‘Thuggee’ and the Margins of the State in Early Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

‘Thuggee’ and the Margins of the State in Early Nineteenth-Century
Colonial India.
Tom Lloyd
University of Edinburgh

In their attempts to constitute a particular kind of authority over bandits in early colonial India,
British administrators of the East India Company were moved to legislate against what they
perceived as certain extraordinary criminal groups, defined by the alleged secrecy of their
operations and the fundamental irrationality of their cause, which was figured as merciless
depredation. The attempt to constitute this authority is most brilliantly illuminated by the
campaign to suppress ‘thuggee’ (hereafter, the Anti-Thug Campaign or ATC), which ran for over
a decade, circa 1829-41.1 Officials defined ‘thuggee’ as a specific, ritualistic form of highway
robbery and murder by strangulation, and the suppression of the their ‘extraordinary association’2
was accomplished by similarly extra-ordinary police and judicial procedures, defended as a
temporary departure from normal legal values. This departure was justified, repeatedly, as an act
of salvation for the supposedly innocent, ignorant, mainstream population of northern India,
while British-led efforts against ‘thuggee’ were heralded as indicative of the kind of good
government that only colonial rule could bring to the subcontinent.3 By the end of the 1830s, the
General Superintendent of the Thuggee Department specially constituted to coordinate the ATC,
claimed that the ‘system’ of ‘thuggee’ had been eradicated in India.4 3,026 indigenes had been
found guilty of the new crime and subjected to various forms of condign punishment:
imprisonment, transportation, and strangulation on the Company’s gallows.5 The Thuggee
Department now turned its attention to the suppression of dacoity, understood as ‘plain’ banditry.
The contention of this essay is that early colonial efforts to suppress banditry in India—
and particularly the ATC—relied upon the creation of a zone of sovereign power that was
justified as a means to ends that conventional, judicial power allegedly could not reach. This
functioned as an excess of conventional, judicial power, through procedural and punitive
innovations such as indefinite detention without trial, the use of denunciations from proven
criminals, and the criminalization of a subject-position (Thug), rather than the establishment of
individual guilt for particular acts. Beginning with the late eighteenth-century operations against
dacoity in the Bengal Presidency, the attempt here is to explain the processes by which certain
British colonial officials abrogated for themselves the right to produce specific definitions of
criminality that located the accused in a realm beyond what was defined as ordinary legal
procedure—a ‘state of exception’6—in which multifarious forms of violence against them were
deemed acceptable. By understanding this process, we can explore how operations against
banditry were both informed by, and, crucially, informed, wider efforts to constitute and enable a
particular type of sovereignty in the northern and central subcontinent. I have called this power
‘colonial sovereignty’, and this essay explores the meaning and significance of this term for
understanding the nature and consequences of colonial rule in early nineteenth-century India. I
suggest that the elaboration of colonial sovereignty was incipient in the prosecution of, and fully
established through, the ATC: this campaign marked a decisive extension of the domain of the
Company’s ‘state’ authority in the Indian subcontinent; a point of no return in the history of the
British presence in India. Henceforth, the Company’s administrators justified their state’s colonial
rule of the subcontinent as not only beneficial, but necessary.

It was the marginalization of ‘thugs’ as a special category of criminal, posing a unique
threat to colonial authority, which undergirded the extra-judicial innovations introduced during
the ATC. On the peripheries of the expanding colonial polity of the early nineteenth-century,
officials re-worked existing anti-banditry legislation in order to suppress what they presented as a
systematic, lurking menace that had until now escaped ‘justice’ by exploiting the margins of civil
and state authority in the decentred topography of north-western and central India. The Company
state’s claims to jurisdiction over ‘thugs’, believed to inhabit the margins of, and prey upon,
settled society were elaborated through forms of violence and authority that can be understood as
both beyond ‘the law’ and outside ‘the state’; exceptional. It is through an exploration of these
particular preoccupations with certain forms of ‘collective’ crime that we can gain historical
insight into the priorities of the Company’s state in this period. Therefore, this essay attempts to
locate the margins of ‘the state’ itself, in the sense in which it was imagined by the colonial
administrators and officials encountered below, by outlining the peculiar limits of its concerns in
relation to acts of collective criminality, by indicating where the boundary between ‘civil’ and
‘state’ authority lay, and by demonstrating how this boundary shifted over time as the Company
re-negotiated and re-constituted its forms of authority and juridical prerogatives.

In the context of a reconsideration of the 1857 uprising, this essay will provide a
background of the changes to both the Company’s administrative power and preoccupations in
the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as indicating certain characteristics of colonial
responses to perceived challenges to its authority. Moreover, it is suggested that the apparently
dramatic alteration of the nature of British rule in India that followed the quashing of the
‘mutiny’—the dissolution of the Company and the administration of the subcontinent by a
Government of India orchestrated from London—was not the foundational moment of colonial
sovereignty in India taken for granted by many historians; rather, this occurred in the lateeighteenth
century, which is where my essay begins.

Anti-Dacoity Legislation and the Colonial State of Exception of 17727
Captain William Sleeman would later sell the ATC to governor general Bentinck’s administration
as an essential, indeed glorious, policing initiative waged against a subcontinental underground
network of extraordinary, hitherto in-detectable foes. ‘Thuggee’ was an unprecedented threat to
colonial security, he argued; it was the ‘duty’ of the ‘supreme Government’ to undertake an
equally unprecedented suppression campaign for the good of the hapless Indian population.8
However, for all the novelty that attended the ATC, British operations against banditry in India in
fact extended back well into the eighteenth century. In 1772, the Company’s first governor
general, Hastings, passed a series of judicial reforms that can be seen as an administrative kneejerk
to the devastation caused by the so-called great famine of 1770, one short-term consequence
of which had been a sharp rise in the incidence of dacoity in the Bengal Presidency.9 Article 35 of
the 1772 regulations laid down that bandits would be executed for their actions, while their
families would become ‘slaves of the state’.10 This legislation, and the debates arising from it,
established several of the most significant principles, and justifications of them, to be reelaborated
through the anti-‘thuggee’ laws of the 1830s. The opening section of this essay
examines its significance for the ATC.

Hastings quickly found himself frustrated by the reluctance of Islamic legal officers who
then oversaw the Company’s criminal courts to implement article 35, complaining about their
inability to distinguish between desperate peasants temporarily driven to crime by famine, and
dacoits, whom he figured as professional robbers.11 His elected criterion of difference was the
latter’s public notoriety. Rather than proof of responsibility for an individual act of robbery and
murder, notorious suspects (especially sirdars, or leaders) should, if necessary, be convicted of
dacoity without the use of circumstantial evidence, while their families were guilty by
association. This argument was advanced through both a teleological juxtaposition of the Mughal
past and the colonial present, and a progressive forecast for the colonial future. Hastings attacked
the Mughal judicial system for its alleged venality and laxity, stereotypical features of an
administration then characterized by British officials as an ‘Oriental despotism’.12 However, in
this specific critique of the Mughal juridical order, ‘despotism’ was not revealed (as in other
defamatory colonial accounts) by arbitrary brutality towards the ruled, but by an inability to make
felt the state’s presumed power to punish.13 Hastings’ therefore articulated a certain conception of
‘state power’, and criticized the Mughals for their apparent failure to reach a particular level of it.
