If Indian villages were populated by American teenagers, The Bandit Queens would be a black-humor romp.
The novel is inspired by the true story of Phoolan Devi, a poor woman at the bottom of the caste structure in Uttar Pradesh. She was married off at a young age, abused, abandoned and raped before she formed her own gang and murderously revenged herself, was captured, spent years in prison, was released and went on to be elected as an MP and then assassinated at the age of 37.
Set in a village in Gujarat, this novel is centered on Geeta, a woman in her thirties whose husband vanished mysteriously five years ago. The villagers suspect that Geeta murdered the drunkard, and people avoid her out of fear. She keeps afloat by making and selling jewellery, and is content to be left alone until another woman with an unpleasant husband approaches her to get rid of him.
You can see where this is going. Murder, complications, blackmail and further murders ensue. There are several women with difficult husbands, a widowed booze-shop owner as a love interest, spunky kids, female-bonding, female-bickering …. all adding up to a darkly amusing novel wanting to make some loud points about patriarchy and Indian society.
The point of the novel is that the women stand up to the heavy hand of patriarchal oppression, as did Phoolan Devi. Great! Who wouldn’t root for them?
But here’s a sampling of the dialogue:
That’s super weird.
Did too!
What’s the scene there anyway?
Oh, fuck off, yeah?
Like, so brave.
That’s kinda the whole problem here.
Grieving widow is a good look for me, don’t ya think?
You’re an emotional guerilla.
I swear, the way this country white-knuckles caste … it’s a disgrace. Those poor guys [Dalits] can’t catch one damn break.
About 90% of the dialogue is very American-teen, but the remaining 10% is very Indian:
Keep your filmy dialogues to yourself. (I think the author meant ‘filmi’, but we’ll let that go)
Instead of fixing my one problem, you broke my head with more!
Tubelight. (a very Indian insult, meaning your brain flickers before sparking into life)
There’s something black in those lentils. (this one appears multiple times)
The inner monologues are also very American.
If she was this lonely, Geeta berated herself, she should get a damn dog.
[Geeta remembered when ] Saloni dope-slapped the boys.
The look wasn’t exactly doing her any favours.
From an authorial point of view perhaps this is less condescending than having all the characters speak in pidgin English, but for the reader, it’s simply ludicrous at times, and quite distracting.
The descriptions are far more American-suburb than Indian-village:
If she herself had been a mother, impelled into the bullshit rotation of teacher conferences and game-day events […] (Really? Indian village mothers spend their time going to PTA meetings and soccer league games?)
their economics teacher in the village school (the village school has a teacher specifically for economics?!)
[A woman with a disfigured face] My name is fucking Preity. Preity of all things! Do you know what it’s like introducing myself to people? (Preity, more commonly Priti or Preethi, is a common name in India. It means ‘joy, pleasure’ in Sanskrit, and it is not associated with the English word ‘pretty’)
[A woman says] His brother once invited me over to study. (a boy inviting a girl over to study might just be ok in a liberal urban Indian household, but is very unlikely in small towns or villages)
There’s an ongoing joke about ‘whimpering like a baby raccoon’, but raccoons are not native to India. There are some very awkward phrases:
Geeta adjusted furniture akimbo
Leaving aside the heavy Americanism of the storyline and dialogue, the female characters are strong and quite distinct. Geeta, for all her independence, is naively helpless when pressured into illegal activities by the other women. Her best friend Saloni grew up poor, is now wealthy and married, but retains her mean-girl bullying attitude. There is history and years of silence between Geeta and Saloni, and it is nice to see them warily reconnecting. Farah is a Machiavellian instigator. The twins, Preity and Priya, are largely interchangeable despite Preity’s acid-scarred face. To be clear, they are not convincing representations of any Indian woman I can imagine, but they are potentially interesting because of the natural complexity of their relationships.
The male characters are unconvincing. The booze-shop widower, Karem, is open-minded in a modern-American way: he holds Geeta’s hand, kisses her with just the right mix of affection and lust, and is willing to have a slow romance where they ‘just figure things out as they go’. Preity’s husband Darshan is a stereotypical boor; his justification for attempting to rape Geeta is that ‘widows have needs’. The other male characters are drunken louts.
The story could have been fun, but for me, the sheer dissonance of the dialogue precluded it from being a pleasant read. I did like the cover, though.
Cringed as I read the quotes in the review! Argh! Dire! I take my hat off to you for managing to make it all the way through the book!