WOUNDED - The Realistic 'Bandit Queen'

Seema Parihar is yet another woman dacoit from the Chambal ravines to lay her arms and turn mainstream. After 18 long years of hunting and being hunted in the jungles and ravines of the Chambal with the Lala RamSri Ram gang, Seema Parihar surrendered before the police last June.

The life of dacoits, shown in films like Sholay or even the 'realistic' Bandit Queen, is bunkum. In reality, these bandits don't go about shooting around on horses or having cabaret shows in the evening. On the contrary, their lives are scary and full of struggle, they keep running from the police all the time.

After Seema's surrender, it was during her incarceration that Krishna Mishra decided to make a film on her life. But before signing on the dotted line, Seema had a set of conditions. She did not want to romanticise her life, the way Phoolan Devi's was done and wanted a realistic portrayal of what she has been through. And replaying her life on the screen was "a heart-rending experience" for the former bandit who was kidnapped from her home at the age of 13. The reason? Her father refused to give her hand in marriage to someone from a lower-caste community. They took their revenge thus and she was married off to Nirbhay Gujjar (a bandit again) who was recently killed in an encounter. And this made an apradhi out of her. The men's atrocities forced her to pick up the gun for survival. Life in the jungle was tough, moving around on foot, sometimes covering 60 to 70 kms in a day with no horses.

Like Phoolan Devi, Seema nurses a hope of joining politics. In 2002, she was given a ticket to fight the polls by Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. However, she declined to fight at the last moment. Seema also dreams of a bright future for her five-year-old son Sagar.