawl into a corner of her father's house and
live out her days as a shamed creature. And now
she was back, a failed wife, just back expecting to
(14:35):
live with them again. It made them want to take
whatever it was in her that kept her so so alive,
so buoyant, such a fighter and stomp it out. Let's
(14:58):
take a quick break to hear from this episode sponsors.
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used to getting beaten by members of the cast above them,
whether over a misunderstanding or just because the wealthy felt
like it that day. Her parents' attitude was shut up,
curl into a ball, and pray that it's over soon.
But to Poulan that was absurd. So one day, when
a couple of rich boys were trying to teach her
a lesson by beating her into submission, she did something
her mother had always told her. She could do if
(18:16):
she was in trouble. She grabbed the boy's penis, twisted
it as hard as she could, and refused to let go.
That night, the boy and his friends came to find her.
Not only had she hurt him, but she had humiliated him,
and that he could not stand so he and one
other man assaulted her in front of her parents, deliberately
(18:38):
staging the violation to bring the most disgrace and shame
possible to her family. Poulan later wrote, my spirit flickered
like a lamp and began to fade. Afterward, she wanted
to die. She ran to her mother's arms and begged
her to throw her into the well. As if that
weren't enough, The wealthy men of her village then framed
(19:01):
her for a robbery, despite the fact that she had
been in another village at the time, visiting her sister.
She was thrown into jail for this and raped repeatedly
by the police, which was a horribly common experience for
any lower caste woman who ended up at the police station,
even if they were there to report a crime. When
she returned home, it was like some tenuous social code
(19:23):
had been officially snapped in the village. Suddenly, Poulan was
considered the property of any man who wanted her. She
screamed and gnashed her teeth and began sleeping in trees
to avoid them. But the men, wealthy, powerful landowners called
takours who belonged to the class above her, just kept
showing up at her family's house asking where they could
(19:45):
find her. Again, Poulan refused to be quiet about what
was happening to her. She'd run to the houses of
her abusers and stand outside screaming, kill me, kill me.
Come on, I'll kill you two and it'll be over.
The villag authorities, panicked, would try to impose sanctions on
her parents, saying that her family couldn't drink from the
(20:06):
communal well because their daughter was so unclean, and Poulan
would defy them, striding up to the well and drinking
from it as if she were a queen. She walked
up to the rich boy who had raped her in
front of her parents and told him point blank that
she had a rifle and she was going to kill him.
She noted with fascination that even though she had no
(20:27):
gun in her hands, he was terrified. One day, a
disgusting old Takur came to the village, like so many
men before him, asking for Poulan. He said that he'd
heard you could do whatever you liked with her. Poulan replied, oh, okay,
I'll go get her, and instead came back with a
tree branch. As she whipped him into a bloody pulp,
(20:48):
she screamed, you wanted Poulan, You've got her. It must
have stimied these upper cast men who thought they would
break her that she still hadn't broken. The girl simply
was not cracking, no matter how much they abused her,
and so they started to fear her. They needed to
get her out of there, away from their drinking water
(21:10):
and their grain and their submissive wives, so they hired
a group of bandits to come and kidnap her and
take her away for good. Pulan was terrified when she
(21:44):
found herself being marched through the jungle by a group
of ragtag male bandits dressed in filthy police uniforms. She
had no idea what was going on. She just knew
that these bandits, called dacoits, were known for their viciousness.
At least some of them were certain dakoits were rapists
and murderers, no better than the men she was leaving behind.
(22:06):
Others were practically folk heroes, stealing from the rich and
redistributing to adoring villagers. The bandits wh'd taken her were
comprised of two casts. Some were Malas like her, and
others were Takurs, belonging to the same cast that had
so repeatedly violated her in her hometown. She kept making
desperate eye contact with one of the Malas, a young
(22:28):
man named Vicrum, who seemed nicer than the others. He
wasn't explicitly showing her any mercy, but she thought he
might be sympathetic to her, since at least they were
members of the same cast. In sharp contrast, the leader
of the Takur bandits kept making jokes about violating her.
This man, Babu Gujar, was a disgusting brute who used
(22:49):
banditree as a quick path to bloodshed and rape. Pulan
doesn't say whether or not he carried out his jokes,
though her biographer says that he did. But tensions had
all right, he been growing between him and Vikram, and
one night, while Babu was at least attempting to rape
Pulan a gunshot rang out and Babu slumped over on
(23:09):
top of Pulan dead. This was the first time in
Pulan's life when a man had defended her. Her poor,
beaten down father could only cower and beg when people
came to assault her. Her husband, the police, and members
of the upper castes had only ever abused her, but
Vicrom was different. Now that Babu was dead, Vicram awkwardly
(23:32):
declared that she was his mistress, and while this must
have been terrifying to Poulan at the time, she realized
soon that it seemed to be a move designed not
to violate her, but to protect her. Vikram said that
if she stayed with him and his bandits, she'd be safe,
and that he'd help her avenge herself on anyone who
ever hurt her. He made his bandits swear to treat
(23:53):
her like a mother or sister. Most importantly, he said
that he wouldn't sleep with her unless she asked him to.
In her autobiography, she describes this moment their unofficial marriage
ceremony in swoony romantic terms. She says that he wiped
away her tears and kissed her gently. She says that
(24:14):
it was the first time she'd ever been kissed. Imagine
the utter terror that coursed through the veins of Puti Lal,
Poulan's first husband, when she showed up at his door
(24:34):
with a raving squad of bloodthirsty bandits behind her, looking
like an avenging angel, like an incarnation of the warrior
goddess Durga herself. The bandits dragged Putti out to the
street and beat him, then handed him over to Poulan,
who sprang on him as the memories of his abuse
flooded her brain. She later wrote that she was driven
(24:57):
half mad to be able to finally quench my thirstad
for violence. This was the man who had come at
her with his serpent when she was eleven years old,
who had introduced her to the depths of fear and degradation.
In a frenzy, Poulon turned on that disgusting serpent, whipping it,
then stabbing it, then crushing it with her own shoes.
(25:19):
When she was finished, she left him for dead on
the outskirts of town, positioned to catch the eyes of
the police with that note warning, this is what happens
to old men who marry young girls. From then on,
Poulon took to gang life quickly, though she had not
chosen it, and though being the only woman in the
group would often wear on her. She and the men
(25:40):
would roam through the jungle, eating all the mangoes they
wanted from trees, those mangoes that were so forbidden to
her as a child. It was a life of freedom,
though it wasn't an easy life. They walked about twenty
five miles a day and ate mostly at night, always
on the lookout for police. She learned to use a rifle,
how to talk to informants, how to plunder the houses
(26:01):
of the abusers, how to beat the flesh of rapists.
She wore a khaki police uniform as a disguise and
was often able to pass as a young male officer.
She found out that her fellow bandits were just like her.
They too had been caught up in land disputes, got
no justice from the police, and so turned to a
life of crime in order to enact their own wild
(26:22):
justice on those who depressed them. At one point, the
gang swung by her home village to give her parents money,
and Poulan was shocked to find that the village was
now terrified of her. They groveled at her feet. They
begged her for mercy, Afraid that she'd gunned them down.
