It wasn’t the best or the worst of times, but it must have been the strangest when a British archive restorer chose to write to a bandit languishing in an Indian jail. The letter, written in June 1991, fetched an instant response. Phoolan Devi, who had just stood and lost in elections, wrote back to Roy Moxham asking him for financial help.
Nine years after her assassination, Moxham attempts to resurrect the association which spanned several letters and visits to India. However, his book Outlaw is as much about Moxham himself and his India adventure as it is about the bandit who became a lawmaker.
Much has been said and written about Phoolan Devi for the vengeance she sought against injustice. Born into the bramble of caste and gender, Phoolan had a fairly unfair share of reversals. But neither stoicism nor silence suited her style. Armed with a double-barrel gun and an acerbic tongue, she chose to fight back. Years later, she gave up the gun before the pictures of goddess Durga and Mahatma Gandhi, but retained her tongue. This is the point where most accounts about her draw to a conclusion, but Outlaw takes off from here.
Moxham describes her as small and thin when he met her for the first time in February 1994 after her release from prison; nothing like the fighting-fit woman in fatigues who had surrendered in 1983. He meets the inevitable question of the nature of his relationship with Phoolan headlong. He confesses of being tempted to propose a marriage of convenience to Phoolan when she confided of being under pressure to remarry. He clarifies at the cost of appearing rude to the memory of his dead friend, “… had she been more beautiful, I might perhaps have had second thoughts about our future relationship.”
The Phoolan Devi Moxham befriends is not the gun-wielding outlaw one would imagine. She comes across as a cheerful, plain-speaking woman who spent little on show even during her halcyon days. The book works much like a photo album. The pictures the writer presents are interesting, be it Phoolan bargaining with a vegetable vendor, blessing a shy Dimple, the daughter-in-law of Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Moxham talking to Ravi Shastri. The language is simple and bare, the flip side being that it doesn’t cover up where the writer descends into banality.
During most of his India visits, Moxham stayed with Phoolan or her immediate family. He describes her house as frugally furnished, without any servants and full of near and distant relatives at all times. On his first visit, Phoolan’s brother tricks Moxham into sending him a camera. This is the first in a series of incidents where those around Phoolan come out as coveting her legacy. After her death the relatives bickered in public while the case against those accused of her assassination lingered. Moxham uses the milieu around Phoolan to understand and explore India. Not all his shots are close-ups of Phoolan. More frequently he zooms out and indulges himself with brow-beaten briefs on the great Indian railways crush, the differences between North and South Indian cultures or the political picture. He is, however, more engaging when he observes in the vein of a sahib in India: Roses stay wrapped in cellophane, beds shared by those of the same sex, blasting fan like sleeping under a draught or the girl not going to her own engagement. Phoolan Devi’s political career had kept her in the news years after she gave up arms. Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, much to Phoolan’s dismay, carried her story to an international audience. In an appended note, Moxham says he could not get himself to see the film till 2009.
He documents his own fruitless fight against its release in London while in India Arundhati Roy fought fiercely against the film. The book also suggests the possibility of Phoolan’s husband being covertly paid to get her consent to the film.
A circus of feuding relatives, funeral and politics followed Phoolan’s assassination in 2001. Moxham says it robbed Phoolan of the dignity she deserved in death. Outlaw attempts to redeem what was so lost. It reconstructs Phoolan as a brave woman who lives the burden of a traumatic past and an endangered future. Yet it shows, ironically, how susceptible the once bandit queen was to harm. Moxham neither indicts nor condones, but he is a crucial witness to the legend of Phoolan Devi, the woman who not only survived but also prevailed.