NEW DELHI — The first, and possibly the only, time I have reached the end of the road was 20 years ago. We had set off in a couple of jeeps from Kanpur toward Kanpur Dehat, an unambiguous definition of territory that started at the dying edge of the city and rose toward the dust-choked ravi nes in sudden profusion to shape the course of rivers, armies, kingdoms and destinies in the heart of India.
We were in search of a village that had become instantly famous as the birthplace of a young woman who was using a gun and a gang for revenge that was personal, political and age-old. This was unique, a sensational combination of gender war and rough revolution; this was exotica at its most exotic, in a landscape out of fiction. Her name was Phoolan. Devi would come much later, when caste support for her courage evolved into a mild form of veneration. She never quite became a heroine, but a Queen of Hearts was apt. Reality fused quickly into legend.
A sudden bump, and then a straight line at some arbitrary point where the Public Works Department of some government had either run out of money, or out of imagination, or simply decided that enough progress had been made. This was where the tarred, motorable road ended, with decisive finality, in a straight line that dropped a couple of inches into hard mud overlain with dust. Our jeeps now had to negotiate toward our destination by query and strong stomach. But the comparative ease with which we reached the edge of a stunning ravine, towering over a pristine blue river on which picture boats moved with slow patience, was testimony to the growing fame of yet another bandit in a region that offered poverty and violence as its staple realities.
This was “Sholay” country. As it so happened “Sholay” was still running to nonstop and generous applause in the small-town cinema hall on our way, a single-source catchment area for bioscope entertainment in a land that had remained dark, brutal and hungry for centuries. They knew no other life, and wherever we paused we encountered excited curiosity in modern India’s interest in their traditional caste wars.
Caste and crime were the flavor of the Eighties in the Hindi heartland. The flavor has not gone, but it was pungent and acrid then. It had not stabilized into the cuisine of today’s political recipes, and sold through fast-talk chains across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The caste domination of the upper layers was facing a challenge from those in the middle, the so-called Backwards; the empowerment of the lowest castes would come in the Nineties, with the arrival of Ram Vilas Paswan, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.
Indira Gandhi had been defeated in 1977 by the folly of her own Emergency, but among the victors were Backward caste leaders like Charan Singh, Devi Lal and the then still-unknown Yadavs, Mulayam and Laloo Prasad, who would use power to quicken the pace of a caste conflict predicted by Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia but still waiting to be born.
When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she responded in the Gangetic plains by seeking a coalition of the two upper castes, her own Brahmins and the Thakurs, as the engine of a social coalition that would include the Muslims and Dalits. V.P. Singh, therefore became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (and A.R. Antulay chief minister of Maharashtra). V.P. Singh, then unknown for any proclivity toward campaigns, launched his first own in the name of a cliché, law and order. Against dacoits. Maybe he too had seen “Sholay”. But life was more complicated than a movie.
Life is also more complicated than journalism. So we will have to use a little shorthand to get by. The Thakurs of Hindi India did not represent only the power of landed interests; they were also synonymous with social power, reinforced by the gun, which defined justice and social equations as it suited them. One offshoot was the spread of Thakur banditry, from the dispossessed margins of this syndrome. These gangs were despotic, and ruled over clusters of villages and perhaps even districts, leaving the traditional order helpless when it was not indifferent.
These gangs made the Chambal Valley into a nest of stories that made their way into literature and cinema. As the Backwards began to stir, one of the options they chose was to answer terror with terror. As the nouveau element they were mostly at the receiving end of this conflict, but the war had begun. When V.P. Singh started his law and order campaign, his machinery, also a part of the traditional caste-power structure, chose to be selective against the Backward gangs. The Backwards interpreted Congress’ hypocrisy as yet another attempt by the upper castes to eliminate, this time by the use of state machinery, their rising power. Two decades later the Backwards are firmly anti-Congress in the north as ever and show no sign of changing.
Into this bubbling chemistry Phoolan threw charismatic acid. A mallah by caste, a queen by disposition, she taunted the Thakurs with her tongue, lashed them with her gun and provoked them with her courage. No one had seen anything like her. In one stunning incident, she and her gang killed 22 Thakurs in Behmai as punishment for their violence. The incident mesmerized both rural and urban India.
