Between Admiration and Administration: Code-switching ...

Between Admiration and Administration:

Code-switching, Style-shifting, and

Sociolinguistic Crossing in Philip Meadows

Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug

NOA REICH

University of Toronto

[email protected]

Introduction

WHEN PHILIP MEADOWS TAYLOR PUBLISHED CONFESSIONS OF A THUG IN 1839, he helped

construct and familiarize the English reading public with the identity of an Indian criminal

profession that had been ‘discovered’ by the British as recently as the last few decades. At its

most sensationalized, the word Thug was used to describe the member of a secretive, cult-like

organization that transcended the barriers of caste and religion, worshipping the goddess Kali

by conning, strangling, and robbing travellers (Wagner 2009, 2, 29, 33). 1 Beginning in the initial

decades of the nineteenth century, the British launched an anti-Thuggee campaign which

reached its peak in the 1830s under Captain Sleeman’s direction (Poovey 2004, 10). Taylor’s

extremely popular2 Confessions can be read as largely according with the sensationalized

perception of Thuggee (Wagner 2009, 36; Brantlinger 1988, 89), and this is how contemporary

reviewers generally viewed the novel (Poovey 2004, 4). More recent critics such as Mary Poovey

and Pablo Mukherjee have drawn attention to ways in which the text is rather more complex

and ambivalent (Poovey 2004; Mukherjee 2003). This paper explores this ambivalence by

examining more closely what Javed Majeed recognizes as the novel’s complex exploration of

linguistic diversity (Majeed 1996, 94). I aim to bring into sharper focus the role of code-

switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing in the novel, contextualizing it in view of

the role played by language in British attempts to suppress Thuggee. Attending to these

1 The OED defines Thug as ‘One of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who

strangled their victims; a p'hansigar’ (‘thug’ n, a.). The word derives from the Hindi word thag or thak

meaning ‘a cheat, a swindler’, and only later came to mean ‘robber’ or ‘assassin’, and to be associated

with the word phanseegar, meaning ‘strangler’ (Yule and Burnell 1886, 115-16; Wagner 2009, 3). 2 Confessions of a Thug was very successful. Taylor claims that ‘Queen Victoria herself had ordered the

publishers to send her the sheets as they were being revised, because she could not wait for them to be

published’ (Mukherjee 2003, 107). The novel came out in two editions already in the first four months,

and went through four more reprints between 1887 to 1897 (107).

mailto:[email protected]

Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 2

linguistic aspects highlights the ways in which the novel represents the diverse social

organization, diffuse governing structures, complex religious practices, and myriad languages

of India as a ripe environment for Thuggee’s contradictory practices: criminal, often violent, yet

in some ways also honourable. More specifically, the novel’s exploration of linguistic diversity

displays a tension between the linguistic scholar’s and imaginative writer’s fascination with the

Thug’s artful linguistic performance, and the colonial administrator’s disposition to view this

performance as a practice that should be emulated as a means to achieving fuller control.

A Short History of Thuggee In order to understand Confessions of a Thug and the importance of linguistic aspects

such as code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing in the novel, it is necessary to

trace some of the history of Thuggee and the ideological contexts of the campaign for its

suppression. In 1809 and 1810 the first British reports appear mentioning ‘a set of people’ or a

‘detestable race of monsters’ called ‘T(,)ugs’ who are said to murder travellers by night (Wagner

2009, 67-8).3 Initially, ‘Thuggee’ was ‘perceived as yet another type of crime’, alongside other

instances of ‘indigenous criminality’ that were tied to specific ethnicities (Wagner 2009, 22). In

1810 the first suggestions of prosecuting these ‘offenders’ appear, followed by the first judicial

regulation that mentions ‘Thugs’ as ‘public robbers’ alongside other criminal groups, and in

1829 the India Office gave two Company officials, T. C. Smith and William Sleeman official

permission to carry on the campaign against Thugs (Wagner 2009, 70-74).4

From its very beginnings, with the reduction of multiple words (phanseegar, dacoit, and

others) to one key term, ‘Thug’, the history of Thuggee displays a process of simplification,

homogenization, and sensationalization, not just of words, but also of practices, social groups,

geographical locations, and religious beliefs. An examination of the official British documents

that mention Thuggee suggests that a considerable degree of interpretation and some

imagination were involved in the production of what came to constitute the dominant

perception of the ‘Thug’. By the publication of W. H. Sleeman’s anonymous letter to the Calcutta

Literary Gazette of 1830, followed by his hugely influential 1836 Ramaseeana, Thuggee had been

turned into a uniform, coherent system, purported to span the Indian subcontinent, and

elements such as the ‘belief in religious sanction and breach of caste and the religious hierarchy

supposedly governing all Indians’ had been added, rendering it ‘an extraordinary practice even

by Indian standards’ (Wagner 2009 23).5 The implications of this campaign for the British

3 Report of O.W. Steer, 18 November 1809, and report of J. Law, 23 December 1809, respectively (quoted

in Wagner 209, 67-8). 4 Between 1826 and 1832 ‘the division that later became the Thuggee and Dacoity Department captured

and tried 1,562 men for the crime of Thuggee’ (Poovey 2004, 10). Other scholars provide slightly different

figures. According to Shwarz, by 1840, ‘466 had been hanged, 1,504 transported for life, 933 sentenced to

life imprisonment, and 208 died in jail before trial’ (Shwarz 2010, 8). According to Lloyd, ‘Between 1826–

41, 3064 indigenes were accused of ‘thuggee’, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment,

transportation or execution’ (Lloyd 2007, 363). 5 Sleeman’s prosecution of the Thugs was set against the background of parliamentary debates about the

renewal of the Company’s charter and about William Bentinck’s appointment, in 1828, as Governor-

General of India. These debates appeared in the press between 1825-33 and expressed concerns over the


public’s perception of India are not to be underestimated. Texts like the article that appeared in

1833 in the New Monthly Magazine, Thornton’s 1837 Illustrations of the History and Practices of the

Thugs, and an 1841 article in Blackwood’s Magazine equated ‘The eastern/Indian character’ and

‘the entire history of Asia’ with ‘the figure of the Thug’ and used it as a justification or British

rule (Mukherjee 2003, 102). For example, Frederick Holme, a well-known Greek scholar,

claimed in Blackwood’s that if the British Government in India were able to ‘eradicat[e]’

Thuggee,, it would earn ‘a title…to the gratitude of the natives of India, which will alone make

the benefits of our later administration more than atone for the injustices and rapacity which

marked our early acquisitions of Indian territory’ (244, qtd. in Poovey 2004, 4). ‘Using [Thuggee]

as a rubric’, Mukherjee argues, ‘the colonial rulers could draw conclusions about the ‘Indian

mind’ that would serve every administrator of that country’, rendering ‘the continent itself as

ripe for the thrust of British reforms’ (Mukherjee 2003, 102). The public furor over Thuggee

helped reinforce the perception that India was in dire need of penal and legal reforms that

could only be achieved through British intervention.