Far from being dispensed, he argued, justice simply leached away under the Mughal system,
while, the pockets of corrupt landowners, revenue agents and court officials were lined with
unauthorized fees and fines.14 Mughal squeamishness, first indicated to Hastings by laws
‘founded on the most lenient principles and an abhorrence of bloodshed’, and now confirmed by
the reluctance of Islamic legal officers to use article 3515, would thus be temporarily overcome
through regulations that included arbitrary prosecutorial powers such as notoriety and guilt by
association until, as his leading judges put it, Bengal reached ‘the same perfection’16 as England:
the Company’s reform of juridical procedure was therefore seen as a justification for British
colonial rule itself.

The Company state’s assumption of the power to punish dacoits rested upon its selfconfident
ability to define, detect and capture such individuals, not only in the physical sense, but
in the epistemological one too, for it was these historically-constituted forms of, and ambitions
for, colonial knowledge that attached signification to the arbitrary category of ‘notoriety’, that
filled an empty term with meaning.17 This self-confidence was demonstrated by the Committee of
Circuit, which supported Hastings’ claim that dacoits marked the difference between occasional
and professional criminals. The dacoits of Bengal, it argued,  are not, like robbers in England, individuals driven to such desperate courses by sudden want: they are robbers by profession, and even by birth; they are formed into regular communities,
and their families subsist by the spoils which they bring home to them. … [Dacoits] are all,
therefore, alike, criminal wretches, who have placed themselves in a state of declared war
with our Government, and are therefore wholly excluded from every benefit of its laws.18
Thus homogenized and criminalized, dacoits were defined as those individuals who could only be
included in the Presidency’s regulations by their exclusion from them, in the sense that they were
not to be protected by these laws. The figure of the dacoit thus marked the point at which the
law’s reach ended and the grip of sovereign power took hold, where ‘sovereign’ names the figure
or the power that can declare a ‘state of exception’, that can name those who may be included in
society (or its juridical order) solely by their exclusion from it, and which therefore invokes
against these individuals judicial measures that cannot in fact be understood in legal terms.19 This
‘state of exception’ is therefore not a particular kind of law; rather, insofar as the prosecution of
dacoits’ particular activity was deemed contingent upon a suspension of the juridical order itself,
it defines the limit of and departure from the law. These ‘criminal wretches’ were so heinous, the
Committee argued, that the state’s prerogative lay not in the establishment of their guilt (let alone
innocence) in respect to individual charges of robbery and murder, but in their punishment.
By making apparent both the division and the qualitative difference between judicial and
sovereign power, and the process by which the latter serves to constitute itself through the
delineation of certain individuals to be excepted from the juridical order it guarantees, we gain a
significant and novel insight into the functioning of colonial rule in late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century India. The dacoit was not simply set outside the law, but rather abandoned by
it.20 It is this relation of dacoits to state power—the abandoning of the dacoit to an exception—
that alerts us to the possibility that Hastings’ particular attempt to suppress banditry in the late
eighteenth century was a foundational event in the constitution of colonial sovereignty in India.
Although captured in the Company’s juridical order (in the sense that article 35 of the 1772
regulations announced the punishments for dacoity and because dacoity cases passed through its
criminal courts), the power that defined dacoits, that detected dacoity (or ‘notoriety’) in the
character of some suspects but not others, and that captured these suspects in its remit was not
judicial, but sovereign. The criminality of dacoits was ultimately imputed to them by colonial
administrators, not proved by its courts, and, since they were excepted from its sphere of
application, the prosecution of dacoits was neither an execution of the law, nor a transgression of
it, but a demarcation of sovereignty over their lives. Moreover, this was a specific variety of
sovereignty, historically-constituted and open to historical analysis, and furthermore indicative of
the appearance of what may be termed a modern, British colonial state in India during the lateeighteenth
and early-nineteenth centuries, as the Company’s presence changed from that of a
trading company to a civil administration, radically enlarging its claim to authority over the
indigenous population. It is to this relationship—between the attempts of the Company’s nascent
colonial state to suppress banditry and the articulation of its characteristic sovereign authority—
that the essay now turns.

Banditry, Sovereignty and Authority in the Colonial State, circa 1793-1815
Despite the severity of Hastings’ 1770s legislation, the Company continued to experience
significant problems with dacoity in Bengal during the last two decades of the eighteenth century
and at the beginning of the nineteenth.21 A particular surge was noted in the aftermath of governor
general Cornwallis’ infamous permanent settlement of the land-revenue demand with Bengal’s
zamindars22 (large landholders) in 1793, but the administrative response was articulated not
through reform of the settlement, but through a reorganization of policing. This reorganization
attempted to address the perceived failures of Cornwallis’ police reform of 1793; itself an adjunct
to the permanent settlement, since it had further weakened the rural patron-client relationships on
which zamindari power was founded and was partly expressed, by their social duty and authority
to protect and police the inhabitants of their own estates. This reform had separated zamindars’
economic responsibilities from their judicial and punitive responsibilities, with the latter
concentrated in colonial hands, mediated through the newly-instituted office of the darogah
(police-inspector).23 Nevertheless, police reform could not disguise the clear correlation between
the deeper permeation of the terms of the permanent settlement and its accompanying reforms
throughout economy and society, and the higher prevalence of dacoity. During the peak years of
1803-7, Company officials in Bengal reported an average of 1,481 incidences of dacoity a year,
and were well aware of the connection between the higher revenue assessment, the increased
rigor with which payments were collected, and the upsurge in banditry—even alleging that
zamindars were to some degree complicit in it, having been driven to create alternative forms of
rural patronage with new dependents, or now finding themselves in thrall to the threat of
resurgent bandit groups that, until recently, they had carried the social, economic and moral
authority to minimise.24 The argument here is not that Company was blindsided by dacoity:
officials debated its causes, with some clearly implicating the Company in rural mismanagement,
and others more comfortable with displacing it to the perceived feckless- or recklessness of
Bengal’s peasant society. Rather, it is noted that, once the debates were concluded, the
Company’s gaze remained squarely fixed on the affront to colonial authority presented by
dacoity, and of the state’s ‘need’ to suppress banditry if it was to uphold its emergent claims to
sovereignty. Thus, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, networks of spies and informers
(goindas) were developed, and large financial rewards offered for captives or information about
‘notorious’ individuals.25 In early 1810, Hastings’ old frustrations with the anti-dacoity
regulations of 1772 were addressed with new legislation permitting Court of Circuit judges to
dispense with the fatwa (legal ruling) of Islamic legal officers in certain cases, which would then
pass to the Nizamat Adalat (the Presidency’s superior criminal court).26 Moreover, under
Regulation XXII, section X, 1793, a person arrested on the suspicion that they were a ‘notorious
robber’, a ‘vagrant’, or a ‘disorderly and ill-disposed person’, could be detained until he could
provide security for his good behaviour. Where guilt of the commission of a specific act could not
be proved, a suspect could still be detained. A rash of amendments to this regulation (in 1795,
1803 (two), and 1807), soon ensured that if the prisoner was not local, too poor to attract a
guarantor, or deemed too ‘notorious’, they could be potentially subjected to indefinite detention
without trial—an anomaly of which colonial magistrates and judges were well aware, and
increasingly took advantage to counteract dacoity, such that it had largely subsided in Bengal by
about 1815.27
The historians Singha and Freitag agree that the separation of zamindars’ power and the
colonial state’s appropriation of judicial and punitive authority was intrinsic to the late
eighteenth-century process by which Company administrators articulated a conception of colonial
state authority in India as unitary, centralized and exclusive.28 It is also evident that these officials
considered the ‘state’ as an abstracted form of authority. As state-builders, they embodied
sovereignty independently of the population and were therefore authorized to maintain certain
sections of the population as marginal through their administrative practices; indeed, their
asymmetry to the ‘subject’ population meant that they could perceive the true substance behind
what others merely tolerated or were victims of. Dacoits were ‘criminal wretches’, ‘at war’ with
the government, who had forfeited any right to the ‘benefit of its laws’. Yet, the historiography of
Singha and Freitag can be further refined: what was specific about this colonial conception of
authority was not simply an ideological predilection for unitary, centralized, exclusive, and
abstracted power, channelled downward from Calcutta throughout the Bengal Presidency. It was
also its capacity to enlarge its own domain, and in doing so, to justify the presence of an alien
state. The application of the word ‘domain’ is critical here: colonial sovereignty does not accord
solely to an amount of territory possessed or ruled-over, but also to a practice through which
individuals were reconstituted according to the particular political priorities of the Company’s
expanding authority in the subcontinent.

