India

Phoolan Devi

Accused: Phoolan Devi

At 1:30 on a July afternoon in 2001, three masked gunmen opened fire outside a government residence on Ashoka Road in New Delhi. Nine bullets found their mark. The target was Phoolan Devi, 37, a sitting Member of Parliament who had once been the most wanted woman in India, hunted across three states for a massacre that left twenty men dead on the banks of a river in Uttar Pradesh. She had been a child bride, a gang rape survivor, a feared dacoit who robbed from the rich and shared with the poor, and a democratically elected lawmaker. The arc of her life was so extreme that it seemed impossible any single person could have lived it. The man who would claim responsibility for her killing, a Thakur named Sher Singh Rana, said he did it to avenge the 1981 Behmai massacre. The Behmai case itself would not reach a verdict until February 14, 2024, exactly forty-three years after the killings that defined her legend. This is the story of a woman born at the very bottom of one of the world's most stratified societies, who refused to stay there, whatever the cost.