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1996
THE BANDIT QUEEN
BY: T.R.K
Bandit Queen, a film from India which had its world premiere at the
Cannes Film
Festival
last May has caused a minor sensation at the Berlin Film Festival. The
subject variously called "radical, angry, shocking, potentially
inflammatory", is about the treatment of women of the lower castes
in India, seen as "domination through violence." This causes
a current to run through the veins of feminists, and their agenda of
seeking " a reform in the apartheid of gender."
Shekhar Kapur who started his working life training to be an accountant in England 25 years ago, gave up a safe future as a dull and prosperous life in English suburbia for a career in films in Bombay. Once again, Kapur has given up the safe berth of family entertainment films for a controversial theme that requires a wholly new approach. Kapur says that the larger truth of the Hindu caste system and the social brutalities it promotes had to be aired.
The true story of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, a child bride sold to a rapacious man, provided Kapur a subject to explore his concern. However Kapur is no Satyajit Ray. Explicit scenes of sexual sadism, starting with the rape of the child bride would challenge the judgement of censors, even in liberal Europe.
I understand that India's censors have refused to allow Bandit Queen to be shown uncut, with the central and dramatically crucial central scene of rape. The camera is perceived to be uncompromisingly voyeuristic throughout the film. Full nudity on screen has never been shown in Indian films before. Even the British censors would not consider showing what amounts to an illegal act of child abuse, which is what Phoolan Devi undergoes as a child bride. Seema Biswas, the actress who played Phoolan Devi is said to have had a nervous breakdown after these testing scenes. Shekar Kapur, the director is much more sanguine and matter of fact about the turn of events that have ended in Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen disowning the film as an invasion of her privacy. "They are raping me all over again" she is alleged to have said. Kapur maintains that the film does not romanticise her or any of her activities. He blames the urban India's media instead, for turning her into a "raven-headed, blue-eyed Amazonian beauty".
A leading British film critic Alexander Walker who saw the film at the Cannes Film festival in May 1994 compared the Bandit Queen to Francesco Rossi's 1962 movie Salvatore Giuliano, the film that converted the @mythology@ of a bandit leader into a frontal attack on poverty and corruption in the Italian society. Kapur the director has not flinched from showing violence of sex and the bloody revenge that Phoolan Devi wreaks in a climatic scene of massacre of her old tormentors. Hard on the heels of a series of films that celebrate violence like Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, Kapur's film might find an unexpected and wider audience.
The script described as being "brisk, episodic", and based on the prison diaries of Phoolan Devi is by Mala Sen, an old friend of mine, who had her first encounter with the burning bush of political enlightenment in the mid sixties. As a hazel eyed aristocratic 19 year old scion of India's elite, Mala willingly traded in her birth rights of class and wealth and a comfortable if mindless return to India's high society for a life of long dedication in England to the causes of the black immigrant population and to feminism. I have not met Mala for a decade or more, but her passionate defence of her ideals using subtle Marcusian dialectics with a remarkable lack of fanaticism or rancour is quite unforgettable.
625 Words