Colonial Rule, Colonial ‘Knowledge’, and Linguistic Diversity In addition to situating the novel in the context of the political and ideological aims of

the Thuggee campaign, it is important to contextualize Confessions in terms of the East India

Company’s epistemological and administrative approaches to India’s cultural and linguistic

diversity. The novel was published during a time when strategies for controlling the ‘complex

cultural, linguistic, and communal heterogeneity of the subcontinent’ through surveillance and

information gathering were seen as crucial for British rule (Majeed 1996, 88; Mukherjee 2003;

Wagner 2009). Thuggee was one of the ways of representing India that ‘could justify the

massive incursion of the colonialist administrative panoply in the name of constructing an

archival ‘knowledge’ about the essence of the country’ (Mukherjee 2003, 101), and judicial

reforms provided some of the means for this construction. Another important means of

constructing this sort of archival knowledge—and one in which Taylor himself participated—

was through British Orientalist scholarship.

In the late eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth century, the Company

founded a number of schools and funded some Orientalist research, hoping it might have

practical benefits to its rule (Thiessen 1992, 4). ‘In Anglo-Indian practice’, ‘“orientalism” was

directly linked to a mastery of Indian languages; an “orientalist” was first and foremost a

linguist’ (31). Orientalist scholars, who were overwhelmingly Company men, prided

themselves on learning what, from the Anglo-Indian perspective, were four main groups of

languages: Hindostanee, seen as the ‘lingua-franca’ and used by Company armies; Persian, the

official language of the Sultanate, and the language of legal record; the Indo-European

languages; and the Dravidian languages (32). According to Shuchi Kapila, Taylor himself was a

bit of an ‘anomal[y] for a nineteenth-century colonial ideologue’, displaying a ‘true’ eighteenth-

alarming debt of the Indian government, which was not being balanced by the Company’s profits. An

important role of the campaign was to manifest ‘the kind of fiscal and judicial efficiency that the English

government was demanding of the Company’ (Poovey 11).


century style ‘Orientalist spirit’ in his proficiency in the local languages and customs (Kapila

1998, 218).

Beginning around 1833, however, the Company decreased support for the Orientalist

community and promoted liberal education, Westernization, and Christianization (Thiessen

1992, 2). Macaulay’s Education Minute of 1835, which heralded the beginning of a systematic

effort to incorporate English and English literature in Indian institutions of higher education,

marks an important shift in approaches to governing the Indian population (Majeed 1996, 96).

During the Orientalist period of scholarship, however, the ability to translate between English

and these languages was cultivated as a skill both for its own sake, and in the hopes that it

would improve the Company’s ability to understand the local culture and enable it to improve

its administrative rule (Thiessen 1992, 34-5). For example, the journal Asiatick Researches, the

journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, was started as part of this trend; it would publish

Sherwood’s article on ‘The P’hansigars’ in 1816, an article that claims evidence for the practice

back to the Muslim conquest of India and even Hindu mythology (Wagner 2009). The belief in

the importance of acquiring and disseminating this linguistic knowledge in the period leading

up to the 1830s is manifested in the proliferation of translations of texts, glossaries, and

dictionaries.

Sleeman’s Ramaseeana, published in 1836, and ‘the source for nearly everything

subsequently published about Thuggee, including Taylor’s novel’ (Poovey 2004, 10), is a later

instance of this trend. It is also an example of the British attraction to the notion of Indian

culture as characterized by secrecy—as seen in the popularity of the representation of the thugs

as a secret cult or society. The British colonial imagination was obsessed with the notion of a

secret language; gaining knowledge over the secret language of the Thugs, as Sleeman presents

it in his incredibly influential Ramaseeana, was an important step, if not the key, to capturing the

criminals (Sleeman 1836, 88). Sleeman displays the colonial desire to control through a kind of

totalizing knowledge of the language and culture of the region. He claims that he ‘has entered

into this Vocabulary everything to which the Thugs in any part of India have thought it

necessary to assign a term’, and that he is ‘satisfied that there is no term, no rite, no ceremony,

no omen or usage that’ has been concealed and not recorded, or at least none of importance (3).

Sleeman also stresses the specialized knowledge that underpins this text: every word recorded

is ‘Ramasee in the sense assigned to it’, although of the words, ‘but few of them are to be found

at all in any language with which [he is] acquainted’ (3).

As we can see, the study of India’s myriad languages played a crucial role in British rule

in the period leading up to the novel’s publication, although the form of this study underwent

various changes in emphasis. My consideration of the role of code-switching, style-shifting, and

sociolinguistic crossing in Confessions of a Thug will show the influence of these different

emphases, including traces of Taylor’s Orientalist leanings, as well as the impact of Sleeman’s

concern with the linguistic secrecy of the Thugs.

‘Capable of Exciting the Mind So Strongly’: Linguistic Diversity

in Confessions of a Thug


This historical context makes clear that Taylor’s novel was published during a period of legal

and penal reform, and the implementation of new policing strategies (Mukherjee 2003, 108).

British colonialists constructed Thuggee as an all-pervasive organization based in secret forms

of communication, disguise, and criminality, which in turn is representative of Indian culture

more generally. To a certain extent Taylor’s novel reflects this representation. Confessions of a

Thug is a fictionalized confession of Ameer Ali, a Thug cum informant, or ‘approver’, to the

British authorities. He narrates his life to a ‘Sahib’, apparently an officer of the British East India

Company, whose voice intrudes only occasionally in brief comments and questions.