They brought her garlands of flowers and offerings of sweets,
(26:42):
calling her a goddess. Even her evil cousin Maya Dean,
the source of all her woes, came to her in rags,
tripping over himself as he raved about how amazing she
was and how he'd always been a fan. She would
have killed him then and there, but Vicram told her
that killing family was an act of violence she'd never
(27:03):
be able to recover from. So she forced him to
give some land back to her father and let him
slither away to slay her desire for vengeance. Though the
gang found her cousin's brother in law and Pulan shot him.
It was her first killing. She called it simple and terrible.
When the police heard that she'd taken a life, they
(27:24):
put a reward on her head. Pulan felt no regret
what they called a crime, She said, I called justice.
Years before he'd ever met Pulan, Vicram had befriended an
(27:47):
older bandit named Shri ram A Takur, who taught Vicram
a lot about the ways of banditry. Shri Ram had
been in jail for years, but now he was out
and he wanted to be pals with his old buddy
Vicram again. Now Vicrom was kind and trusting and respected
this man as his guru. But all the other bandits
absolutely hated Shri Ram, especially Pulan, who saw him for
(28:10):
the utter scumbag that he was. She defied him at
every turn, and Shri Ram hated that, though he hid
it under a saccharin layer of devotion to Vikram. Now
that Shri Ram and his gang of Takurs had joined
up with Vikrm's gang, cast problems began to plague the
men again. Tensions ran high, and Vikram and Pulan began
sleeping apart in case of an ambush. One day, as
(28:33):
the gang was talking to a villager, someone shot Vicrim
in the back. Shri Ram denied that he had anything
to do with it, but he had been conveniently absent
during the gunfire and reappeared right afterward, playing innocent. Vikram
almost died of the wound before they could find a
doctor who'd treat him without telling the police who he was.
In order for Vikrim to recover in peace, he and
(28:55):
Pulan took off for Nepal, where Pulan experienced, for the
first time in her life the joy of being someone ordinary,
someone who didn't always have to be looking over her
shoulder afraid of violence. She and Vikrom were able to
walk around holding hands in public like your average non
bandit couple. They even went to the movies together, though
(29:16):
she almost ran out at one point, thinking that the
fighting on screen was real. Really, she could have stayed
there forever, but Vicrim desperately wanted to return to India
and take his revenge on Shri Ram. When they got back,
Vicrom wanted everyone to know they were back, and so,
since he was a stylish bandit with a flare for
presentation that definitely rubbed off on Pulan, he fixed a
(29:39):
stamp up that said Pulan and Vikram are back from Heaven.
The two of them used it to stamp the doors
of their future victims, a little personal branding their very
names weaponized. But Shri Ram was still part of the gang,
still slithering around whispering filthy things to Pulan and then
paying ingratiating lip service to oh, I was so sorry
(30:01):
you got shot. How unfortunate that anyone would want to
hurt you. Pulan knew that he was absolutely untrustworthy, and
at one point her nerves were so afraid that she
begged Vikram to just let her shoot shri Ram as
he slept. But Vikram said no, that was dishonorable. He said,
to shoot someone when they were vulnerable like that. That
(30:22):
exchange would haunt Pulan forever because shri Ram wasn't like Vikram.
He didn't care about killing honorably. He didn't care if
you were asleep. One night, Vikrm and Pulan decided, for
(30:48):
a reason they couldn't really articulate, to sleep in the
same bed again. They had been sleeping apart in case
of an ambush, but that night they were exhausted and
just wanted to be together, and so they curled up
into each other's arms in the middle of the jungle
and fell into a deep sleep. Some time later, Pulan
woke in a groggy panic, with the smell of something
(31:10):
sickly sweet in her nostrils and the sound of gunfire
all around her and next to her. Vikram was still there,
but he was moaning and bleeding out and whispering to
her that he was dying. She realized that she had
been chloroformed, and that Shri Ram was standing right there
(31:33):
firing bullets into her lover's chest. She begged him to
kill her instead, but it was too late. Vikrom was
gone Before she even knew what was happening. She was
being dragged off by Shri Ram. He took her to
a nearby village, displayed her in front of all the
wealthy men there, and told the Takurs to have their
(31:53):
way with her. For three weeks, any man who wanted
to assault her was welcome to do so. It was
a montage of horror that Poulan would never really talk
about for the rest of her life, or if she
did mention it, she would often use euphemisms, like saying
that they made a mockery of her. Finally, she heard
(32:14):
Trei Ram's gang talking to a brahmin, a holy man,
a member of the highest cast there was, and this
holy man, this priest, was asking for a turn with her.
She couldn't bear the thought that a holy man could
be like all the others and begged him to spare her.
But once they were alone together, the brahmin whispered that
he was there to help her escape. He gave her
(32:36):
water and a gun and helped her over the wall
of his courtyard. Poulan was free again, but she was
completely alone, running for her life and back to sleeping
in trees, or at least partially sleeping. My hunger for
vengeance was so strong, she said later, it woke me
in the night. In order to avenge Vikrumb's death, Poulan
(33:15):
decided it was time to form her own gang. I
wanted men driven like me by a hunger for vengeance,
she said, and so she began to interview potential gang
members to see just how serious they were about the
business of revenge. She made them swear to think of
her as a brother, not a woman, and she found
a lieutenant Man Singh to be her right hand man.
(33:37):
She then tied a red cloth around her head, a
symbol of vengeance, and began hunting down shri Ram as
a bandit. Her reputation grew and grew until villagers in
the territory thought of her as larger than life, a
bandit queen driven by cosmic anger. This actually helped Pulan
(33:57):
the real girl, because people would pass her on the
street without a second look, never once thinking that this
diminutive policeman, or if she was wearing a sorry this
humble village lass could be Poulan Devy the great and terrible,
But she was great and terrible. She would scream into
a megaphone as her gang looted a village, calling for
(34:19):
Shiram to show his face and stop hiding like a dog.
She would hunt down the men who'd watched her be
raped and beat them between the legs with her rifle butt.
I crushed, burned, and impaled. She said she would force
them to name the names of everyone they'd ever assaulted.
One old man listed all the girls in the village,
(34:41):
and then some of the young boys, his own daughter,
and several animals. She tortured him by cutting off body
part after body part, and then had one of her
men deliver the coupdi gras. She would humiliate them as
they'd humiliated her, stripping them naked and forcing them to dance,
getting the villagers to sing ominous song with lyrics like
(35:02):
what are we going to do with him? Kill him?
Or make him dance? Hers was a class based revolution,
grassroots DIY. Here's how her biographer, Mala Sen explains the
larger significance of what she was doing. Until the early
nineteen seventies, most dacoit gangs had consisted of upper cast
men who had provided a degree of protection to those
(35:24):
of their community. But now it seemed the tables returning.