Between 1808-1809, more than sixty mutilated corpses were discovered in wells and
ditches scattered along the busy highways of the ‘turbulent’29 frontier district of Etawah in the
Ceded and Conquered Provinces of north-western India.30 In 1810, Thomas Perry, the district’s
new magistrate, offered a one thousand-rupee reward for information about the bodies, and,
following a lead from an informant, eight men were arrested on suspicion of murder. One of
them, a sixteen-year old agricultural labourer named Ghulam Hussain, made a ‘confession’ to a
certain Imaum Cooly Beg, one of Perry’s darogahs. Several of Ghulam’s associates subsequently
admitted to murdering travellers over many years as members of a ‘thug’ gang, describing their
methods in lurid detail. For Perry, this was confirmation of the existence of ‘thuggee’, a form of
brigandage native to India, whereby unsuspecting travellers were inveigled from the roads by
duplicitous highwaymen before being garrotted, robbed and buried. After several weeks of
interrogations, it emerged that 1,500 ‘thugs’ were living under the protection of the zamindars of
their home villages in Etawah, venturing out in small gangs and travelling as far as Bundelkhand,
Jaipur and Lucknow to commit murder.31 Following a detailed report on the ‘thuggee’ problem
produced by the acting magistrate at Farruckabad in March 1810, a Superintendent of Police was
appointed for the administrative divisions lying within the Ceded and Conquered Provinces. His
‘primary object’ was ‘the apprehension of Dacoits, Cozauks, Thugs, Buddecks, and other
descriptions of public robbers, guilty of the commission of robberies and other crimes by open
violence’.32 The specific assignation of the superintendent to the investigation of the activities of
these groups—all of whom were here figured as different types of bandit, defined by their method
of attack, who carried out pre-planned and co-ordinated raids and highway assaults—indicates the
administration’s concern about collective acts of public, violent (rather than petty) crime, and
indeed its desire to stamp a particular kind of authority over the countryside. This of course
supports the aforementioned historiographical impressions of the contours of colonial sovereignty
in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India, impressions derived from synoptic
perspectives of both colonial authority (Freitag) and jurisprudence (Singha).33 Crime that was
perceived as collective, violent, and public, in which an alternative locus of authority—such as a
landowner or dacoit sirdar—had persuaded his dependants to engage in activity inimical to
colonial norms, was an affront to colonial sovereignty, for it indicated that unitary, central,
exclusive, abstract, state authority had not been properly established in rural locales. However, a
consideration of the first attempts to prosecute ‘thuggee’ in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces
generates insights into the mechanisms of this sovereignty; how it was worked-out on the lives of
Indians through policing initiatives, rather than how it was framed in abstracted terms. As such,
we see how colonial sovereignty came to life, albeit with a perspective framed by the parameters
of historiographical discourse.

In a letter of May 1810, sent to the secretary to the judicial department, the magistrate of
Etawah, Thomas Perry wrote, ‘it is improbable that a person whether Hindoo or Musulman can
be justly denominated a Thug without being a notorious murderer’.34 For Perry in 1810, just as
for Hastings in the 1770s, the figure of the Thug (read dacoit) marked a point of departure: the
point at which conventional judicial process (the burden of proof) could no longer apply and so
ended, and the inscription of sovereign power began, dependent upon an officer’s conviction (‘it
is improbable’) that any individual thus ‘denominated’ was indistinct from a ‘notorious
murderer’.35 The act of denominating an individual a Thug has been the subject of lengthy, if
inconclusive historical investigation, for, it has been argued, if the term existed prior to or
independently of the arrival of the British colonial presence in the subcontinent, then officials like
Perry were simply applying a vernacular noun to a relevant case in point.36 Yet this would be to
completely disregard the power-relations at play in the colonial investigation of ‘thuggee’ (and
indeed in the constitution of meaning generally). In this context, Thuggee derived its meaning
from its ascription to a particular kind of individual deemed to have transgressed colonial
authority in a significant way, and understanding of the ‘practice’ was derived from the
interrogations of suspects facing execution if they did not accede to the accusation that they were
a Thug and agree to volunteer further information about it. The modicum of indeterminacy
contained in Perry’s assertion—that ‘it was improbable’, not impossible—was an indication of
the problems presented by a reliance on the ‘confessions’ that he had obtained from ‘thugs’,
which, he warned, were ‘so extraordinary that the whole [discovery of ‘thuggee’] might be
considered fabulous’.37 Moreover, to Perry’s wonder and frustration, the methods allegedly used
by ‘thugs’—strangulation to kill quickly and quietly; mutilation and dismembering to expedite
burial and decomposition; and the deliberate targeting of travellers far from home who could not
be identified in the locality in which they were attacked—made it difficult to produce evidence
adequate to prove each man’s culpability for a specific attack. ‘In no[t] one of the cases which has
been reported to the office has any individual been directly implicated’, he wrote.38 Without
witnesses to the attacks, or even formal complaints from relatives of the victims, the sole proof of
the prisoners’ guilt were the potentially fabulous ‘confessions’ from other gang-members.
