This entry is a classification correction. Phoolan Devi killed, or is held responsible for, a number of men in a single incident on a single day. That is not serial murder, and her presence in a roster of serial killers is a category error that this archive is correcting rather than repeating.
She was born in 1963 in Uttar Pradesh into a Mallah family, one of the lowest castes, and was married at eleven to a man in his thirties who abused her. She was driven out, taken by a gang of dacoits, and in 1980 was held for weeks at the village of Behmai by upper-caste Thakur men and repeatedly gang-raped, then paraded naked before the village. Indian reporting called her the Bandit Queen, and a 1994 film of that title fixed the name in English.
On January 30, 1981 she returned to Behmai with an armed band and twenty-two Thakur men were lined up and shot. She always denied firing.
She surrendered in 1983 on negotiated terms and spent eleven years in Gwalior jail without ever being brought to trial. The charges were withdrawn by the Uttar Pradesh government in 1994 and she was released.
She was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, for Mirzapur in 1996 and again in 1999, as a representative of the lower castes. She was shot dead outside her house in Delhi on July 25, 2001 by men who said it was revenge for Behmai.
She is one of the most contested figures in modern Indian public life: a mass killer to some, a caste rebel and a rape survivor who was failed by every institution to others. She was not a serial killer either way.