Introduction

Indian Diamonds 111
stance which depicts the conflation of religion and crime and then generalises the
idea to comprise the whole of the population was the popularity of narratives of
Thuggee. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the figure of the Thug became
an important symbol for Indian cruelty and immorality. Thugee came to
stand for crime rooted in religion, social organisation and culture (Reitz 25). The
sect drew its legitimation from the devotion to the goddess of destruction, Kali,
and her decree to provide her with human sacrifices (Rapoport 662). Thuggee was
perceived as widespread but hidden from imperial eyes. Deception could also be
detected in the way Thugs murdered: they used a sash which could be concealed
on the body (Reitz 28). Disguise and - murder were seen as the hallmarks of
Thuggee and applied to India as a whole. An important aspect of Thuggee is its
wide literary dissemination in Britain as representative of India through the success
of Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839). In the discussion of
Thuggee as an omnipresent phenomenon, it should be noted that actual numbers
of stranglers and victims are unknown (Rapaport 661-662) and that the allegation
was also used to discredit resistance to British rule in general as during the Indian
Mutiny 4 in particular. Considering the uncertainties surrounding the historical
existence of Thuggee, critics even speak of an invention and “manufacturing” to
justify rule and provide the colonial administration with a success story in exterminating
crime (Mukherjee 103). The conflation of religion and crime, however,
also entails the idea of criminal castes, which gained impetus especially after the
Mutiny. The conviction that criminal behaviour is inevitably tied to certain castes
actually turns into law in the ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ of 1871. The distinction between
caste and tribe was blurry at best but nevertheless strengthened the notion
of a systematic and deeply rooted social leaning to crime (Yang 109).
The depiction of William Sleeman and the work of the colonial ‘Thagi and
Dakaiti Department’ figures in a number of texts from the 1830s onwards and
informed the public’s image of the upright policeman and colonial administrator.
His opponents, the sect of Thugs, served to provide a neat “compartmentalization”
of “English cops and Indian robbers” (Reitz 23) 5. The excessive secrecy of
Thuggee demands an emphasis on detection and confession which often provided
the only chance to penetrate the Thug network. The main strategies employed
were the use of spies and approvers as witnesses were generally unwilling to testify
4 I will use the term Mutiny as this was the designation used in Victorian writing and carries the
connotations which I am interested in with regard to the texts, although more appropriate terms
such as First Indian War of Independence, the Great Revolt or Uprising, etc. are used by historians
to account for the Indian perspective.
5 The colonial setting naturally highlighted the Englishness of the detective. This was important
as the reform of the police in England was widely opposed. The presentation of an English detective
in India helped disperse these reservations and cleared the way for the acceptance of new
forms of policing in England. The colonial detective furthermore rallied the imperial project as
the spread of justice and law. The police as benevolent reformers was more readily accepted and
supported as colonial agents than the military or the East India Company. (Reitz 29)