Richie Mehta initially wanted nothing to do with Phoolan, the new Hindi-language film about Indian outlaw-turned-politician Phoolan Devi. The filmmaker behind the International Emmy-winning Delhi Crime was reluctant to return to another story steeped in extreme violence, and he questioned whether he was the right person to tell Devi’s story.
He eventually found his way in by abandoning the idea of making a conventional biographical film. Instead, Phoolan concentrates on a single, extraordinarily tense episode: the 48-hour siege in which roughly 2,000 armed police and paramilitary personnel surrounded a village while trying to capture Phoolan Devi, who was 17 at the time.
Fast Facts
- Film: Phoolan
- Director: Richie Mehta
- Lead: Sneha Kumari
- Language: Hindi
- Setting: Chambal region of India
- Central event: A 48-hour police and paramilitary siege
- Phoolan Devi’s age: 17 during the siege depicted
- Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival
- Producers: Shareen Mantri Kedia, Kishor Arora and Kanwal Kohli
- Studios: Amazon MGM Studios and Namah Pictures
Why Mehta Chose One Episode Instead of Her Entire Life
Phoolan Devi’s life is too expansive to comfortably fit into a single conventional biopic.
Born into poverty in rural Uttar Pradesh, she experienced caste and gender-based violence before becoming one of India’s most notorious bandits. Her later life took another dramatic turn: she entered politics and was elected to India’s Parliament twice before being assassinated in 2001.
Mehta felt that attempting to cover all of those chapters would force the film to compress experiences that deserved more room.
The siege offered a different possibility.
By limiting the story to roughly two days, the filmmaker could stay close to the immediate imbalance of power between a teenage woman and the enormous state force surrounding her. It also gave him a way to examine caste, gender, institutional power and resistance without turning Phoolan’s suffering into a collection of biographical milestones.
The producers had originally approached Mehta with the rights to Phoolan Devi’s dictated autobiography. His first reaction after reading the hundreds of pages was that the material was almost impossible to film.
What changed his mind was being asked to find a contemporary reason for telling the story.
From Delhi Crime to a Different Kind of Survival Story
Mehta’s earlier work on Delhi Crime played a major role in his decision.
That series centered on investigators trying to protect others and make sense of horrific violence. With Phoolan, Mehta wanted to turn the perspective around and place the person experiencing the violence at the center.
He had become increasingly interested in what happens when testimony and justice fail to produce the change survivors hope for.
That led him toward a much angrier film.
Rather than presenting Phoolan Devi simply as someone acted upon by violent forces, Mehta wanted to portray a woman who managed to retain a sense of agency despite circumstances designed to strip it away.
That distinction is central to the film’s approach.
Mehta has said he did not want to make Phoolan a passive victim. His interest was in how she continued to make choices, hold onto hope and find a form of humanity under extreme pressure.
The Siege Is Not Designed as Conventional Action
Although Phoolan revolves around an armed standoff, Mehta did not approach it like a conventional action thriller.
The violence is intended to feel overwhelming rather than exhilarating.
Instead of turning the confrontation into a spectacle where audiences can enjoy the choreography of combat, the film emphasizes the enormous disparity between the forces involved and the young woman at the center of the siege.
That approach also affects how the film handles some of its most disturbing material.
Mehta made a deliberate decision not to visually recreate the worst violence described in Phoolan Devi’s account. Some of the most traumatic events are communicated through dialogue rather than explicit images.
For the filmmaker, showing those events directly would have crossed an ethical boundary.
The dialogue surrounding those scenes was drawn from Phoolan Devi’s own writing, keeping her testimony at the center of the film rather than transforming it into purely cinematic invention.
Nature Becomes Part of the Story
The Chambal landscape plays an unusual role in Phoolan.
The film repeatedly returns to animals, insects and birds around the river, creating a contrast between the natural world and the human violence taking place around it.
That decision wasn’t simply an aesthetic extension of Mehta’s earlier Prime Video series Poacher.
It came from Phoolan Devi’s own writing.
In her autobiography, she described feeling more at ease among predators in the wild than among people. Mehta used that idea to make the landscape part of her emotional world.
The natural environment also witnesses the siege in its own way, including the disruption caused by aircraft and armed forces moving through the area.
Research Took Mehta to the Real Chambal
The film’s focus on one relatively contained historical episode created another challenge: much of the siege was not formally documented.
Mehta traveled to the actual locations in the Chambal valley described in Phoolan Devi’s autobiography and spoke with villagers who remembered what happened.
