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

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With the exception of a single scene—the climax in Geeta’s house goes on too long and the tone, which had previously been exactly what it needed to be without ever getting too dark or too flippant, wavered— The Bandit Queens is an exciting ride, with each event no matter how seemingly small spiraling out of control until Geeta finds herself in an ever-expanding web of insanity.

Things quickly spiral out of control as the bodies start piling up, the police get curious, and Geeta enters into a second-chance romance with a quiet widower who runs a speakeasy. Arguably that’s the main idea of this novel: that women are stronger together, that they should look out for each other, and that structures of oppressive power can only be challenged or broken when the oppressed put aside petty differences and stand together. Despite the prior agreement that she would not spend more than eight years in prison, she spent over ten years on remand.Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Ballantine Books. What I got from this novel: Very dark humor that failed to limit my shock at the depiction of life in India. Phoolan Devi (10 August 1963 – 25 July 2001), popularly known as the Bandit Queen, was an Indian dacoit (bandit) and politician, who became a member of parliament before being assassinated.

Women start coming to her for advice and help in killing their no-good husbands, believing Geeta has experience in such a murder despite her protests. Still, the premise and cover sounded interesting enough that I was willing to go in with solid expectations even though I’ve gotten a bit skeptical of Barnes and Noble’s book club selections. Shroff expresses herself further in The Author’s Note, which I hope readers will take the time to read. With murder just as with their loan group, with every step the women take towards independence, they find five more obstacles in their way. The family was illiterate and the parents were warned that it contained a clause giving Maiyadin legal rights to their land, so they refused to sign.It was written, produced, and directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as the title character. Shroff cleverly considers how women might achieve autonomy within rural India's patriarchal society through shrewd, if complicated, female friendships.

I am beyond impressed with the author's ability to explore serious subjects while maintaining a humorous tone throughout. Phoolan Devi was born on 10 August 1963, in the village of Gorha Ka Purwa in Jalaun district, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Her life has also inspired several biographies, and her dictated autobiography was entitled I, Phoolan Devi. Thank you, NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, and Ballantine Books, for the eARC. A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her helpgetting rid of their own husbands—in this razor-sharp debut.

Despite growing up in abject poverty and in a patriarchal society, Devi stood up for herself and was notoriously outspoken from a young age — she was not happy about the control . It's hard to box it into a genre - certainly not a thriller, and there is no mystery, but nor is it exactly cosy. It’s visually striking, its vibe matches that of the novel itself, and it does not closely resemble any other books out there. To quote Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘ show a people as one thing, as an only thing over and over again, and that is what they become’.The 1994 film Bandit Queen was loosely based on Mala Sen's biography; it was directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as Phoolan Devi. Phoolan's aging father Devideen (Ram Charan Nirmalker) conforming to his culture, disagrees, and Phoolan is sent off with Puttilal. Also, though the plot kept moving, the plot points tended to be quite similar, further, the cultural imbalance is hammered home repeatedly with a great deal of rape and almost rape running a constant theme throughout. Every few chapters brings a new surprise, and the result is that there aren’t any lags where the reader might get bored and set the book aside. Phoolan Devi, Marie-Thérèse Cuny and Paul Rambali, I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen, Little, Brown and Company, 1996.