It was a process that was to dominate the whole
of Indian political life through the nineteen eighties and into
the nineteen nineties, with those of the lower casts suddenly
aware of their potential for power and their ability to
demand fundamental changes at all levels of society. The villagers
(35:44):
loved Poulan, welcoming her and her men with open arms,
hiding them in their houses, and feeding them royally. At
one point, villagers even brought bedding and mosquito NEETs into
the jungle so that Poulon could sleep in the open,
as she preferred, but in queenly comfort. She was robin
hood to them, looting liquor stores and jewelry shops, and
handing out rum and bangles to the thrilled, impoverished young
(36:08):
people who gathered around her. During one such a violent celebration,
an eleven year old girl came up to Pulan, clearly
unafraid of her fearsome reputation. Pulan filled her lap with
jewelry and rupees until it was overflowing. It was an
extravagant gesture. Perhaps she saw something of herself in that
brave little girl, who was the exact same age that
(36:31):
she had been when she was given jewelry to wear
on her wedding day. Pulan never actually got to kill
shri Ram, which must have driven her mad, because his
own brother shot him during a debate over a woman.
But revenge was had. Revenge was most certainly had, though
Pulan coyly denied any involvement in it. On Valentine's Day
(36:54):
nineteen eighty one, the year Pulan turned eighteen twenty two,
Takur men from the village of Behmi were lined up
along the bank of a river, asked to kneel, and
then shot at close range, so many times that the
soil was still soaked with blood days later. Pulan always
denied that the massacre was heard doing, but her lieutenant
(37:16):
Man Singh said that Behmai was the village where Shiram
had killed Vikrm and raped Pulan, and so this was
their revenge. In one interview, Pulan said of the Takurs
who'd been shot, their dogs dirty dogs. I won't say more.
(37:44):
Police ramped up their search for Pulan after the Bechmai massacre,
and pressure began to build for her to surrender, especially
as she was wanted on almost fifty counts of murder,
kidnapping and looting. People told her that she was so
famous by then could set forth the terms of her
own surrender, but she didn't know who to trust, and
(38:05):
she wasn't sure that authority figures would respect her terms.
She knew that she didn't want to surrender in her
home state of Uttar Pradesh, where the furious and embarrassed
police were sure to shoot her on the spot. But
her men were growing thinner and life was growing ever
more dangerous, and so eventually, two years after the massacre,
(38:25):
she agreed to hand herself over to the police of
a different state. She set the terms. She and her
gang would not be hanged, Her family would be kept
safe and given land, Her gang would be fed in jail,
they would only spend eight years behind bars, and so on.
The actual process of surrendering was long and fraught. Pulan
was illiterate and paranoid and still very young, so the
(38:46):
whole official process terrified her, and she occasionally became convinced
it was all a trap. Journalists would try to interview
her and take her photo, which only made things worse.
But finally, on February twelfth, nineteen eighty se twenty year
old Pulan and her men were escorted by police to
a stage in front of a crowd of seven thousand
(39:07):
villagers who'd gathered to see her. Where they surrendered. She
didn't know why there were so many people there. She
didn't know yet that there were songs written about her
and clay statues of her being sold in the marketplace.
She didn't know that women of her cast had even
started praying to her in secret. She just handed over
(39:28):
her gun, put a garland around a portrait of her
patron goddess Durgas, and lifted her hands in a gesture
of prayer in front of the enormous crowd. Though Poulon's
legend would rise from that moment until people were making
movies about her, life didn't magically become easy for her
once she gave up her dacoit ways. She was in
jail after all, and the eight years came and went,
(39:51):
and still she wasn't released, partially because she refused to
go back to her home state to be tried like
the rest of her gang did. Her family was still
a plague by troubles. Her father died, her sister died
in what seemed like a staged suicide, and Takurs began
bullying them again. The police of her home state started
a rumor that she was suicidal, presumably so that if
(40:13):
they managed to kill her, they could claim that she
did it herself. At one point in jail, she was
rushed to the hospital because of an ovarian cyst, and
when she was being operated on, the doctors took out
her womb, giving her a hysterectomy, without ever asking for
her permission. When her biographer, Mala Sen, who was there,
(40:33):
asked why in the world this was necessary, the doctor chuckled,
we don't want her breeding anymore, Poulan davies, he said.
One month before she was released from prison, a movie
came out about her life called The Bandit Queen, a
movie Poulan hated because of its graphic and all consuming
focus on her many rapes, especially its drawn out scene
(40:57):
of gang rape. She even threatened to set herself on
fire outside of the theater if it ran, though she
settled for suing them. She told a journalist from the
Atlantic that she was angry the film never portrayed her
conflict with her cousin Maya Deine, which was the source
of all her troubles. There's absolutely no mention of my
family's land dispute, she says. In the film. I'm portrayed
(41:20):
as a sniveling woman, always in tears, who never took
a conscious decision in her life. I'm simply shown as
being raped over and over again. In fact, Poulan didn't
even like the word rape, which she found too fancy.
To her. The word felt one off, too exceptional to
describe something that was everyday life for many of the
(41:42):
women she knew. She told that same journalist. It is
assumed that the daughters of the poor are for the
use of the rich. In the villages, the poor have
no toilets, so we must go to the fields, and
the moment we arrive, the rich lay us there. We
can't cut the grass or tend to our crops without
being accosted by them. We are the property of the rich.
(42:05):
In February nineteen ninety four, she was released from jail
by a new Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who was
also from a lower caste, making the pardon a class
victory and not just a personal one. Two years later, Pulan,
the woman who'd once told her biographer that all politicians
are thieves, ran for and was elected to parliament, even
(42:26):
though there was still a murder trial looming over her.
She campaigned directly to the lower cast voters eighty percent
of the electorate, mind you, and vowed to uplift the
downtrodden among them, becoming a beloved politician. The flare for
drama that she developed as a bandit served her well
as a politician. She would pop onto trains without warning
or sweep into prison to sealed friends, and even went
(42:48):
to Europe to promote her autobiography even though she was
technically still on parole. She also got married again. Her
life may have taken an almost fairy tale turn political power,
international fame, but her past was always there, lurking behind
the trees. If Poulan never forgot the names of those
who'd wronged her, there were people out there who never
(43:11):
forgot the name of Poulan. Davy. One July day in
two thousand and one, she came home from the morning
session of Parliament, got out of her car, and was
shot five times by three masked men. The men were
from an upper cast They killed her in retaliation for
the nineteen eighty one massacre of upper cast men. That
(43:32):
massacre of upper cast men had been done in retaliation
for the murder and gang rape of lower caste people.
It was a vendetta for a vendetta for a vendetta.
Violence heaped on violence, heaped on violence. But let's go
back to nineteen eighty three, before Poulan had any idea
that she'd be on TV, that she'd have a book out,
(43:53):
that she'd be a politician, when she was preoccupied with
the idea of surrender and what it would mean for
her for her when she was walking to that stage
where thousands of people were waiting for her, the mostly
male journalists who wrote about that day seemed disappointed that
the avenging bandit Queen of Legend was a rather small
young girl. They said her skin was too dark, her
(44:16):
chest was too flat, her language was too filthy. They
said she was an infomaniac, a bandit brat One journalist
called her a plain woman with a touch of the
wild about her, but the photos of her surrender are
incredibly compelling. There she is a girl, a girl who
(44:38):
not so long ago was sleeping in the jungle, in
her khaki uniform, a red scarf around her hair, a
cartridge belt slung around her chest. She holds her rifle
with ease, and though she's so much smaller than the
men around her, it's clear that she's their leader. Her
face is preoccupied but resolute. She looks like someone who
(45:00):
as real power. Not power that was conferred on her
or stolen by her, but power that she was born with,
Power that was knit into her bones as she grew
inside the womb of her angry mother. Power that the
world was never able to snuff out. Thank you so
(45:39):
much for listening to this story. I hope you have
become a super fan of Poolan Devy as I have.
