On February 14, 1981, a band of dacoits walked into Behmai, a Thakur village in the ravines of what is now Kanpur Dehat district in Uttar Pradesh, rounded up the men and held them at gunpoint. Twenty of them were lined up and shot. One villager, Babuji, was a child of about five in his father's arms when the gunmen asked his father, Himmat Singh, how many children he had; Himmat Singh and two of Babuji's cousins were among the dead. The band was led by Phoolan Devi, and she was seventeen or eighteen. Some accounts give the date as January 30 and the toll as twenty-two; the court record and the reporting on the trial give February 14 and twenty.
The massacre was widely understood as revenge. Phoolan Devi was born in 1963 into a Mallah family, boat people near the bottom of the caste order, and was married at eleven to a man in his thirties who abused her. Driven out, she fell in with a dacoit gang. Its leader, Vikram Mallah, was said to be her lover. He was shot dead by two Thakur gang leaders and rivals, Lala Ram and Sri Ram, who then held her at Behmai, where, by her account and the accepted history, she was gang-raped over weeks and paraded before the village. She always denied firing a shot at Behmai herself.
The killings made headlines around the world and brought down a government: V. P. Singh, then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and later prime minister of India, resigned, taking moral responsibility. The press called her the Bandit Queen, and Shekhar Kapur's 1994 film of that name fixed it in English.
She stayed at large for two years, then surrendered to the police of neighboring Madhya Pradesh in February 1983 under an amnesty negotiated with the chief minister, Arjun Singh. She spent eleven years in Gwalior jail without trial and was released in 1994. Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh then moved to withdraw the cases against her, and in 1996 she was elected to the Lok Sabha for Mirzapur on the party's ticket. The families of the dead fought the withdrawal; Munni Devi, a Behmai widow, led protests against it, including in Mirzapur. A local court set the withdrawal aside, and the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court upheld that ruling. Phoolan Devi was re-elected in 1999 and became a champion of the Nishad and other boatmen castes.
She never faced the trial. On July 25, 2001, as she came home for lunch after a sitting of the Lok Sabha, three masked gunmen shot her at close range at the gate of her official residence at 44 Ashoka Road, in the heart of New Delhi's government district. She was thirty-seven. A security guard was also shot.
Sher Singh Rana, a young Thakur man, surrendered and was charged with ten others; police said he had killed her to avenge Behmai and to make his name as a Thakur leader. He escaped from Delhi's Tihar Jail on February 17, 2004, later claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan to retrieve relics of the Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan, and was rearrested in Kolkata in April 2006. On August 8, 2014, Additional Sessions Judge Bharat Parashar convicted him of murder and attempted murder and acquitted the other ten for lack of evidence. "Why have you convicted only me," Rana said. "Others were also there." He was sentenced to life imprisonment later that month.
The Behmai case itself outlived almost everyone in it. Of the thirty-six people eventually named as accused, thirty-three, Phoolan Devi among them, died while it was pending; several were killed in police encounters, and twenty-eight witnesses died too. Only five were ever tried. On February 14, 2024, the forty-third anniversary of the massacre, a special anti-dacoity court in Kanpur Dehat convicted one of them, Shyam Babu Kewat, of murder during dacoity and sentenced him to life imprisonment, and acquitted another, Vishwanath, for lack of evidence. One accused, Man Singh, has never been caught. The families had received about 7,000 rupees each in compensation, Munni Devi said, and it went on the cremations.
Behmai was a single massacre on a single day, not a series of killings. To the families of Behmai, Phoolan Devi was the woman who murdered their men and never answered for it. To millions of others she was a low-caste rape survivor who took revenge when every institution had failed her. Both views have outlived her.