1

The Travels of M. de Thvenot through the Thug Archive

From 1828 through to the end of the 1830s, the campaign against thuggee (robbery
accompanied by strangling) in India occupied a growing share of the East India
Company administrations resources, both financially and in terms of personnel
committed to it. It also became the focus of public attention both in India and
elsewhere, as the inherently sensational nature of the subject was exacerbated by the
narratives which accompanied it. These narratives, products of the Thuggee
Department (TD),1 offered a series of accounts of the genesis of thuggee, the practices
of thugs told in their own words (i.e., the recorded and translated depositions of
approvers or informers), and the operations carried out against it by the British
administration in India. Popular interest in Britain (and the USA) was met by the
publication of a series of works on the subject, and it became part of the general
knowledge and history of India current during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This public knowledge was the product of a very small data pool of primary
information. The works of the TD were its only source, and by far the most influential
of these was the first report compiled by W.H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana (1836). This
was quoted, pirated or simply raided for material by writers of history, literature and
biography, both academic and popular. It is the wide circulation of material from one
source that accounts for the phenomenon observed by Parama Roy, who notes that the
diverse collection of texts produced by these writers, which she designates the thug
archive, all repeat one another and use the same rhetorical mode; she concludes that
there is very little significant difference between them.2
While this description is broadly accurate, the differences between the texts,
though small, are not insignificant. They may be categorized in three distinct groups,
roughly chronological, corresponding to three phases of the production and
dissemination of information about the phenomenon of thuggee. One phase begins
with Ramaseeana, which was widely copied and imitated in the years immediately
following its publication. The second spans approximately the second half of the

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
nineteenth century, during which the work of the TD continued relatively
unremarked, and the Indian Mutiny and its aftermath replaced thuggee as a focus of
public interest in Indian affairs; while the third coincides with the publication of
several twentieth-century biographies of Sleeman which concentrate on his work in
the TD. Through these three phases, alterations in the manner of accumulation and
deployment of information (material which does not itself change) correspond to
reformulations of the narrative of the history of thuggee, and the larger history of
British India. This process is foregrounded by the sharp change of direction apparent
in the later years of this century.
The focus of my analysis is one element of the thug archive, a paragraph from
the work of a Frenchman, Jean de Thvenot, whose Relation dun voyage fait au
Levant appeared in translation as The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the
Levant in1687.3 In one sense, this stands for all the mass of material contained in the
archive, as many other motifs and stories were treated in the same way. Thvenots
account differs from most of the archive in that it contains information that formed,
for reasons that will become apparent, a vital part of the narrative history of thuggee.
If it is by now a statement of the obvious to say that the gathering and dissemination
of information may be a form of control, the force of such a statement was equally
well recognized by the officials dealing with thuggee. The acquisition of knowledge
of the customs, lives, habits and rituals of the various Indian individuals and groups
denoted thugs at various times allowed the officers of the TD to establish their
authority in progressively larger tracts of India (as intelligence of thug operations in
more and more provinces was used to argue for a corresponding increase in the
number and range of TD personnel).4 Such knowledge also enabled them to argue for
more resources in legal powers and co-operation from other officials.5 Equally
importantly, the TDs equation of their knowledge of thug practices and individual

2
. P. Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley, 1998), p.
42.
3
. Jean de Thvenot, The Travels of M. de Thevenot into the Levant, trans. A. Lovell, 3 pts (London,
1687).
4
. In August 1834, for example, Smiths 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 (Boards Collection F4/1566/64216,
317-32, India Office Library).
5
. See Sleemans 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).
 3
criminals, and their ability to defeat them, relieved the information panic that C.A.
Bayly identifies as the origins of the British encounter with thuggee.6 In a broader
context, this process was continued throughout the nineteenth century: Sandria Freitag
points to the selective organization of material in such works as William Crookes
North Indian Notes and Queries, which presented thugs as ethnographic curiosities,
objects of interest to be studied, and thereby controlled.7 Information is the currency
in all aspects of British dealings with thuggee.
***
At first sight, the information contained in a single quotation from Thvenots Travels
does not appear to offer any great insight into thug practices, especially since it was
written more than a hundred years before the commencement of the campaign against
thuggee. The extract comes from the chapter treating Of the Province or Town of
Dehly, or Gehan-Abad, and is here reproduced in full, spelling and punctuation as in
the original:
Though the Road I have been speaking of be tolerable, yet it hath many
inconveniencies [sic]. One may meet with Tygres, Panthers and Lions upon
it; and one had best also have a care of Robbers, and above all things not to
suffer any body to come near one upon the Road. The cunningest Robbers in
the World are in that Countrey. They use a certain Slip with a running-
noose, which they can cast with so much slight about a Mans Neck, when
they are within reach of him, that they never fail; so that they strangle him in
a trice. They have another cunning trick also to catch Travellers with: They
send out a handsome Woman upon the road, who with her Hair deshevelled,
seems to be all in Tears, sighing and complaining of some misfortune which
she pretends has befallen her: Now as she takes the same way that the
Traveller goes, he easily falls into Conversation with her, and finding her
beautiful, offers her his assistance, which she accepts; but he hath no sooner
taken her up behind him on Horse-back, but she throws the snare about his
Neck and strangles him, or at least stuns him, until the Robbers (who lie hid)
come running in to her assistance and compleat what she hath begun. But
besides that, there are Men in those quarters so skilful in casting the Snare,

