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Thuggee: an orientalistconstruction?Alexander Lyon MacfiePublished online: 08 Jul 2008.

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Thuggee: an orientalist construction?

Alexander Lyon Macfie*

This article surveys the historiography of thuggee, the system of massmurder supposedly discovered by the British in India in the nineteenthcentury. In particular, it asks how far the thuggee archive, created byWilliam Sleeman, the British official mainly concerned, can beconsidered reliable, and how far it should be seen as an orientalistconstruct. At the same time the article looks briefly at the way thuggeeappears from time to time in western literature and film in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries as a significant image representing oriental(Indian) backwardness and barbarity.

Keywords: thuggee; construction; reconstruction; orientalism; discourse;post-colonialism

There is no doubt that thuggee – the system of deceit, robbery and murderpractised by the thugs, held responsible by the British for over a millionmurders in India in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries –inspired one of the strongest and most long-lasting orientalist discoursesever invented, starting with Philip Meadows Taylor’s extraordinary three-volume crime novel, The Confessions of a Thug (1839), and appearingthereafter in a series of stories, novels and films, not least of which wasSteven Spielberg’s gloriously orientalist Indiana Jones and the Temple ofDoom (1984). In many, but by no means all, of these stories, novels andfilms, the Indian people, in particular those concerned with the practice ofthuggee, are presented as strange, mysterious, backward, irrational andinferior, a uniform mass ruled over by a fanatical oriental despot, much asEdward Said, the leading (Arab, Palestinian) American student oforientalism (see his immensely influential Orientalism: Western Conceptionsof the Orient, 1978) would have predicted. What is less clear is how far theoriginal thuggee archive, created almost single-handedly by WilliamSleeman, the British East India Company official principally responsible

*Email: alexandermacfie@btinternet.com

Rethinking HistoryVol. 12, No. 3, September 2008, 383–397

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

� 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13642520802193262

http://www.informaworld.com

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for the discovery and suppression of thuggee, mainly in the 1830s, was itselfan orientalist construction – that is to say, the product of a deep-seatedEuropean inclination to make an ontological and epistemological distinctionbetween the Occident (Europe, the West) and the Orient (the East), whichleads Europeans (westerners) to characterise the Oriental as mysterious,backward, degenerate, irrational and inferior.

The question as to whether thuggee was an orientalist construction,created by the British in India, not found by them, is one of some interest,not only to philosophers of history, who nowadays are much concerned withthe issue of construction (construction, reconstruction, deconstruction), butalso to historians of thuggee who, in recent years, have taken a considerableinterest in the question. In this article, besides looking briefly at theappearance of thuggee in western literature and film, I survey the work of anumber of historians of thuggee, both western and eastern (Gupta, Gordon,Chatterjee, Roy, van Woerkens, Wagner, Dash), to see what they, explicitlyor implicitly, conclude, before arriving at my own no doubt predictableconclusion. It is not my intention, it should be noted, to add new material tothe thuggee archive (thoroughly researched in recent years by, in particular,van Woerkens and Dash), merely to look again at a part of thehistoriography of the subject.

A full account of the development of the orientalist image of thuggee inwestern literature and film can be found in Martine van Woerkens’ TheStrangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002).Among the works there analysed, Philip Meadows Taylor’s The Confessionsof a Thug stands out, as Meadows Taylor, an Assistant Superintendent ofPolice and member of the Nizam’s army in Hyderabad, was, along withSleeman, one of the first British East India Company officials to discoverand investigate thuggee, and his novel almost certainly the first fictionalaccount of the subject. Other significant works in which thuggee appearsinclude Mery, Les Etrangleurs de l’Inde (The Stranglers of India) (1859),Rene de Pont-Jest, Le Proces des Thugs (The Trial of the Thugs) (1877),George Stevens’ film, Gunga Din (1939), John Masters, The Deceivers(1952), the Merchant Ivory film The Deceivers (1988), and Steven Spielberg’sIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). In all of these novels andfilms, except perhaps that of Meadows Taylor, the thugs are presented as astrange and sinister oriental sect, led by a fanatical leader, intent on drivingthe British out of India and destroying western civilisation.

In The Confessions of a Thug, Meadows Taylor, who based his story inpart at least on the confessions of an actual thug, Sayyid Amir Ali, recordedin Sagar in 1832, encloses the confessions of the thug, Ameer Ali, within anarrative frame constructed by a strangely silent interrogator (presumablyMeadows Taylor himself). As a result, despite the evident sympathy andadmiration of the interrogator for the thug hero of the novel, who recountsnumerous picaresque tales of deceit, treachery, murder, robbery, romance

