The travels of M. de Thévenot through the Thug Archive

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 31-42

  Fhlathúin, Máire Ní ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 6444243553     PISSN: 13561863     EISSN: 14740591     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. This was instituted in 1835, under W. H. Sleeman; however, its work had been carried on within the general remit of the political agent in the Sagar and Narbada Territories and, in the beginning, the resident in Hyderabad since 1828. It became the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in 1839. For convenience, I have referred to the TD throughout.
2. P. Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley, 1998), p. 42.
3. Jean de Thévenot, The Travels of M. de Thevenot into the Levant, trans. A. Lovell, 3 pts (London, 1687).
4. In August 1834, for example, Smith's report to the Bengal government requesting the extension of TD operations into southern India cites the "abundant evidences" offered by Captain P. A. Reynolds "that the Provinces both of the Madras and Bombay territories... abound in Phansegurs as cruel as rapacious but far more cunning than their brethren of the Deccan" (Board's Collection F4/1566/64216, 317-32, India Office Library [henceforth IOL]).
5. See Sleeman's letters of 8 and 10 September 1836, where the discovery of "new" kinds of thugs is cited as the rationale for the changes desired by the TD in the laws regarding the judicial treatment of thugs (India Political Consultations, 26 September 1836, nos 81 and 82, IOL).
6. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 174.
7. S. Freitag, "Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India", Modern Asian Studies, 25.2 (1991), pp. 242-43.
8. Thévenot, iii, p. 41.
9. See W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana (Calcutta, 1836), Appendix U.
10. R. C. Sherwood, "Of the Murderers Called P'hansigars", Asiatic Researches, 13, (1820), pp. 250-81; Thévenot is quoted on pp. 276-77.
11. See, for instance, the instructions of George Swinton, chief secretary to the government of India, to Major Stewart, the officiating Resident at Indore, 23 October 1829, Ramaseeana, ii, pp. 379-84. It is at this point that he famously designates the thugs as "like Pirates, to be placed without the pale of social law" (p. 380).
12. Swinton to G. Wellesley, Resident at Indore, 8 October 1830
13. in Selected Records Collected from the Central Provinces and Berar Secretariat on the Suppression of Thuggee (Nagpur, 1939), pp. 8-9.
14. See Bengal Political Consultations 21 January 1831, nos 29-35, IOL.
15. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, ii, pp. 327-62. The passage omitted coven pp. 278-80 in Asiatic Researches.
16. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, i, pp. 9-11.
17. See India Political Consultations 26 July 1841, no. 120, IOL.
18. E. Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (London, 1837), pp. 18-19.
19. C. Trevelyan, "The Thugs; or, Secret Murderers of India", Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, LXIV, (1837), pp. 357-95.
20. "The Thugs, or Phansigars", Foreign Quarterly Review, 21, (April 1838), pp. 1-32.
21. The Thugs, or Phansigars of India (Philadelphia, 1839), pp. 45-46.
22. The partial exception is J. Stevenson, "Some Account of the Phansigars, or Gang-Robbers and of the Shúdgarshids, or Tribe of Jugglers', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1 (1834), pp. 280-84;
23. this does not quote Thévenot directly, but includes a paragraph on thugs' use of "a pretty-looking girl" to ensnare travellers, which is in its turn reproduced by W. H. Carey in his compilation of The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company (Simla, 1882), p. 86. Stevenson had certainly seen the Sherwood article in Asiatic Researches, which he recommends to his readers.
24. See R. Singha, " 'Providential' Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation", Modern Asian Studies, 27.1 (1993), p. 90;
25. also Freitag, "Crime in the Social Order", p. 243.
26. See India Political Consultation 26 September 1836, no 116, IOL. The various acts dealing with thuggee and dacoity in the 1830s and 1840s are reproduced in Sleeman, Report on Budhuk alias Bagree Decoits and other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession (Calcutta, 1849), pp. 353-57;
27. see also Singha, "Providential Circumstances", pp. 84-86 for a description of some of the novel features of Act XXX.
28. The argument that "thuggee" (loosely described as the activities of the various social classes, communities and groups on whom the term "thug" was imposed) was probably related to changes in East India Company policy in India from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s, and was in any case far from being the tighdy-organized hereditary religion suggested by the TD's publications, is generally accepted in modern scholarship. See H. Gupta, "A Critical Study of the Thugs and their Activities", Journal of Indian History, 37, (1959), pp. 167-77;
29. S. N. Gordon, "Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-formation in 18th Century Malwa", Indian Economic and Social History Review, vi.4, (1969), pp. 403-29;
30. The equation between thuggee and sati was made at the outset by George Swinton, who said that the successful defeat of the thugs would be "a source of no less satisfaction" than the abolition of sati (Board's Collection F4/1251/50480 (2), 669-72, IOL).
