Hello and thanks for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service

with me, Reena Stanton Sharma. Today I'm bringing you the incredible story of how a woman

from a small Indian village started a women's rights group that has now spread across the

country. The group has tens of thousands of members and has even inspired a Bollywood

film. Nobody can stop me from fighting for the cause, especially when there is so much

injustice. This is Sampadpal Devi. She is the leader of the Gulabi gang based in one

of India's most lawless states, their women who wear distinctive pink saris and protest

against everything and police corruption to domestic violence.

I just thought how long can this carry on that a woman gets constantly hit for no reason?

How long can we live in fear? And the Gulabi gang don't just chance slogans. They think

it's sometimes justified to use violence, to fight back against men. We are strong

together and don't need much outside help, where one woman is not able to fight a thousand

turn up to help. Sampad Devi is now well known and controversial figure, but she was born

in a small village in a remote part of North Central India called Bundelkhand. It was

an area where women were often badly treated by their husbands, by their relatives or

by gangs. From when I was a child, I always had a sense of right and wrong, naturally,

when you are small you can't fight. But when I grew up, I knew that I would fight against

these atrocities towards women. Sampadpal had to leave school and get married at 12. Desperate

to learn how to read and write herself, she asked the boys in the village to teach her.

Then aged 16, she took a stand for the first time.

There was a man who used to beat his wife a lot in the village. I complained to my family

and no one bothered to do anything about it. So one day, I decided to challenge the man

...