Feel free to get in touch at any time. Criminal
Broads at gmail dot com is my email address, or
message me on Instagram at Criminal Broads. You can also
check Instagram for photos of Poolan. I'm always putting up
photos of these women so you can see what they
actually looked like. She is always interesting and feel free
(46:02):
to reach out if you have any suggestions or requests
for next time. And if you like this episode, please
consider leaving a review on iTunes. It would mean the
world to me. It would seriously, I would be so grateful.
And now as we exit, I just want to play
you a quick clip of Pulan talking being interviewed. I
was unable to find a translation, but you'll be able
(46:23):
to hear her. You'll be able to hear her voice,
which is just adorable. I mean that sounds insulting. She
she just has this cute, high pitched voice. And then
I'm gonna round out by playing you the theme song
of the movie The Bandit Queen. Now, she didn't like
a lot of the movie, but this this theme song
is an old folks song about child marriages and it
is sung by a maestro singer and it is just beautiful.
(46:45):
I'll link to them on the episode description anyway, thank
you for listening. Bye with the last color girl.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
Mm hmm, ch.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
As co.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Co call.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Come come.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Come, you don't stop, who don't stop? You'll see.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
You sneaking, No sea Snea, nobody want you.
Speaker 3 (49:48):
You got jo.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Please not.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
Jo Sound for Better Monety Card A bitter money in soul.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Who Sound
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Wou
Is it a same Is it a crime loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you. Hello, listeners, Welcome back to Criminal
(00:22):
Broad's a true crime podcast about wild women on the
wrong side of the law. I'm Tory Telfer, your host,
and I am traveling for the next couple of weeks.
I'm road tripping out to my grandparents' farm in Illinois,
so to take a little break this week before we
plunge into next month, which is a theme which I'll
(00:42):
talk to you about in one second. I am re
releasing one of my old and dare I say my
most iconic episodes. I'm not saying it's iconic because I'm
so great. I'm saying it's iconic because the person we're
about to talk about her story. There's so many twists
and turns. It's oh extreme, it's so incredible. It's oh
it's a lot. When I tell people about it, just
(01:04):
like in passing in the park, they like don't know
how to react. Their face is freeze and they're like,
which part of the story, Like am I screaming? Am
I crying? Am I whooping with joy? I don't know
So this is episode eleven. It aired in oh gosh,
I think the end of twenty eighteen on Poulan Devi
The Bandit Queen. Now, if you haven't heard this episode before,
(01:27):
great welcome. If you have, but you listen to it
back in twenty eighteen, listen to it again. I just
relistened to it for the first time in ages, and
I had forgotten so much about her story, and I'm
pretty sure it holds up. This is also going to
be like a little glimpse into criminal Broad's history because
you'll hear my old theme song. I mean, it's the
same song, but it's the vintage version of it. And
(01:50):
I used to spend a lot of time trying to
find music that was at least vaguely from the country
and maybe even era that each episode took place in,
so you'll hear that. I like it. I like how
it adds to the atmosphere of the story. I just
had to stop doing it because it just took so
much time each week finding these songs. But you'll get
(02:10):
to hear that, okay, before we go into the story
next month. We have a theme. I've said this several
times now, Houston, we have a theme. The theme of
the month is sisters. The most ominous word you've ever heard, right,
you know? But I kept getting listener requests for cases
involving sisters, and so I said to myself, Tori, let's
(02:31):
do an entire month on sisters and see if we
can figure them out. So if you meet me back
here next week, we're kicking off our Sister Month with
a bang and a lot of blood, unfortunately, sorry, and
it's gonna be great. So the last thing I wanted
to tell you nothing to do with sisters, but is
very good news is I'm recording this on Thursday, so
(02:56):
like it's only been a day since last week's episode
came out, if that mean sense. It's only been twenty
four hours and we've already raised over one hundred dollars
for Lloyd Dean, who is the son of Marie Dean Arrington.
I talk about him in the last episode, but I've
corresponded with him and he has been in jail half
a century plus for a crime he committed when he
was a teenager. And I'm just so grateful you guys.
(03:18):
I'm getting little notifications on my phone every time you
venmo me with notes like for mister Dean, it's really nice.
It's really nice. I'm just happy that I have listeners
who care about these things. So thanks. I'll put my
Venmo in the show notes again this time if anyone
else wants to give to him. But anyway, thank you.
All right, without further ado, let's revisit a case of
(03:40):
Criminal Broad's past, the case of Pulan Debbi.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, is it? Is it? A prime?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Loving you Dear life heard?
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Yes, love, Hello, and welcome to Criminal Broad's, a true
crime and history podcast about wild women on the wrong
side of the law.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
My name is Tory Telfer. I am the author of
Lady Killers Deadly Women Throughout History, which is a book
about real life, historical female serial killers that you should
be able to find at your friendly local bookstore. Now,
the woman I'm here to tell you about today is
a genuine bad ass. She is someone I'm so excited
(04:45):
for you to hear about. And I know, I know,
I say I am excited about every episode, but I
really am. But this woman is special. I think she
is the most uh well, she's definitely the most badass
woman we've covered yet, because we've covered a lot of
women who are just playing bad, but she's also this
is also the most intense story I've covered yet, So
(05:05):
with that in mind, two quick things. One. Unfortunately, this
episode contains a number of instances of sexual assault, So
if that is not something you want to hear or
deal with right now, please skip ahead with my blessing
and I'll see you back here in a couple weeks
for episode twelve, which is going to be a romp
through a world that's very different than this one second.
(05:27):
Of all, one of my primary sources for this episode
was our protagonist's autobiography. Now, if you've read, if you've
ever read an autobiography, you know that they tend to
be a little bit self mythologizing. So there are so
anyway I try to keep that in mind. And also
there are places where her autobiography conflicted with her biography
(05:51):
which conflicted with her like journalistic articles written about her,
So when I tried to kind of find a middle
ground between. But I did sort of favor her autobiography
for a reason that is perhaps not the most academic,
but it was this, if there's one thing the world
owes this woman, it's to hear her voice, to let
her speak. You'll see what I mean in a minute.
(06:13):
So anyway, without further ado, let's travel to the northern
part of India in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen seventy nine,
(06:38):
just outside a rural village in northern India, police were
shocked to find a man lying on the dirt, nearly dead,
who had been beaten viciously. The man was missing teeth,
his arms and legs were broken, but what was most
notable was that his genitals had been crushed. There was
a note left on top of his bleeding body that
(07:00):
read warning, this is what happens to old men who
marry young girls. The whole scene was gruesome, ominous, frightening,
but you couldn't deny that it also had something like style.
This was no ordinary crime, no run of the mill
beating by a random bully or a jaded debt collector.
(07:21):
This was the work of someone longing for revenge, someone
bringing an element of almost storytelling to their violence. Someone
who clearly wanted to be heard, to be seen, to
be noticed, someone who wanted the police to know I
was here, I was here, she was here. The police
must have had at least an inkling at this point
(07:43):
of the girl who did this, there had been talk
of her a wild thing, a female demon on the loose.
