However, administration would mean classifying, categorizing and codifying the diversity that the subcontinent held in its belly. Two cases of such classification would suffice to demonstrate the general methodological fallacy of these endeavors before I delve into the specific case of the thugs.
First, there is the case of the employment of European classification models in Afghanistan by Mountstuart Elphinstone. Elphinstone, trying to read into the Afghans what he saw in Scotland, overestimated the role of kinship in tribe-formation and this may serve as a good example of misconceptions generated due to assumption of similarity and the application of a system of classification that is alien to the population being studied.
Secondly, there is the case of the recording of caste in the Madras Presidency by Dr. Francis Buchanan. Mark Brown , 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 s and highlights how they were inherently problematic. The three previous cases in this section, together paint a picture of British colonial epistemology that saw the metropole in terms of the colony i.
James C. In the thugs, can be seen a similar case of frustration. The obsessive focus on the language used by the thugs is also interesting as similar obsession is noticed by Scott in the attempts at classifying the Burmese highland tribes; where at the transgression of all other forms of classification, British colonial officials tried using language as the primary mode of recording tribes. Sleeman too, insists on the existence of one pan-Indian language used by the thugs in order to communicate with each other undetected by the victim present in their midst.
This intrusion into India also presents the first major point at which the colonial state actually stepped out of its urban core and reached into the periphery forests, highlands etc. This incorporation can only be expected to weaken and gradually become non-existent as one approached the forests and highlands. The monster, as Foucault et al.
The desire to know, record and catalog this region is in fact well-founded in the archival record of the time. John William Kaye in the course of his The Administration of the East India Company: A History of Indian Progress remarked how recent the origins of the desire to know more about India and its people in order to better administer the region was.
It is not unreasonable to imagine that anomalous elements such as the thugs effectively were responsible in the generation of this desire. Spatially, the thug is found on the margins of the empire, in areas beyond the control of the Company or their collaborators.
This lack of official state control over highlands, forests or highways is not new in the history of South or Southeast Asia; however, their position beyond the epistemic reach of the administrators is essentially novel.
Traditional pre-colonial governments were wary of their inability to rule these areas directly and administered them with the help of tribal, nomadic or local chiefs Luiz, , pp. Moreover, it is precisely here, at the juncture between embodied forms of knowledge practiced by the local populations, and the institutionalized forms of knowledge privileged by the emerging Weberian state that Christopher Bayly , p.
Bayly correctly identified the root of the panic in Etawah between and the latter being close to the date of Dr. This threat is not only epistemological but also actual as Brown notes in his article; the colonial state, in suppressing the thug was essentially trying to establish itself by monopolizing forms of organized violence in Weberian tradition. The Foucauldian monster, as Nuzzo discusses, is not only neutralized in spatial terms but also through temporal banishment.
Macfie explains this as an attempt to historically establish thuggee as a phenomenon predating British colonial rule thereby absolving themselves of the possibility that the impoverishment caused by extractive policies led to the development of highway robbery. However, the projection of the thugs in fact is not only limited to pre-colonial rule. This is consistent with the monstrosity of the thugs.
As touched upon earlier, the threat to knowledge embodied in the monster has been traditionally neutralized through spatial or temporal banishment. With the encroaching of the colonial state into the Indian heartland, the spatial banishment that might have been successful in neutralizing the threat from such anomalous elements in pre-colonial times was rendered impossible.
The only remaining option was the temporal banishment and complete eradication, which Foucault et al. By putting an end to thuggee, the British aspired to defeat the titans at the heart of India and make the earth i. Finally, it is in the sphere of the law that we find the most convincing arguments for the monstrosity of the thugs. The laws that were instituted to suppress thuggery displayed, as Radhika Singha argues in her article, unprecedented legal innovation.
The series of acts beginning with Act XXX of not only gradually increase the sphere of activities of the Thug and Dacoity Department but also show an interesting discourse culminating in the Criminal Tribes Act of This legal innovation was necessary as the laws existing prior to that were increasingly failing to address the problem of the ambiguous nature of the thugs.
The thug was neither Hindu nor Muslim making the application of a highly confessional legal system difficult. Subsequent acts demonstrate the growing knowledge of thuggee and also a greater understanding of the Indian social reality. Brown , p. In this context the image of thuggee as a quintessentially Indian crime shrank in the face of its stronger competition.
The thug is a nomad and hence not a definable subject of either the Company which, relying on European physiocratic notions of territoriality, understood the geography of India, both physical and human, in terms of its land revenue policies as discussed in detail by Nicholas Dirks ; nor was it a subject to the territories of the Native Princes; thus, transgressing the law and exposing its inadequacies in the context of the growing desire of the colonial state to combine the two spheres by constant outward expansion.
Yet, the thug cannot be identified. It is not true that the nature of these trials went entirely unnoticed and without criticism in the political discourse of the day. The most lasting consequence of the discovery of the thugs and subsequent attempts to eradicate them came from the last piece of legislation introduced in order to control thuggee, as well as all other such anomalous populations that failed in integrate into the colonial state system more precisely, those that the Weberian state-system failed to accommodate , namely the Criminal Tribes Act of Although a completely physiological theory of addiction explaining it as a consequence of abnormal neurotransmitter flows in the brain was not developed in Victorian England, it is crucial to understand the close connections between morality and biology in nineteenth century Europe.
