‘The Bandit Queen’ Still an Outcast in India : Movies: Both the real-life subject and censors object to a new film on the life of the legendary outlaw. And a court order could prevent the film from an Academy Award nod.

S.S. (Bobby) Bedi has produced what some critics term the greatest movie in India’s history, an ugly yet spellbinding profile of a downtrodden, abused woman who in seeking vengeance on an unjust society becomes “The Bandit Queen.”

It’s a shocking film some have said is worthy of India’s first foreign-film Oscar.

But there’s a problem: Both the film’s real-life subject, Phoolan Devi, and Indian censors object to the $1.4-million production, which, along with heavy doses of sex and violence, bares in a brutally graphic manner the inequalities of the Hindu caste system.

“I request the public not to participate in my humiliation,” Devi begged last month in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the movie from being shown at the Toronto Film Festival. “I would not go and watch you being raped, if I knew you didn’t want me to.”

Indian filmgoers may never get a chance to make up their minds about the movie, financed by Britain’s Channel 4 Television and directed by Shekhar Kapur. On Sept. 9, the Delhi High Court issued a nationwide stay against showing the 120-minute film in public or private. The order will remain in force at least through Nov. 7.

That timing, Bedi asserts, is specifically designed to block an Oscar nomination for “The Bandit Queen,” since, to qualify in the foreign-film category, a picture must have been screened in its home country by Oct. 31.

“Holding the film back is akin to putting Dreyfus in jail because he was a Jew,” the 38-year-old producer said this week, as he and Channel 4 commissioning editor Farrukh Dhondy unsuccessfully filed a motion in Delhi to have the stay lifted.

After failing on the legal front, Bedi left for Los Angeles on Wednesday to ask the motion picture academy to bypass its customary rules and consider “The Bandit Queen” for the Oscar anyway.

“I’m going to try to convince the academy that, since there is political censorship, they should waive their usual requirements,” Bedi explained. “It’s a shame that something so significant out of India would lose its chance because two or three people want otherwise.”

Devi, released from jail this year, spent 11 years in confinement without trial after surrendering to police in 1983.

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The film, based on a biography by Mala Sen, chronicles an almost unbelievable adventure that began, when Devi, at age 11, was sold into marriage in exchange for a cow and a bicycle. To avenge repeated rapes and the murder of her lover, the lower-caste Hindu woman became a gun-toting outlaw leader, hiding out in the ravines of north India.

In one of the most notorious allegations linked to her, on Feb. 14, 1981, 22 members of the upper-caste Thakur clan were shot dead in an Uttar Pradesh village where she had earlier been paraded naked. The film, which claims to be a “true story,” depicts the murders.

But Devi denies she killed anyone at the village. “This film should be called a work of imagination and not my real life story,” she says.

In a lawsuit, she asserts her right to privacy has been breached by Bedi’s project. Some, though, suspect the former bandit has political ambitions and is concerned the film may hurt her reputation or alienate slices of the population.

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In its simplest terms, the movie shows Devi, a member of the lowly Mallah, or boatman caste, being victimized at every turn by the higher-born, land-owning Thakurs, then taking her revenge. It is this portrayal of the caste system, as well as the sexual victimization it can lead to, that mesmerized many Indians who saw the film at private screenings before the Delhi court issued its stay.

“Every Indian must see it to learn about the living hell they call India,” Sunil Sethi wrote in the Pioneer. Kushwant Singh, probably the country’s best-known newspaper columnist, called the film the best Indian movie he had ever seen.

One English critic said it was as important for the evolution of India cinema as Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” was in Japan or Vittorio De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” was in Italy. “Here is a truly radical film. Angry, shocking, potentially inflammatory. It owes nothing to decades of perceptive but undisturbing filmmaking by Satyajit Ray and his like,” Alexander Walker said in the Evening Standard of London.

Before “The Bandit Queen,” Indian audiences had never seen rape so realistically depicted from the viewpoint of the violence and humiliation it causes the victim, critics said. It may also set a record for the rawness of its language.

Before it issues a certificate allowing the film to be shown in the country’s theaters, India’s Censor Board wants cuts to eliminate profanity, much of the rape sequences, and, says Bedi, “all references” to the Thakurs. He thinks the real reason for the censors’ objections is the hostility of the “high-caste lobby” to the film’s portrayal of caste injustice.

“The fact is, these things are happening and we cannot keep shutting our eyes,” Bedi says.