The introduction to the novel, signed by Taylor, claims that it is based on conversations

that took place between Taylor himself and a real Thug. Most scholars agree that Taylor

probably relied to a large extent upon Captain Sleeman’s and James Paton’s interviews with

Thug informers, many of which were published in Sleeman’s Ramaseeana in 1836 (Majeed 1996;

Poovey 2004; Wagner 2009). Taylor frames the narrative as a truthful record of the captured

Ali’s narration of his life, and largely effaces the role of the Sahib as interviewer, so that the

impression is of direct and transparent access to Ali’s words. Ali’s story rehearses in many ways

the sensationalized version of Thuggee, emphasizing the apparent contradiction between

religiosity and observance of rituals and omens alongside cold-blooded murder, the way the

‘profession’ unites Muslim and Hindu, and the use of disguise to con incompetent or corrupt

local authority figures.

As I will suggest, however, Taylor’s attention to, and display of his own knowledge of

the linguistic plurality of India in the novel, both embodies and exceeds the kind of narrow

concern with cultural administration represented by texts like the Ramaseeana. The novel

displays a rich exploration of a range of linguistic practices: it references, and in some cases

makes crucial to the plot, several of the numerous languages in usage in the region, including

Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Gujarati, Marathi, Arabic, as well as different local patois; it dramatizes

Sleeman’s emphasis on the role of the secret language of the Ramasee; and it deploys various

styles and genres of English—archaic, elevated, flowery, sentimental, etc. Majeed has discussed

the novel’s engagement with India’s ‘linguistic diversity’ as an attempt to negotiate one of the

main sources of contemporary colonial anxiety (Majeed 1996, 94). Yet while Majeed draws

attention to the importance of language in the novel, he does not quite pinpoint the nuances

that arise from the novel’s use of code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing. I

suggest that more detailed attention to these linguistic aspects contributes to an understanding

of the novel’s ambivalent relationship to the colonial project of suppressing Thuggee and

gaining epistemological and administrative control over the Orient. While Sleeman presents

knowledge of the secret language of the Thugs as crucial to controlling them, for example, the

novel paints the Thug world in a far more complex manner as a world richly textured with

code-switching and linguistic performance. Further, in its sheer exploration of linguistic

hybridity, the novel seems to take pleasure in this density, and to admire Ameer’s skill in

manipulating it. However, in giving the impression of an almost transparent transmission of the

Thug’s linguistic performance in his confessions, the novel itself becomes an exhibition of

Taylor’s own skill with languages. Indeed, I suggest that the very obfuscation of the Sahib’s role

as mediator and of Taylor’s as animator reinforces the parallel between Taylor’s and the Thug’s

roles as linguistic performers. Ultimately, then, the novel presents an ambivalent position: on


the one hand, Taylor displays an imitative admiration of the Thug’s linguistic performance; on

the other, he invites the conclusion that it is this very linguistic prowess which must be outdone

if India is to be mastered by British rule.

‘The Old…Story’: Disguise and Linguistic Performance Before turning to look at more specific instances of linguistic performance, it is helpful to

situate Confessions within Taylor’s more general portrayal of Thuggee, and particularly his

representation of the role of disguise in the ‘profession’. The novel focuses on the Thugs’

impersonation of members of different tribes, castes, and professions. In treating this practice,

Taylor displays a complicated attitude: his introduction takes the hegemonic British attitude

towards Thuggee, but the narrative and particularly the representation of Ameer’s character

blurs clear moral lines. This strategy is perhaps in part a way of making Ali’s character more

sympathetic to the reader, but it also offers a view of disguise and the taking on of different

identities as not intrinsically wrong or evil, setting up a more nuanced context for the novel’s

engagement with linguistic performance. In representing Ali’s performance of different identities, Taylor seems to oscillate

between casting him as a cynical impersonator of religious figures, on the one hand, and on the

other, as genuinely honourable and even pious. For example, Ali disguises himself more than

once as a fakeer; in various instances ‘the religious vagrants and mendicants who throng every

village are shown to liaise with the Thugs’ (Mukherjee 2003, 108; Majeed 1996, 89); and at one

point Ameer discovers there are ‘sacred ministers of our faith [who are] Thugs as well as

ourselves’ (Taylor 1998, 79). To a certain extent, then, the novel presents the ‘false religion’ of

the land as complicit in the ‘network of criminality’ that spans the entire region (Mukherjee

108), reinforcing the view Taylor espouses in his Introduction. However, in other places Ameer

seems to display piety. For example, Ameer regretfully exclaims, ‘Would to God I had become a

Moola’, a learned and pious Muslim such as the man who taught him Qusrut, and describes

praying at saints’ shrines and mosques during the Thugs’ journeys (for example Taylor 1998, 27;

for example, 242). At the beginning of the narrative, Ameer overhears Thugs discussing how

they might induce him to join their profession, and they consider Ameer’s faith as a major

means of enticement. Ameer also ascribes his path in life to ‘Fate’, claiming that he ‘ought not to

murmur at the decrees of Providence’ (30). In this sense, the emphasis on Ameer’s religiosity

contributes to Taylor’s portrayal of him as an essentially honourable, moral person, if misled by

his beliefs. This not only complicates a reading of the representation of religion as simply

aligned with deceit and criminality—it also makes it difficult to view his impersonating habits

as completely at odds with a respect for religion.

The Thugs’ other disguises are also presented in a complicated manner, in part

reiterating the stereotypical presentations of Thugs as highway thieves, which Taylor presents

in the Introduction, and in part highlighting a more sophisticated linguistic ability. Taylor’s

Introduction claims that ‘the unruly conditions of the roads’, and the nomadic lifestyle of many

of the native groups, afford ‘every temptation and opportunity...for plunderers of all

descriptions to make travellers their prey’ (Taylor 1998, 6). More specifically, it suggests that the

diversity of social groups compounds the problem, because ‘the greatest facility of disguise


among thieves and Thugs exist in the endless division of the people into tribes, castes, and

professions’ (6). In the novel, the Thugs often exploit the conditions of the roads and the

‘endless division of the people’ by pretending to be honest travellers and offering fellow

travellers protection from thieves. They also don other, sometimes more complicated personas.