6
. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India,
1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996), p.174.
 4
that they succeed as well at a distance as near at had [sic]; and if an Ox or
any other Beast belonging to a Caravan run away, as sometimes it happens,
they fail not to catch it by the Neck.8

While Thvenots Travels retained its interest over the intervening century, this
passage went unnoticed until Dr Richard Sherwood wrote an account Of the
Murderers called Phnsigrs, based on a set of depositions taken by the Magistrate of
Chittoor, W.E. Wright, in 1811-16.9 Sherwood combined prisoners evidence, local
hearsay and such historical material as he could lay hands on into a story of villains
as subtle, rapacious, and cruel, as any who are to be met with in the records of human
depravity a precursor to the same kind of narrative later produced in abundance by
the members of the TD. The Thvenot passage is used in the context of a description
of the kinds of thugs to be found in different parts of India, and is prefaced by
Sherwoods assertion that Thevenot, in the following passage, evidently alludes to
the Phnsigrs or Thegs. Sherwood also amended the first line, interpolating from
Delhi to Agra to specify the particular road Thvenot had in mind. His article
appeared in the Madras Literary Gazette in 1816, and was reprinted in Asiatic
Researches in 1820.10 From this point on, the history of the circulation of information
on thuggee can be traced, for the most part, through the reproduction and citation of
Thvenots account.
Sherwoods work is tentative compared to later productions: he does not
attempt to depict his Phansigars as covering all of India in one organization; and he is
willing to consider possible economic or social contexts for their actions, rather than
stressing religiously-inspired murder.11 By the time his article entered the thug
archive proper, however, negotiations between George Swinton, the chief secretary
to the government of India, F.C. Smith, political agent in Sagar and the Narbada
Territories, and Sleeman were producing a policy of expansion and centralization of
operations against thugs which demanded a commensurate documentation of thug

7
. S. Freitag, Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India Modern Asian Studies 25.2 (1991),
pp. 242-3.
8
. Thvenot, iii, p. 41.
9
. See W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana (Calcutta, 1836), Appendix U.
10
. R. C. Sherwood, Of the Murderers Called Phnsigrs, Asiatic Researches 13 (1820), pp. 250-81;
Thvenot is quoted on pp. 276-7.
11
. Sherwood suggests, for instance, that many persons, deprived by the declension of the
Mohammedan power of their wonted resources, were tempted to resort to criminal courses to obtain a
subsistence (Ibid., p. 271).
 5
practices and origins stressing their special nature compared to other criminals. One
immediate result was the practice of circulating depositions of prisoners to
magistrates and local authorities in the districts where they were captured, in the hope
of alerting these to the extent and nature of the problem.12 This was supplemented
from October 1830 by the order to Residents and political agents of the districts at
that time thought most affected by thuggee to maintain a frequent correspondence
with each other and communicate whatever new information they may acquire
respecting [the thugs] plans, and rendezvous on the return of the season for their
annual excursions.13 In response to this, H.S. Graeme, then Resident at Nagpur,
suggested that Sherwoods article, which he apparently remembered from its
publication in Asiatic Researches, should also be circulated; and Swinton on 17
November1830 ordered that 30 copies should be lithographed for distribution.14
This circulated version was the one reprinted by Sleeman in Ramaseeana, a
compendium including approvers narratives, what the title page called a vocabulary
of the peculiar language used by the thugs, and correspondence relating to the
apprehension and trial of various thug gangs. In the process of reproduction, the
article underwent several changes: Sherwoods spelling of Phnsigrs and Thegs
was simplified, capitalization was modernized, and a substantial passage, relating the
practice of killing with a noose described by Thvenot to accounts given in texts such
as the Ramayana, was omitted.15 As well as reprinting Sherwoods article, Sleeman
was sufficiently impressed by the Thvenot passage to include part of it in his own
introduction to the book, where the author is named as Thievenot, and the quotation
cited to Sherwood. Here, it forms part of his link between the Sagartii, a pastoral
people of Persian descent mentioned by Herodotus, and his own prisoners. Admitting
that there is a vast interval of time between the Persian invasion of Greece and the
travels of Thievenot, and of space between the seat of Sagartii and that of the ancient
capital of India, Sleeman declares himself still inclined to think that Thvenots
robbers came from some wild tribe and country of the kind, and furthermore feels