The first colonial trial of suspected ‘thugs’ (four men named Udjbah, Dundhar,
Ramzannee, and Dhoondee) was heard at the second session of the Bareilly Division Court of
Circuit, at Mainpuri, in November 1810. It collapsed into farce after the prosecution’s sole
witness, Ghulam Hussain, admitted to conspiring with the arresting darogah to win Perry’s
reward and lying about the number of ‘thug’ attacks he had witnessed.39 The government now
attempted to prosecute Ghulam himself, on the basis of his dubious confessions, but the Nizamat
Adalat rejected the case, unwilling to use such unreliable testimonies as the sole proof of his
guilt.40 Writing six years later, the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces admitted
that while sixty-eight murders had been attributed to ‘thugs’ in his jurisdiction in 1815 alone (and
seventy-four in 1814), ‘Much scepticism still prevails [here] regarding the existence of any
distinct class of people, who are designated Thugs’. Consequently, he admitted, there had still be
no successful convictions for ‘thuggee’ under British auspices.41 Yet the Superintendent went on
to commend the ‘exertions’ of Perry, and, significantly, noted that the ‘thugs’ of Etawah, Aligarh
and Farruckabad had been dispersed because the zamindars of these districts had been
‘intimidated from affording further protection to these villains’—not least by the razing and
ploughing of a settlement in neighbouring Maratha territory, an alleged haven for them, by an
army detachment in November 1812.42 Therefore, while the burden of proof still prevailed over
discretional magisterial authority within the confines of the Nizamat Adalat, on the north-western
frontier of British-administered territory, judicial scepticism had been overcome by brute force.
The subordination of due legal process to the preservation of a certain form of state
authority explains why, in the course of operations against banditry in the Ceded and Conquered
Provinces, circa 1810-15, landowners themselves became an increasing target of new legislation
passed to aid its suppression. This required landowners to register all horsemen with Company
officials, made them amenable to prosecution and punishments (fines, prison sentences, even the
forfeiture of their estates to the government) if they were found to be withholding information
about, or in any other way assisting, ‘public robbers’.43 It gave legal form to the growing
conviction among administrators that landlords were not fit to be petty sovereigns of their estates,
either because they actively patronized gangs of ‘public robbers’, or because the latter terrorized
their lands, and that responsibility for civil order must pass directly and totally into colonial
control. Therefore, the whittling of landowners’ authority was paralleled by legislation that
widened the sphere of the ‘exception’—the legal form of that which cannot have legal form—by
which certain suspects could already be held in indefinite detention (under Regulation XXII of
1793 and its various amendments). Regulations VIII of 1808, VIII of 1818, and III of 1819
enlarged the zone of sovereign discretion so that it now applied to ‘notorious robbers of whatever
denomination’, acquitted of specific charges but thought to be of ‘desperate or dangerous
character, whom it would be unsafe to set at liberty without substantial security for their future
good behaviour’.44 ‘Although I despair of being able to convict a thug’, Perry wrote in July 1812,
‘still it is better that they should remain in jail than be allowed unmolested to carry on their
system of murder & depredation’.45 Neither able to find guarantors for their bail, nor guilty of
murder, hundreds of suspected ‘thugs’ were simply left to rot in district jails across northern and
central India throughout the 1820s. Those held at Sagar jail would go on to provide Sleeman with
much of the information used to present the government with the picture of ‘thuggee’ as a secret,
organized ‘system’ of robbery and murder, at the beginning of the 1830s.46
As noted above, Singha argues that the cumulative effect of the aforementioned reforms
of the anti-dacoity laws was the creation of two separate spheres of colonial authority over civil
order: one that would remain in the hands of co-operative zamindars, albeit mediated through
colonial norms of civil administration and property law, and another construed in relation to
criminal justice. In the latter sphere, ‘Rule of law had to communicate [not only] a promise of
rights, but also one of subjection’, and ‘order’ was inflected with a radically-different notion of
Indian agency to that imagined for co-operative zamindars—‘as a routine state of pacification in
which the state alone had the right to a legitimate exercise of violence’.47 This image of two
discrete spheres of civil order can be sharpened by further consideration of the ‘state of
exception’ created during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What for Singha was
a ‘re-constitution’ of ‘criminal justice’ was in fact a suspension of it in certain cases deemed to be
exceptional, such that it now passed over into, and indeed articulated colonial sovereignty. The
historical significance of these reforms then, was not their separation of powers, but their
institution of a new and compelling form of power with implications for the entire population
subject to British colonial administration. The exception by which dacoits were included in the
colonial judicial order solely by their exclusion from it, did not as such confirm the rule, that is,
the normality of the Bengal Regulations and the universal legal subject whom they supposedly
protected. Rather, the rule was only created by the colonial state’s sovereign power to except
certain people from its application. The sovereign exception defined the very space in which the
normal juridical order had validity.48 The justifications given for this suspension of the juridical
order—critiques of both the previous juridical order as unable to conduct a successful suppression
of dacoity, and of indigenous society itself, which at times appeared as an integrated netherworld
of criminality—were therefore also justifications for an extension of the domain of the colonial
state, of its own necessity as the pre-eminent political formation in the northern subcontinent, as
the only one prepared to undertake responsibility for the policing of banditry. As such, this
sovereignty had a totalizing quality, drawing into its sphere not only those defined by their
exclusion from the juridical order it suspended—dacoits—but also those who would be offered
the protection of these laws: co-operative zamindars and those dependants whose peacefulness, or
loyalty to the state, they could enforce without intervention from Company officials. This form of
power was given its fullest elaboration in the early colonial period in India during the ATC of the
1830s, and is to this that I now turn.
‘A theatre for the experiments of incipient legislation’: the ATC in the non-regulation
territories, circa 1829-3949
On 23 October 1829, George Swinton, chief secretary to the recently-arrived governor general,
Bentinck, wrote to the British Resident at the Court of Indore to advise on how to proceed with
the prosecution of a gang of seventy-four ‘thugs’ arrested in the Malwa region of western central
India. The gang had been betrayed by six of their members, who described their numerous, fatal
attacks on travellers throughout western-central India to their captor, one Captain Borthwick, the
Company’s political agent at Mahidpur. ‘These murders having been perpetrated in territories
belonging to various Native Chiefs,’ wrote Swinton,
and the perpetrators being inhabitants of various Districts belonging to different authorities,
there is no Chief, in particular, to whom we could deliver them up for punishment, as their
Sovereign or as the Prince of the Territory in which the crime had been committed. … The
hand of these inhuman monsters being against every one and there being no country within
the range of their annual excursions, from Bundelcund [Bundelkhand] to Guzeraut [Gujerat],
in which they have not committed murder … they may be considered like Pirates, to be
placed without the pale of social law, and be subjected to condign punishment by whatever
authority they may be seized and convicted.50

The government therefore argued that ‘thug’ gangs transgressed the operative political
boundaries—significantly redrawn in north-western and central India following the Anglo-
Maratha wars of the early nineteenth century (circa 1802-18)—in two ways. First, they
committed their alleged crimes beyond the confines of their native districts, falling under the rule
of different authorities. Second, the enormity of ‘thug’ attacks was such that their perpetrators
entered a zone of judicial indeterminacy, in the sense that conventional measures could not apply
to them: they were ‘inhuman monsters…against every one’ who would be ‘placed without the
pale of social law’. Forty leaders of the gang arrested by Borthwick were executed shortly after
this letter was written, and the principles laid down in it were immediately adopted by Francis
Curven Smith, agent to the governor general in the Sagar and Narmada Territories, as he initiated
the trials of seventy-two ‘thugs’ who had been detained without trial at Sagar for the last seven
years.51 Twenty-six more ‘thugs’ were presently hanged.52 In October 1830, Sleeman, Smith’s
principal assistant, was given special responsibility for the extermination (to paraphrase Swinton)
of ‘the abominable race of Thugs’.53 The ATC—a sustained, centrally-directed, British-led
campaign to suppress ‘thuggee’ in India—was thus founded on the principle that the ordinary
colonial juridical order, whether understood in abstraction, as the Liberal and Utilitarian concept
of the rule of law, or in the pragmatic application of the Bengal Regulations used in Indian
territories administered under direct rule, would only apply to ‘thugs’ in not applying to them.
