Bandit Queen is the name of a film about the life of Phoolan Devi, a village woman raped by the landlord of her village. She joins a band of dacoits to seek revenge on him. The following poem by a local poet and women's rights activist, Deepa Pathak, is about the reaction of some of the male spectators of the film.
Being a woman
The geography between two thighs
The anger of the raped body from centuries
The filthy comments
The eyes of the spectators compare
the truth of Choli ke Piche*
with the naked body of Phoolan
They are not with
the extreme grief of the raped woman
They try to find
images of Playboy and Debonair
in the black pages of her cursed life
Worms of unsatisfied lust
In the crowd, alone, in the bus, everywhere
Where can we escape from them?
* "Behind the blouse" — the words of a popular Hindi film song.