Excerpts from Confessions of a Thug

Nautch, Thuggee and Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

“…But thugs, who used to disguise themselves as wealthy persons, would also get involved in intimate relationships with dancers. In Confessions of a Thug (Taylor, 1839), the protagonist Ameer Ali narrates that they arranged ‘a set of dancing girls’ from a nearby town to spend an entire night watching their performance, and this association offered Sikundur Jah, their victim, a false endorsement of their profession as rich traders with cultural and artistic taste (Taylor, 1839: 42).…”

Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction

“…Mukherjee 2003). Criminality is shown to emerge from the social organisation of India itself: "[T]he greatest facilities of disguise among thieves and Thugs exist in the endless divisions of the people into tribes, castes, and professions" (Taylor 1998(Taylor [1839, 6). It thus becomes the duty of the colonial authority to suspect and control everyone in the colony, for all are potentially disguised criminals in the pay of the native rulers (Taylor 1998(Taylor [1839, 6).…”

“…Criminality is shown to emerge from the social organisation of India itself: "[T]he greatest facilities of disguise among thieves and Thugs exist in the endless divisions of the people into tribes, castes, and professions" (Taylor 1998(Taylor [1839, 6). It thus becomes the duty of the colonial authority to suspect and control everyone in the colony, for all are potentially disguised criminals in the pay of the native rulers (Taylor 1998(Taylor [1839, 6). Similar to the case studies and demographic reports, which arose at the time as a means of controlling the British populace, the introduction of the Confessions uses a Brought to you by | Carleton University OCUL Authenticated Download Date | 6/17/15 3:07 PM statistical chart to slot Thugs into specific states of the legal-bureaucratic process and to legitimate increasingly sophisticated techniques for the policing of suspected groups (Majeed 1996, 86):…”

“…Numerically fixing Thugs as a distinct social group, the chart affords a pretext for setting up a network of imperialist surveillance to control and regulate Indian society, thus drawing India into a Western form of power which Foucault calls 'discipline.' In his "Introduction," Taylor complains that there are not enough superintendents to supervise the vast number of provinces and divisions and recommends that the Government should extend to every part of the colony "an extreme attention and scrutiny" in order to "put an end to this destructive system" (Taylor 1998(Taylor [1839, 11). The chart, then, not so much reflects the threat of Thuggee, but constructs an archival knowledge about the essence of the country (Mukherjee 2003, 101).…”

The Jungle and the Village: Discourses on Crime and Deviance in Rural North India

“…In establishing British forms of regulation, successive governors, administrators and legal reformers sought to eradicate a series of deviant 'native' practices such as thagai, sati and child marriages. Thagai (also known as thuggee) was suppressed by Sir William Sleeman, an Indian official and major-general during the period 1835-41 (Taylor, 1986). Sati was banned by the British from 1829 onwards, and a further law was passed in 1987 making the glorification of sati a criminal offence (Dalrymple, 1998).…”