Drawing from what was by now a deep well of prejudice that cast Indian rulers as indolent,
unfeeling, and backward54, and insisting that ‘thugs’ were ‘generally Hereditary’55 and therefore
presented a threat to authority that would persist irrespective of specific political, social or
economic contexts, Smith outlined his plans for the suppression of ‘thuggee’ in a letter sent to the
government in November 1830. Since ‘thugs’ perpetrated attacks in both Company territory and
the so-called Princely (or Native) States, the ATC would have to take on subcontinental
dimensions. Moreover, the extraterritoriality of ‘thug’ attacks meant that responsibility for
operations against ‘thuggee’ was the concern of the Company’s Political, rather than its Judicial,
Department, because the latter could only claim jurisdiction in territories administered according
to the Bengal Regulations.56 This was also a means to bypass the review of the Nizamat Adalat,
as sentences passed by Smith, in his capacity as Commissioner in the Sagar and Narmada
Territories, were forwarded directly to the government. During the early 1830s, Smith presided
over the trials of ‘thugs’ not only captured in British-administered territories in western, central
and northern India, but also extracted from neighbouring Indian states. By 1836, well over half of
the total ‘thuggee’ trials held under British auspices circa 1826-41 had been completed, with a
conviction rate of 98.9 per cent.57 The rapid accumulation of guilty verdicts convinced senior
administrators of the significance of Sleeman’s and Smith’s work. In 1835, the Thuggee
Department (hereafter, TD) was convened and its expenses recognized as a ‘General charge being
incurred for the welfare of the whole of India’, with Sleeman appointed to the new post of
General Superintendent of the ACT.58 The general superintendent’s assistants soon expanded
operations into the Deccan, the Doab, Rajputana, Malwa and Delhi.59 A permanent staff of seven
assistants, commanding more than three hundred nujeebs (mounted soldiers), was assisted by a
further seventeen British officers: residents at the courts of Indian rulers based in Indore,
Hyderabad and Lucknow, and Agents based in territories under British control. Just as in the
trials heard by Smith, those held by residents were only submitted to the Political Department’s
secretary, H. T. Prinsep, for review, while Agents tried ‘thugs’ at tribunals specially convened by
the TD to evade interference from the Judicial Department.60 In the introduction to his
Ramaseeana (1836)61, Sleeman was unequivocal about the need for subcontinental—or
‘supranational’62—sovereignty presented by the threat of ‘thuggee’:
It is a principle of the law of nations, recognized I believe by every civilized people, that
assassins by profession shall find in no country a sanctuary, but shall every where be
delivered up to the Sovereign who reclaims them and in whose dominions they have
perpetrated their crimes; and as the crimes of these assassins are never confined to the
country in which they reside, and as every country in India must now be considered as under
the protection of the Supreme Government in some relation or other, that Government very
properly undertook the duty which seemed imposed upon it by the laws of humanity and of
nations, and determined to reclaim them from every State in which they might seek shelter.63
The ATC therefore ran to an expansionist logic, both because the representation of the nature of
‘thuggee’ accepted by the government insisted that the practice was systematic, widespread, and
could only be stopped by the arrest of all ‘thugs’, and because the procedural licence granted to
the architects of the campaign allowed for the pursuit of ‘thugs’ believed to be sheltering beyond
the boundaries of the Company’s jurisdiction.
The specific anti-‘thuggee’ legislation promulgated in 1836 was therefore, as Singha
observes, partly a means to cloak with legitimacy the freewheeling, idiosyncratic operations led
by Sleeman and Smith in the first half of the decade, and partly a means to assuage concerns
voiced in various sections of the colonial establishment about the police powers entrusted to
‘thug’-hunting detachments now ranging over the Regulation territories.64 The first paragraph of
Act XXX of 1836 read as follows:
whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the passing of this Act, to
any gang of Thugs, either within or without the Territories of the East India Company, shall
be punished with imprisonment for life, with hard labour.65
The legislation sanctioned the Company’s courts to punish anyone who could be proved to be or
to have been associated with ‘any gang of Thugs’, captured ‘within or without’ British territory.
Clearly, guilt by association was far easier to prove than culpability for a specific murder or
robbery, not least when the TD relied heavily on information from convicted ‘thugs’ who had
turned ‘approver’ (in the legal parlance of the time) in return for testimonies alleging the guilt of
former associates.66 To resolve the ambiguity of using confessions from guilty ‘thugs’ as
evidence in the trials of their gang-members, Act XIX was passed in 1837, enshrining the
principle that
no person shall, by reason of any conviction for any offence whatever, be incompetent to be a
witness in any stage of any cause, Civil or Criminal, before any Court, in the Territories of
the East India Company.67
The extra-ordinary procedural innovations rejected in the course of the late eighteenth-century
attempt to suppress dacoity, and critiqued by opponents of the ATC as liable to abuse by
representatives of the TD, were therefore now formally incorporated into the juridical order of the
Company’s state. For Singha, this was a political manoeuvre intended to avoid legal dualism with
the Company’s domains (one rule for the Regulation territories, another for the rest).68 For
Freitag, it marked the appearance of a ‘covert’ legal structure especially targeting forms of
‘collective crime’.69 However, this legislation gave legal form to that which cannot have legal
form—a Schmittian ‘state of exception’; a form of sovereign authority precisely defined by the
ability to decide whether or not ‘the law’ applied to certain individuals. Neither ‘thug’ nor
‘thuggee’ was defined in the laws passed 1836-7; this remained a question of executive
discretion. And, although Sleeman announced victory over ‘thuggee’ in 1839 (although statistics
for ‘thug’ trials run on until 1841), this did not lead to a retreat or a shrinking of the sovereign
power that vitalized the ATC. To understand why this did not happen is to gain a final, crucial
historiographical insight into the realization of colonial sovereignty in British India.