She'd appear in the night, dressed like a policeman, screaming
obscenities through a megaphone, and rampage through village after village,
and then disappear again into the jungle. She was angry,
and she brought her anger, crashing down on those who'd
wronged her. In her autobiography, Pulan Devi says that she
(08:19):
was born angry because her mother was angry. She was
also born simply Pulan. The Devi, which meant goddess, was
given to her later once she'd become a folk hero.
Pulan meant flower, which was fitting because she was born
in nineteen sixty three during a flower festival. It was
a lovely origin story, but Pulan was born into serious poverty.
(08:43):
Her family lived in a tiny village in northern India
in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and they belonged to
the Mala caste, which was a subcast of the Sudras
at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Malas were
fishermen and boatmen and sometimes farmers like her father. The
cast system was is rigid, feutile, oppressive, and to be
(09:06):
born into a lower cast was to be born not
just into poverty, but into absolute powerlessness. The land where
her family lived was what her biographer Mala Sen called
bandit country, inhabited by people who have for centuries been
contemptuous of the state but remained fearful of God. Her
father owned a tiny scrap of land, but it was
(09:28):
difficult to grow much there. Pulan had vivid memories of
watching the rich men in her town eat mangoes, and
she remembered longing so badly for one that she dared
to ask for a slice and received a beating instead.
Poulan was always getting beatings from the wealthier people of
the village, who didn't like her impudent nature, and from
(09:49):
her own mother, who was furious at Pulan and her
three sisters for being girls. Boys brought in money, Girls
cost money. Girls were walking liabilities. If they didn't starve
during childhood, they might be raped during girlhood, dooming them
to a life of worthlessness. If you could manage to
get them married off, you had to pay a dowry
(10:10):
to their husband's family. You certainly wouldn't waste any time
teaching them to read. At one point, Poulan's mother raged
that she was going to throw her daughters down the
well and then fling herself down after them. The message
was clear. As a lower caste woman in rural northern India,
life was barely worth living. In contrast to her mother,
(10:31):
who vacillated between extremely loving and furiously abusive, Pulan's father
was a weak man who went through life with his
head bowed. He believed that the poor should be quiet
and subservient to the rich. But this infuriated Poulan, who
was an exceptionally brave child, born with a sense of
rebellion and justice deep inside her bones. She may have
(10:52):
been angry like her mother, but unlike her mother, she
was determined to do something about it. It didn't take
her long to realize why exactly her family was so poor.
Her uncle, her father's brother, had cheated her father out
of his inheritance, taking all of her grandfather's land and
leaving a mere scrap for Pulan's father. Because of that deception,
(11:14):
Pulan's family now had to watch her uncle and his
loathsome son, Mayadine, waltz around town drinking fresh milk, eating mangoes,
and luxuriating in a thousand and one signs of superiority.
They would harass Pulan's parents or send thugs to beat
them up for no reason. They'd even steal from their
meager stores of grain. Her father just kept his head down, subservient,
(11:38):
but not Pulan. When she was only ten, she convinced
her quiet older sister to come and sit with her
smack dab in the middle of her horrible cousin's chickpea fields.
This was their land, Pulan argued, sitting down and beginning
to pluck plump chickpeas right off the plants. When Mayodine
came running over screaming at them to leave, Poulan refused,
saying that this was their land. In response, Maadine beat
(12:02):
her over the head with a brick until she blacked out,
and then complained to the authorities and made sure her
parents were beaten for good measure. This didn't stop Poulan,
who tried to drag him off to court, and then
attacked him when he cut down their only tree, a
valuable old neme tree, in retaliation. It was no use,
though she only succeeded in destroying her own reputation. Now,
(12:24):
in the eyes of the village, she was a dangerous,
headstrong girl. She was only eleven by that point, but
she had to be married off as soon as possible.
Poulan was so young that during her wedding ceremony she
(12:48):
remembers thinking that after the ceremony she'd run outside and
play with her little sister. Her husband was so foreign
to her that she didn't even register what husband meant.
All she knew was that here this creepy, graying, thirty
year old widower named Pouti Laul who was undergoing some
sort of ceremony with her. Afterwards, the women kept telling
(13:09):
her that she was a married woman now and the
time for playing was over now. Her parents had made
an agreement with Pouti Law that he wouldn't bring her
to live with him, and that he certainly wouldn't touch
her until she was of age. But after the ceremony,
Pouti Lau reneged on his promises immediately and dragged Pulan
off as her mother sobbed. It was in Puti Laul's house,
(13:32):
miles from home, that Poulan's first terrible violations happened. He
told her that they were going to play a game
and that he'd teach her how married people were supposed
to behave He then showed her what she called his serpent.
Even though his fellow villagers and even his own father
told him weakly that she was too young, no one
(13:53):
stepped in to protect her. After about a year, she
managed to escape him, But ironically, in her home village,
being a failed wife was more of a social taboo
than being an abused child bride. Poulan had been an
outsider in her village when she tried to take on
her much older cousin. She was now even more of
a fallen woman. But that's not all. It seemed like
(14:13):
there was something about her that the powerful men of
her village just didn't like. She wouldn't bow to them,
She wouldn't shut up when they wanted her to shut
up when they tried to beat her into silence. She
wouldn't crawl into a corner of her father's house and
live out her days as a shamed creature. And now
she was back, a failed wife, just back expecting to
(14:35):
live with them again. It made them want to take
whatever it was in her that kept her so so alive,
so buoyant, such a fighter and stomp it out. Let's
(14:58):
take a quick break to hear from this episode sponsors.
Our first sponsor is Daily Harvest. Okay, guys, I've been
feeling a tiny bit under the weather recently. It's not coronavirus,
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used to getting beaten by members of the cast above them,
whether over a misunderstanding or just because the wealthy felt
like it that day. Her parents' attitude was shut up,
curl into a ball, and pray that it's over soon.
But to Poulan that was absurd. So one day, when
a couple of rich boys were trying to teach her
a lesson by beating her into submission, she did something
her mother had always told her. She could do if
(18:16):
she was in trouble. She grabbed the boy's penis, twisted
it as hard as she could, and refused to let go.
That night, the boy and his friends came to find her.
Not only had she hurt him, but she had humiliated him,
and that he could not stand so he and one
other man assaulted her in front of her parents, deliberately
(18:38):
staging the violation to bring the most disgrace and shame
possible to her family. Poulan later wrote, my spirit flickered
like a lamp and began to fade. Afterward, she wanted
to die. She ran to her mother's arms and begged
her to throw her into the well. As if that
weren't enough, The wealthy men of her village then framed
(19:01):
her for a robbery, despite the fact that she had
been in another village at the time, visiting her sister.
She was thrown into jail for this and raped repeatedly
by the police, which was a horribly common experience for
any lower caste woman who ended up at the police station,
even if they were there to report a crime. When
she returned home, it was like some tenuous social code
(19:23):
had been officially snapped in the village. Suddenly, Poulan was
considered the property of any man who wanted her. She
screamed and gnashed her teeth and began sleeping in trees
to avoid them. But the men, wealthy, powerful landowners called
takours who belonged to the class above her, just kept
showing up at her family's house asking where they could
(19:45):
find her. Again, Poulan refused to be quiet about what
was happening to her. She'd run to the houses of
her abusers and stand outside screaming, kill me, kill me.