12
. See, for instance, the instructions of George Swinton, chief secretary to the governmentt 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 (380).
13
. Swinton to G. Wellesley, Resident at Indore, 8 October 1830, 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 covers pages 278-80 in Asiatic
Researches.
 6
no doubt, that from these vagrant bands are descended the seven clans who, by the
common consent of all Thugs throughout India are admitted to be the most ancient,
and the great original trunk upon which all the others have been grafted.16 In this
shaky historical edifice, Thvenots account was a central plank, and so it remained as
the contents of Ramaseeana were gradually disseminated.
While Ramaseeana was produced at government expense, and most of the
print run of 750 were required for distribution to East India Company officials, just
over a hundred copies were privately sold in the five years after its publication,17 and
at least one or two made their way to London, where Edward Thorntons Illustrations
of the History and Practices of the Thugs appeared in 1837. A reorganization and
popularization of the material contained in Ramaseeana, the book offers the Thvenot
quotation in support of the contention that travellers attest that the practice of
Thuggee is not of recent introduction. Thevenot, in the following passage, evidently
alludes to it.18 The borrowing from Ramaseeana is apparent in Thorntons retention
of the misprint (misfortunes for the female decoys misfortune) introduced in
Sleemans version.
The same misprint was perpetuated by Charles Trevelyan, reviewing
Ramaseeana for the Edinburgh Review at about the same time. He was mainly
concerned to argue that thuggee was proof of the evils of the Hindu religion, and to
look forward to the time when English influence, and the gradual infusion of English
literature, English science, and English morals into the mass of Indian society would
redeem India.19 He also found space, however, to speculate on the origins of thuggee,
first quoting Seneca on Egyptian stranglers, and then disingenuously repudiating any
intention to trace a supposed emigration of [these stranglers] from the banks of the
Nile to the shores of Western India. All we mean to suggest is, that as a system nearly
allied to Thuggee prevailed at an early period in a country closely connected with
India, it is not improbable that Thuggee itself has an equally remote origin.
Predictably, he continues with the assertion that Thevenot is the first European

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.
 7
author who notices the Thugs, and quotes the familiar account from Sherwoods
article, unattributed.20
The following year, the Foreign Quarterly Review published another essay on
The Thugs, or Phansigars.21 This is a review of Ramaseeana written with the aim to
lay before our readers a summary of information on the subject; it quotes the passage
from Sleemans Introduction, together with most of Sleemans own commentary on it,
rectifying the misspelling of Thvenots name in the process.22 Finally, in 1839, a
pirated version of Ramaseeana appeared in America; it opens with a History of the
Thugs or Phansigars, which is Sherwoods article, complete with the Thvenot
passage.23 By the time Philip Meadows Taylors Confessions of a Thug made the
subject of thuggee popular in 1839, readers wishing to pursue their new interest would
have found every text pretending to a comprehensive account featuring Thvenots
warnings of the road from Delhi to Agra, home to wild beasts, mounted stranglers and
deceitful women with dishevelled hair, and using this to bolster one version or another
of the historical progress of thuggee.24