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and adventure (not all of which derive from the accounts of thuggeerecorded by Sleeman and Meadows Taylor in their interrogations), theauthority of the European sovereign observer is always maintained over thenon-European native, this despite the fact that the non-European nativeproves to be a remarkably engaging character. Or, as van Woerkens puts it,in her insightful and comprehensive analysis of Meadows Taylor’s novel inThe Strangled Traveler, a split is made between ‘the West, the self, harbingerof the future; and the Orient, the other, the elsewhere, the blight of the pastin the present’ (van Woerkens 2002, 248). At the same time, in order tofurther entrap the oriental narrative in a web of European perception, manyof the chapters are introduced by epigraphs, taken for the most part fromShakespeare’s plays (Richard III, Macbeth, As You like It, King Lear,Othello) and other mainly European works. In this way the moral authorityof the European self is generally (but by no means always) maintained overAmeer Ali, the sometimes noble, brave, sympathetic, but ultimately barbaricand mysterious other. It is no wonder that Queen Victoria found TheConfessions of a Thug compulsive reading.

The early critics of The Confessions of a Thug together with a number oftheir post-colonial successors, such as Robert Grant Williams (‘Shadows ofImperialism: Canonical Typology in Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug’ [1992–1993]), generally take it for granted that it was Meadows Taylor’s intention,in writing The Confessions of a Thug, to portray the backwardness andcriminality of the Indian people in order to justify the expansion of Britishpower in India. Mary Poovey, in ‘Ambiguity and Historicism: InterpretingConfessions of a Thug’ (2004), on the other hand, suggests that it is possibleto read the novel not as a justification of British imperialism but as anoblique critique of the East India Company and everything it represented:assumptions about the racial superiority of the English, the conviction thatChristianity is morally superior to various Indian religions, and the beliefthat western bureaucracy is more efficient and rational than its easterncounterpart. This reading, which is based essentially on the fact thatMeadows Taylor, as a heavily acculturated Anglo-Indian – MeadowsTaylor’s wife was half Indian and according to a visiting friend he ruled inShorapur like a nabob, enjoying all the pleasures of a well-stocked harem –was able to observe both the Indians and the British more objectively thanmost of his friends and colleagues, and was therefore the better able toappreciate the virtues and failings of both, is strangely convincing.Nevertheless, one would in the end, I suppose, have to conclude thatMeadows Taylor’s portrayal of Ameer Ali and his fellow thugs as surrogateEnglishmen owes more to the author’s inability to escape the mind-set of hisown tribe than to any nefarious intention to criticise the English by way ofan Indian proxy. One way or the other it is evident that, in this as in somany other instances, a charge of orientalism is difficult at times tosubstantiate.

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In Les Etrangleurs de l’Inde, Mery, a French novelist, referred to thethugs as monsters who had nothing in common with the human race. Theyseem, he remarks, ‘to have been issued from the mating of hyenas andbaboons’ (Mery 1859, 30, cited in van Woerkens 2002, 263–4). Similarly, inLe Proces des Thugs, a serial novel which includes the trial of a leading thug,Feringheea, Rene de Pont-Jest, a legal columnist for the Figaro,symbolically indicts ‘the India of Brahma’ before ‘Christ’s tribunal’, andthe ‘Far East and its superstitions’ before ‘civilised Europe’. The trial, inPont-Jest’s view, involves the most horrible cause that human justice hasever had to judge. The crimes committed, which include the sacrifice of fortyyoung women before Kali, are not just those of the criminals concerned.They are those of a ‘whole race’ (Pont-Jest 1879, cited by van Woerkens2002, 273–6).

In Gunga Din, a film based in part at least on Rudyard Kipling’s SoldiersThree and Other Stories (1888) and on his poem ‘Gunga Din’ (Kipling neveractually wrote about the thugs in his novels and short stories, though he didread The Confessions of a Thug whilst at school), three British armysergeants, played by Cary Grant (an unconvincing cockney), DouglasFairbanks Jr. (an unconvincing Englishman) and Victor McLaughlin (anequally unconvincing Englishman) use India as a sort of adventureplayground in which, largely unrestrained by any sort of adult supervision,they are enabled to indulge in a series of childish pranks, before almostsingle-handedly taking on the (completely anonymous) massed ranks of thethug worshippers of Kali, whose fanatical leader wants to raise a (sort ofnationalist) rebellion and drive the British out of India. Fortunately forthem, the leader of the thugs proves just as arrogant and short-sighted asthey are so that in the end, following a series of impossible incidents, ablyassisted by the eponymous Gunga Din, the despised water-carrier and truehero of the story, they succeed in saving the British army from defeat and byimplication the British raj in India from extinction. In the closing scene ofthe film we, the audience, see ‘Rudyard Kipling’, who is accompanying theBritish army, saved by our three valiant heroes from defeat, sitting down ata table in a military camp and penning the first words of his famous poem.