Urban India, at least partially influenced by the investigative reporting of Sunday magazine, had begun to discover caste in its rural dimensions. Kurta-clad undergraduates from Delhi University and its Brahmin cousin, JNU, now ambiguous about the Naxalite uprising, which was the high of the Seventies, went out in search of the Kurmi and the Yadav of Bihar, often meeting them at teashops in cities called Champaran and Hajipur.
I have no empirical evidence of the Kurmi response to this historic intervention of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in their lives, but I gather that they treated it with their customary, stoic silence. It was a phenomenon, and it would pass.
The politics of this social upheaval, however, would stay, not least because at the end of the Eighties V.P. Singh became Prime Minister of India with an anti-Congress coalition and, learning from his tenure as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, set the caste fires further alight by accepting the job-protection recommendations of the pro-Backward Mandal Commission in 1990.
By this time Phoolan was on the road to redemption, thanks to another Congress Thakur, but one who did not leave the party during Rajiv Gandhi’s time, Arjun Singh, a thinking Congressman with still some personal relationship to ideology. We will, perforce, use time-compression techniques again in our narrative. Suffice to say that Arjun Singh understood the politics of the Phoolan upsurge as well as V.P. Singh and before him.
As chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Singh tried to balance off the pro-upper caste policies of his party by stretching out to the Backwards; he knew that his party could not afford to alienate them. Rajiv listened, but did not hear as much as Arjun Singh would have wished. Rajiv in fact took Arjun Singh out of Madhya Pradesh and sent him as governor of troubled Punjab; a political mistake.
It was a formative period in northern social life. If today the Congress still lives in Madhya Pradesh it is because of Arjun Singh and a few others like him. For Rajiv, the inability to fully comprehend the social change taking place in the Eighties in the north was a bigger problem than Bofors. Arjun Singh brought Phoolan back, step by typically cautious step, to civil society via surrender and an obligatory period of detention.
Phoolan went on to join the system without quite surrendering a foreboding, maverick identity as she struggled with the contradictions within herself, and within the social forces she represented. From child rape to marriage is an impossible transition in our biased and merciless male centric culture. Her trauma needed better interlocutors than she got. She could not adjust easily to the icon status bestowed upon her by urban India’s journalists, authors and filmmakers in search of a story. For a little while she confused their attention with sympathy and a search for the truth. Sympathy she got, but truth was another matter, particularly if it interfered with popular drama. She resolved her anger, as she had resolved her anger earlier, and accepted.
Once in the mainstream, winning elections was the easy part. What was she to do with her victory? Sit in parliament as a silent and strange exhibit? She had, one understands, just begun to think out a few answers when she was shot dead within the inner radius of parliament and government, in the broad daylight not of Mirzapur but of Delhi, by assassins whose identity could shape the next 10 years of social conflict in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
The system will not make it easy for anyone to find the truth. At one level, this will be further exposure of the decay of governance under the vigil of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its principal ideological strongman, L.K. Advani. On another level, the fate of governments in Lucknow and Delhi is involved. This in turn impacts upon the fate of India.
Phoolan was born to be larger than life.
When we reached her village, she of course was not there. A single adult male relative spoke briefly to us, uncertain and edgy. Phoolan’s sister, in ragged clothes and snotty, about five years old, was playing somewhere in the village and was dragged back to meet this unexpected jeep load of shirt-and-trouser, sari-and-blouse sophisticates from English India.
The child looked frightened and nervous, and her tension must have communicated itself to my daughter, who was less than five then and who got frightened as well. But they were the only ones to share something on that morning in the ravines as time calmed their nerves.
The hut in which Phoolan had been born was empty. Fame had brought journalists and even their families but there was still no food, only a yard of cotton as dress, and straw pretending to be shelter overhead. There was a sort of helplessness in my questions as I tried to be a journalist, as if it was all pointless and nothing would change.
I never did write that story for Sunday and often wondered why. I know now. The story was only beginning then. I am not so sure that the story had ended with Phoolan’s death.