The Politicization of Bare Life
Invested with discretional powers providing for the definition of suspects, as well as their arrest
and detention, TD officers defined several new categories of ‘thug’ in the late 1830s, using the
legislation against various itinerant groups, such as child-traffickers (‘Megapunniastic Thugs’),
gamblers (‘Tushma-Baz Thugs’), and wandering mendicants (classified, variously, as ‘Dathura
Poisoners’, Tin Naimi, Gosain, Bairagi, Jogi, Kan Phuttie, Thorie and Panda Brahmin ‘thugs’).70
J. R. Lumley’s harassment of Yogis provides an instructive example of the way in which the
vagueness of the anti-‘thug’ legislation provided sustenance to the ATC. In December 1837,
Lumley, one of Sleeman’s deputies in the TD, wrote to the magistrate at Ahmednuggur to inform
him that he had ‘the very strongest ground of suspicion for believing all the twelve tribes of
Jogees to be in truth Thugs but ostensibly Beggars and Peddlars who traffic in small wares’.71
‘The Headquarters of the Jogees is [a temple] at Sonaree’, Lumley continued, where there are
‘some fifteen or twenty Gooroos and three or four Muctiyar Jogee families I wish to seize’. He
subsequently arrested ‘50 or 60’ Yogis, ‘among whom more than a dozen confessed or recorded
Thuggee against their accomplices’. Despite admitting that he did not think the ‘Gooroos’ had
‘any connection with Thuggee’, he went on to say that he had interned ‘a few of them’ to try to
improve knowledge of ‘arcana Jogeeana’.72 Although Lumley obviously had reservations about
the applicability of the noun ‘Thuggee’ to the activities that he had encountered, only a few
months later, Sleeman informed the chief secretary that the TD had ‘always had reason to believe
that a great part of the Byragees, Gosains and other religious mendicants that infest all parts of
India were assassins by profession’.73 A year later, Sleeman argued that,
There is one great evil which afflicts and has afflicted the country, and which no government
but a very strong one could attempt to eradicate. This is a mass [around two million people,
by Sleeman’s estimate] of religious mendicants who infest every part of India, and subsist
upon the fruits of all manner of crime…. [They] rob and steal, and a very great portion of
them murder their victims before they rob them…[using] dutoora [Datura alba, also spelled
‘dathura’ in colonial accounts], or some other deleterious drug.74
Yogis were now re-figured into a representative portion of a wider section of indigenous society
defined, by Sleeman, by its criminality: ‘There are not anywhere worse characters than these
Jogies, or greater pests to society, save the regular Thugs’, he concluded.75 The dramatic
ascription of criminality to religious mendicants attests to the reach and robustness of the
discretional power at the TD’s disposal. Relocated outside the colonial juridical order as a certain
variety of ‘thug’, these individuals were now trapped in a relation to the power that attempted to
prosecute them, an ontological position fully-loaded by the politics of their criminalization. We
thus return to the concept of abandonment introduced at the beginning of the essay. As Giorgio
Agamben has observed,
The life…of the bandit, … is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the
fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in
perpetual flight or a foreign land. And yet he is in a continuous relationship with the power
that banished him precisely insofar as he is at every instant exposed to an unconditioned
threat of death. 76
Therefore, while the bandit exists in a state of ‘bare life’ in relation to the sovereign power that
banished him—a life marked by the absence of political choice in the sense that its politics are
discredited by his pursuers—his ‘continuous relationship’ with that power is such that this bare
life is immediately and totally, ‘at every instant’, inscribed-upon by and with the politics of the
sovereign-pursuers. The bandit cannot stray in or out of the particular politics that concerns itself
with his actions; he is, by definition, trapped in a permanent relationship to it by the power that
designates him such and so out-laws him.77 In the example of the ATC, the ‘particular politics’
were those of certain colonial officials and administrators who defined ‘thuggee’ in specific ways.
Sleeman’s suggestion, in his report of 1839, that there were ‘regular Thugs’ was strikingly
at odds with the diversity of people arrested on suspicion of ‘thuggee’ throughout the ATC, and
the mass of heterogeneous information about their experiences of life on India’s roads found in
their testimonies and so-called conversations with officials involved in it. In fact, the lack of
‘regular Thugs’ was a vital source of legitimization for the ATC. The difficulty of rationalizing
and categorizing ‘thuggee’ in the first place—what Company officials perceived as its
extraordinary qualities—had necessitated that ‘thuggee’ be considered an exception, and
produced legislation wide enough to permit the discretional powers deemed necessary to bring in
for interrogation people with fluid, multiple and diverging identities. The consistent justification
given for these powers, was that for various reasons, ‘thugs’ lay outwith the bounds of humanity
itself, as defined by the colonial administration: ‘abhorrent to human nature, they are the sworn
and irreconcilable enemies of mankind,’ Smith wrote in November 1830, adding, ‘they deserve
no mercy; mercy to such wretches would be cruelty to mankind’.78 The paradox of this parochial
use of a term—‘mankind’—invoked for its quality as a universal signifier as the fundamental
justification for the suppression of ‘thuggee’ (in that this would protect ‘mankind’) shows how,
by figuring the ‘thug’ as an ‘inhuman wretch’, the colonial administration elaborated a claim for
sovereign power over the lives of Indians.79 By locating ‘thugs’ beyond the bounds of humanity it
of course simultaneously advanced a definition of what constituted a ‘human’. ‘Thugs’ were the
exception that proved the rule, and indeed served to authenticate colonial sovereignty, to the
degree that the colonial state could enforce its definitions of ‘thuggee’ and ‘humanity’. It was
crucial for the colonial administration not to fully rationalize ‘thuggee’, for this would have
conceded a modicum of empathy, of identification with what its politics declared ‘monstrous’,
‘wretched’, and ‘inhuman’. The ATC could never be about erasing ‘thuggee’, so much as
policing it, subordinating it: construing an element of the colonized population as ‘inhuman’ and
sustaining that construction, or re-constructing it elsewhere. Colonial sovereignty provided the
means by which British officials were able to do this, to inscribe and re-inscribe their politics
upon the depersonalized body of the ‘thug’.