Come on, I'll kill you two and it'll be over.
The villag authorities, panicked, would try to impose sanctions on
her parents, saying that her family couldn't drink from the
(20:06):
communal well because their daughter was so unclean, and Poulan
would defy them, striding up to the well and drinking
from it as if she were a queen. She walked
up to the rich boy who had raped her in
front of her parents and told him point blank that
she had a rifle and she was going to kill him.
She noted with fascination that even though she had no
(20:27):
gun in her hands, he was terrified. One day, a
disgusting old Takur came to the village, like so many
men before him, asking for Poulan. He said that he'd
heard you could do whatever you liked with her. Poulan replied, oh, okay,
I'll go get her, and instead came back with a
tree branch. As she whipped him into a bloody pulp,
(20:48):
she screamed, you wanted Poulan, You've got her. It must
have stimied these upper cast men who thought they would
break her that she still hadn't broken. The girl simply
was not cracking, no matter how much they abused her,
and so they started to fear her. They needed to
get her out of there, away from their drinking water
(21:10):
and their grain and their submissive wives, so they hired
a group of bandits to come and kidnap her and
take her away for good. Pulan was terrified when she
(21:44):
found herself being marched through the jungle by a group
of ragtag male bandits dressed in filthy police uniforms. She
had no idea what was going on. She just knew
that these bandits, called dacoits, were known for their viciousness.
At least some of them were certain dakoits were rapists
and murderers, no better than the men she was leaving behind.
(22:06):
Others were practically folk heroes, stealing from the rich and
redistributing to adoring villagers. The bandits wh'd taken her were
comprised of two casts. Some were Malas like her, and
others were Takurs, belonging to the same cast that had
so repeatedly violated her in her hometown. She kept making
desperate eye contact with one of the Malas, a young
(22:28):
man named Vicrum, who seemed nicer than the others. He
wasn't explicitly showing her any mercy, but she thought he
might be sympathetic to her, since at least they were
members of the same cast. In sharp contrast, the leader
of the Takur bandits kept making jokes about violating her.
This man, Babu Gujar, was a disgusting brute who used
(22:49):
banditree as a quick path to bloodshed and rape. Pulan
doesn't say whether or not he carried out his jokes,
though her biographer says that he did. But tensions had
all right, he been growing between him and Vikram, and
one night, while Babu was at least attempting to rape
Pulan a gunshot rang out and Babu slumped over on
(23:09):
top of Pulan dead. This was the first time in
Pulan's life when a man had defended her. Her poor,
beaten down father could only cower and beg when people
came to assault her. Her husband, the police, and members
of the upper castes had only ever abused her, but
Vicrom was different. Now that Babu was dead, Vicram awkwardly
(23:32):
declared that she was his mistress, and while this must
have been terrifying to Poulan at the time, she realized
soon that it seemed to be a move designed not
to violate her, but to protect her. Vikram said that
if she stayed with him and his bandits, she'd be safe,
and that he'd help her avenge herself on anyone who
ever hurt her. He made his bandits swear to treat
(23:53):
her like a mother or sister. Most importantly, he said
that he wouldn't sleep with her unless she asked him to.
In her autobiography, she describes this moment their unofficial marriage
ceremony in swoony romantic terms. She says that he wiped
away her tears and kissed her gently. She says that
(24:14):
it was the first time she'd ever been kissed. Imagine
the utter terror that coursed through the veins of Puti Lal,
Poulan's first husband, when she showed up at his door
(24:34):
with a raving squad of bloodthirsty bandits behind her, looking
like an avenging angel, like an incarnation of the warrior
goddess Durga herself. The bandits dragged Putti out to the
street and beat him, then handed him over to Poulan,
who sprang on him as the memories of his abuse
flooded her brain. She later wrote that she was driven
(24:57):
half mad to be able to finally quench my thirstad
for violence. This was the man who had come at
her with his serpent when she was eleven years old,
who had introduced her to the depths of fear and degradation.
In a frenzy, Poulon turned on that disgusting serpent, whipping it,
then stabbing it, then crushing it with her own shoes.
(25:19):
When she was finished, she left him for dead on
the outskirts of town, positioned to catch the eyes of
the police with that note warning, this is what happens
to old men who marry young girls. From then on,
Poulon took to gang life quickly, though she had not
chosen it, and though being the only woman in the
group would often wear on her. She and the men
(25:40):
would roam through the jungle, eating all the mangoes they
wanted from trees, those mangoes that were so forbidden to
her as a child. It was a life of freedom,
though it wasn't an easy life. They walked about twenty
five miles a day and ate mostly at night, always
on the lookout for police. She learned to use a rifle,
how to talk to informants, how to plunder the houses
(26:01):
of the abusers, how to beat the flesh of rapists.
She wore a khaki police uniform as a disguise and
was often able to pass as a young male officer.
She found out that her fellow bandits were just like her.
They too had been caught up in land disputes, got
no justice from the police, and so turned to a
life of crime in order to enact their own wild
(26:22):
justice on those who depressed them. At one point, the
gang swung by her home village to give her parents money,
and Poulan was shocked to find that the village was
now terrified of her. They groveled at her feet. They
begged her for mercy, Afraid that she'd gunned them down.
They brought her garlands of flowers and offerings of sweets,
(26:42):
calling her a goddess. Even her evil cousin Maya Dean,
the source of all her woes, came to her in rags,
tripping over himself as he raved about how amazing she
was and how he'd always been a fan. She would
have killed him then and there, but Vicram told her
that killing family was an act of violence she'd never
(27:03):
be able to recover from. So she forced him to
give some land back to her father and let him
slither away to slay her desire for vengeance. Though the
gang found her cousin's brother in law and Pulan shot him.
It was her first killing. She called it simple and terrible.
When the police heard that she'd taken a life, they
(27:24):
put a reward on her head. Pulan felt no regret
what they called a crime, She said, I called justice.
Years before he'd ever met Pulan, Vicram had befriended an
(27:47):
older bandit named Shri ram A Takur, who taught Vicram
a lot about the ways of banditry. Shri Ram had
been in jail for years, but now he was out
and he wanted to be pals with his old buddy
Vicram again. Now Vicrom was kind and trusting and respected
this man as his guru. But all the other bandits
absolutely hated Shri Ram, especially Pulan, who saw him for
(28:10):
the utter scumbag that he was. She defied him at
every turn, and Shri Ram hated that, though he hid
it under a saccharin layer of devotion to Vikram. Now
that Shri Ram and his gang of Takurs had joined
up with Vikrm's gang, cast problems began to plague the
men again. Tensions ran high, and Vikram and Pulan began
sleeping apart in case of an ambush. One day, as
(28:33):
the gang was talking to a villager, someone shot Vicrim
in the back. Shri Ram denied that he had anything
to do with it, but he had been conveniently absent
during the gunfire and reappeared right afterward, playing innocent. Vikram
almost died of the wound before they could find a
doctor who'd treat him without telling the police who he was.