For instance, a common disguise deployed by Ali and his father is that of merchants—a con

referred to in brief as ‘the old Oomerkher story’ (148)—in order to be able to sell the goods that

they have stolen without causing suspicion. In other instances, Ali pretends to be ‘but a poor

soldier, a Syud by birth’ (103), or a horse-dealer (242). At another point, when one of the victims

of the Thugs turns out to have been traveling under alibi to hide the fact that he is a revenue

collector wanted for taking off with the money he’d collected, Ali is himself commissioned by

the village Aumil—who takes him for a trustworthy man—to assist in arresting the collector

and bringing him to justice (150). Here the Thugs’ criminal actions are unexpectedly made to

overlap with a sort of vigilante restoration of the law. Having stolen bills of exchange and a

personal seal that were found on the victim’s person, Ali impersonates the ‘Syud’s confidential

agent’ and manages to fool the dealer who owed the man the money into paying him (214). In

what becomes a quite elaborate scheme, Ameer’s knowledge of both Persian and Hindoostanee

is crucial, because it is what enables him to understand and manipulate the bills of exchange.

This is just one of several instances where his success as a Thug hinges on his ability to read

documents in both Persian and Hindoostanee.

This example is also illustrative of the way Taylor weakens sharp lines of distinction

between legal and criminal, moral and corrupt. The local authorities are presented as either

corrupt or incompetent and helpless. Ameer’s adoptive father is repeatedly shown to be

speaking the truth when he claims that ‘No one can withstand the sight of gold: from the prince

on the throne to the meanest peasant is the same’, and goes on to list the effect of money on all

ranks, ages and genders (235). That so many of the people the Thugs encounter—even the non-

Thugs—are corrupt or scandalous has at least two effects: on the one hand, it makes the Thugs’

duplicitousness seem less blameworthy, and on the other, it suggests that perhaps such double-

dealing is unavoidable under such circumstances. Yet, if this might be seen as inviting a more

lenient view of the Thugs, it also aligns comfortably with the view of the anti-Thuggee

campaign that ‘the duty of the colonialist authority’ is ‘to suspect everyone in the colony, for all

are potentially disguised criminals in the pay of the native rulers’ (Mukherjee 2003, 108).

Nevertheless, even as Taylor’s representation lends itself to justifications of legal and

penal reform, it also seems to insist on portraying Ali and at least some of the other Thugs as

abiding by a recognizable code of honour. In the context of the novel’s depiction of helpless or

despotic local rulers, such as the Aumil who enlists Ali’s help, or the Nuwab who holds a girl

against her wishes, Ali’s intercessions emerge as extralegal but frequently moral. Capturing an

embezzler, helping an oppressed woman escape, and, eventually, revenging himself on his

parents’ murderer, Ganesha, Ali is the more sympathetic criminal within a world of criminals, a

kind of arbiter of justice in a world devoid of the rule of law. Indeed, in one of the novel’s rare

mentions of non-natives, it appears that they too are morally questionable: the ‘Europeans

[who] had got a footing in the country’, and whose ‘authorities were suspicious and inquisitive’

are influenced by ‘bullying’ and ‘bribes’ (461-2). The novel even draws certain parallels between

the Thugs’ business practices and those of the East India Company men (who were merchants);


as Poovey points out, both organizations view themselves as ‘free-traders’ who ‘obey a strict set

of laws intrinsic to their trade’, ‘follow established trade routes… and keep their own trade

secrets, both through disguise and through the language unique to their community’ (Poovey

2004, 13). Finally, the capture of Ali and other Thugs at the end of the novel is only possible

because the English authorities manage to get certain Thugs to betray their brotherhood (Taylor

1998, 492, 542). Not only then does the novel draw similarities between the Thugs and the

Company men, the English are here associated with a corruption of the Thugs’ code of honour.

Against this background, Ali, and by extension the successful impersonating practices of

the Thugs, appear to have redeemable qualities. While the novel presents the world of India as

criss-crossed by criminal networks, the Thug gang’s network is painted in a somewhat positive

light as an honourable brotherhood that transcends the various ‘divisions of the people’. As one

Thug explains, in Thuggee, ‘the Hindoo and the Muslim both unite as brothers.... a sure proof

that our calling is blessed and sanctioned by the divine authority.... From the lowest to the

highest among us…go where we will we find the same brotherhood’ (Taylor 1998, 33). This

type of moral code and welcoming spirit are ‘conspicuously absent from the “policing” society’

(Mukherjee 2003, 108). Taylor has Ali protest directly against being perceived as evil, asking his

interviewer to recognize points of the code of honour by which he has abided:

Have I not ever been a kind husband and a faithful friend? Where is the man existing

who can say a word against Ameer Ali’s honour, which ever has been and ever will

remain pure and unsullied? Have I ever broken a social tie?.... Ever neglected a rite or

ceremony of my religion? (Taylor 1998, 267).

Ali’s defiance against British law goes hand in hand with his defense of the honour of his

‘profession’ against British attempts to quell it: ‘Thuggee, capable of exciting the mind so

strongly, will not, cannot be annihilated. Look at the hundreds who have suffered for this

profession; does the number of your prisoners decrease?’ (Taylor 1998, 15). Taylor seems to be

inviting admiration for Ali’s spirit, an attitude that will make the reader more comfortable in

appreciating his linguistic skills. Indeed, Ali here seems to capture at least one aspect of Taylor’s

attitude towards Thuggee: the ‘profession’, and specifically its expert linguistic performance, is

‘capable of exciting the mind so strongly’.