***

The appeal of Thvenots account to writers on thuggee becomes clearer: it can, with
a little ingenuity, be fitted into a narrative of thug depredations stretching back into
the mists of antiquity and, more to the point, beyond the British occupation of India.
For Sleeman and the TD, this was of use in creating the sense of a difference between
thugs and common criminals, thus allowing them to argue for special powers in
dealing with them.25 Perhaps by coincidence, Ramseeana had just been circulated at
the point when Sleeman was soliciting the enactment of the landmark act XXX of

20
. Ibid., pp. 369-70.
21
. The Thugs, or Phansigars, Foreign Quarterly Review 21 (April 1838), pp. 1-32.
22
. Ibid., pp. 2-3.
23
. The Thugs or Phansigars of India (Philadelphia, 1839), pp. 45-6.
24
. The partial exception is J. Stevenson, Some Account of the Phansigars, or Gang-Robbers, and of
the Shdgarshids, or Tribe of Jugglers, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland 1 (1834), pp. 280-84; this does not quote Thvenot 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.
25
. See R. Singha, Providential Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal
Innovation, Modern Asian Studies 27.1 (1993), p. 90; also Freitag, Crime in the Social Order, p. 243.
 8
1836, making membership of a thug gang punishable by life imprisonment.26
Similarly, Trevelyans attack on the innate evil of Hinduism is sustainable only by
ignoring any possibility that thuggee, like other forms of crime, was related to the
social and economic conditions created by the East India Companys operations in
India.27 Indeed, such an idea is directly opposed to the reformist tradition that
produced the campaign against thuggee: it sits alongside the abolition of sati in the
history of Lord William Bentincks administration, 28 and its protagonists and
historians were keen to stress the disinterested benevolence that motivated them to
protect the native society of India from an evil which pressed on them so heavily, and
on them alone.29 To adapt Gayatri Spivaks formulation on sati, white men were
saving brown men from one another.30
Nevertheless, Thvenots story presented a difficulty to its users a point
underlined by the one notable writer on thuggee who never uses it. Taylors
Confessions of a Thug is a work of fiction, but its author based the thug lore it
contains, and many of the incidents, on the researches of the TD his first essay on
thuggee, in the best traditions of the field, reproduces vast tracts of the Notes on the
Thags by P.A. Reynolds, an officer seconded to the campaign against thuggee on
Taylors own ground of Hyderabad.31 Taylor also makes liberal use of Sleemans

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. 353-7; see also
Singha, Providential Circumstances, pp. 84-6 for a description of some of the novel features of Act
XXX.
27
. The argument that thuggee (loosely described as the activities of the various social classes,
communities and groups on whom the term thug were 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 tightly-organized hereditary religion suggested by the TDs 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; 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; Freitag, Crime in the Social Order, pp. 232-5; Singha, Providential
Circumstances, pp. 95-107.
28
. 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
(Boards Collection F4/1251/50480 (2), 669-72, IOL).
29
. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, i, 14.
30
. 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. 296-7. The essay has been widely reproduced.
31
. See Philip Meadows Taylor, On the Thugs, New Monthly Magazine 38 (1833), pp. 277-87; and cf
Reynoldss Notes on the Thags, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 4
(1837), pp. 200-13. Although it was the later published, Reynoldss paper was supposedly drawn up
in 1832, from his personal observations; and Taylors article includes some additional material, such
as the footnote on the history of British knowledge of thugs (277-8); among these additions is the first
mention of his Confessions protagonist Ameer Ali (286).
 9
reports on the subject, including Ramaseeana,32 but his protagonist in Confessions,
Ameer Ali, is disrespectfully skeptical of the picture evoked by Sherwoods
description of Thvenots robbers as thugs. One of his intended victims, a sahoukar,
tells him as they travel of the stories hes heard of thugs: I have heard too that they
have handsome women with them, who pretend distress on the roads, and decoy
travellers who may have soft hearts to help them; then they fasten on them, and they
have some charm from the Shitan which enables them to keep their hold till their
associates come up, despite of all the efforts of the person so ensnared to gain his
liberty. But theres no such episode in the book, and Ameer Ali laughed inwardly at
the sahoukars idea of Thugs33. His reaction, if it is an expression of Taylors own
views on the subject, is understandable; because Thvenots account, when read as a
description of thugs at work, is not reconcilable to the other facts about thuggee
being established by the same writers who so sedulously quoted it.
The approver narratives collected by the officers of the TD reiterate endlessly
the procedures and preparations for their murders; these do not include the use of
horses, beautiful female decoys with dishevelled hair, or cowboy-style lassos. The
question of precisely how victims had died was one on which information was
deliberately sought by officials from the beginning, as the method of killing was one
of the definitive attributes of thugs. So, Thomas Perry asked his prisoners in 1810
how professed Thugs carried out their murders, and Captain Borthwicks
interrogation of Poorun in 1829 elicited the information that he had never seen a cord
used rather than a rumal, though he professed himself well aware of the general
supposition that it is by such an implement people are strangled by us.34 In fact, the
only coincidence between Thvenots account and the descriptions of thugs built up
by Sherwood, and later the TD, is the dealing of death by strangulation. This is not to
say that the TD versions are more authentic; the confident recitation of thug practices
that characterises the work of Sleeman and his associates masks widespread
differences and uncertainties in the information they gleaned from approvers. Even
the trademark rumal as a means of killing does not become established until the
circulation of information which accompanied the campaign against thugs tended to