The premise for the ATC had been that ‘thuggee’ presented an extra-ordinary threat to the
indigenous population and to colonial authority, and that similarly extra-ordinary measures were
temporarily required to suppress it. However, following the announcement that ‘thuggee’—as an
‘organized system’—had been defeated, neither the legislation enacted, nor the police agency
especially convened to counteract the perceived threat were withdrawn. Indeed, the TD now
focused its efforts on dacoity, and various forms of ‘organized’ crime believed to be prevalent in
central and northern India (aforementioned). During the 1840s, the anti-‘thuggee’ laws of the
1830s were widened, expanding the TD’s remit to the pursuit of increasingly ill-specified groups
of ‘criminals’, culminating in Act XI of 1848, which laid down that
Whosoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the passing of this Act, to
any gang of wandering persons, associated for the purposes of theft or robbery, not being a
gang of Thugs or Dacoits, shall be punished with imprisonment, with hard labour, for any
term not exceeding seven years.80
With this legislation, the colonial administration gave judicial force to the topos of the road as a
place of danger, where ‘wanderers’ could escape surveillance, harass
travellers, practice unregulated commerce, and—worst of all—develop what were perceived to be
wild and savage cults, inimical to the envisioned society of civilized, taxable cultivators.81
Moreover, the vagaries of such legislation indicate the expansionist dynamic at work within the
establishment of the type of power here called ‘colonial sovereignty’, as the Company state
became ever more interventionist from the 1830s. Interest in ‘marginal’ groups of the
population—adivasis, forest-fringe cultivators, itinerant traders, entertainers, and holy men—was
matched by legislation, police-powers, and procedural flexibility that served to expand the state’s
own margins in the form of the exception.82 In this Hobbesian conception of the state, as an
abstracted, exclusive, centralized and unitary locus of authority, Company administrators now
claimed that a British colonial government would dominate and defend the ‘Indian’ community,
order and nurture its civil life, and embody sovereignty. As Asad puts it, ‘the state’s abstract
character is precisely what enables it to define and sustain the margin as a margin through a range
of administrative practices’83; although the Company’s pursuit of dacoits, ‘thugs’, and various
‘wandering’ groups brims with legislative innovation and the appearance of due process, the
authority of these laws came from beyond written rules: it rested with officials who believed
themselves to be the appropriate arbiters of what was ‘notorious’ or ‘extraordinary’ about certain
sections of the indigenous population. The risings of 1857-8 would subject this abstracted ‘state’
authority to a cataclysmic interrogation.
Conclusions
The extra-ordinary, British-led operations to suppress banditry in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, particularly the ATC, yield new insights into the realization and functioning
of colonial sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent. The historiographic claim made here is that
‘colonial sovereignty’ names a type of power that British administrators demanded, and
instituted, for the control of certain individuals whose actions transgressed the threshold of their
modes of comprehension and categorization. ‘Thug’ was the name given to a figure located
beyond the pale of ‘civil’ society, and held to be a member of a community of ‘irreclaimable’
predators upon it, who could not be socialized into ‘conventional’ law. From this, it followed that
their prosecution necessitated the creation of a novel sphere of authority, defined by the
suspension of the existing juridical order. In this state of exception officials dealt with crimes
that, it was claimed, only they could police—in all senses of the word. Through this policing, this
defining and controlling, they characterized (and indeed caricatured) not only those individuals
who would henceforth be considered non-subjects to which the ordinary procedures of British
administration could not apply—dacoits and ‘thugs’—but also those who would be afforded
protection of its laws, the supposed benefits of the rule imagined and enforced by this exception.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Crispin Bates and Markus Daechsel for their insightful, challenging, and thorough
comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I wish to acknowledge the outstandingly detailed, provocative,
and illuminating research into ‘thuggee’ and dacoity by Radhika Singha, Kim A. Wagner, and John R.
McLane: I have made extensive use of their references in preparing this paper.
Notes
1 The words ‘thug’ and ‘thuggee’ appear without a capital letter and in inverted commas throughout this
essay to indicate my contestation of the colonial usage of the noun Thug, and the verb Thuggee (which
appear in their original form only in quotations or to indicate the colonial usage). ‘Thug’ and ‘thuggee’ can
be read as shorthand for ‘suspect(s) accused of being a Thug/Thuggee’. Current Indian place-names have
been used where possible, although the colonial versions are retained in references to primary sources for
ease of use.
2 Extract from W. Wright, Magistrate of Chitoor, to the Register of the Foujdari Adalat, Dec. 1809, in E. M.
Thornton, Illustration of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1851 edn.; repr. New Delhi: Asian
Educational Services, 2000), pp. 271, 274.
3 For self-justifying colonialist accounts of ‘thuggee’ and derivative, celebratory secondary literature, see,
in particular, W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836); Philip Meadows
Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (1839; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); J. M. Kaye,
Administration of the East India Company; A History of Indian Progress (London: Richard Bentley, 1853);
Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons,
1961); George Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and its Overthrow in British India (London:
Longmans, 1968). For revisionist historiography, see, in particular, Stewart N. Gordon, ‘Scarf and Sword:
Thugs, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century Malwa’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (1969); Radhika Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee
Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (1993); Martine Van
Woerkens, The Strangled Traveler, Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, trans. Catherine Tihanyi
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; repr. 2002); C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information:
Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740—1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
Parama Roy, ‘Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee’, in Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in
Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); John
Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003); Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee and the ‘construction’ of crime in early
nineteenth century India (unpublished doctoral thesis; University of Cambridge, 2003); Maíre Ní Flathuín,
‘The Campaign Against Thugs in the Bengal Press in the 1830s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 37, no.
2 (2004); Kim A. Wagner, ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian
Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (2004).
4 W. H. Sleeman, ‘Introduction’ to Report on the Depredations committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India, from the Cold Season of 1836-37, down to their gradual suppression, under the operation of the measures adopted against them by the supreme government in the year 1839 (Calcutta, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1840), p. xix.
5 See ‘Tabular Statement of the Results of Thug trials held in India, 1826-41’, in Philip Meadows Taylor,
‘State of Thuggee in India’, British and Foreign Review, vol. xv, no. 29 (1843), p. 293.
6 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. with and
introduction by George Schwab (1922; repr. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7 See Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 26-32.
8 See W. H. Sleeman, anonymous letter, in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, Journal of Belles Lettres,
Sciences and the Arts, vol. 40, 3 Oct. 1830, in ‘Note by the Secretary [G. Swinton]’, 4 Oct. 1830, Board’s
Collections [hereafter, BC,] F/4/1251/50480(2), fos. 669-90, Oriental and India Office Collections, British
Library [hereafter, OIOC].
9 According to official estimates of the time, six out of every sixteen Bengalis perished in the famine.
Revised estimates put this closer to one in three. See W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (repr. of
6th edn; Calcutta, 1965), p. 26; cf. Atis Dasgupta, ‘Early Trends of Anti-Colonial Peasant Resistance in
Bengal’, Social Scientist, vol.14, no. 4 (1986), p. 22.
10 Article 35, Bengal Regulations, 1772, quoted in Singha, A Despotism of Law, p. 29.
11 Extract from proceedings of Governor and Council, 19 Apr. 1774, in J. E. Colebrooke, Supplement to A
digest of the regulations and laws, vol. 1 (1807), p. 122.
12 For example, see ‘Seventh report’, 6 May 1773, in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons,
vol. IV, 1772-3, esp. p. 324, cited in Singha, A Despotism of Law, p. 3, n.10.
13 Letter from Warren Hastings, 10 July 1773, recorded on the proceedings of Council, 3 Aug. 1773, in
Colebrooke, Supplement, pp. 114-19.