‘Words of Recognition’: Code-switching and Style-shifting The prevalence of disguise and linguistic impersonation among the Thugs means that

code-switching and style-shifting play a central role in the novel. I use code-switching to

designate ‘the systematic alternation of two or more languages during a conversation’

(Mahootian 2006, 511). The switches in Confessions occur in Ameer’s speech and in the

conversations he recounts, and alternate between English, Hindostanee, Persian, Ramasee, other

Indian languages, and various registers of English. Transitions between registers of language

may also be considered style-shifts. Code-switching and style-shifting in Confessions of a Thug

highlights India’s linguistic diversity and, more specifically, suggests that the Thugs’ success is

largely based on their successful manipulation of linguistic practices. Yet over and above these


functions, they offer an opportunity to explore the complexities of linguistic performance,

which appears as a both a potential barrier to understanding and a means to covert practices,

and as an admirable, even desirable, skill. Linguists most commonly discuss code-switching as a feature of oral discourse, and less

commonly as a fictional device. As part of a narrative, code-switching in Confessions operates

under different rules than in spontaneous bilingual oral discourse. In this sense, it can be

considered an instance of what Susan Ferguson calls ‘ficto-linguistics’, referring to ‘systems of

language that appear in novels and both deviate from accepted or expected sociolinguistic

patterns and indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional

world’ (Ferguson 1998, par. 11). Fittingly, the overwhelming majority of code-switches in the

novel occur in the direct speech recounted by Ameer as having taken place between himself and

other people, rather than in his narration of events. Thus the novel retains the oral quality of

code-switching. At the same time, Ali’s narration is generally in Standard English, which is

congruent with the tendency of Victorian authors to represent the speech of major characters in

Standard English, rather than dialect, even if this constitutes a deviation from the ‘expected

sociolinguistic pattern’ (Ferguson 1998). As a ficto-linguistic device, code-switching in

Confessions serves particular purposes, some of which overlap with the functions linguists

identify in oral code-switching—specifically marking the speaker as a member of a certain

community; and some of which are specific to the novel’s form and themes—for example,

establishing the authenticity of the fictional world. Significant for my purposes, however, is the

way in which these aspects of code-switching function to engage representations of India’s

linguistic diversity, and to construct stereotypical, sensationalized representations of Thuggee,

but also to complicate them. On a basic level, the novel’s use of code-switching serves to convey a sense of

authenticity, and to produce the ‘extrinsic’ effect—i.e., one directed at a community of non-

native speakers—of ‘giving local colour’, and creating a dense layering of local languages and

dialects (Gordon and Williams 1998, 80). At the same time, Taylor takes care that the code-

switches won’t impede the non-expert reader’s comprehension. The novel typically deploys

‘intrasentential switches’, or switches ‘within a clause involving a phrase, a single word or

across morpheme boundaries’, including lexical as well as grammatical switches, rather than

including larger and potentially more opaque sections of switches (Mahootian 2006, 512). Often

just single non-English words, typically nouns, are incorporated into Ali’s narration. Thus, for

example, Ali recounts the speech of other characters as direct speech in which a non-English

word appears while clarifying the word through context. For instance: ‘would you not like

some sweetmeat? See how tempting those julabees look at the Hulwaee’s’ (Taylor 1998, 18). At

other times, Ali uses the word and then defines it (and we might understand the informant to

be explaining the term to his interlocutor): ‘Persian mootsuddee, or writer in the service of the

Rajah of Nagpoor’ (53). In other instances, which more clearly betray the written status of the

text, Taylor uses parenthesis following a word that might be unknown to his reader: ‘“Bhilla

manjeh?” (have you cleared the hole?) he eagerly inquired’ (83). Less typically, words are

untranslated, and in these cases it seems to be important to the narrative to convey the

impression of a chaotic side of Indian culture. Thus for instance, the tumultuous public

spectacle of the ‘festival of the Mohorum’ is conveyed by description not only of the visual


aspects of the parade, the crowds and the elephants, for instance, but also by an auditory

account of the ‘jeers and abuse of the multitude’, and of the ‘cries’—which go untranslated—of

‘“Hassan! Hoosein! Doola! Deen! Deen!”’ (Taylor 1998, 166; see also Majeed 1996, 94).

As this last example suggests, another function of the code-switching appears to be to

reinforce Taylor’s views about the challenges of managing India. In his introduction to the

novel, Taylor endeavours to explain ‘[h]ow the system of Thuggee could have become so

prevalent, [yet] remain unknown to, and unsuspected by, the public of India, among whom the

professors of it were living in constant association’, by conjuring up the ‘vast[ness of the]

continent’ of India (Taylor 1998, 5). Ali’s narrative references specific geographic locations, the

names of cities and villages, particular tribes and ethnic groups, and contemporary political

struggles such as the ‘wars of Holkar and Sindea with the Feringhees’ (36). To an educated

reader familiar with India’s geography, history, and politics, these details index a far more

fleshed out world; to an unfamiliar reader, they create a sense of the overwhelming size and

complexity of the subcontinent. In both cases, this attention to geography contributes to the

impression that Thuggee was made possible on such wide scale because of the difficulty in

managing such a large area, especially as it was ‘portioned out into territories, the possessions

of many princes and chieftains—each with supreme and irresponsible power in his own

dominions, having most lax and inefficient governments’ (5). To an extent, then, these instances

of code-switching might be taken to reflect the notion, influenced by the ‘new policing

strategies’ of the time, that Indian criminality is almost unavoidable as a result of its

sociolinguistic diversity, which in turn is the result of the size of the region (Mukherjee 2003,

108).

However, Taylor’s deployment of code-switching in the novel does more than just

illustrate the political, administrative argument he outlines in the Introduction; it suggests an

attempt to engage with, while actively reinforcing, a sense of the figurative excess that linguistic

performances, especially linguistically diverse performances, can give rise to. This is apparent in

the type of code-switching that involves the use of phrases and idioms, a linguistic usage that is

inherently far more difficult to explain or translate. Ameer is fond of referring to the ‘carpet of

patience’, for example; as in, ‘“we sat down on the carpet of patience, to smoke the pipe of

regret, and to drown our affliction in the best way we could”’ (Taylor 1998, 71). At another

point an old woman says to him, ‘“You know the old proverb, ‘Kubootur bu kubootur, bāz bu

bāz’—pigeons mate with pigeons, and hawks with hawks”’ (113). These idioms add a more

textured layer to the textual representation of India’s complex cultures and languages, indexing

and producing a sense of a larger culture with a signifying system unfamiliar to native English

language users. Indeed, the Sahib himself acknowledges the challenges posed by idiomatic

speech and style-shifts. Referring to Ameer’s style, he notes that ‘his eloquence kindles and

bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language, which it would be impossible to render into

English, or, if it were rendered, would appear to the English reader, unused to such forms of

speech, highly exaggerated and absurd’ (266). As this comment acknowledges, figurative and

stylized modes of language are difficult to translate, but they are central to Ali’s speech;

attempts to convey them to the English reader may render them ‘absurd’, but they are really

‘eloquent’. The idiomatic passages might seem reductive or trite attempts to portray a

stereotyped picturesque linguistic culture. Nevertheless, at the same time, the Sahib’s reference


to the difficulty in translating Ameer’s speech directs the reader’s attention to the effect of the

strangeness of the phrases, and the palpable difficulty in translating idioms, reminding the

reader of the limits to his or her ability to grasp the world depicted in the text.