Physiognomic theories such as those by Johann C. Lavater and Francis Galton posited a relationship between the biological and moral elements of Man.
Brown notes one particular case from in the North-West Frontier Province where the Legal Department noted the absence of concrete evidence in the appeal for the registration of criminal tribes there. Interestingly, the Criminal Tribes Acts have not entirely been abrogated in the Republic of India after independence but only repealed by the Habitual Offenders Act, This may in large part be because of the strong resemblance the post-colonial Indian state has with its colonial avatar.
To explain this treatment of the tribes and the case of other such anomic elements such as itinerant populations i. Devy cites the continued teaching of the Criminal Tribes Act in the curriculum for police training as a major reason. Here, the impact of the discovery of the monster in the form of the thug has a direct role to play. I have discussed how it can help us understand the periodization of the Indian past and that this has a direct relationship with the teleology and the notion of progress in Indian history.
The discourse of Indian textbooks portrays Indian history as the story of the birth of the independent nation-state Bhattacharya, , p. The short answer would be, no. The Mughal empire for empire, essentially functioned by means of complex and precarious negotiations with local rulers— rajas , nawabs and nizams or mansabdar s who had the right to raise armies and only a nominal duty to fight under the banner of the emperor Parthasarathi, , p.
Underneath the narrative construct of the empire, these local rulers effectively formed a patchwork of administrative spheres radiating outward from the regional capitals and leaving ample marginal space between them for the thug and other such anomic elements to flourish and such monsters to be spatially banished.
It is only with the establishment of the Weberian colonial state in the s that an encroachment into these marginal areas was attempted with some success and the monsters that lay in that darkness, emerged. What I have attempted in this article is to argue that understanding the thugs as monsters helps further our understanding of the British obsession with them.
The monster metaphor here, is a methodological tool used in order to explain a complex series of processes that made the thugs so marvelous and yet so dangerous at the same time. Furthermore, whereas Macfie concludes the reason for the obsession with the thugs as merely a fundraising strategy for the Thug Department; I argue that it stemmed from the deep-seated desire to believe that they were liberating India from itself and the monsters that lay in its bowels.
As articulated before, the monster metaphor when used as a methodological tool helps explaining not only the sudden emergence of the thugs as pre-colonial references to them are scanty at best , but also aids our understanding of the consequences of the discovery. By inventing a pre-colonial continuum, Sleeman and the colonial administration in general, was trying to justify to themselves and the Indian population the rationale of their existence there.
Why the thugs remain important and worth this investigation, in purely theoretical terms, is because their discovery set in motion the series of legal reforms culminating in the Criminal Tribes Acts that have left their mark to this day on the post-colonial state in India.
The fear that the thugs and more specifically the press campaign of the Thug Department generated in the minds of the natives, still haunts the Republic today and can be seen in the sense of unease felt by the government and government servants in administering the forests of Central India Shah, Moreover, given the strong Maoist movement in the region, it would be wrong to say the common populace does not share similar sentiments.
Whether it is the thug or the Maoist guerrillas, the forest Dandakaranya and the hills Naga hills continue to pose a challenge to the Indian ecumenical narrative and continues to be a nightmare for the administration Footnote The understanding of the thugs as a tribe, also initiated Indian colonial anthropology to some extent and more importantly, set the tone for the state-and-tribe relations that remain largely unchanged.
Thuggee is the word for the crime of being a thug. The magistrate at Etawah, after interrogation, discovered three classes of thugs and concluded that they had no relation to each other Singha, , p. Hopkins notes that this change was reflected even within Pashtun society as members increasingly began identifying distant relative as fellow Pashtunwali but distancing them when identifying their rewaj , which constitute the performative element of Pashtun tribal identity.
See : Hopkins , pp. For a discussion and detailed account of the role of tribal and forest population in pre-colonial Indian polities e. Luiz, The Tribes of Kerala Delhi: , — Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh.
Routledge, London. Proceedings dated November 4, Section Alpa Shah has in fact invoked the Frankenstein metaphor in analyzing the Maoist situation in central India. Am Imago 39 3 — Google Scholar. Bayly CA Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. Bhattacharya N Teaching history in schools: the politics of textbooks in India.
Hist Workshop J — Article Google Scholar. Brown M Postcolonial penality: liberty and repression in the shadow of independence, India c. Theor Criminol 21 2 — PubMed Article Google Scholar. Brown M Crime, governance and the company Raj: the discovery of thuggee. Br J Criminol 42 1 — Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.
Routledge, New York. Devy G For a nomad called thief. India International Centre Quarterly 27 2 — Dirks NB Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India. Book Google Scholar. Douglas M Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo.
Ernst W Histories of the normal and the abnormal: social and cultural histories of norms and normativity. J R Asiatic Soc 11 1 — Vic Periodicals Rev 37 2 — Picador, New York. Guha R The small voice of history. In: Guha R ed. The small voice of history: collected essays. Permanent Black, New Delhi. Hopkins BD The making of modern Afghanistan. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Jahangir Memoirs of the emperor Jahanguir.
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