In The Deceivers, John Masters – the popular novelist and soldier, whosefamily had served in India for five generations – contrasts the civilisation ofEngland (the ‘impersonal rule of English law’) with the anarchy and chaosof India, a country in which it was possible for a sect, devoted to the worshipof the goddess Kali, to commit a ‘million murders’ undetected. England inthe novel is represented by William Savage, the somewhat diffident herowho, disguised as Gopal the weaver, penetrates the thug sect and discoversits extraordinary secrets, thereby making possible its eventual suppression.India is represented by the thugs, and by Kali, the ‘dark blue’ goddess withdishevelled hair and bloodstained hands, who orders her servants to kill.Yet, surprisingly, the victory of English civilisation in the novel is never

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absolute. For whilst pretending to be a thug, a pretence which leads him notonly to participate in numerous thuggee acts of murder, but also to commitmurder himself, William Savage finds himself falling under the spell of Indiaand its strange gods, in particular Kali. ‘Where then was God, the trueChristian God?’ he asks himself at one point in the story. Had he perhapsbecome two men, a Christian and a Deceiver? ‘Has God arranged it, soloathing Kali, that even to know her was to know Death, become Death?’(Masters 1955, 185). Who, in other words, was William Savage? (JohnMasters, perhaps.) It’s by no means clear that Masters ever found theanswer to this question.

In 1988 Ismail Merchant and James Ivory made a film (directed byNicholas Meyer) of Masters’ The Deceivers, entitled The Deceivers, in whichWilliam Savage (played by Pierce Brosnan) once again disguises himself as athug, penetrates the sect, discovers its strange secrets and participates in itsmurders. As a result, as in the book, he once again finds his own identity as aChristian European threatened by the hypnotic power of the Indian ‘other’, anIndian ‘other’ which perhaps reveals the true reality of the Christian European‘self’. In the film the story starts with the murder of Lieutenant Maunsell, anEnglish officer, an event that actually happened in 1812 (though in general thethugs hardly ever murdered the English); and George Angelsmith, theexemplary servant of the East India Company in the novel, becomes a sponsorof the thugs, from whose activities he profits. In case anyone is in any doubt, itis announced at the beginning of the film that it is based on a true story andthat the thugs were held responsible in India for two million murders.

Finally, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a Ben Hecht andCharles MacArthur film, directed by Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones(Harrison Ford), an American archaeologist, following in the footsteps ofthe intrepid heroes of Gunga Din, similarly takes on a modern-day (1930)version of the thuggee cult and its fanatical leader, who is busy on thisoccasion kidnapping the children of an Indian village in order to employthem as slave labour in his mines. Once again the civilised West (representednow by America: Europe appears to be a spent force) is contrasted with theanarchy and violence of India; and once again a fanatical leader of the thugsaims at the defeat of the British raj. Though now the archaeologist IndianaJones, ably assisted by two companions, Willy and Shorty, is, unlike hisBritish predecessors, prepared to engage with the Hindu mythology of theIndian villagers, who believe that Jones has been selected by Shiva to land inthe village (Jones’s plane crashes) and save its inhabitants threatened,because of the theft by the thugs of a mystical stone phallus, with ruin (therain stops falling, the rivers run dry, the villagers are starving). Not thatJones is entirely immune to the less benign aspects of Indian culture. At onepoint in the story he is forced by the thugs to drink blood so that, likeWilliam Savage, he falls for a moment under the spell of the terrible goddessKali and becomes capable of committing a human sacrifice.

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It is not difficult then to identify key elements in the orientalist discourseregarding thuggee in European literature and film. What is more difficult isto determine the extent of the orientalist contribution to the construction ofthe original thuggee archive, the archive on which the thug discourse islargely based (other sources are almost non-existent). This consistsessentially of four documents: an article, written by Robert (Dash 2005has Richard) Sherwood, a doctor in the Madras Medical Service, entitled‘Of the Murderers called Phansigars’ (the word for thug in southern India),published in the Madras Literary Gazette in 1819, and reprinted in AsiaticResearches in 1820 (a copy of the article was also included in WilliamSleeman’s Ramaseeana); an anonymous letter about the cult of the goddessKali and her devotees (the thugs) actually written by William Sleeman, theBritish colonial official mainly responsible for the later suppression of thethugs, and published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette in October 1830;Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugswith an Introduction and an Appendix Descriptive of the System Pursued byThat Fraternity and the Measures Which Have Been Adopted by the SupremeGovernment for Its Suppression, published by the Military Orphan Press,Calcutta, in 1836, similarly written by Sleeman; and A Report on theDepradations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India fromthe Cold Season of 1826–27 [Dash 2005 has 1836–37] down to Their GradualSuppression, under the Operations of the Measures Adopted against Them bythe Supreme Government in the year 1839, again published by the MilitaryOrphan Press, Calcutta, and written by Sleeman. A summary of this reportwas later published in the British and Foreign Review (1843). Some scholarsalso include William Sleeman’s Rambles and Reflections of an Indian Official(1893) in the thug archive, as Sleeman comments widely there on the issuesraised by thuggee.