Taylor also emphasizes Ali’s ability to style-shift—to transition into different registers of

linguistic usage—and to understand other characters’ usage of different linguistic styles, as

demonstrating a sophistication that goes beyond basic communication skills. Thus, throughout

the novel, Ali gains favour in the eyes of various powerful figures—Nuwabs, Aumils,

merchants and Moolas, through his use of elaborate and deferential speech that emulates

codified linguistic practices, easily mimicking the ‘polished Persianised etiquette of the courts of

Hindostan’ (Majeed 1996, 93). This suggests that there is an art to Ali’s linguistic performance,

one that Taylor, as the author of these convincing style-shifts, clearly appreciates.

Another important function of the style-shifts, which is a particularly ficto-linguistic

role, is characterization—that is, marking characters in terms of personality and class. These

style-shifts often group together. In the speech of the old woman who serves Ameer’s first love

interest, non-standard or archaic English vernacular appears, apparently to mark her class

status: ‘“My blessings on ye that ye are come”’ (Taylor 1998, 128); ‘“Ay, that she is; I warrant the

hours have gone as slowly with her as with me”’ (128); ‘”methinks sir”’ (130). At other points,

the grouping of discourse markers, a sense of translated syntax, and idioms appear in the

speech of certain characters that are somewhat caricatured. For example, Dildar Khan, an

arrogant but cowardly tiger hunter, is fond of ‘Inshalla’ and speaking of himself in the third

person. His comic speech is accompanied by the twisting of his mustachios, ‘twirling round and

round, and leaping in every possible direction’, and braggadocio: ‘“we have determined that

the brute dies today. Many a tiger has fallen from a shot from my good gun, and what is this

brute that it should escape? May its sister be defiled; the only fear is, that it will not stand to allow us

to prove that we are men, and not dogs before it”’ (37 emphasis added).

A broader form of style-shifting, I suggest, is exhibited in the novel’s shifts between

‘Oriental’ and ‘English’ genres, and this style-shifting contributes on another level to my

reading of the novel as ambivalently resistant to hegemonic and totalizing portrayals of India’s

linguistic diversity as merely a source of chaos and criminality. For example, at one point,

Ameer recognizes a woman’s coded appeal to him in the form of a Persian ‘Ghuzul’, or love

song, because he, unlike his Hindu Thug partner, ‘understand[s] Persian, thanks to the old

Moola [his] teacher’ (Taylor 1998, 113). The use of the Oriental genre of the ‘Ghuzul’ is also

significant here, insofar as it appears to influence much of Ali’s romantic discourse, rendering it

particularly elevated and sentimental. On listening to the appealing woman, for example,

Ameer narrates, ‘I listened till I could have fallen at her feet, and worshipped her as a Peri from

heaven. My soul was so intoxicated with the blessed sounds I heard, that I was insensible to all

around me’ (107). Here the style-shift has nothing to do with deception or criminality, but

rather expresses elevated feelings, a kind of spiritual aesthetic appreciation. In addition to

allusions to Oriental genres such as the language of the ‘Ghuzul’, and comparisons of Ameer’s

speech to the verses of the Arabic poet Hafiz (474), Taylor inserts epigraphs from Shakespeare

and other English plays at the start of certain chapters. In this way Taylor seems to ‘pit’, as

Majeed notes, the high literary Oriental form against the traditional English one, while

displaying his own facility in moving between these traditions (Majeed 1996, 95).


The potential as well as limitations arising from linguistic diversity are explored from

another angle in terms of the role played by code-switches and secret forms of communication

within the Thug community. The commands of the Thugs are usually recorded as code-

switches; for example, a repeated phrase is: ‘Tumbako lao (bring tobacco)’, which is ‘the signal!’

to attack their victims (Taylor 1998, 56). Their omens are usually referred to by their Ramasee

names: ‘the Pilhaoo, or omen on the left hand, was vouchsafed: a jackass brayed, and was

almost instantly answered by one on the right, which was the Thibaoo’ (51; also 412). Certain

objects of symbolic importance to the Thugs are referred to in Ramasee; for example, ‘the

nishan, the pickaxe’, ‘was now called, having been consecrated, khusee’ (52). And at one point

Ameer identifies another Thug by testing his response to the Thug ‘words of recognition’: ‘“Ali

Khan Bhaee Salam!”’Ameer says, and the Thug responds correctly: ‘“Salam Aleikoom!”’ (416).

The Thug then mentions ‘the goor of the Toupounee’, to which Ameer replies, ‘“Then you have

eaten it?”’ The man responds in the affirmative (416). ‘“Enough”’, Ameer cries; ‘“I have met

with a friend”’ (416).

Passages representing the secret communication system of the Thugs often refer to ‘the

Goor’, and this initially obscure reference comes to serve as a metonym for belonging to the

Thuggee community. The phrase appears at first without explanation. For example, Ameer

overhears men mentioning ‘eat[ing] the Goor’ (Taylor 1998, 26), and someone saying, ‘you

know I have eaten the Goor, and cannot change’ (30); in both these instances, in contrast to most

other code-switches, Ali does not translate ‘Goor’ or explain what ‘eating the Goor’ might mean.

At the time when he heard these references, Ali the character did not know what they meant;

but the fact that as a retrospective narrator he withholds any explanation until the moment in

his story when he discovered what the ‘Goor’ was about invests the term with an esoteric

quality, which is typical of sensationalized representations of Thuggee as a secretive cult and

contributes to its association with obscurity. It eventually becomes apparent that the Goor is

sugar eaten as part of the ritual by which one becomes a Thug (49). The Goor is also eaten again

at the ‘sacrifice of the Tupounee’ that is made post-killing (57). Eating the Goor comes to take on

greater symbolic significance when Ali’s father and Thug jemadar, or captain, says:

You have eaten the goor, and are now a Thug in your heart; were you to desire to forsake

us you could not, such is the power it has when consecrated as you have seen it over the

hearts of men. Were any one to find a portion and eat it, whatever might be his rank or

condition in life, he would assuredly become a Thug, he could not avoid it, the power it

would exercise over him would be irresistible. (58)

Although Ali describes several rituals leading up to becoming a full Thug, the ‘eating of the

Goor’ stands metonymically for the whole process and the mystery that accompanies its first

appearance as an opaque code-switch imbues Thuggee practices more generally with an air of

secrecy.