31. "White men are saving brown women from brown men". See G. C. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 296-97. The essay has been widely reproduced.
32. See Philip Meadows Taylor, "On the Thugs", New Monthly Magazine, 38, (1833), pp. 277-87;
33. and cf Reynolds's "Notes on the T'hags", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 4, (1837), pp. 200-13. Although it was the later published, Reynolds's paper was supposedly "drawn up" in 1832, from his "personal observations"; and Taylor's article includes some additional material, such as the footnote on the history of British knowledge of thugs (pp. 277-78); among these additions is the first mention of his Confessions protagonist Ameer Ali (p. 286).
34. See D. Finkelstein, "A Study of the Works of Philip Meadows Taylor" (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 56-58.
35. Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 1839 (Oxford, 1986), p. 294.
36. See the Thomas Perry papers, Add Mss 5375, Cambridge University Library; and Borthwick's proceedings in Sleeman, Ramaseeana, ii, p. 416.
37. The latter is drawn on in the description of thugs in J. H. Stocqueler, The Oriental Interpreter (London, 1848), pp. 228-30.
38. G. Wellesley, Resident at Indore, to J. Stewart, acting Resident at Gwalior, 25 June 1819, in Board's Collection F/4/774/20972, 6-7, IOL. N.J. Halhed, stationed in the Western Provinces in 1812, described his encounters with large bodies of thugs/rebels, some of whom, he writes, tried to kill him using poisoned milk (F/4/389/9872). Even the later records contain traces of such discrepancies, as when Sleeman's account of Sheik Inaent's crimes tells of a victim stabbed "with knives and swords" rather than strangled. Report on the Depredations committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India (Calcutta, 1840), p. 74.
39. C. A. Bayly correcdy locates the beginning of this process in Etawah, in the reporting of the magistrate Thomas Perry of his dealings with "thug" prisoners (Empire and Information, pp. 174-75), but the categorisation of . thuggee across India, and the endorsement and widespread circulation by government of the defining approver narratives, happened gradually during the 1830s.
40. Sherwood, Asiatic Researches, p. 257.
41. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, ii, p. 359.
42. "The Thugs, or Phansigars", p. 3.
43. Trevelyan, "Secret Murderers", p. 370.
44. Ramaseeana was followed by A Report on the System of Megpunnaism (Serampore, 1839)
45. the Report on the Depredations committed by Thug Gangs (1840)
46. and the Report on Budhuk Decoits (1849).
47. J. Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garotters and Gang-Robbers of India (London, 1857);
48. E. Lake, Sir Donald McLeod: A Record of Forty-Two Years' Service in India (London, 1873);
49. V. A. Smith, "Appendix" to Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by W. H. Sleeman (1844), rev. & arm. edn. (London: 1915);
50. "A Religion of Murder", Quarterly Review, 194 (1901),pp. 506-19.
51. "A Religion of Murder", p. 512.
52. P.Elliott, Warrior Cults: A History of Magical, Mystical and Murderous Organizations (London, 1995), p. 116.
53. G. Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and its Overthrow in British India (London, 1968); this is stricdy speaking a history of thuggee, but shares with the biographies a narrative focus on the exploits of Sleeman.
54. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London, 1959), p. 16.
55. I am writing on this topic elsewhere.
56. J. L. Sleeman, Thug: or, A Million Murders (London, 1933), pp. 19-22.
57. Cf. Smith, "Appendix" in Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, pp. 652-53.
58. F. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (London, 1961), pp. 14-15, 29.
59. Bruce, Stranglers, pp. 25-27.
60. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, pp. 11-12, 335.
61. Sherwood's article in Asiatic Researches is immediately followed by John Shakespeare's "Observations regarding Badheks and T'hegs" (pp. 282-92), equally as relevant to Sleeman's topic but not included in Ramaseeana; this again suggests that Sleeman had not seen the Asiatic Researches issue, and had no acquaintance with Sherwood's work before its 1830 circulation.
62. A. Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740-1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 126.
63. A. Ahmad, "Between Orientalism and Historicism: Anthropological Knowledge of India", Studies in History, 71 (1991), p. 150.
64. K. Gough, "Indian Peasant Uprisings", in Peasant Struggles in India, ed. A. R. Desai (Bombay, 1979), pp. 103, 104.
65. Singha, for instance, examines prisoners' depositions for "points of distinction" between their own views on themselves and their activities and those of the recording officials; this allows her to question many aspects of the TD's picture of thuggee, but does not address how the questions asked sprang from, and reinforced, the underlying narratives of the "history and practices" of thugs (pp. 96-109).