"Most mornings while the street peddlers set up their goods and the snake charmers feed their cobras, poor village women wait outside Phoolan Devi's home to seek her help against cruelty by husbands and in-laws, scoundrels who 'violated their modesty,' a euphemism for rape.

A woman's threat of going to see Phoolan Devi has intimidated many an Indian male chauvinist who has heard all about the Bandit Queen of India, a heroine to women and a scourge to evil men. A girl, who took up a gun and formed a gang to become the nation's avenging angel, she has acknowledged killing many men she insists wronged her or her clan. To her devoted followers, she is the reincarnation of Kali, the sanguine Hindu goddess of thieves and robbers.

For millions of rural Indian women exploited by men, shackled to husbands chosen for them by their elders and burdened by dowries their in-laws might consider insufficient, the Bandit Queen has become a militant symbol for women's rights. Her tragic story remains a reality for millions of women even now, as India nears the cusp of the 21st Century.

"I was a simple girl from a low-caste family who was married off at 11 years of age. But when society put me up against the wall, I reacted. I am a human being," Devi said in an interview in her rented home on Delhi's posh Ashoka road.

The khaki-clad young woman with the ammunition belt slung across her shoulders has gone. The red-lacquered toes of the 41-year-old woman in a yellow sari are adorned with three good-luck rings of the Zodiac. After a lifetime of banditry, Devi wants to fight for women's rights by legal means, she says, though she remains illiterate, a legacy of her upbringing as a Dalit, India's lowest caste.

Her temper flares when she talks of the women who come for help. "When I'm really free, I'm going to thrash these men. But right now the government won't even give me a license for a gun. They know I can use it," she said wistfully.

After languishing for 11 years in jail without trial for reportedly murdering some 70 people, Devi was released in 1994. Within a year, adoring women had elected her to federal parliament with a 50,000-vote majority on the ticket of an Uttar Pradesh State socialist party.

This week, Devi threatened to immolate herself in parliament unless new murder charges brought by the male relatives of her alleged victims are dropped.

"I'm serious. I have not been able to do anything in parliament for women because I'm always running off to the courts to face reopened cases. What kind of justice is this? They are after me because I'm a Dalit and a woman. I made a mistake when I surrendered to the government," she said.

By the time she turned herself in to authorities in 1983, Devi's life story had become folklore, perpetuated in a film "The Bandit Queen." Born into a Dalit caste of Untouchable boat-rowers, she was married at age 11 to a widower 20 years her elder. He already had six children.

Beaten by her husband, the high-spirited and intelligent girl defended her father in a court case over a land dispute. She won, was arrested by police on questionable charges and raped in detention. Devi ran away to the deep jungle of her native region south of Agra and became the mistress of a bandit leader.

A rival gang from the powerful landowner caste caught them, killed her lover and dragged her to their village. She was publicly raped for days. She would never bear children.

After three days she escaped, went back to the jungle and gathered a gang. A year later, 20 of her tormentors were dead.

Stalked by police across India for two years, she and her gang surrendered in public in exchange for a government promise of eight years in jail. The promise was not kept, and now Devi fights to be free of a past that still haunts her.

"I took revenge against torture and injustice, not against men. I do not hate men," she explained. "But I'm still enraged when women come to me and say they have been raped and the police will not do anything against these men."

Devi's legend has grown in this nation of nearly 1 billion people, where urban women demand a quota of one-third of all jobs, an end to the outlawed but still common dowry system and a judiciary that cracks down on wife-beaters. But Devi's militancy represents a rural class, where traditions remain untouched.

In her office in New Delhi, academic Vina Mazumdar exemplifies the growing number of upper-class Indian women who have attained some measure of independence and a growing voice in society.

But she acknowledges that many women of her status remain divorced from the plight of rural women.

Sixty percent of India's female population, mainly in rural areas, remains illiterate. But three of every four people enrolled in the country's literacy campaign are women from the countryside.

Mazumdar, head of the Study Center for Women's Development, sees the elusive promise of female political power in the world's largest democracy as the main instrument to erase the many wrongs imposed by religious strictures and a culture that fuels male chauvinism."