Ameer’s first mature encounter with Thuggee (he was kidnapped by Thugs as a young

boy) is also representative of the novel’s linguistic concerns insofar as it is framed as the

experience of covertly overhearing an unknown language, a code-switching Ali found

incomprehensible. I suggest that Ameer’s initial contact with Thuggee and its secret form of


communication models the reader’s positioning by the narrative as obtaining some kind of

privileged access, from behind a comfortable screen, into a mysterious, exciting, and largely

incomprehensible world of intrigue. The youthful Ameer hears this language one night when

he decides to spy on his adoptive father Ismail and his mysterious guests for the evening,

hiding behind a ‘Purdah or screen’ (Taylor 1998, 25). He hears the men ‘conversing in a

language [he] only partially understood, and [he] thought this strange, as [he] knew

Hindoostanee and the common dialect [him]self, having picked up the latter by associating with

the boys of the town’ (26). Ameer watches as Ismail divides up valuables, and then the men

‘speak in Hindoostanee, a language [he] underst[ands]’ (26). A reader who has some

background on Thugs will know of Ramasee, and it will later become clear that the Thugs

communicate in this special dialect and use special signs, and that Ameer himself has become

competent in it. The narrative form, however, emphasizes not so much demystifying the

language, or how Ameer learns it, but rather the sense of opacity and mystery experienced by

Ameer—and by extension the reader as well—on first hearing it. Later on, a Thug stresses the

Thugs’ ability to communicate amongst themselves through Ramasee: ‘“Go where we will, we

find homes open to us, and a welcome greeting among tribes even of whose language we of

Hindostan are ignorant; yet their signs of recognition are the same as ours”’ (33). Taylor thus

represents Thuggee as an organization defined by the ability of its members to communicate in

a secret lingua-franca. Yet the excitement and frustration represented by the doubly layered

experience—the young Ali’s, and indirectly, the reader’s—of initial exclusion from the

mysterious linguistic organization, followed by but partial incorporation—partial because,

unlike Ali, the reader only has access to that which Ali chooses to divulge—exceeds the

stereotypical, and, I would argue, is representative of the novel’s more complex engagement

with linguistic diversity.

As this foundational event in the novel suggests, code-switching in Confessions helps

create an ambivalent sense of India’s linguistic diversity as both chaotic and exciting; as

partially glimpsed through the medium of the fiction, but ultimately inaccessible. A related

ambivalence surrounds Taylor’s representation of Ameer’s style-shifting as part of his depiction

of Thuggee as a rather sophisticated profession of performance. As I will suggest, Taylor’s own

participation in linguistic performance, and his evident appreciation for the power it potentially

offers, further complicates this aspect of his depiction.

‘Impossible to Render into English’: Style-shifting and Sociolinguistic

Crossing As we have seen, Taylor’s novel frequently portrays Ali and other characters code-

switching and style-shifting, and more broadly taking on other linguistic personas. In this

regard, I now want to suggest, the novel is engaging issues of ‘sociolinguistic crossing’, both in

terms of the fictional world it describes, and in terms of its formal structure, which effaces the

roles of the Sahib (the fictional interviewer), and Taylor (the author) in mediating the linguistic

performances presented in the novel. ‘Sociolinguistic crossing’ is particularly useful for

identifying certain types of linguistic crossings that occur in the narrative, which stand out from

the rest because ‘the code-switching speaker stylizes a typical speaker of the owning group’,

often ‘us[ing] a mock form of that variety or language’ (Auer 2006, 490). In these cases,


[t]he current speaker... animates another past or future, factual or fictitious, generic or

individualized speaker, giving him or her a typified or even stereotypical representation

through language choice, accent, prosody, or any kind of social-communicative style

that is not associated with the teller’s own social persona. (490)

Some of the examples of style-shifting I have considered, such as Ameer’s polished etiquette,

his elevated love discourse, and Dildar Khan’s braggadocio, can be viewed as instances of

playful ‘sociolinguistic crossing’. In the novel, Ameer’s amorous discourse is presented as

sincere, but Taylor may be somewhat parodying his imitation of the literary form (and possibly

the form itself). Ameer’s diplomatic flattery to various figures of power may be taken as more

consciously imitative and mocking. His representation of Dildar Khan’s speech, finally, is most

blatantly an instance of sociolinguistic crossing in that it is a stereotypical and mocking

animation of a communicative style that is certainly not Ameer’s own. It is in such instances of

linguistic performance—augmented by the novelistic form and literary elements such as

characterization and parody—that Taylor’s exploration of linguistic diversity goes beyond an

over-determining ideological representation of Thuggee and India.

More importantly perhaps, but less explicitly, sociolinguistic crossing is embedded in

the very structure of the novel itself. As noted above, Taylor keeps the role of the interviewing

‘Sahib’ quite minimal. The first pages contain a few short exchanges between the Thug and the

Sahib, mostly conveying the interlocutor’s condemnation of Thuggee, assertions about how the

Government’s ‘heart[y]’ pursuit of Thugs will lead to their speedy obliteration, or the occasional

appeal to Ali’s conscience (Taylor 1998). But as the novel begins with, and overwhelmingly

presents Ali’s voice speaking in the first person, his ‘I’ seems to become the dominant subject

position of the text, and the ‘Sahib’ is relegated almost entirely to Ali’s rather frequent addresses

(such as, ‘You see, Sahib’, or ‘You may believe, Sahib’). The Sahib, while implicitly aligned with

Taylor himself, never provides any details about himself; thus he remains a kind of cipher.

