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Preface Introduction Notes Preface 1. George Bruce, The Stranglers – The cult of thuggee and its overthrow in British India (London: Longmans, 1968), p. 1–2. 2. A note on words and spelling: this book is based on primary sources that for a large part have not been utilised before and, accordingly, I have quoted exten- sively from these ‘new’ sources. I have retained the original spelling in these quotations, but otherwise I have used a contemporary spelling of places and names, apart from those with specific colonial connotations. In terms of termi- nology, it should be noted that thuggee is what a thug practised, just as a robber commits robbery. I am using the term ‘thug’ to describe the people who engaged in the murder and plunder of travellers, without any implication of a religious practice or a cult of hereditary assassins. The actual implication and meaning(s) of the term, will emerge as the text progresses. 3. See Martine van Woerkens, The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (Paris, 1995, English edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Kevin Rushby, Children of Kali (London: Constable); and Mike Dash, Thug – The True Story of India’s Murderous Religion (London: Granta, 2005). Van Woerkens and Dash both provide very detailed and well-researched accounts of thuggee, while the standard academic work on the subject remains Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime & Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 5. Introduction 1. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix, descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity and of the measures which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its suppression (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836). E. Thornton unscrupulously copied Sleeman’s work in his own Illustrations of the history and practices of the Thugs and Notices of Some of the Proceedings of the Government of India for the Suppression of the Crime of Thuggee (London, W. H. Allen, 1837, reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2000), while a pirated American version of Ramaseeana was published in 1839 entitled History of the Thugs or Phansigars of India. 2. P. Meadows Taylor Confessions of a Thug (London: 1839, reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Most of Taylor’s material was derived from Sleeman, but the former made the thugs known to a much wider audience through his novel. 3. I shall return to this point further below. 4. See, for instance, Fanny Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850, reprint Karachi: Oxford 232 Notes 233 University Press, 1975), vol. I, pp. 151–8 and 201–2. Skulls of thugs were also made the subject of study by phrenologists, see H. H. Spry, ‘Some accounts of the gang murderers of Central India, commonly called thugs; accompanying the Skulls of Seven of them’, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8 (March, 1834): 511–24; and R. Cox ‘Remarks on the Skulls and Character of the Thugs’, ibid., 524–30. 5. James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garotters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen, 1857), p. 97. 6. J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company: A History of the Indian Progress (London, 1853), pp. 354–79. 7. R. Russell and Hira Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 558–87. 8. Much has been written on the construction of caste in colonial India, see, for instance, the work of Bernard Cohn, or Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 9. James Sleeman, Thug or a Million Murders (London: S. Low, Marston, 1933), p. 18. 10. Ibid., p. 5. 11. Sir Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1961), and Bruce. 12. Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command – An Imperial Progress, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 72, 77 and 81. 13. More recently the thugs have been recast as terrorists and thuggee compared to Al-Qaeda, see David C. Rapoport ‘Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions’, The American Political Science Review, 78 (1984) 658–77; and ‘Ameer Ali – Thug’, http://www.roadtopeace.org/terrorism/Terrorists/ameer_ali.html (accessed 13/07/2003). 14. Benedicte Hjejle, The Social Legislation of the East India Company, with regard to Sati, Slavery, Thagi and Infanticide, 1772–1858 (unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford, 1958). 15. See also Kim Wagner, ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers – a Reassessment of Thuggee’, MAS, 38, 4 (2004): 931–63. 16. Hiralal Gupta, ‘A Critical Study of the Thugs and their Activities’, Journal of Indian History, 37, 2 (Aug. 1959): 167–77. 17. See Stewart N. Gordon ‘Scarf and Sword: Thugs, marauders, and state-formation in eighteenth-century Malwa’, IESHR, 4, 6 (1969): 403–29; p. 429. Mention should also be made of the collection of articles published in Anand A. Yand (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India, Association for Asian Studies monograph, 42 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). 18. See Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, MAS, 25, 2 (1991): 227–61; and C. A. Bayly Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996). 19. Singha (1998). 20. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). 21. Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 41–70; Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 125–44; and Maíre ní Fhlathúin, 234 Notes ‘The Travels of M. de Thévenot through the Thug Archive’, JRAS, 2, 1 (April 2001): 31–42. Two very recent articles are in a similar vein: Mark Brown’s ‘Crime, Governance and the Company Raj. The Discovery of Thuggee’, The British Journal of Criminology, 42 (2002): 77–95; and Tom Lloyd, ‘Acting in the “Theatre of Anarchy”: The “Anti-Thug Campaign” and Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, 19 (2006). 22. Chatterjee, Representations of India, p. 4. This is a quote from Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. See also Said, Orientalism, p. 5. 23. Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 24. Simon Scharma, A History of Britain 3: 1776–2000 The Fate of Empire (London: BBC, 2002), p. 211. See also Rajnaryan Chandvarkar in Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c: 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who talks of ‘the invention of “thuggee” ’, p. 226. 25. While I do not accept the notion of ‘truth’, I do insist that there is a social real- ity of India, which, however, can only be examined through representations, and representations are by definition subjective and discursive and do not provide any direct access to the past. 26. Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time – History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse, Second Edition (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 4. 27. The wording is Carlo Ginzburg’s. 28. The notion of the ‘thuggee archive’ was conceived by Parama Roy and consists of the published works of Sleeman and the vast range of derivative secondary literature, which she claims is the embodiment of the British discourse on thuggee, see Roy, p. 41. 29. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 77. 30. Dirk H. A. Kolff Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 183–4. 31. I will, in the words of Arthur Marwick, be ‘using one episode in one place to draw out wider conclusions’. Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 125. 32. I would like to point out that this book does not make any claims to be an exhaustive account of thuggee or of the British operations against the thugs. I shall be dealing almost exclusively with the phenomenon of thuggee in the Doab, only briefly mentioning its initial discovery in the Madras Presidency and elsewhere. 33. Dacoits are gang-robbers or bandits, see further below. 34. See, for instance, Paul Winther, Chambel River Dacoity: A Study of Banditry in North Central India (unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1972). 35. See also Florike Egmond’s brilliant Underworlds: Organized crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); and P. Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 36. See E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969, reprint London: Abacus, 2000); and A. Blok, ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Notes 235 Banditry Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1972): 494–503, and Honour and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 37. See Blok (2001), especially p. 21. 38. According to Blok: ‘Hobsbawm’s comparative treatment of banditry overem- phasizes the element of social protest while at the same time obscuring the sig- nificance of the links which bandits maintain with established power-holders. In future research on the subject, the relative importance of both elements must be accounted for.’ The present book heeds this call in examining thuggee, a type of banditry that Blok incidentally also referred to, see Blok (2001), pp. 22 and 17. 39. Egmond, Underworlds, p. 19. 1 Engaging the Colonial ‘Archives of Repression’ 1.
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