Taylor, Colonel Meadows. Confessions of a Thug. 1839. Ed. C. W. Stewart. The World's Classics, 207. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1916.
When I was at Graduate School in Edinburgh in the late 1980s I made the acquaintance of a young American called David Finkelstein. We became quite good friends, in fact. Like me, he was a bit of a bibliophile and a book-obsessive. He was working on a Doctoral thesis on Philip Meadows Taylor's classic work Confessions of a Thug and - I presume - the view of India it imposed on its early nineteenth century audience. At the same time, I was working on my thesis on the images of South America projected by various canonical European authors.
Would you believe that it's taken me thirty years to crank around to reading this intriguing sounding novel? Partially this is because I came across a cheap World's Classics edition at that wonderful little bookshop in Pukerua Bay I've written about in a previous post on this site - but also, perhaps, because the subject matter did not especially attract me.
In style, it's something of an amalgam of the Arabian Nights and Sir Walter Scott - which is not surprising, given its date. What other models for an historical novelist writing in English were there, at the time, besides the Waverley novels?
And as for exemplars of 'Eastern-ness' generally, the Arabian Nights were reaching the apogee of their popularity at that time. Editions based on Galland's French translation (1704-17) had been available in English for more than a century, but Lane's new translation direct from the Arabic had started to appear in monthly parts in 1838:
As well as this, the first volume of Henry Torrens' projected (though, alas, never completed) unexpurgated English translation appeared in India in the very same year, 1838.
It may seem odd for a book with such grim subject matter, but there's a great deal of swashbuckling and derring-do in Taylor's pages, along with abductions from the seraglio, beautiful charmers sought out in crowded market places, and all the other paraphernalia of contemporary Orientalism.
But what exactly is a thug (pronounced 'toog')? The word has, of course, come into contemporary English with rather broader connotations, but originally it meant a devotee of the Hindu goddess Kali, who put into practice her principles of destruction by murdering travellers along the innumerable lonely roads of central India.
A more recent novel on the same subject is John Masters' The Deceivers, which I read when I was a teenager, and found suitably harrowing.
I suppose, though, that the most prominent contemporary treatment of the theme - albeit spiced up almost beyond recognition - is to be found in Steven Spielberg's horrifyingly graphic adventure movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
If you want to know more about the facts about Thuggee, you won't be surprised to learn that it's a pretty controversial subject:
Contemporary scholarship is increasingly skeptical of the thuggee concept, and has questioned the existence of such a phenomenon, which has led historians to describe thuggee as the invention of the British colonial regime.The suppression of the thugs, and the abolition of suttee (or sati) - the practice of coercing Hindu widows to immolate themselves on their husband's funeral pyres - were for a long time used as the major justification for British presence in India. "Without us here, just look what they would be getting up to!" Or, as Kipling expressed it, there was a responsibility for white men to look after these "lesser breeds without the law."
Be that as it may, it's hard to believe that there wasn't some truth behind this sheer mass of historical evidence. The fact that Meadows Taylor's hero is a Muslim rather than a Kali-worshipping Hindu in itself calls into question the religious or cult-like nature of the practice - it may have been a refinement of banditry with a variety of motivations in different places. A great many people were certainly murdered, however, and the complex codes adhered to by the killers who did it seem to have placed them beyond suspicion for a very long time.
Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug (1839)
Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug (1889)
Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug (Folio Society: 1974)
In this age of revisionism it's hard to read any such narrative straight. That doesn't mean one shouldn't read it at all, though. It may drag in parts, but I do at last, belatedly, understand a little of why David Finkelstein decided to devote three years of his life to this strange nineteenth-century story: half-fiction, half-reportage (as it purports to be).
Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug (2010)
Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug (2018)
The fact that it's still in print, in so many editions, after all this time is surely testament to the perennial fascination of its subject-matter, at least?
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- category - English Prose (pre-1900): Nineteenth Century
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