32
. See D. Finkelstein, A Study of the Works of Philip Meadows Taylor (PhD thesis, University of
Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 56-8.
33
. Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 1839 (Oxford, 1986), p. 294.
 10
fix accepted views on their ways in the minds of the officials dealing with them.
Before this policy was carried out from 1829 onwards, references to thugs, dacoits,
and even rebels seem often interchangeable, and thugs are described as employing
both the sword and the noose to finish off their victims.35 In this sense, the question
is one of semantics only: Thvenots criminals were not thugs, because they did not
fit the definition of thugs later imposed by the East India Company administrations
attempts to categorise its enemies.36 However, for Sherwood, Sleeman and the writers
who followed them, the problem was very real: Thvenots value in creating a history
of thuggee is undermined by the clear discrepancies between his account, and their
other sources of information.
Even the terms phansigar or thug do not appear in Thvenots account,
they are supplied by Sherwood in his preface to the quotation; and their
appropriateness to Thvenots robbers is taken for granted by every other writer
following him. But doing so, they (or the more conscientious among them) also had to
account for this discrepancy. Sherwood, who introduces the passage (like so many
other motifs) to the thug archive, finds himself qualifying it even in anticipation of its
iteration, by denying the applicability of his description to contemporary
circumstances:
It is not improbable that formerly a long string, with a running noose,
might have been used by Phnsigrs for seizing travellers, and that they
robbed on horseback. But, be this as it may, a noose is now, I believe,
never thrown by them from a distance, in this part of India [Madras].
They sometimes use a short rope, with a loop at one end; but a turban or a
doth, (a long narrow cloth, or such worn about the waist,) are more
commonly employed; these serve the purpose as effectually as a regularly

34
. See the Thomas Perry papers, Add Mss 5375, Cambridge University Library; and Borthwicks
proceedings in Sleeman, Ramaseeana, ii, 416. The latter is drawn on in the description of thugs in J. H.
Stocqueler, The Oriental Interpreter (London, 1848), pp. 228-30.
35
. G. Wellesley, Resident at Indore, to J. Stewart, acting Resident at Gwalior, 25 June 1819, in Boards
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 Sleemans account of Sheik Inaents 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.
36
. C. A. Bayly correctly 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. 174-5), 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.
 11
prepared noose, with this advantage, that they do not tend to excite
suspicion.37
Sleeman does not comment on this particular problem, but the story of the female
decoy clearly did not fit his picture of thuggee, and he omitted it from the quotation
while writing his introduction to Ramaseeana. When reprinting Sherwoods article, he
adopts a different strategy. Rather than omit the piece that does not fit, he turns it to
his advantage by adding a footnote: This may have been the case in the sixteenth
century [sic], but is so no where now I believe. The Thugs who reside in fixed
habitations and intermarry with other people, never allow their women to accompany
them or take any part in their murders. The only exception to this rule that I am aware
of is the wife of Bukhtawur Jemadar of Jypore, after whom we have long been
searching in vain.38 This note, like the many others Sleeman places throughout
Ramaseeana, serves the purpose of establishing himself as the supreme authority
upon the subject. Upstaging both Thvenot and Sherwood, he lays down the rule of
thug conduct (establishing his bona fides with the obligatory exception), and reminds
the reader of the scope of his knowledge, and the broad stage occupied by his
Thuggee Department. The discrepancy between Thvenots account and his own is
never allowed to threaten the inclusion of these seventeenth-century robbers in the
history of thuggee; instead, it becomes an irrelevance whether or not it was true
then, Sleeman is in indisputed possession of the facts as they stand in the present.
Others followed his lead, sometimes to the extent of perpetuating his placing
of 1687 in the sixteenth century. The Foreign Quarterly Review article, while
reproducing Sleemans thoughts on the subject, adds its own surmise: The people
mentioned both by Herodotus and Thevenot must have been very different from the
present race of Thugs, and more resembling the Guachos [sic] with their lassos in
South America.39 Trevelyan dismisses all discrepancies, paraphrasing Sleeman
with insouciance: This may have been all true in the sixteenth century; but if so, a
considerable change has since taken place in the habits of the order. The sash has been
substituted for the noose, as being less open to detection; and the Thugs who have
settled habitations, seldom permit their wives to accompany them on their
expeditions. He even manages to fit this change into an unconscious parody of the

