2002
DOI: 10.1093/bjc/42.1.77
|View full text |Cite
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

Crime, Governance and the Company Raj. The Discovery of Thuggee

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
2
1

Citation Types

0
13
0

Year Published

2002
2002
2023
2023

Publication Types

Select...
3
3
1
1

Relationship

0
8

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 16 publications
(13 citation statements)
references
References 7 publications
0
13
0
Order By: Relevance
“…If nothing else, the dependence of Sleeman's career on criminal fraternities, in which he claimed exclusive expertise, could well have inclined him to creativity (e.g., Singha 1993). Thus historians have dismissed his accounts and reports on the interrogation of Thugs (1836; 1839; 1849) as tales that tell us nothing about what the Thugs themselves may have thought and only what Sleeman himself wished his readers to believe (Chatterjee 1998: 125–44; Brown 2002; Lloyd 2008). They say Sleeman's reports are so hopelessly contaminated by imperial politics that it is impossible to tell fiction from fact (e.g., Freitag 1998; Singha 1998).…”
Section: Whose Stereotype and For What Purpose?mentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…If nothing else, the dependence of Sleeman's career on criminal fraternities, in which he claimed exclusive expertise, could well have inclined him to creativity (e.g., Singha 1993). Thus historians have dismissed his accounts and reports on the interrogation of Thugs (1836; 1839; 1849) as tales that tell us nothing about what the Thugs themselves may have thought and only what Sleeman himself wished his readers to believe (Chatterjee 1998: 125–44; Brown 2002; Lloyd 2008). They say Sleeman's reports are so hopelessly contaminated by imperial politics that it is impossible to tell fiction from fact (e.g., Freitag 1998; Singha 1998).…”
Section: Whose Stereotype and For What Purpose?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…45 When they were finally approved, the criminal tribe initiatives (like the Thuggee campaign before them) were perennially under-funded. Drastically understaffed reformatory colonies often dispersed within weeks of being formed, and the whole venture was perennially vulnerable to fiscal and administrative collapse (Singha 1993; Brown 2002: 84; Piliavsky 2013b). By the 1920s, the Government of India substantially washed its hands of the dubious enterprise, subcontracting most of it to the Salvation Army (Tolen 1991; Radhakrishna 2000).…”
Section: Whose Stereotype and For What Purpose?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Thus was completed a disturbing link between India's native landholding class and its lower social echelon, or what came to be referred to as its criminal tribes. I have described in more detail elsewhere the circumstances by which this symbiotic relationship between landed power groups and professional crime came to be discovered and the related emergence of taxonomies of native criminality which were eventually to underpin responses to it (Brown, 2001(Brown, , 2002. My aim here is to concentrate on the way responses framed within the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 reflect a PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 4(4) particular kind of penal modernity.…”
Section: Containing Suspect Communities: the Criminal Tribes Act 1871mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Mark Brown (2002), for his article on the discovery of the thugs, details the general patterns and necessities that drove the process of knowledge production about India (such as those described above) in the 1830s and highlights how they were inherently problematic. He outlines Cohn's (1996) assertion that British colonial epistemology sought to "know" the colony and the metropole within the same conceptual framework and in that vein the early empire witnessed a circulation of demographic ideas-particularly the concept of caste as hereditary occupationbased groups exhibiting distinct characteristics.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…He outlines Cohn's (1996) assertion that British colonial epistemology sought to "know" the colony and the metropole within the same conceptual framework and in that vein the early empire witnessed a circulation of demographic ideas-particularly the concept of caste as hereditary occupationbased groups exhibiting distinct characteristics. Brown (2002) cites Tobias' example of an 1829 explanation of the genesis of London's criminal class where the unidentified author writes that "they are born [thieves], and it is their inheritance: they form a caste of themselves, having a particular slang…" (Tobias, 1967, p. 53) alluding to the appropriation of the concept of caste beyond its original context and a downplaying of the geographical and historical development and dynamics of caste.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%