Sherwood’s article in the Madras Literary Gazette, which for a variety ofreasons (the obscurity of the Gazette, the concentration of the officials of theEast India Company on the far more urgent task of winning the Pandiriwars, the policy of non-interference widely advocated at the time) waslargely ignored by the British in India at the time, was both detailed andconvincing. According to Sherwood, in the territories subject to theGovernment of Fort St. George, numerous non-European travellers hadin recent years fallen victim to the Phansigars, or stranglers, villains assubtle, rapacious and cruel as any who are to be met with in the records ofhuman depravity. The Phansigars are thus designated from the Hindustaniword Phansi, a noose. In the more northern parts of India they are calledthugs, signifying deceivers; in the Tamul language Ari Tulucar or Mussul-man noosers; and in Canarese, Tanti Calleru, implying thieves, who use awire or cat-gut noose. There is no reason to believe that Europeans wereaware of the existence of such criminals until shortly after the conquest ofSeringapatem in 1799, when about 100 were apprehended in the vicinity of

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Bangalore. It was not known then that they belonged to a distinct class ofhereditary murderers and plunderers, settled in various parts of India. Manylive peaceably with their neighbours, whom they never attempt to molest,protected by the Polygars (Indian chiefs) and other petty local authorities.Phansigars never commit robbery unaccompanied by murder, their practicebeing first to strangle and then to rifle their victims. A gang of Phansigarsconsists of from ten to fifty, or even a greater number, a large majority ofwhom are Musssulmans, though Hindus, and particularly those of theRajput tribe, are often associated with them. Brahmans too, though rarely,are found in their gangs. Emerging from their haunts, they sometimesperform long journeys, being absent from home for many months. Theirvictims are almost exclusively travellers whom they fall in with on the road.Different gangs often act in concert, occasionally apprising one another ofthe approach of travellers whose destruction promises a rich bounty.Phansigars usually have the appearance of ordinary inoffensive travellersand seldom assume any particular disguise. No one is allowed to escapefrom a party, however numerous; though occasionally a boy may be spared,in order that he might be adopted by the thugs and on attaining the requisiteage initiated into their sect. The bodies of those murdered are generallyburied immediately, face downwards and shockingly mangled, in order thatthey should not be discovered. The plunder gained is almost always carriedhome by the Phansigars and sold below its value. They worship Kali, andpay the most servile regard to omens, and they never leave their abodes to goon an expedition without a previous persuasion, derived from modes ofdivination in use among them, that it will be attended with success. Likeothers who follow lawless and abandoned courses, the Phansigars areprofligate and improvident, and addicted to the use of opium (Bruce 1968,13–26).

Sleeman’s anonymous letter in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, on theother hand, had a profound effect, both on the British authorities in Indiaand on public opinion in general. In his letter, Sleeman once again set outwhat he believed to be the basic facts about the murderous activities of thethugs. But where Sherwood had merely remarked their peculiar religiousbeliefs, rites and ceremonies, Sleeman went into considerable detail. Kali’stemple, he wrote, at Bindachul, a few miles west of Mirzapore on theGanges, is constantly filled with murderers from every quarter of India.They go there to offer up in person a share of the booty they have acquiredfrom the victims strangled in their annual excursions. The priests of thistemple know perfectly well the sources from which they derive their offeringsand wealth, and the motives from which they are made. They suggestexpeditions and promise the murderers in the name of their mistressimmunity, provided a due share be offered up to their shrine and none of therites and ceremonies be neglected. If they die by the sword in the executionof these murderous duties by the goddess assigned or sanctioned, she

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promises them paradise in its most exquisite delights, but if they are takenand executed it must arise from her displeasure, incurred by some neglect ofthe duties they owe her, and they must, as disturbed spirits, inhabit mid-airuntil her wrath be appeased. After they have propitiated the goddess byoffering up a share of the booty of the preceding year and received thepriests’ suggestions on the subject, they prepare for the following year.Thuggee is an organised system of religious and civil polity prepared toreceive converts from all religions and sects and to urge them to the murderof their fellow creatures under the assurance of high rewards in this worldand the next (Bruce 1968, 81–3).

In Ramaseeana, written by Sleeman after a thorough investigation ofthuggee instigated following his appointment as Superintendent for theSuppression of Thuggee in 1830, Sleeman, as the full title of the worksuggests, once again described in some detail the thug ‘system’, and theculture that supported it. But on this occasion he added a short history of thesuppression of thuggee from its first discovery up to the time when he tookover as the official responsible for its suppression, copies of official andprivate correspondence relating to the issue, detailed accounts of theinterrogations of thugs carried out by himself and his officials in the course oftheir duties and a lexicon or glossary of Ramasee, the thug argot or slang,some six hundred or so words in length, which the thugs used to communicatesecretly with one another. Similarly, in the Report on the DepredationsCommitted by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India published bythe Military Orphan Press in 1839, Sleeman published detailed accountsof the numerous expeditions undertaken by the gangs, in the period 1826–39,the names of their leaders, the numbers in each gang, and the value of theplunder they seized, along with a variety of extracts from thug interrogations.