37
. Sherwood, Asiatic Researches, p. 257.
38
. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, ii, p. 359.
39
. The Thugs, or Phansigars, p. 3.
 12
nineteenth-century ideal of progress: The substitution of a more secret method of
strangling for the lasso, is what might have been expected in the progress of
improvement.40 When Kaye wrote his own history on this theme, The Administration
of the East India Company: A History of Indian Progress (1853), his presentation of
the inevitable quotation indicates how far this approach had become the standard:
Thevenot, who travelled in India in the seventeenth century, has given an account of
the Thugs, from which it appears that in those days they employed female decoys
by now, Thvenot is an accepted part of the history of thuggee, his cunning robbers
are assumed without question to be thugs, and discrepancies are merely a matter of
the change, or even progress, associated with the passage of time.

***
Though the 1857 Indian Mutiny provided new material, and in many ways a new
outlook, for British commentators on India, this does not appear to have affected the
pattern of narrative treatment of thuggee, except insofar as it was naturally relegated
to a minor role compared to more recent events. The basic story described above,
accompanied by the reproduction of Thvenots account, continues throughout the
second and third phases outlined at the beginning of this paper; it would be tedious to
trace the process of reproduction in detail. Like Kaye, other commentators in the
second half of the nineteenth century (often aware of Sleemans increasingly
triumphalist series of reports on his departments dealings with thugs and dacoits41),
are no longer concerned to establish the antiquity of thuggee; this has become an
unquestioned fact. The invocation of Thvenot is used, at this point, as a familiar part
of an old theme, the omission of which would indicate an oversight by the writer.
Often accompanied by a repetition of Sleemans gnomic statement that there is
reason to believe in a link between wandering peoples of history and contemporary
thugs, Thvenots travels appear in texts as diverse as James Huttons Popular
Account of the Thugs and Dacoits; Major-General Lakes biography of Donald
McLeod, once assistant to Sleeman in the TD and later Lt-Gov of the Punjab; Vincent
Smiths appendix to Sleemans Rambles and Recollections, where it forms part of his
evidence for a contention that thuggee existed continuously on a large scalefor

40
. Trevelyan, Secret Murderers, p. 370.
 13
more than 5 centuries; and the Quarterly Reviews 1901 account of A Religion of
Murder.42 By this time, the fact of Thvenots encounter with thugs has become so
well integrated into the narrative that his name is no longer required: The system of
Thuggee was found in India, by an adventurous European traveller, so early as the
seventeenth century; but its previous history is unknown.43 He and the thugs are
enduringly connected, and no incongruity will divide them: Reinhold Rosts entry on
thugs in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edn) cites Thvenot as among the first
European travellers to refer to thugs without mentioning their names. Such
unproblematic references continue to the present day, no doubt encouraged by the
appearance of thug characters in several films, and the availability of the biographies
discussed in the next section: the most recent, to my knowledge, is by Paul Elliott,
who introduces his chapter on The Thugs Indias Dark Angels by remarking that
the earliest writer to mention thugs was a Frenchman named Thevenot who wrote
that the most cunning robbers in the world could be found on the road from Delhi to
Agra.44

***
In the twentieth century, Ramaseeana was revisited, together with the other
nineteenth-century materials on thuggee, by the writers of a series of biographies of
W.H. Sleeman. In terms of content, and of methodology, these do not vary
significantly from the nineteenth-century accounts (though the content of George
Bruces work includes the results of his research in the unpublished papers of the East
India Company, the format and focus conform to earlier models45) indeed, A.J.
Wightmans reproduction of Thvenot is as faithful to its source in Ramaseeana as
any of the nineteenth-century imitations, drawing on Sleemans commentary even as

