Abstract
The following is an attempt to reconstruct the universe of the thugs, examine their mentality and understand how they perceived themselves and their practices. It thus touches upon ‘certain important aspects of their lives’, such as the thugs’ religious beliefs, notions of honour and status, and identity. These issues are notoriously difficult to deal with, and any findings can only be tentative. Furthermore, the relevant sources cannot be examined independently of the process by which they were produced, and a narrative of the thugs’ mental outlook is therefore also one of the interviews conducted by the British. Yet, the material is sufficiently rich to make such an endeavour worthwhile and not simply settle for the recognition that the material cannot be taken at face value.
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Notes
See Hugh Urban, ‘India’s Darkest Heart: Kali in the Colonial Imagination’, in J. J. Kripal and R. F. McDermott (eds), Encountering Kali; In the Margins, at the Center, In the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
David R. Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1995), pp. 91–2, see also n. 15.
See also Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See Janet Dunbar (ed.), Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals 1837–1838 (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 104 and 119–23. While visiting Cawnpore in 1837, Emily Eden wrote of another British officer engaged in the operations against the thugs: ‘A Captain G. here is one of its great persecutors officially, but by dint of living with Thugs he has evidently grown rather fond of them, and has acquired a latent taste for strangling.’
Emily Eden, Up the Country — Letters from India (London, 1866, reprint London: Virago Press, 1983), p. 59.
See Norman P. Ziegler, ‘Rajput Loyalties During the Mughal Period’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) 242–84. It is not impossible that the self-sacrifice of two Muslim thugs at Vindhyachal was inspired by the jauhar or respectable Rajput act of sacrifice, see Genealogical table nr. 82, Ramaseeana, vol. I, following p. 270.
Sleeman (1844), vol. II, pp. 30–1. See also David Shulman, ‘On South Indian Bandits and Kings’, IESHR, 17 (1980): 283–306.
It has been suggested by some authors that thuggee might have constituted an anti-colonial practice, but this is simply not borne out by the material, see Hiralal Gupta, p. 173; and Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 138.
Kathleen Gough invokes the thugs as reformative social bandits in her article ‘Indian Peasant Uprisings’, in A. R. Desai (ed.), Peasant Strugglesin India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 103–5.
Inayat, Ramaseeana, vol. I, p. 229. See also H. Bevan, Thirty Years in India, or, A Soldier’s Reminiscences of Native and European Life in the Presidencies, from 1808 to 1836 (London: Pelham Richardson, 1839), pp. 256–66; and Dash, p. 200.
See Kaye (1853), footnote p. 361. The newspaper in question is Sumachar Durpan. See also Fhlathftin, ‘The Campaign Against Thugs in the Bengal Press in the 1830s’, Victorian Periodical Review, 37, 2 (2004): 124–40.
See also J. F. Richards and V. N. Rao, ‘Banditry in Mughal India: Historical and Folk Perceptions’, IESHR, 17, 1 (1980): 95–120, particularly pp. 115–16.
See Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), p. 109–10.
W. Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India (Allahabad, 1894, reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1994), p. 306.
See, for instance, Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj (London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 5–6
DGUP. Etawah, p. 43; and Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State. North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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© 2007 Kim A. Wagner
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Wagner, K.A. (2007). The World of the Thugs. In: Thuggee. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590205_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590205_10
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