The “thug”, in its 19th century sense of “a cult of professional killers”, was largely a Raj construct. Perhaps thugs existed and, as the (in)credulous officers of the East India Company in the 1830s believed, went about strangling unsuspecting travellers with a yellow rumaal as a kind of macabre ritual to propitiate the goddess Kali. Or perhaps, as post-colonial historians now agree, they were small bands of marauders, poor and displaced most likely by the political turmoil in those early years of the 19th century, and the British demonised them because they did not fully understand them and because it served their interest at that juncture to do so. But imagined or real, the bloodthirsty thug took powerful hold of the imagination of Victorian England; in fact, the myth continues well into modern times with figures like Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Ameer Ali, the protagonist of Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs, is no thug in this hoary tradition. In fact, he’s no thug at all — as readers are told early in the novel. He’s merely a babu’s clerk in Patna who has fooled Captain William Meadows, an officer of the East India Company, into believing he is a thug and will help the British in their campaign against thuggee by revealing “the tale of my order” and “the story of how I became a thug”.
That testimony, reproduced as passages from a book, Notes on a Thug: Character and Circumstances, 1840, forms one of the three main narratives in the novel, alternating with passages from Ali’s diary addressed to Jenny or “Jaanam” his lover and the charwoman in Meadows’ house in England, in which he puts the record straight, so to speak.
Khair is, very obviously, referencing Confessions of a Thug, Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel, published in 1839, whose protagonist was also called Ameer Ali. It was Taylor’s novel, hugely popular in its day, that fixed the thug’s fearsome image in the imagination of Victorian England and gave a kind of evangelical legitimacy — at least in the eyes of the constituency back home — to the British repression of thugs, which later led to the enactment of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a law that institutionalised the notion of “hereditary” crime and the proscribing of entire communities (a legacy that lives on in independent India through the “denotified tribes”).
By showing Ali’s testimony to Meadows to be duplicitous, Khair casts into question the entire Raj narrative of thuggee — including the notion of native barbarity that the Raj made so much of — which was built largely on the depositions of approvers such as Ali. Indeed, Philip Meadows Taylor’s hero is said to have been based on one such real-life thug called Ferringhea who turned informer after his arrest in December 1830.
Is there a physiognomy of crime? How are the narrative of crime and notions of criminality constructed — especially when the crime involves two people who are culturally as far apart as the Indian and the British, when attempts at understanding are bound to involve some amount of mediation, some form of “imagining”?
Imperceptibly, without breaking the dramatic tenor of the narrative, Khair works through these and allied issues, alternating the two versions of Ali’s story with that of John May and Lord Batterstone. Even the debate over phrenology, the theory that it was possible to predict criminality by the shape of a skull, which found many takers in Victorian England, is played out as a clash of characters — the liberal values of William Meadows, risen from mercantile stock and representative of an assertive middle class, versus the inflexible dogmatism of Lord Batterstone, who does not care to find out where the skulls he needs for his collection are coming from. Ironically, thus, phrenology becomes not an explanation for criminal behaviour but the cause of a series of horrific crimes.
This bit of the novel, set in the poor quarters of London in the 1830s, in its opium dens, its streets choked with horse droppings, its filthy markets and its streets full of beggars, rag-pickers, gypsies, lascars and migrants from every part of the globe, is pure Dickens (also Henry Mayhew, Khair acknowledges). Crime is a regular affair in these parts, but even so a series of horrific murders followed by beheadings creates a stir. Who are the murderers, what is the motive behind these random decapitations? As the city police get involved and the newspapers start to follow the murders, suspicion falls on Ali — not because there’s any evidence linking him with the crimes but because the general consensus is that as a thug, he surely must be involved. Ali is arrested, and Qui-Hy — a former ayah who came to London with her employers two decades ago and now ran a shelter for London’s destitutes —draws together a rag-tag bunch of detectives from among the poor of London to clear his name and find the real culprits. This last section of the novel trips along fast, almost like a whodunit, rounding off into a neat denouement in which the lovers may not be left happily ever after, but the villains do get their just deserts.
THE THING ABOUT THUGS
Tabish Khair
Fourth Estate
244 pages; Rs 399