41
. Ramaseeana was followed by A Report on the System of Megpunnaism (Serampore, 1839), the
Report on the Depredations committed by Thug Gangs (1840), and the Report on Budhuk Decoits
(1849).
42
. J. Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garotters and Gang-
Robbers of India (London, 1857); E. Lake, Sir Donald McLeod: A Record of Forty-Two Years Service
in India (London, [1873]); V. A. Smith, Appendix to Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official
by W. H. Sleeman (1844), rev. & ann. edn. (London: Oxford UP, 1915); A Religion of Murder,
Quarterly Review 194 (1901), pp. 506-19.
43
. A Religion of Murder, p. 512.
44
. P. Elliott, Warrior Cults: A History of Magical, Mystical and Murderous Organizations (London,
1995), p. 116.
45
. G. Bruce: The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and its Overthrow in British India (London, 1968);
this is strictly speaking a history of thuggee, but shares with the biographies a narrative focus on the
exploits of Sleeman.
 14
far as placing Thvenot in the sixteenth century, and remarking that there must have
been some change in the organization since that time.46 They exacerbate, however, a
tendency already present in these earlier accounts: the placing of Sleemans work, and
his knowledge, at the centre of the campaign against thuggee, sometimes to the
exclusion of any mention of the contributions of others.47 The appearance of
Thvenots travels in these texts follows this trend, generally forming part of a
narrative of Sleemans inevitable and inexorable eradication of his thug enemies.
Wightmans chapter on the origins of thuggee, cited above, ends with the climactic
appearance of the notorious approver, Feringhia, who tells Sleeman all the thugs
secrets.
James Sleeman set this trend in his biography of his grandfather. His account
of the Origins and Customs of Thuggee locates the quotation in the customary litany
of thug antiquity, alongside the description of the pastoral Sagartii, the history of
Firoz Shah, and the reign of Akbar. The historical summary is then revealed as the
overture to James Sleemans main theme: despite these unsystematic and spasmodic
efforts to bring thuggee to light, its real nature was unknown until Sleemans industry
discovered it. The structure of James Sleemans work underpins this explicit
statement: Thvenots ingenuous narrative of the cunningest robbers in the world is
closely followed by another extract from Ramaseeana, a dialogue between Sleeman
and some of his prisoners where he questions, and they supply him with the most
authentic material possible: personal testimony. The subject of their discussion is the
supposed depiction of thug activities on the walls of the Ellora cave, for which there is
no evidence (as Vincent Smith points out in the note which forms the immediate
source for some of James Sleemans information); but as this is not mentioned, the
impression of Sleemans omniscience, and control, is sustained.48
In James Sleemans work, Thvenot is cited separately from the Sherwood
article, following the nineteenth-century trend whereby it has its own place in the
archive, apart from its original source. This strategy is carried to its logical conclusion
by Francis Tuker in his biography, where the chronology of the introduction of
Thvenot into the thug archive is reversed. In his narrative, Thvenots Travels is
rescued by Sleeman from its dormant and moth-eaten state in the Fort William library,

46
. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London, 1959), p. 16.
47
. I am writing on this topic elsewhere.
 15
sometime between 1810 and 1813, where it becomes the source of his interest in
thuggee; this is later intensified by his equally fortuitous discovery of Sherwoods
article among some old books in the Collectors office in Allahabad.49 Surpassing its
longstanding status as a brick in the edifice of thug antiquity (whose cobbled-together
shakiness is now concealed by the authoritative patina of citation in many histories),
Thvenots account becomes, in a sense, the founding text of the thug archive: the
work which starts the entire campaign. And the credit of discovering this key text is
transferred from Sherwood to Sleeman, the key figure. The Stranglers, by George
Bruce, contains a corresponding, though less extreme, rhetorical inversion, where
Sherwoods article in total, rather than Thvenots account alone, becomes the key
text: Bruces reproduction of the main substance of the article is followed by his idea
of probable civilian and military reaction to it: indifference or boredom. Sleeman, by
contrast, is supposed to have understood its meaning, and in consequence dedicated
his life to the campaign against the thugs.50 Just as the writers on thuggee had long
ignored the absence of any thugs in Thvenots work, so both Tuker and Bruce ignore
the fact that Sleeman nowhere cites Thvenot other than in Sherwoods version of the
quotation (though he refers to the work later in his career for information on
Christians in Agra51); there is no evidence that he knew of either Thvenots Travels
or Sherwoods article before the latter was circulated by government order in 1830,
well after the thug campaign had started.52
***
Although the latest of these biographies was written in 1972, they often appear, in
style as well as in content, to be looking back to the nineteenth century. Nostalgia for
Empire permeates them, as does an unquestioning belief in the good intentions, and
good results, of the operations of the British in India; they end on Sleemans death on
the way home from the country he had served so well.53 The narrative they contain
is essentially the same story of progress put forward by Kaye or by Thornton, a

