The Bandit Queens: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

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Now she's got a line of women outside her door hoping that she'll put an end to their suffering by getting rid of the one thing that's making them miserable . It is a complex social structure wherein social roles like one’s profession and status became “hereditary,” resulting in fixed hierarchies. In Shroff's acerbic debut, a woman helps other women escape their abusive marriages in their small village in India, often through murder.

It was written, produced, and directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as the title character. From top to bottom these are: Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (traders) and Shudra (labourers). Ashok Roy made the 1984 film Phoolan Devi in Bengali and followed it the next year with a Hindi version entitled Kahani Phoolvati Ki ( The story of Phoolan). It also serves up commentary on class, power dynamics and the role of women in society, with a feminist history lesson to boot. The court case concerning the Behmai massacre began in 2012; of the twenty-three people facing charges, sixteen (including Devi) were dead by 2020.

THE BANDIT QUEENS, however, is murderous, raucous fun that also has a keen eye for social commentary. After her drunken, abusive husband disappeared one day, Geeta has been treated with fear and suspicion by the others in her village. To what extent does it change the course of the characters' lives and help drive the plot within the story?

Therefore, creating a life of isolation and newfound freedom from her abusive husband which Geeta surprisingly enjoys since she can now be independent and self-sufficient without fear and her husband’s judgment. She was assassinated outside her house by Sher Singh Rana, who was convicted for the murder in 2014. Shroff does an excellent job of placing the reader in this small Indian village, with a mix of language, caste delineation, customs and folklore. The book has many references to CID (it is a popular crime show on Sony TV and one of my favorites).Saloni—a woman whose capacity for food was exceeded only by her capacity for venom—goaded most of the conversation. It's good to see some improvement in their relations toward the end, but be warned, there is a very rocky road to go over first. I often unintentionally get in a rut of reading only books set in America and England, and whenever I read something like The Bandit Queens I’m reminded of how shortsighted and limiting that is.

The top police officials now begin a massive manhunt for Phoolan, and Thakur Shri Ram relishes the opportunity to come to their aid.In 1983, Devi surrendered to the Indian government (then under Prime Minister Indira Ghandi) and was accused of 48 criminal offenses. ETA (07 May 2023): This is the fourth time (patterns are easy to figure out) I've been labeled and judged after my review got a fresh bout of likes (all from strangers). It's kept from being incredibly depressing by the female solidarity (which is shonky beyond belief in a realistic way) and by the super-dark humour that pervades the book (the ongoing gag about motherhood being so rewarding is hysterical). I think ultimately the thing that didn’t work for me was that I either wanted this book to go fully into the ridiculous humorous side of the story like a DIAL A FOR AUNTIES or fully go towards the serious side of what the story tried to discuss as far as the caste system in India, and how differently genders are looked at/treated differently in India etc. I did wish it didn’t drag so much in the middle but overall I loved getting pulled in the world of these husband killing women!

The saddest part is that such stereotypes are encouraged and cemented by authors of Indian origin, which adds a false layer of credibility to the narrative and makes them ‘ more authentic’. Of these is being a part of a group of entrepreneurial women- her business is going good and things are looking up.

I just never got to that happy place in reading where I was excited to pick it up when I had the time. Over the following year, the gang robbed trains and vehicles, and looted higher caste villages, sometimes disguising themselves using stolen police uniforms.