Monsters in the dark: the discovery of Thuggee and demographic knowledge in colonial India

The paper interrogates how the “thug” emerged in the British colonial archive in the 1830s and why the colonial administration devoted outsized attention and resources to eradicating “thuggee.” It situates the problem within nineteenth-century British fascination, popularized by works like Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug, and within the expansion of the East India Company into the Indian interior. The author’s central contention is not to adjudicate the empirical reality of historical thugs, but to analyze how “thuggee” was known to and constructed by the colonial state. The study proposes that the thug became a potent metaphor and methodological tool to expose flaws in colonial knowledge production. It argues that the “thug” emerged from fissures between indigenous and colonial surveillance networks and from the imposition of alien classificatory schemes in a rapidly changing state formation. Framed through the notion of the “monster,” the article contends that the discovery and suppression of thuggee furnished a powerful justification for colonial expansion and continues to shape teleologies of Indian history and the othering of tribal and anomic populations.

The paper revisits extensive debates on the authenticity and construction of the thug archive. It engages Martine van Woerkens and A. W. Macfie, who argue that “thuggee,” as the British knew it, was an orientalist construct. It surveys precolonial and early modern references (Barani, Thévenot, Xuanzang via Stanislas Julien) often marshalled in colonial texts (notably Sleeman’s Rammasee/Rammaseena manual) to claim historical continuity. Flahaut’s analysis suggests these references describe different phenomena from nineteenth-century “thuggee,” undercutting claims of timelessness. Early colonial writings, especially Richard Sherwood (Madras Literary Journal; Asiatic Researches), allowed for socio-economic explanations (e.g., dispossession after Mughal decline), unlike later texts that accentuated religious-ritual inspiration (Kali/Bhawani) and uniqueness. The literature shows a marked shift in the 1830s toward presenting thuggee as an anomalous, organized, pan-Indian system with a secret language, justifying extraordinary state measures. The paper also dialogues with broader scholarship on colonial knowledge production and classification (Bayly, Dirks), audience framing and criminology in the metropole (Tobias), and the identification of “information panics” (Brown) to contextualize the thug archive within nineteenth-century epistemic practices.

The study is a conceptual-historical and discourse-analytical examination of the “thug” as a colonial construct. It employs the theoretical lens of the “monster” as elaborated by Mary Douglas (purity/danger and classification), Victor Turner (liminality), and Michel Foucault (the abnormal/monster as epistemological and juridical construct). Empirically, it analyzes: - Colonial archival materials central to the thug archive (e.g., W. H. Sleeman’s 1836 Rammasee/Rammaseera manual; Richard Sherwood’s early articles). - Nineteenth-century journalistic discourse, including Bengali press reactions, tracing amplification and skepticism about thug-related hysteria. - Legal and administrative instruments used to suppress thuggee (Act XX of 1836; subsequent Acts XVIII of 1839 and 1843), culminating in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, to show legal innovation and exceptionalism. - Comparative cases of colonial classification (Elphinstone’s Afghan tribal taxonomy; Buchanan’s caste recording; Mackenzie’s surveys) to illustrate the imposition of alien categories and their consequences. The approach triangulates these sources to track how the colonial state named, classified, and governed a phenomenon it could not easily fit into existing categories, producing the figure of the thug as an epistemological and juridical “monster.”

- The “thug” in the colonial archive is best understood as an epistemological monster: an entity that defied colonial categories of religion, caste, territory, and language, thereby exposing the limits of colonial knowledge systems. - The sudden prominence of thuggee in the 1830s coincided with the Company’s inland expansion and intensifying will to classify and govern; failures of classification and surveillance produced an “information panic,” amplifying fears and justifying extraordinary measures. - Colonial discourse shifted from earlier socio-economic explanations (Sherwood) to portrayals of a hereditary, ritualized, pan-Indian criminal sect (Sleeman), supported by claims of a secret language (“Ramnasee”) and deep antiquity—claims that scholarship (e.g., Flahaut, Wagner) has challenged. - Legal innovation marked thug suppression: beginning with Act XX of 1836 (allowing conviction without reliance on traditional law officers and without precise definition of thuggee), followed by Acts XVIII of 1839 and 1843, and culminating in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, which biologized and moralized criminality (heredity, registration, relocation). - Trials relied heavily on informers and approvers due to the invisibility of the crime (method of strangulation, absence of weapon, crimes away from public view), raising contemporary critiques about evidence and justice. - The thug construct contributed to a lasting teleology of Indian history that centers state-building, progress, and development while othering tribal and itinerant populations; many of these logics persisted into the postcolonial state (e.g., Habitual Offenders Act, 1952, and policing practices).

Addressing the research question, the paper argues that the colonial state’s disproportionate focus on thuggee arose from the thug’s status as a category-defying object that destabilized colonial classificatory confidence. This epistemic threat generated an “information panic,” mobilizing exceptional administrative and legal resources and producing a robust narrative of a unique, pan-Indian criminal conspiracy. Through the monster framework, the analysis shows how the thug became a repository for fears of the unknown and a justification for deeper penetration of the colonial state into the Indian interior. The legal response illustrates how monstrosity is neutralized: by exceptional laws, reclassification, spatial control, and the creation of hereditary criminal categories. This move from epistemic uncertainty to juridical codification reveals how knowledge, law, and governance co-produced the thug and reshaped colonial governance. The findings underscore broader relevance: colonial imposition of alien categories generated durable forms of othering and state practices that persisted into postcolonial governance, affecting tribal and itinerant groups and shaping national historical narratives focused on progress and development.

The paper demonstrates that the colonial “discovery” of thuggee was less a mirror of empirical reality and more a product of epistemic gaps, classificatory failures, and the political imperatives of a rapidly expanding state. Framed as an epistemological monster, the thug enabled the colonial regime to justify exceptional legal instruments and deeper surveillance, culminating in enduring policies like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and their postcolonial echoes. It calls for re-evaluating the South Asian “state” as an institution and re-examining social science theories and imported European terminology used in demographic knowledge production. Future work should: - Engage non-colonial archives and vernacular sources to triangulate colonial narratives. - Systematically analyze continuities from colonial legal-exception regimes to postcolonial policing and legislation. - Reconstruct historical interactions between the state and tribes/itinerant communities beyond teleologies of progress, integrating them into mainstream historiography.

- The study deliberately brackets the empirical “actuality” of historical thugs, focusing instead on colonial representations; this limits claims about the real extent or nature of thuggee. - The analysis relies predominantly on colonial archives, published accounts, and secondary literature, which carry inherent biases of nineteenth-century knowledge production. - The monster framework, while illuminating, is interpretive and may not capture all socio-economic dynamics underlying crime and policing in the period. - Limited incorporation of indigenous, non-state archival voices may constrain the breadth of perspectives represented.