48
. J. L. Sleeman, Thug:, or, A Million Murders (London, [1933]), pp. 19-22. Cf Smith, Appendix in
Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, pp. 652-3.
49
. F. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (London, 1961), pp. 14-15, 29.
50
. Bruce, Stranglers, pp. 25-7.
51
. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, pp. 11-12, 335.
52
. Sherwoods article in Asiatic Researches is immediately followed by John Shakespeares
Observations regarding Badheks and Thegs (pp. 282-92), equally as relevant to Sleemans topic but
not included in Ramaseeana; this again suggests that Sleeman had not seen the Asiatic Researches
issue, and had no acquaintance with Sherwoods work before its 1830 circulation.
53
. Bruce, Stranglers, p. 218.
 16
master-narrative of history which is no longer the dominant mode, at least in the
area of postcolonial studies, where the metaphors of writing back and of the
marginal are the favoured vehicles for thought. Far from subscribing to the versions
of thug history offered by Sherwood or Sleeman, Amal Chatterjee produces what is in
effect a counter-narrative, a mirror image of the original, where the popular works of
the archive are drawn upon in order to class thuggee as the invention of three men
alone (Sleeman, Thornton and Taylor).54 At this extreme, all the information
produced during the British administration of India is consigned to what Aijaz Ahmad
has termed the realm of pure untruth 55 but the building-blocks of this realm are
still the motifs of the thug archive. Kathleen Gough, characterizing thugs as social
bandits and locating them within a long series of Indian peasant insurrections, dates
their first occurrence to about 1650 in the area between Delhi and Agra. 56 No
precise authority is cited for the statement, but the phrase contains the ghost of
Thvenots account, mediated as usual by Sherwood. Radhika Singha, in her
perceptive re-examination of the records relating to thuggee, directs the reader to
Sleemans citation of Thievenots Travels [sic], thus making a point about the
constructed history of thuggee while perpetuating the kind of distortion of elements
characteristic of that history. 57
Thvenots account no longer figures in scholarly discussions of thuggee (the
brief mention by Singha is the only example known to me), for the valid reason that
contemporary scholarship focuses on the local, political and social contexts for
criminal activity in nineteenth-century India, rather than accepting an apocryphal
tradition. But while this tradition may have had nothing to do with the incidence of
murder and robbery on the roads of India, it is inextricably connected to the
contemporary and later reading of such acts of violence, whether these readings
follow an imperialist narrative of progress or question it.58 And, as is evident in
Goughs article on social bandits, any attempt to re-examine the records of British

54
. A. Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740-1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial
Imagination (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 126.
55
. A. Ahmad, Between Orientalism and Historicism: Anthropological Knowledge of India, Studies in
History 7.1 (1991), p. 150.
56
. K. Gough, Indian Peasant Uprisings, in Peasant Struggles in India, ed. A.R. Desai (Bombay,
1979), pp. 103, 104.
57
. Singha, Providential Circumstances, p. 100.
58
. Singha, for instance, examines prisoners depositions for points of distinction between their own
views of themselves and their activities and those of the recording officials; this allows her to question
 17
India from a new perspective is still influenced by the deliberate or unconscious
decisions made by those who created and collected them. A study of the phenomenon
of thuggee must therefore include not only an examination of the elements of the thug
archive, but also the interaction of these elements in the formation of the archive
itself. Thvenots account has accumulated layer upon layer of significance since its
genesis on the road in the province of Delhi, where there are robbers, but no thugs,
because thugs have not yet been invented.

many aspects of the TDs 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).