Bandit Queen is a 1994 Bollywood film based upon the life of Phoolan Devi. It was directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as the title character. It was produced Bobby Bedi’s Kaleidoscope Entertainment. The film opens in the summer of 1968 at a small village in Uttar Pradesh. Phoolan, eleven years old (played by Sunita Bhatt) [1], is married to a twenty-something fellow called Puttilal (Aditya Shrivastava). Though child marriages are customary during that time, Phoolan’s mother Moola (Savitri Raekwar) objects to the timing of the match. Phoolan’s aging father Devideen (Ram Charan Nirmalker) hesitates at first, but eventually agrees, and Phoolan is sent off with Puttilal. Phoolan is exposed to some sobering realities, including the caste system. (Phoolan’s family as well as Puttilal’s family belong to the lower ranked Mallah sub caste; the higher ranked Thakur caste takes the lead in social and political situations.) Puttilal is physically and sexually abusive, and Phoolan eventually runs away and returns home. As Phoolan grows older, she faces incidents of (non-consensual) fondling and groping from the Thakur men (whose parents make up the panchayat or village government). At the next town meeting, the panchayat decides to banish Phoolan from the village.