Phoolan Devi. Even her name has an implied promise of fruition. In India, the name Devi may be as common as Mary is in Europe. But its meaning is “goddess”, while “Phoolan” implies a blossoming.

Yet her short, horrific life was damned from the start.

The commonest image of Phoolan Devi has been that of a revolutionary brigand-cum-avenging angel who terrorized hordes of upper caste men in Northern India. She is seen as a natural rebel against oppression – a young woman with a rifle slung across her shoulder and a red bandana that kept her hair off her face.

While these are interesting elements for myth-making, they don’t quite fit the Phoolan Devi who settled down in Delhi in 1994 after serving an eleven-year sentence in Gwalior Jail. In fact, anyone who met her then would have been taken aback to find a poorly dressed, plump and plebian housewife. When not in front of a camera being interviewed by the innumerable channels that pursued her, she was most at home in her own kitchen, cooking and chatting with other women there.

What this genial demeanour contained was not so much a social rebel as a person with a strong sense of self worth. This self-esteem protected her from being intimidated by people or situations. She had an uncanny ability to look beyond established structures of caste, class or power to see the real area of conflict. This then allowed her to find a response that was appropriate to the situation. From my limited contact with her in 1994, two examples illustrate this.

A reversal of roles

Towards the end of that year, I was invited by Lady Shri Ram College, an elite college for women in Delhi, to give a talk on the controversy surrounding Bandit Queen, a film that claimed to be the true story of Phoolan Devi. At that time, I was involved in helping her fight a legal case against the producers of the film. After the talk, students from the college hostel asked if it would be possible to arrange for her to visit the hostel one night to talk with the students. Phoolan agreed without much fuss.

A few days later, she turned up at the hostel in her usual “regalia” – a sloppy, crumpled sari with an ill-matched blouse. Under normal circumstances, a woman dressed like her would not have been able to get past even the outermost gate of this college. Students would not have spared her a second glance, let alone spoken to her. So it was on that night too.

As she passed, workers in the dining hall craned their necks for a glimpse of a legend from their ranks, while the women waiting for dinner didn’t seem interested and merely giggled. For Phoolan, without much of a record of public speaking, this was a disconcerting moment. Here she was about to address women who were not really interested in her. Did she bat an eyelid? Within five minutes, she had sized up the situation.

Clothes, class and language didn’t matter to her. These primarily English-speaking women had issued an invitation to someone who knew only a very rustic form of Hindi. She knew they had come to listen to what was original about her – and she gave it to them!

She spoke of the oppression of women in the home, on the streets and in the villages; the secondary status of women and the need to resist it. She spoke from personal experience, as one of the lowliest of the low that had suffered the worst indignities possible. And she spoke of the need to fight all of this, not by taking to the gun, but by using whatever tools education and our own nature provide us. She spoke one to one, yet to the whole group. Even when she spoke to the group, she managed to speak intimately to every one of us.

Word spread through the hostel that this woman was something special. At first the room where Phoolan was speaking was fairly empty. But people who had turned in for the night kept on coming in until there was not an inch of free space.

An ironic reversal of social roles had taken place. Class taboos do not operate in subtle ways in India. The Indian middle class does not suffer plebians at its table. In domestic seating arrangements, the poor sit on the floor or at best at a level lower than the middle class. On this day, a low caste, plebian woman sat on a chair while nearly a hundred upper class and upper caste women willingly sat mesmerized on the floor, at her feet. In a single leap, Phoolan Devi had moved from being a dacoit to an orator and social activist.

Living by her own rules

The court case filed by her in the Delhi High Court through the lawyer Indira Singh and the author, Arundhati Roy, gave me my second glimpse of this remarkable capacity of Phoolan’s. When she first appeared in court, the opposition confronting her was formidable: filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, lawyers Ashok Desai and Arun Jaitley and Channel Four’s Commissioning Editor Farrukh Dhondy.

The casual power and cosmopolitan sophistication exuded by these gentlemen was evident in the servility of the retinue of assistants that hovered nervously about them. The poorly dressed Phoolan seemed hardly to notice. She let loose a volley of expletives. “They’re liars and will die a dog’s death, each one of them…” she promised.

Naturally, her confidence and self-image were enormously boosted by the fact that a huge crowd of workers at the High Court – drivers from the parking lot, and all manner of tattered and torn litigants – were falling over themselves to see her.

She came to court regularly. Each day her impatience with the process grew. “What is the problem with the judge? Why can’t he decide a simple case like this?” she kept complaining. For a person who had spent eleven of her thirty-one years in prison waiting for countless trials to start, this was impatience indeed.

But by now Phoolan had changed. At some stage in that court case, she decided she’d had enough. She had a sense of her destiny. She had survived the backwaters of India. It was time to collect the debt which society owed her. Eager to get on with her life, she soon settled out of court, whether this was due to pressure from Channel Four or the French publishers of her biography or as a result of the temptation of a fat financial settlement.

Those who had supported her during the court case were hugely disappointed. For Phoolan Devi was on the verge of a court victory that would have defined the notion of the public and private domain within the Indian context. But then legends do not follow other people’s agendas. They carve out their own.