One of my earliest memories is of getting into trouble for being a tomboy. I used to climb mango trees with the village boys and run around wildly. My mother caught me one day, swinging off a branch with my hair in tangles and she scolded me fiercely, saying that girls cannot behave that way, we had to be good. “But what about the boys?” I asked. “Boys are different,” she replied.

To prove her wrong, I used to get into fights with anyone who treated me badly. I was quite a misfit. I think my parents knew I was going to be feisty when I grew up, but they would never have imagined that one day I would be leading a women’s gang with more than 20,000 members.

My gang is called the Pink Gang, or Gulabi Gang, and we are a gang for justice. That is because in Uttar Pradesh, the state where I live in India, getting justice is very hard, especially for women. Unlike criminal gangs, we do not rob or kill. We just try to help women who have no one else to turn to.