Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:10:36.997Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lydia H. Liu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the modern english lexicon, the curious word thug is usually traced to Hindi. In the early days of the antithug military campaign in India, William Henry Sleeman, the British architect of the campaign, brought out a thug lexicon entitled Ramaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs in 1836. This lexicon represents the first systematic attempt to identify who the thugs are and how they communicate with one another in secret society. It appears to provide hard linguistic evidence for a newly discovered threat to the British presence in India, cobbling together a large collection of predominantly Hindi words and phrases and building them into a coherent image of the thug that attests to the authenticity of Hindu thuggism. The graphic details of thugs' cold-blooded strangling of innocent travelers are as numerous as the amount of verbs and nouns that have found their way into the book and into subsequent embellishments by popular media. That the word thug is of Hindi origin (thag, theg, or thak) seems sufficient to prove that thugs exist and pose a threat. (Echoes of this argument can be found in the justifications for the United States–led war against the terrorist network al-Qaeda.) But as Martine Van Woerkens and other scholars have shown, thuggism was actually invented by the British who tried to seize criminal jurisdiction in areas that had been in the hands of the Mogul rulers. In the course of extending their control over a mobile population, the British used the construction of thug monstrosity to lay the foundation of “a ritual of conjuration” in the play of mirrors between them and the colonized (Van Woerkens 292).

Type
Correspondents at Large
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 5: Special Topic War , October 2009 , pp. 1859 - 1863
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Wendy, Brown. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Ensor, F. Sidney, ed. The Queen's Speeches in Parliament from Her Accession to the Present Time. London: Allen, 1882. Print.Google Scholar
Liu, Lydia H. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
James, Matheson. The Present Position and Prospect of Our Trade with China. London: Smith, 1836. Print.Google Scholar
Nebrija, Antonio de. Gramática castellana. 1492. Madrid: Junta del Centenario, 1946. Print.Google Scholar
Jenny, Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William H. Ramaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs with an Introduction and an Appendix Descriptive of the System Pursued by That Fraternity and of the Measures Which Have Been Adopted by the Supreme Government for Its Suppression. Calcutta: Military Orphan, 1836. Print.Google Scholar
Treaties, Conventions, etc., between China and Foreign States. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Shanghai: Statistical Dept. of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1917. Print.Google Scholar
Van Woerkens, Martine. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Trans. Tihanyi, Catherine. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print.Google Scholar