In order for Vikrim to recover in peace, he and
(28:55):
Pulan took off for Nepal, where Pulan experienced, for the
first time in her life the joy of being someone ordinary,
someone who didn't always have to be looking over her
shoulder afraid of violence. She and Vikrom were able to
walk around holding hands in public like your average non
bandit couple. They even went to the movies together, though
(29:16):
she almost ran out at one point, thinking that the
fighting on screen was real. Really, she could have stayed
there forever, but Vicrim desperately wanted to return to India
and take his revenge on Shri Ram. When they got back,
Vicrom wanted everyone to know they were back, and so,
since he was a stylish bandit with a flare for
presentation that definitely rubbed off on Pulan, he fixed a
(29:39):
stamp up that said Pulan and Vikram are back from Heaven.
The two of them used it to stamp the doors
of their future victims, a little personal branding their very
names weaponized. But Shri Ram was still part of the gang,
still slithering around whispering filthy things to Pulan and then
paying ingratiating lip service to oh, I was so sorry
(30:01):
you got shot. How unfortunate that anyone would want to
hurt you. Pulan knew that he was absolutely untrustworthy, and
at one point her nerves were so afraid that she
begged Vikram to just let her shoot shri Ram as
he slept. But Vikram said no, that was dishonorable. He said,
to shoot someone when they were vulnerable like that. That
(30:22):
exchange would haunt Pulan forever because shri Ram wasn't like Vikram.
He didn't care about killing honorably. He didn't care if
you were asleep. One night, Vikrm and Pulan decided, for
(30:48):
a reason they couldn't really articulate, to sleep in the
same bed again. They had been sleeping apart in case
of an ambush, but that night they were exhausted and
just wanted to be together, and so they curled up
into each other's arms in the middle of the jungle
and fell into a deep sleep. Some time later, Pulan
woke in a groggy panic, with the smell of something
(31:10):
sickly sweet in her nostrils and the sound of gunfire
all around her and next to her. Vikram was still there,
but he was moaning and bleeding out and whispering to
her that he was dying. She realized that she had
been chloroformed, and that Shri Ram was standing right there
(31:33):
firing bullets into her lover's chest. She begged him to
kill her instead, but it was too late. Vikrom was
gone Before she even knew what was happening. She was
being dragged off by Shri Ram. He took her to
a nearby village, displayed her in front of all the
wealthy men there, and told the Takurs to have their
(31:53):
way with her. For three weeks, any man who wanted
to assault her was welcome to do so. It was
a montage of horror that Poulan would never really talk
about for the rest of her life, or if she
did mention it, she would often use euphemisms, like saying
that they made a mockery of her. Finally, she heard
(32:14):
Trei Ram's gang talking to a brahmin, a holy man,
a member of the highest cast there was, and this
holy man, this priest, was asking for a turn with her.
She couldn't bear the thought that a holy man could
be like all the others and begged him to spare her.
But once they were alone together, the brahmin whispered that
he was there to help her escape. He gave her
(32:36):
water and a gun and helped her over the wall
of his courtyard. Poulan was free again, but she was
completely alone, running for her life and back to sleeping
in trees, or at least partially sleeping. My hunger for
vengeance was so strong, she said later, it woke me
in the night. In order to avenge Vikrumb's death, Poulan
(33:15):
decided it was time to form her own gang. I
wanted men driven like me by a hunger for vengeance,
she said, and so she began to interview potential gang
members to see just how serious they were about the
business of revenge. She made them swear to think of
her as a brother, not a woman, and she found
a lieutenant Man Singh to be her right hand man.
(33:37):
She then tied a red cloth around her head, a
symbol of vengeance, and began hunting down shri Ram as
a bandit. Her reputation grew and grew until villagers in
the territory thought of her as larger than life, a
bandit queen driven by cosmic anger. This actually helped Pulan
(33:57):
the real girl, because people would pass her on the
street without a second look, never once thinking that this
diminutive policeman, or if she was wearing a sorry this
humble village lass could be Poulan Devy the great and terrible,
But she was great and terrible. She would scream into
a megaphone as her gang looted a village, calling for
(34:19):
Shiram to show his face and stop hiding like a dog.
She would hunt down the men who'd watched her be
raped and beat them between the legs with her rifle butt.
I crushed, burned, and impaled. She said she would force
them to name the names of everyone they'd ever assaulted.
One old man listed all the girls in the village,
(34:41):
and then some of the young boys, his own daughter,
and several animals. She tortured him by cutting off body
part after body part, and then had one of her
men deliver the coupdi gras. She would humiliate them as
they'd humiliated her, stripping them naked and forcing them to dance,
getting the villagers to sing ominous song with lyrics like
(35:02):
what are we going to do with him? Kill him?
Or make him dance? Hers was a class based revolution,
grassroots DIY. Here's how her biographer, Mala Sen explains the
larger significance of what she was doing. Until the early
nineteen seventies, most dacoit gangs had consisted of upper cast
men who had provided a degree of protection to those
(35:24):
of their community. But now it seemed the tables returning.
It was a process that was to dominate the whole
of Indian political life through the nineteen eighties and into
the nineteen nineties, with those of the lower casts suddenly
aware of their potential for power and their ability to
demand fundamental changes at all levels of society. The villagers
(35:44):
loved Poulan, welcoming her and her men with open arms,
hiding them in their houses, and feeding them royally. At
one point, villagers even brought bedding and mosquito NEETs into
the jungle so that Poulon could sleep in the open,
as she preferred, but in queenly comfort. She was robin
hood to them, looting liquor stores and jewelry shops, and
handing out rum and bangles to the thrilled, impoverished young
(36:08):
people who gathered around her. During one such a violent celebration,
an eleven year old girl came up to Pulan, clearly
unafraid of her fearsome reputation. Pulan filled her lap with
jewelry and rupees until it was overflowing. It was an
extravagant gesture. Perhaps she saw something of herself in that
brave little girl, who was the exact same age that
(36:31):
she had been when she was given jewelry to wear
on her wedding day. Pulan never actually got to kill
shri Ram, which must have driven her mad, because his
own brother shot him during a debate over a woman.
But revenge was had. Revenge was most certainly had, though
Pulan coyly denied any involvement in it. On Valentine's Day
(36:54):
nineteen eighty one, the year Pulan turned eighteen twenty two,
Takur men from the village of Behmi were lined up
along the bank of a river, asked to kneel, and
then shot at close range, so many times that the
soil was still soaked with blood days later. Pulan always
denied that the massacre was heard doing, but her lieutenant
(37:16):
Man Singh said that Behmai was the village where Shiram
had killed Vikrm and raped Pulan, and so this was
their revenge. In one interview, Pulan said of the Takurs
who'd been shot, their dogs dirty dogs. I won't say more.
(37:44):
Police ramped up their search for Pulan after the Bechmai massacre,
and pressure began to build for her to surrender, especially
as she was wanted on almost fifty counts of murder,
kidnapping and looting. People told her that she was so
famous by then could set forth the terms of her
own surrender, but she didn't know who to trust, and
(38:05):
she wasn't sure that authority figures would respect her terms.