Historians of thuggee who have, directly or indirectly, expressed a viewon the authenticity of the thug archive can loosely be divided into threegroups: those who generally accept the authenticity of the archive as a trueand accurate account of the thug phenomenon; those who doubt itsauthenticity, seeing the archive merely as some kind of orientalistconstruction; and those who, whilst admitting that the archive does containan orientalist element, yet regard it as being essentially sound. The firstgroup might include more or less all the histories of thuggee written duringthe imperial period, including Edward Thornton, Illustration of the Historyand Practices of the Thugs (1837), Caleb Wright, A Description of the Habitsand Superstitions of Thugs (1846), James Hutton, A Popular Account of theThugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India(1857), Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (1892), James Sleeman,Thug, or a Million Murders (1920), and George Bruce, The Stranglers: TheCult of Thuggee and its Overthrow in British India (1968). As Parama Royremarked, in Indian Traffic (1998, 42), in these works there appears to bevery little significant difference between one text and another. Each seems to

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repeat the others in an uncanny fashion; each narrates the same incidents inalmost exactly the same rhetorical mode; and each looks to W.H. Sleeman’sproductions as the founding texts of the thuggee archive. The second groupmight include a number of, for the most part, post-colonial studies writtenfollowing the end of empire, including Hiralal Gupta, ‘A Critical Study ofthe Thugs and their Activities’ (1959), Stewart Gordon, ‘Scarf and Sword:Thugs, Marauders, and State-formation in Eighteenth-century Malwa’(1969), Amal Chatterjee, Representation of India (1998), ‘Thugs’, chapter 8,and Parama Roy, Indian Traffic (1998), ‘Discovering India, ImaginingThuggee’, chapter 2. The third group might include Martine van Woerkens,The Strangled Traveler (1995, translated 2002), Kim Wagner, ‘TheDeconstructed Stranglers’ (2004), and Mike Dash, Thug: The True Storyof India’s Murderous Cult (2005). The fact that this division also produces anapparent chronology probably indicates (as Said would have predicted) thata complex power/knowledge relationship was at work. In the imperialperiod British power presumably ensured that British views of the thuggeearchive as reliable and authentic predominated. In the post-colonial periodan opportunity arose for mainly Indian historians and others to ‘write back’against their erstwhile imperial masters. Then towards the end of thetwentieth century it became possible to adopt a more balanced approach –though ideological factors may still have made their influence felt. One wayor the other it is evident that in the post-colonial period a new and moresceptical way of looking at the thuggee archive emerged.

Hiralal Gupta, in ‘A Critical Study of the Thugs and their Activities’,was one of the first of the post-colonial historians to question theauthenticity of the thuggee archive, and therefore, by implication, toidentify it as an essentially orientalist construction. In Gupta’s opinion, theconclusions drawn in Sleeman’s various reports, and similar accounts ofthuggee, written by the English, are at times grossly exaggerated and theopinions expressed in them largely biased. There is no dispute about theareas infested by the thugs, their chief haunts, the nature and scope of theircriminal activities, their customs and practices and things superficial fromthe point of view of purely political history. But it is impossible to acceptother things, particularly the opinions of the English authors, withouttesting them with a spirit of enquiry. In particular, Colonels Sleeman andMeadows Taylor are biased to a point that maligns Indian society. Sleemantreats the thugs as a caste and their system as a ‘natural pastime’. A sense ofracial superiority permeates his (and other similar) remarks, which betrays awoeful lack of reasonableness. There is no evidence that the thugsconstituted an exclusive social order inspired by a religion. Nor had theyany cultural or regional organisation. Similarly there is no justification fortracing the origins of thuggee back to times immemorial. In their variousinterpretations of thuggee the English have simply found a convenient wayof disowning responsibility for its actual origin in the British period.

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Thuggee was the product of a period of political transition. In other words,it connoted the failure of the new (British) political set-up to tackle theintricate problems of rehabilitation and resettlement created by thedestruction of the Maratha Confederacy.

Stewart Gordon, in ‘Scarf and Sword’, comes to more or less the sameconclusion. In his view, William Sleeman in his various writings, encouragedby the Evangelicals, played up locally organised, small-scale groups (giventhe name thugs by the British) into a hideous, widespread, religiousconspiracy, somehow typical of India and Indian ‘national character’. Thethugs did not form a culturally distinct group. They did not recognise aunique set of customs and speak a distinctive argot. Many of the practicesattributed to them alone, such as the involvement of a deity before thecommencement of an expedition, the treatment of objects involved in theiroccupation as sacred, the falling in with travellers by deception, the belief inomens and the specialisation of tasks within a gang, were common to manycriminal groups. Far from being a ‘national fraternity of murderers’, mostthugs were part-time, locally based marauders, deeply involved with thelocal power structure, struggling to make a living in the chaotic conditionscreated by the collapse of the Mogul empire, the British defeat of theMarathas in 1803, and the Pindari wars. Contemporary European accountsof Thuggee, and many of the later histories based on them, reveal ‘almost asmuch colour as the novelists’.

