Abstract
According to the conventional account of thuggee, which George Bruce exemplifies brilliantly, the thugs were a fraternity of ritual stranglers who preyed on travellers along the highways of nineteenth century India. Their unsuspecting victims were first deceived into joining the thugs and later at some secluded spot strangled, plundered and buried, supposedly assuming the status of human sacrifices to the goddess Kali. Thuggee was said to be an ancient practice sanctioned by Hinduism and the thugs supposedly observed a plethora of religious rules; they relied on omens, performed rituals and spoke a secret language. Concurrent with the expansion of the East India Company’s possessions in India, the British administration became aware of the existence of thuggee but failed to respond due to a lack of reformist zeal. Yet from 1830 onwards, the British official W. H. Sleeman managed to unravel their secrets and by using pardoned thugs as so-called approvers, or informers, he put an end to their reign of terror. In 1836 Sleeman published his account of the operations in the important work entitled Ramaseeana, upon which all later accounts of thuggee in standard works and works of reference have been based.1
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W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix, descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity and of the measures which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its suppression (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836).
E. Thornton unscrupulously copied Sleeman’s work in his own Illustrations of the history and practices of the Thugs and Notices of Some of the Proceedings of the Government of India for the Suppression of the Crime of Thuggee (London, W. H. Allen, 1837, reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2000) while a pirated American version of Ramaseeana was published in 1839 entitled History of the Thugs or Phansigars of India.
P. Meadows Taylor Confessions of a Thug (London: 1839, reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Most of Taylor’s material was derived from Sleeman, but the former made the thugs known to a much wider audience through his novel.
See, for instance, Fanny Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850, reprint Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. I, pp. 151–8 and 201–2.
Skulls of thugs were also made the subject of study by phrenologists, see H. H. Spry, ‘Some accounts of the gang murderers of Central India, commonly called thugs; accompanying the Skulls of Seven of them’, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8 (March, 1834): 511–24; and R. Cox ‘Remarks on the Skulls and Character of the Thugs’, ibid., 524–30.
James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garotters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen, 1857), p. 97.
J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company: A History of the Indian Progress (London, 1853), pp. 354–79.
R. Russell and Hira Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 558–87.
Much has been written on the construction of caste in colonial India, see, for instance, the work of Bernard Cohn, or Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
James Sleeman, Thug or a Million Murders (London: S. Low, Marston, 1933), p. 18.
Sir Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1961) and Bruce.
Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command — An Imperial Progress, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 72, 77 and 81.
More recently the thugs have been recast as terrorists and thuggee compared to Al-Qaeda, see David C. Rapoport ‘Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions’, The American Political Science Review, 78 (1984) 658–77; and ‘Ameer Ali — Thug’, http://www.roadtopeace.org/terrorism/Terrorists/ameer_ali.html (accessed 13/07/2003).
Benedicte Hjejle, The Social Legislation of the East India Company, with regard to Sati, Slavery, Thagi and Infanticide, 1772–1858 (unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford, 1958).
See also Kim Wagner, ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers — a Reassessment of Thuggee’, MAS, 38, 4 (2004): 931–63.
Hiralal Gupta, ‘A Critical Study of the Thugs and their Activities’, Journal of Indian History, 37, 2 (Aug. 1959): 167–77.
See Stewart N. Gordon ‘Scarf and Sword: Thugs, marauders, and state-formation in eighteenth-century Malwa’, IESHR, 4, 6 (1969): 403–29; p. 429.
Mention should also be made of the collection of articles published in Anand A. Yand (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India, Association for Asian Studies monograph, 42 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985).
See Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, MAS, 25, 2 (1991): 227–61;
C. A. Bayly Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).
See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).
Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 41–70;
Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 125–44;
Maíre ní Fhlathüin, ‘The Travels of M. de Thévenot through the Thug Archive’, JRAS, 2, 1 (April 2001): 31–42.
Two very recent articles are in a similar vein: Mark Brown’s ‘Crime, Governance and the Company Raj. The Discovery of Thuggee’, The British Journal of Criminology, 42 (2002): 77–95;
Tom Lloyd, ‘Acting in the “Theatre of Anarchy”: The “Anti-Thug Campaign” and Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, 19 (2006).
Chatterjee, Representations of India, p. 4. This is a quote from Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. See also Said, Orientalism, p. 5.
Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Simon Scharma, A History of Britain 3: 1776–2000 The Fate of Empire (London: BBC, 2002), p. 211.
See also Rajnaryan Chandvarkar in Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c: 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who talks of ‘the invention of “thuggee”’, p. 226.
Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time — History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse, Second Edition (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 4.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 77.
Dirk H. A. Kolff Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 183–4.
I will, in the words of Arthur Marwick, be ‘using one episode in one place to draw out wider conclusions’. Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 125.
See, for instance, Paul Winther, Chambel River Dacoity: A Study of Banditry in North Central India (unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1972).
See also Florike Egmond’s brilliant Underworlds: Organized crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993);
P. Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
See E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969, reprint London: Abacus, 2000);
A. Blok, ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1972): 494–503
A. Blok, Honour and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
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© 2007 Kim A. Wagner
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Wagner, K.A. (2007). Introduction. In: Thuggee. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590205_1
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