Only mid-way through the narrative, after almost 250 pages of mostly silence on the

part of the Sahib, the narrative suddenly pauses, and the Sahib addresses the ‘Reader’ directly,

describing for his or benefit Ameer’s appearance (‘gentlemanlike’ and mild, if a bit self-

important) and, more importantly, his speech (Taylor 1998, 265). First he tells us, in a passage

quoted earlier, that ‘his eloquence kindles and bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language,

which it would be impossible to render into English, or, if it were rendered, would appear to

the English reader, unused to such forms of speech, highly exaggerated and absurd’ (266). This,

however, still does not tell us exactly what language Ali is speaking. Only after describing Ali’s

appearance, does the Sahib give us more precise information:

His language is pure and fluent, perhaps a little affected from his knowledge of Persian,

which, though slight, is sufficient to enable him to introduce words and expressions in

that language, often when they are not needed, but still it is pure Oordoo; he prides

himself upon it, and holds in supreme contempt those who speak the corrupt patois of

the Dukhun, or the still worse one of Hindostan. (266)


It thus becomes apparent to the reader for the first time that Ali’s narrative has been translated,

that it is mediated by the Englishman.

The significance of this linguistic mediation has not been remarked upon by critics of the

novel, and I suggest it needs to be considered as an important aspect of the novel’s textual,

linguistic layering. It is an instance of sociolinguistic crossing, in the sense of a linguistic usage

that arises when ‘one of the languages or varieties used in the bilingual encounter does not

belong to the speaker’ (Auer 2006, 490). One linguistic layer arises from Ameer’s fictional

animation of the speech of the various characters he encounters, which itself can be considered

an example of imitative, even playful crossing. Indeed, as Auer notes, broadly speaking, such

crossing ‘may be involved in any quotation of another voice’ (490). However, frequently, ‘its use

implies a transgression, an act of trespassing into the linguistic territory of another group of

speakers who have privileged or sole access to it, by a speaker who is not an accepted member

of that group’ (490). It is the latter kind of sociolinguistic crossing that occurs in the Sahib’s

(fictional) translation and mediation, as well as in the (authorial) ventriloquizing on the part of

Taylor, of speakers of Indian languages. The novel constitutes a dense layering of reported

speech: Taylor purports to report a Sahib reporting Ameer’s speech, while Ameer himself

reports extensively other characters’ speech, and occasionally recounts other characters’

narratives. All of these linguistic acts entail a transgression of the boundaries of the speaker’s

linguistic territory, but the sociolinguistic crossing of the Sahib as translator, and of Taylor as

author, is de-accentuated, rendered almost invisible in comparison with the ostentatious

performance associated with Ali.

It seems to me that this contrast is significant, and it has to do with the ambivalence of

Taylor’s treatment of linguistic performance, which is torn between the appreciation of a

scholar and a fictional writer, and the suspicion of a colonial official who identifies at least in

part with the British stance towards ruling India. Taylor is caught, in other words, between

admiration and administration. In effacing the role of the Sahib’s translation and mediation of

Ali’s words, he seems to strive towards a kind of ideal sociolinguistic crossing, a kind of perfect

‘passing’. The exceptional moment in the narrative when he does acknowledge that Ali’s words

are not only translated from ‘Oordoo’, but that they are in a sense untranslatable—’his eloquence

kindles and bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language, which it would be impossible to

render into English’—is a rather paradoxical attempt to highlight the Sahib’s (and Taylor’s)

linguistic facility insofar as it remains exceptional and, moreover, the measure of this facility is

that its operation largely succeeds in going unnoticed (Taylor 1998, 266). In this sense, it is as

though Taylor is seeking to out-Thug the Thug himself as a linguistic performer.

I have suggested that there is something transgressive about Taylor’s linguistic crossing.

This transgressive quality is more clearly discernible in the context of Taylor’s explicitly colonial

attitude in the Introduction to the novel: its emphasis on issues of administrative and

epistemological control situates Taylor’s exploration of linguistic performance within the

project of colonial mastery. Thus, even as Taylor displays an imitative admiration of the Thug’s

linguistic performance, he invites the conclusion that it is this very linguistic prowess which

must be outdone if India is to be mastered by British rule.

Taylor’s appreciation for India’s linguistic diversity—evident in the rampant code-

switching of the text, as well as in the crucial role played by the characters’ deployment of their


linguistic abilities at various moments in the plot—aligns the novel with the Orientalist project.

This engagement with the relationship between the Oriental and English literary traditions can

be partly understood, I suggest, as a response towards a shift in the administrative approach of

the East India Company towards ‘Oriental’ culture. As discussed earlier, the 1830s were the

start of a decline in appreciation for the value of Oriental scholarship, and the beginning of the

tendency to implement English as a tool of cultural administration. The novel was published

towards the waning end of the East India Company’s interest in Orientalist scholarship of India.

However, as noted above, Taylor himself displayed an Orientalist spirit, taking seriously the

study of local languages and customs. That support for such intellectual pursuits was waning

on the part of the Company in the 1830s may be seen as part of what prompts Taylor’s emphasis

on these issues, rendering the novel in this sense implicitly polemical towards emerging British

strategies that would work to diminish the value ascribed to ‘Oriental’ languages and cultures.

Confessions suggests that for Taylor, to out-Thug the Thug in one’s ‘Oriental’ knowledge, would

not only be an impressive achievement of linguistic proficiency, but would also constitute a

more promising strategy for addressing India’s complicated and apparently ‘unruly’ ‘division

of peoples’.

Conclusion

My analysis of Confessions of a Thug has explored the novel’s ambivalent relationship to the

British representation of and campaign against Thuggee, and the implicit challenge of India’s

linguistic diversity and ‘Oriental’ traditions. By configuring India’s heterogeneity as directly

linked to deceitfulness and criminality, the novel participates, to a certain extent, in the

ideological work served by the Thuggee campaign more generally. However, my analysis has

suggested that although the narrative depiction of disguise, style-shifting and sociolinguistic

crossing as strategies of Thuggee aligns this density with criminality, it also blurs the

distinctions between the legal and the criminal, and the moral and immoral insofar as the

Thugs’ actions are often coded as honourable. Further, by attending to the linguistic aspects of

code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing, I have presented a more complex

reading of Taylor’s representation of these issues, identifying an ambivalent appreciation of

Thuggee as a form of linguistic performance which is both impressive in its own right, and an

achievement worthy of emulation by British colonial administrators.


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