An abiding interest in ethnographic research on women's crimes and punishments in India took me to one of the most opaque institutions in the world – a women's prison. I often try to remember what aroused my interest in the lives of women who violate legal regulations. Was it the ‘Phoolan story’, that my mother used to tell me when I was a kid? Was it an intellectual curiosity to understand why and how women in a deeply entrenched patriarchal society like India violate laws? Or was it simply a personal desire to celebrate female agency? I still do not know. It probably did begin with my childhood stories of Phoolan – the ‘female Robin Hood’ of India.

The narrative of Phoolan Devi is among the many narratives of female offenders who have captivated postcolonial India. It is the story of a young girl's abuse in her family, her revenge, the way she eludes law and order, surrenders to the government, emerges as a public figure, and finally gets assassinated.

The story of Phoolan Devi, India's most famous female offender has spawned legends, literary productions, research studies and theories, an output that qualifies as a genre of thought and imagination in modern India. The Phoolan Devi story is a potent pool of symbols and meanings that captures and signifies the anxieties, aspirations, paradoxes, dilemmas and dynamics of a changing India.

Phoolan Devi first stepped on to the national stage in 1983 when she ‘surrendered’ during a public function in Bhopal, before the Chief Minister of the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh and other VIPs.