Translations of Thuggee
By Jaro Demetter

The ‘thugs’ were members of a legendary criminal collective in nineteenth-century India, who famously strangled and robbed their victims along desolate travel routes. They allegedly posed as fellow travelers or local merchants and offered to journey together, winning the trust of their innocent targets by sharing their knowledge about the area. Then, after days or even weeks, when all circumstances were deemed favorable and all precautions had been taken, the unsuspecting travelers were killed, and their bodies skillfully concealed in inconspicuous graves.

State persecution of the thugs began in the 1830s, at the instigation of General William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856), who led the Thuggee (i.e., the perpetrated crime) and Dacoity Department between 1835 and 1839. In the final year of his tenure, he declared that the last remnants of the criminal collective had been eradicated.

During the 1830s, and especially during his years as General Superintendent of the Department, Sleeman created and gathered a broad collection of legal documents, transcribed interviews, and other texts concerning the thugs, which he compiled in several monographs; the first and foremost being his 1836 book Ramaseeana; or, a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs. Meanwhile, the thugs began to appear with increasing frequency in popular narratives, such as Edward Thornton’s Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1837), and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839). In this period and the decades that followed, thuggee quickly became a popular subject in both fictional and non-fictional European literature, including newspapers and magazines.

The new texts presented on the ESIND Digital Platform are translations of some of these non-fictional magazine and newspaper articles: article 25 | article 27 | article 33 | article 35.

All of these excerpts are drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century periodicals from the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), although many of these authors clearly took inspiration from, and refer to, British colonial sources and/or newspaper articles.

As these translations reveal, Western European popular representations have often conceptualized the phenomenon of thuggee in a remarkably consistent manner, regardless of the author’s personal, socio-economic, or religious background or the intended readership. That is, thuggee was historically portrayed as an enterprise fundamentally motivated by religious beliefs. The thugs allegedly murdered and robbed their victims in their devotion to a patron goddess (often Kali), thereby following divine instructions. The loot they took was apparently only of secondary importance; their actions were primarily guided by sacred commands that mandated the ritualistic strangulation of innocent people according to specific precepts.

Oftentimes, the reader will find that these articles devote considerable attention to long lists of omens and their meanings, the highly structured hierarchy and division of tasks within the organization, and the very specific divine rules and subrules these criminals were required to follow during their expeditions and murders. But what truly makes these historical representations of the thugs as a religious and dangerous sect so intriguing, is the persistence of several remarkable and peculiar elements in descriptions across time and space. In fact, the more we read into these nineteenth- and twentieth-century articles, the more implausible such representations appear.

For example, not only are these criminals often very explicitly described as “wicked to the core,” “depraved and immoral creatures,” and “the personification of evil, showing no remorse whatsoever,” but in the same breath they are also characterized as “good and loving people”, “noble and caring individuals”, and “impeccable people without any natural vice.” Furthermore, it appears that these authors go beyond simply attributing both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities to the thugs: they establish a causal connection, suggesting that the criminal activities of these stranglers were a direct result of their goodness and their capacity for moral action. In other words, the immorality of the thugs is supposedly rooted in their potential for goodness. How are we to understand the duality in these descriptions? How do we make sense of such seemingly paradoxical and implausible claims?

Moreover, the tenacity of these representations extends beyond the borders of the Low Countries; the same invariable characterization of the thugs as religiously motivated criminals is prominent in historical representations from other Western European regions. In both French and British accounts, for example, the thugs are presented as members of a gruesome cult who ruthlessly strangled their victims as sacrificial offerings to their bloodthirsty deity, strictly adhering to divine rules and denouncing those who failed to obey the commands of the goddess. This paradoxical interplay between immorality – even criminality – and morality and/or religion also seems to appear in both historical and contemporary scientific and ostensibly secular descriptions of other cultural phenomena in India such as caste violence, infanticide, and everyday crime.

The more we delve into these articles, the more research questions arise about the foundations and constraints of European thinking about religion, humanity, and crime: how can we explain that such implausible conceptions were reproduced time and time again across time and space to the point that they still impact our understanding of India today? Which underlying assumptions and cultural resources more generally must have been available for these authors and their readership to make sense of such seemingly paradoxical narratives? And what do these portrayals reveal about the foundations of (Western) European conceptualizations of religion and society? It thus becomes clear that the descriptions of thuggee are not merely sensational stories of a legendary band of robbers; they serve as gateways to examining (Western) European culture itself.