She knew that she didn't want to surrender in her
home state of Uttar Pradesh, where the furious and embarrassed
police were sure to shoot her on the spot. But
her men were growing thinner and life was growing ever
more dangerous, and so eventually, two years after the massacre,
(38:25):
she agreed to hand herself over to the police of
a different state. She set the terms. She and her
gang would not be hanged, Her family would be kept
safe and given land, Her gang would be fed in jail,
they would only spend eight years behind bars, and so on.
The actual process of surrendering was long and fraught. Pulan
was illiterate and paranoid and still very young, so the
(38:46):
whole official process terrified her, and she occasionally became convinced
it was all a trap. Journalists would try to interview
her and take her photo, which only made things worse.
But finally, on February twelfth, nineteen eighty se twenty year
old Pulan and her men were escorted by police to
a stage in front of a crowd of seven thousand
(39:07):
villagers who'd gathered to see her. Where they surrendered. She
didn't know why there were so many people there. She
didn't know yet that there were songs written about her
and clay statues of her being sold in the marketplace.
She didn't know that women of her cast had even
started praying to her in secret. She just handed over
(39:28):
her gun, put a garland around a portrait of her
patron goddess Durgas, and lifted her hands in a gesture
of prayer in front of the enormous crowd. Though Poulon's
legend would rise from that moment until people were making
movies about her, life didn't magically become easy for her
once she gave up her dacoit ways. She was in
jail after all, and the eight years came and went,
(39:51):
and still she wasn't released, partially because she refused to
go back to her home state to be tried like
the rest of her gang did. Her family was still
a plague by troubles. Her father died, her sister died
in what seemed like a staged suicide, and Takurs began
bullying them again. The police of her home state started
a rumor that she was suicidal, presumably so that if
(40:13):
they managed to kill her, they could claim that she
did it herself. At one point in jail, she was
rushed to the hospital because of an ovarian cyst, and
when she was being operated on, the doctors took out
her womb, giving her a hysterectomy, without ever asking for
her permission. When her biographer, Mala Sen, who was there,
(40:33):
asked why in the world this was necessary, the doctor chuckled,
we don't want her breeding anymore, Poulan davies, he said.
One month before she was released from prison, a movie
came out about her life called The Bandit Queen, a
movie Poulan hated because of its graphic and all consuming
focus on her many rapes, especially its drawn out scene
(40:57):
of gang rape. She even threatened to set herself on
fire outside of the theater if it ran, though she
settled for suing them. She told a journalist from the
Atlantic that she was angry the film never portrayed her
conflict with her cousin Maya Deine, which was the source
of all her troubles. There's absolutely no mention of my
family's land dispute, she says. In the film. I'm portrayed
(41:20):
as a sniveling woman, always in tears, who never took
a conscious decision in her life. I'm simply shown as
being raped over and over again. In fact, Poulan didn't
even like the word rape, which she found too fancy.
To her. The word felt one off, too exceptional to
describe something that was everyday life for many of the
(41:42):
women she knew. She told that same journalist. It is
assumed that the daughters of the poor are for the
use of the rich. In the villages, the poor have
no toilets, so we must go to the fields, and
the moment we arrive, the rich lay us there. We
can't cut the grass or tend to our crops without
being accosted by them. We are the property of the rich.
(42:05):
In February nineteen ninety four, she was released from jail
by a new Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who was
also from a lower caste, making the pardon a class
victory and not just a personal one. Two years later, Pulan,
the woman who'd once told her biographer that all politicians
are thieves, ran for and was elected to parliament, even
(42:26):
though there was still a murder trial looming over her.
She campaigned directly to the lower cast voters eighty percent
of the electorate, mind you, and vowed to uplift the
downtrodden among them, becoming a beloved politician. The flare for
drama that she developed as a bandit served her well
as a politician. She would pop onto trains without warning
or sweep into prison to sealed friends, and even went
(42:48):
to Europe to promote her autobiography even though she was
technically still on parole. She also got married again. Her
life may have taken an almost fairy tale turn political power,
international fame, but her past was always there, lurking behind
the trees. If Poulan never forgot the names of those
who'd wronged her, there were people out there who never
(43:11):
forgot the name of Poulan. Davy. One July day in
two thousand and one, she came home from the morning
session of Parliament, got out of her car, and was
shot five times by three masked men. The men were
from an upper cast They killed her in retaliation for
the nineteen eighty one massacre of upper cast men. That
(43:32):
massacre of upper cast men had been done in retaliation
for the murder and gang rape of lower caste people.
It was a vendetta for a vendetta for a vendetta.
Violence heaped on violence, heaped on violence. But let's go
back to nineteen eighty three, before Poulan had any idea
that she'd be on TV, that she'd have a book out,
(43:53):
that she'd be a politician, when she was preoccupied with
the idea of surrender and what it would mean for
her for her when she was walking to that stage
where thousands of people were waiting for her, the mostly
male journalists who wrote about that day seemed disappointed that
the avenging bandit Queen of Legend was a rather small
young girl. They said her skin was too dark, her
(44:16):
chest was too flat, her language was too filthy. They
said she was an infomaniac, a bandit brat One journalist
called her a plain woman with a touch of the
wild about her, but the photos of her surrender are
incredibly compelling. There she is a girl, a girl who
(44:38):
not so long ago was sleeping in the jungle, in
her khaki uniform, a red scarf around her hair, a
cartridge belt slung around her chest. She holds her rifle
with ease, and though she's so much smaller than the
men around her, it's clear that she's their leader. Her
face is preoccupied but resolute. She looks like someone who
(45:00):
as real power. Not power that was conferred on her
or stolen by her, but power that she was born with,
Power that was knit into her bones as she grew
inside the womb of her angry mother. Power that the
world was never able to snuff out. Thank you so
(45:39):
much for listening to this story. I hope you have
become a super fan of Poolan Devy as I have.
Feel free to get in touch at any time. Criminal
Broads at gmail dot com is my email address, or
message me on Instagram at Criminal Broads. You can also
check Instagram for photos of Poolan. I'm always putting up
photos of these women so you can see what they
actually looked like. She is always interesting and feel free
(46:02):
to reach out if you have any suggestions or requests
for next time. And if you like this episode, please
consider leaving a review on iTunes. It would mean the
world to me. It would seriously, I would be so grateful.
And now as we exit, I just want to play
you a quick clip of Pulan talking being interviewed. I
was unable to find a translation, but you'll be able
(46:23):
to hear her. You'll be able to hear her voice,
which is just adorable. I mean that sounds insulting. She
she just has this cute, high pitched voice. And then
I'm gonna round out by playing you the theme song
of the movie The Bandit Queen. Now, she didn't like
a lot of the movie, but this this theme song
is an old folks song about child marriages and it
is sung by a maestro singer and it is just beautiful.
(46:45):
I'll link to them on the episode description anyway, thank
you for listening. Bye with the last color girl.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
Mm hmm, ch.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
As co.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Co call.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Come come.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Come, you don't stop, who don't stop? You'll see.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
You sneaking, No sea Snea, nobody want you.
Speaker 3 (49:48):
You got jo.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Please not.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
Jo Sound for Better Monety Card A bitter money in soul.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Who Sound
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Wou
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