Amal Chatterjee, in ‘Thugs’, goes even further, arguing that the British,in an attempt to demonise a ‘primitive’ India and its inhabitants in the1830s, chose to identify thuggee as a ‘traditional’ Indian evil of ancientorigin, widely sanctioned by Indian culture and religion. Far from being anaccurate account of an Indian criminal practice, the British description ofthuggee is a fiction, designed to justify an extension of British power in thesubcontinent, illustrate the strength of British arms, provide proof of thecomplete moral superiority of the ‘advanced’ Europeans over the ‘primitive’Indians and prove the superiority of the True (Christian) God as comparedwith the false (Hindu) ones. The men mainly responsible for this falseportrayal of India, as a country infested by religiously sanctioned murder,were William Sleeman, the scourge of the ‘thugs’, Edward Thornton, theirchronicler, and Philip Meadows Taylor, their publicist. Fundamental totheir creation was the claim that so powerful were the forces of superstitionin India that the thugs had managed to keep their existence secret both fromthe British and from the Indian administrators for centuries.

Finally, Parama Roy, in ‘Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee’, seesthuggee as essentially a grand narrative or discourse, one which representedthe thugs as a quasi-religious fraternity that, paradoxically, was capable ofaccommodating just about every Indian. Thuggee was defined by Sleemanand his associates as a compelling and characteristically Indian form ofsocial (ir)rationality, and its practice was represented as resting upon an

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interlocking network of constitutive contradictions. Though the thugsrobbed their victims, thuggee is not conceived as having an economic base.When not engaged in killing and plunder, the thugs are said to occupy arespectable place in social and caste hierarchies. Though ‘obscenelyrespectable’, they are generally characterised as hereditary killers, who revelin the joy of killing (Roy 1998, 45). Though each thuggee expedition andeach act of thuggee was supposedly performed by the book, attended byminutely detailed rituals and scrupulously observed omens, it was notimmediately visible as such to those who could not or did not see it as asemiosis. Knowledge of thuggee as an essence had, therefore, to beconstructed, crucially around an absence; and all the confessions, all thesubject effects produced by the testimonies of approvers (witnesses whosaved their own lives by testifying against other thugs) were merely a‘strenuous effort to recover a ‘‘consciousness’’, a consciousness that wouldprovide the foundation for the revelations that ratified the anti-thugcampaign’ (Roy 1998, 53). Thuggee, in short, is simply a discourse, one‘troped in figures of darkness, mystery, inscrutability, unpredictability andunexpected menace’ invented by Sleeman and his associates, who themselvesinhabited a heroic narrative of the battle of good against evil (Roy 1998, 54).

Of the three works I have mentioned as belonging to the third group ofbooks and articles, which take a view, directly or indirectly, on theorientalist nature of the thug archive, van Woerkens’s The StrangledTraveler is from my point of view the most perplexing, Wagner’s ‘TheDeconstructed Stranglers’ the most sceptical – though paradoxicallyprobably the most convincing, and Dash’s Thug the most surprising. Allthree identify thuggee as some sort of historical reality, yet all threeacknowledge an element of orientalism (exaggeration, bias, prejudice,distortion) in its original construction. In The Strangled Traveler, for instance,van Woerkens adopts a novel approach to the issue, both investigating theetymologies of the thug lexicon collected by Sleeman and analysing thevarious discourses associated with thuggee, in particular those originated bySleeman andMeadows Taylor. By investigating the thug lexicon she is, as sheputs it in the introduction to her work, able to inscribe the thugs into aconcrete reality, one that is both dense and convincing as the words ‘completeand confirm what the documents revealed before, during and after thecolonial era’. By so doing she is, in her opinion, able to ‘make out a historyand coherence different from those we have known’ (van Woerkens 2002, 8).And by investigating the various discourses, particularly the British, she isable to show how all these were constructed and reverberated at the level ofthe colonial state and its representations. The colonial state, that is to say,assuming the right to accomplish a civilising mission, claimed the rightthrough its laws to monopolise all legitimate political violence; and itsrepresentatives, adhering to this dominant ideology, similarly claimed theright to organise prosecutions and trials. In the process of thus prosecuting the

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thugs, they inscribed their ‘exceptional experience and knowledge into adiscourse determined not only by truth but by career and glory, by socialrelations and the desire for power’ (9). The thug archive, in other words, isessentially a discourse, constructed by Sleeman and his colleagues, designed tojustify promotion and an extension of British rule. But it is also a discoursethat to some extent runs parallel with a concrete history of the thugs thatwould identify them as a religious group, practising a religion, albeit adegenerate one, possibly involving human sacrifice. When asked, for instance,by Sleeman why their goddess Kali (also known as Bhowanee, Davey) haddeserted them (allowed them to be caught), many thugs declared that they hadneglected the old rites and failed to perform the proper rituals. In the past theyhad been authentic devotees. Now they were simply bandits and assassins. Itwas not, therefore, surprising that they no longer received protection.

In ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers’, on the other hand, Wagner questionsthe validity of van Woerkens’ analysis of thuggee as the corruption of an oldreligious practice, and of Ramasee as a real language. In his view, Ramaseeshould be seen as reflective of Sleeman’s understanding of thuggee ratherthan of the thugs themselves. In deconstructing Sleeman, van Woerkens hasin fact deconstructed her own account of thuggee as it is based almostentirely on his representation. As the sole authority on thuggee, Sleemanconstructed a religion and a thug language based on a few informers andsubsequently made sweeping assertions where single statements becamedogma and the practice took on the appearance of a religious cult. By failingto use material other than that which came out of the 1830s, selectivelypublished by Sleeman, all van Woerkens’ criticisms of Sleeman and thecolonial discourse can be directed against herself. As for Sleeman’s accountof thuggee, itself, it is now obvious that it is full of inconsistencies andexaggerations and that by presenting it as a serious obstacle to theintroduction of law and order in India, Sleeman was in fact furthering hisown position with the British administration – an administration thatrecognised the use that could be made of the discovery of thuggee as ajustification for a further extension of the colonial state. But that does notmean that the Sleeman archive was a purely orientalist construction, asGupta, Chatterjee, Roy and even van Woerkens seem at times to suggest.Other evidence can be adduced for the existence of thuggee, particularly thatconcerning the attack on N.J. Halhed, an Assistant to the Superintendent ofPolice in the area, at Sindouse in 1812, when Halhed was attacked by a largegroup of ‘thugs’ – so-called by the local inhabitants of the area – an attackduring which three of Halhed’s men were killed and seven wounded. Whatthis evidence, used in conjunction with the evidence adduced by Sleeman,shows is that travellers were strangled and plundered by bands of robbers inearly-nineteenth-century India if not earlier. That thuggee (one may argueabout the appropriateness of the term thug) was a recognisable andlongstanding phenomenon predating British rule. And that the men

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involved in thuggee in the Sleeman period, accustomed to serve in the armiesof the local zaminders and such like, when faced with demobilisation, andpossible starvation, frequently took to the road in search of loot. Accordingto this interpretation, therefore, thuggee should be seen, not so much assome kind of traditional religious practice, but rather as the continuation ofa predatory lifestyle – the lifestyle of the zamindars and their followers –under well-regulated circumstances, carried on by men otherwise deprived ofthe means of open plunder.

Finally, in Thug, Dash, while writing probably the most completelytraditional (reconstructionist) account of the reality of thuggee, based onmuch new (or at least newly assessed) material, acquired in the East IndiaCompany archives in London, Delhi and Bhopal, yet felt obliged to admit inan introductory note to his work that the thuggee archive did contain acertain amount of exaggeration, in particular with regard to thehomogeneity of the thug gangs, the methods they employed and theircommitment to the worship of Kali, the Hindu ‘goddess of destruction’.Moreover, they had distorted the motives of the thugs, which, according totheir own testimony were almost always economic. And the officialsconcerned had sometimes been inclined to glorify the part they played in thewhole affair. As a result the thugs were generally seen in the West as afearsome cult of religiously inspired killers, for whom the act of murder wasakin to human sacrifice. At the same time the number of killings assigned tothe gangs had been exaggerated, a consequence of the misinterpretation of‘some unpublished manuscripts’ and of some generous assumptionsconcerning the antiquity of the practice. But that does not mean, as therevisionists (Gupta, Gordon, Chatterjee, Roy et al.) suppose, that thuggeecannot be clearly identified as a particular sort of crime, discoverable in theevidence, quite distinct from the crimes committed by highwaymen andbandits. It can (Dash 2005, Author’s Note, ix–xiii).

What conclusions, then, can one draw regarding the orientalist contentof the thuggee archive? That it is inherently orientalist in its construction, asthe post-colonial historians generally suppose? That it is for the most part afactual account of what actually happened, as the traditional (reconstruc-tionist) historians generally suppose? Or that it is in part factual and inpart orientalist? Certainly the post-colonial historians (Gupta, Gordon,Chatterjee, Roy and even to some extent van Woerkens) have made out astrong case for the view that the archive should be seen as inherentlyorientalist. Viewed from their point of view it is evident that Sleeman and hiscolleagues did to some extent at least invent thuggee as a widespreadreligious conspiracy, illustrative of the backwardness and irrationality of theIndian people. And that they did this, in part at least, to justify personalpromotion and an extension of British power in India. But there areproblems with this argument, not least that posed by van Woerkens, thatthuggee, as the practice of a religious group, inspired by its own religious

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beliefs, may actually have existed, and that Sleeman’s account of thuggee,and the accounts given by his colleagues, though somewhat wide of themark, may have reflected an Indian reality, about which – inevitablyperhaps – they were largely ignorant. And also that posed by Dash, thatthuggee can be identified as a certain kind of crime, discoverable in theevidence. Sleeman and his colleagues, in other words, may have been not somuch orientalist as simply misinformed. Viewed in this light, the thuggeearchive should be seen not as an orientalist text, but as an inadequate anddistorted factual account of an Indian reality, the product not so much oforientalism as of error.