The filmmaker encountered an important form of evidence that existed outside official records — oral history passed through the local community.
Several villagers independently described the same unusual detail: among the huge number of officers involved in the operation, one officer behaved differently from the others.
That detail became important to Mehta because it complicated the film’s portrait of power.
The siege could have been presented as a simple confrontation between a powerless individual and an entirely faceless institution. Instead, the story leaves room for individual choices inside a violent system.
For Mehta, that human counterpoint was essential.
Sneha Kumari Was Chosen for More Than Acting Ability
The role of Phoolan Devi required an actor who could embody the region as well as the character.
Casting director Mukesh Chhabra’s team spent months searching central India before finding Sneha Kumari, a theatre performer from Bundelkhand making her feature-film debut.
One major advantage was linguistic and cultural familiarity.
Kumari speaks Bundelkhandi, the dialect used in the film, and comes from the region itself. Mehta felt that she brought an understanding of the place and its people that could not simply be acquired through research.
She underwent workshops and physical preparation before production.
But Mehta did not want the most intense siege scenes to become overly controlled performances. The sequences were prepared without a camera, but much of what happened once filming began depended on Kumari’s reactions in the moment.
The director describes her instinctive response to the oppressive environment as something that ultimately shaped the filmmaking.
The Film’s Other Perspective: Constable Vijay
The story also introduces Constable Vijay, played by Anurag Thakur.
Mehta noticed Thakur before formally seeing his audition. The actor was outside a casting office wearing a constable’s uniform, and the director immediately took note of him.
Thakur’s previous work in Black Warrant also helped make him a candidate.
The character was designed to avoid an easy transformation.
Mehta did not want a police officer who suddenly became a heroic ally simply because the story required it. A person arriving at a siege with a particular worldview would not realistically abandon it completely within two days.
Instead, Vijay’s response develops gradually as he witnesses what is happening.
That allowed the character to occupy an uncomfortable middle ground — someone inside the system who begins reacting to the human consequences in front of him.
Bandit Queen Is Part of the Film’s History
Any new film about Phoolan Devi inevitably invites comparison with Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen, starring Seema Biswas.
Mehta does not reject that comparison.
In fact, he considers Kapur’s film an important reason he became interested in Phoolan Devi in the first place.
His connection to Bandit Queen eventually became more personal when he worked with Biswas on his feature directorial debut, Amal.
But Phoolan is intentionally not another attempt to reproduce that film.
Mehta’s argument is that today’s audiences may be more likely to encounter Phoolan Devi through a new film than by independently seeking out the 1994 classic.
His solution was not to remake the earlier movie, but to approach the historical figure through a much narrower period of her life.
The hope is that viewers who discover Phoolan through the new film will then investigate the real history for themselves.
A Story About Agency, Not Just Survival
That distinction is ultimately what separates Mehta’s Phoolan from a straightforward biographical treatment.
The film is interested in what happens when a person subjected to extraordinary violence refuses to become only a symbol of that violence.
Phoolan Devi later became a politician and a public figure, but Mehta has deliberately left much of that later life outside the film’s frame.
Instead, Phoolan asks audiences to remain inside one compressed period when the balance of power appears overwhelmingly one-sided.
The result is a film built less around the legend of the “Bandit Queen” and more around the young woman before that legend was complete.
Toronto Premiere
Phoolan, from Amazon MGM Studios and Namah Pictures, is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
For Mehta, the project represents a return to intense material after Delhi Crime, but with a markedly different perspective.
Rather than turning Phoolan Devi’s life into a catalogue of trauma, the film narrows the timeline so her choices can remain at the center of the story.
That 48-hour structure gives Mehta room to explore violence, caste, gender, institutional power and human agency without attempting to compress an entire extraordinary life into two hours.
And for Sneha Kumari, the film marks the beginning of a feature career in a role that demands not only historical weight, but the ability to carry an entire siege through the eyes of a 17-year-old girl.
FAQs
What is Phoolan about?
Richie Mehta’s Phoolan focuses on a 48-hour siege surrounding Phoolan Devi when she was 17, rather than covering her entire life.
Who plays Phoolan Devi in the movie?
Sneha Kumari plays Phoolan Devi in her feature-film debut.
Who directed Phoolan?
The film was directed by Richie Mehta, known for Delhi Crime and Poacher.
Is Phoolan the same as Bandit Queen?
No. Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 Bandit Queen covers a much broader portion of Phoolan Devi’s life. Mehta’s film concentrates on a specific 48-hour siege.
Where is Phoolan premiering?
The film is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