Neither of these responses, it seems to me, is adequate. This is mainlybecause they do not take due account of Wagner’s reinterpretation of thefacts of thuggee, a reinterpretation which, according to Wagner himself, isnow widely accepted. This reinterpretation is clearly important in its ownright. But it is also important because it explains a significant discrepancy inthe evidence regarding thuggee adduced in the thuggee archive – namely, thefact that whereas Sleeman and his colleagues tended to define the activitiesof the thugs in terms of wickedness, murder, deceit, cowardice andcriminality, the thugs themselves tended to evaluate them in terms ofcourage, enterprise, bravery, daring, cunning, adventure and martial skill –in other words, in terms usually associated by both the British and theIndians with the heroic values of war. What this suggests is that the thuggeearchive, though broadly speaking accurate in its presentation of (most of)the facts, should now be seen in part at least as an orientalist construction,one constructed not on the crude foundations of the stereotypical paradigmsidentified by Said, nor on the foundations of racial prejudice also analysedby him (though there may have been an element of that), but rather on thefoundations of the Christian–Protestant–Enlightenment values Sleeman andhis colleagues carried with them willy-nilly when they first departed for Indiaat the turn of the eighteenth century.

Notes on contributor

Alexander Lyon Macfie has written widely on the Straits Question, the EasternQuestion, the modern history of the Middle East, and other related subjects. Hispublications include The Eastern Question (2nd ed. 1996), The Straits Question(1993), Ataturk (1994), The End of the Ottoman Empire (1998), Orientalism: A Reader(2000), Orientalism (2002), Eastern Influences on Western Philosophy: A Reader(2003) and The Philosophy of History (2006).

References

Bruce, G. 1968. The stranglers: The cult of thuggee and its overthrow in British India.London: Longmans.

Chatterjee, A. 1998. Thugs. In Representations of India: The creation of India in thecolonial imagination. London: Macmillan.

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Dash, M. 2005. Thug: The true story of India’s murderous cult. London: GrantaBooks.

Gordon, S.N. 1969. Scarf and sword: Thugs, marauders and state-formation ineighteenth-century Malwa. The Indian Economic and Social History Review4, no. 1: 403–29.

Gupta, H. 1959. A critical study of the thugs and their activities. Journal of IndianHistory 37, no. 2: 167–77.

Hervey, C. 1892. Some records of crime. London: Samson Low and Co.Hutton, J. 1857. A popular account of the thugs and dacoits, the hereditary garroters

and gang-robbers of India. London: William H. Allen and Co.Masters, J. 1955, first published 1952. The deceivers. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Poovey, M. 2004. Ambiguity and historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug.

Narrative 12, no. 1: 3–21.Roy, P. 1998. Discovering India, imagining thuggee. In Indian traffic: Identities in

question in colonial and postcolonial India. Berkeley and London: University ofCalifornia Press.

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul.

Sherwood, R. 1818. Of the murderers called Phansigars. Madras Literary Review.Sleeman, J. 1933, first published 1920. Thug, or a million murders. London: Sampson

Low and Co.Sleeman, W. 1836. Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the

thugs with an introduction and an appendix descriptive of the system pursued bythat fraternity and the measures which have been adopted by the supremegovernment for its suppression. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press.

———. 1839. A report on the depradations committed by the thug gangs of upper andcentral India from the cold season of 1826–27 [Dash 2005 has 1836–37] down totheir gradual suppression, under the operations of the measures adopted againstthem by the supreme government in the year 1839. Calcutta: Military OrphanPress.

Taylor, P. Meadows 1998, first published 1839. The confessions of a thug. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Thornton, E. 1837. Illustration of the history and practices of the thugs. London:William H. Allen and Co.

van Woerkens, M. 2002, first published in French 1995. The strangled traveler:Colonial imaginings and the thugs of India. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press.

Wagner, K.A. 2004. The deconstructed stranglers: A reassessment of thuggee.Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 4: 931–63.

Williams, R.G. 1992–1993. Shadows of imperialism: Canonical typology in Taylor’sConfessions of a Thug. Dalhousie Review 72, no. 4: 482–93.

Wright, C. 1846. A description of the habits and superstitions of thugs. London.

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