14 This argument conformed to a wider, progressive Orientalist meta-narrative and critique of the Mughals’
‘despotism’ as a political and fiscal formation that had already reached its capacity and was now being
‘naturally’ superseded by a more dynamic system, spearheaded by colonial enterprise, more capable of
maintaining both political power and revenue streams—a critique soon articulated through Governor
General Cornwallis’ attempt to limit zamindari power through the permanent settlement of the revenue
demand.
15 Letter from Warren Hastings, 10 July 1773, in Colebrooke, Supplement, pp. 114-9.
16 Committee of Circuit to President and Council, 15 Aug. 1772, in ibid., p. 13.
17 The historical constitution of these forms of knowledge, of the processes by which dacoits and ‘thugs’were defined, detected and captured in a colonial episteme, forms the principal subject of the later parts ofthis essay.
18 Committee of Circuit to Council at Fort William, 15 Aug. 1772, in Colebrooke, Supplement, p. 13. Cf.
Hastings’ circular on Sannyasis and Fakirs (two groups discussed below) of January 21, 1772, in which he
describes them as ‘enemies of the Government’, which is quoted in Dasgupta, ‘Anti-Colonial Peasant
Resistance in Bengal’, p. 30.
19 My understanding of the ‘state of exception’ here, and throughout the essay, draws on the definition of Carl Schmitt, but follows rather more closely the model elaborated by Agamben, wherein it may be seen to generate a form of power that allows for the reconstitution of certain individuals deemed amenable to the
practice of extra-judicial ‘sovereign’ power. See Schmitt, Political Theology, esp. pp. 5-15; Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 64-5; and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. pp. 1, 4.
20 For the concept of ‘abandonment’ in the context of the ‘state of exception’, see Agamben, Homo Sacer,
pp. 28-9, 71, 82, 85-6.
21 The dacoit ‘outrages’ of the Chuars (adivasi inhabitants of Bengal’s northern and western borders)
peaked between 1770-1783 and 1798-1799. The Sannyasi and Fakir uprisings of circa 1760-1800 were also understood as outbreaks of dacoity. Other notable peasant, artisanal and ‘tribal’ uprisings in this period, likewise construed as dacoity, occurred at Tripura (1761-1763), near Calcutta (1765-1766), in Swandip (1769), in the Chittagong hills (1776-1787), at Rangpur (1783), in Santipur, Jessore and Khulna (1784- 1796), and at Birbhum (1786-1793). See Atis Dasgupta, ‘The Fakir and Sannyasi Rebellion’, Social Scientist, vol. 10, no. 1 (1982), pp. 44-55, and John R. McLane, ‘Bengali Bandits, Police and Landlords After the Permanent Settlement’, in Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson,Ari.: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 35-6.
22 Zamindar means ‘landowner’, though it is important to note that the scale of their possessions, and
influence over dependants, varied greatly. In Bengal, about fifteen zamindars controlled sixty per cent of
the land circa 1775-1800. In the Doab region of northern-central India (part of the Ceded and Conquered
Provinces, added to British administration between 1801 and 1803), there were few large landowners, thus less economic stratification, and more coparcenary (joint-heirship) communities. See Thomas R. Metcalf,
Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979), pp. 11-13, 47-8, and 52-3. See also Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal:
An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).
23 Indeed, this may be seen as a direct continuation of the processes inaugurated by the enactment of the
1772 regulations, which likewise sought to capture judicial and punitive authority for the emergent colonial
state, as the prerogative of sovereignty, by clearly separating them from fiscal claims, which was diffused
and distributed (or ‘farmed out’, as in ‘rent farmers’) down through the network of social authority through
which revenue was collected. See Singha, A Despotism of Law, p. 2.
24 See for example, para. I, Regulation II, 23 Jan. 1810, V/8/18, 336-7, OIOC. See also The Fifth Report
from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812, pp.
39-40, 65-6, and 71; and C. R. Blunt, Magistrate, Birbhum, to Judicial Dept, 1 July 1802, and Magistrates
of the Twenty-Four Parganas to Judicial Dept, 1 July 1802, appendix 10 to ibid., both cited in McLane,
‘Bengali Bandits’, pp. 30, 35-8.
25 From late 1808, judges of the Nizamat Adalat could offer up to five-hundred rupees for the capture of a
proclaimed dacoit leader (sirdar), and one-hundred rupees for an associate. (Darogahs’ monthly salaries
were about twenty-five rupees.) In a significant forerunner of the ATC, W. C. Blacquiere, justice of the
peace for Calcutta, combined the use of spies, informers and rewards to suppress gang robbery in Nadia
and the 24-Parganas between 1808-10. See Regulation IX, 4 Nov. 1808, and Regulation X, 28 Nov. 1808,
V/8/18, 293-9, OIOC. See also Wagner, Thuggee, pp. 66-9.
26 Regulation I, 12 Jan. 1810, V/8/18, 335, OIOC. It is also worth noting that British judges of the Courts of
Circuit replaced Indian officials as the administrators of criminal courts in 1790.
27 Regulation XXII, section X, 1793, cited in Singha, A Despotism of Law, pp. 31-2, n.133-5; see also
Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 112, n. 118.
28 As in the 1770s, this was loaded with an Orientalist critique of the displaced juridical order’s laxity, and
indeed the barrenness of ‘Mughal’ state authority, caused, in turn, by seepage from the many rivulets of
authority streaming up to the emperor Conversely, both Singha and Freitag argue, rather than perceiving
dacoity as a threat to the state—an indication of the impotence and inefficiency of its juridical order—
Mughal practice tended to simply hold local administrators responsible for banditry in their particular
jurisdiction. See, Singha, A Despotism of Law, esp. pp. 1-7; and Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Collective Crime and
Authority in North India’, in Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality, pp. 141-2.
29 Etawah straddled several established and significant routes taken by indigenous merchants and pilgrims,
but suffered from unstable agricultural conditions, and, located adjacent to lands controlled by the
Marathas, had a reputation for lawlessness among colonial writers. See W. Hamilton, The East-India
Gazetteer, 2nd edn, (1815; repr. London: Parbury, Allen & Co., 1828), vol. I, p. 544.
30 The Ceded and Conquered Provinces comprised adjacent territories in northern-central India, ceded to
the Company by the Nawab Vizier of Awadh in 1801, conquered from the Maratha chieftain Daulat Rao
Sindia in 1803, and ceded by the Maratha Peshwa of Poona the same year. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and
the British Raj, pp. 47-8 (this includes a map). For the discovery of the bodies, See T. Perry, Magt. Etawah,
to G. Dowdeswell, Secy. Judicial Department [hereafter, JD, 19 Mar. 1810, T. Perry, Private Papers, Add.
Mss. 5375, Cambridge University Library [hereafter, CUL].
31 Extracts from Perry’s interrogations of Ghulam Hussain and his associates can be found in T. Perry,
Magt. Etawah, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy. JD, 19 Mar., 11 Apr., 24 Apr., and 17 May 1810, Perry Papers,
Add. Mss. 5375, CUL; Dowdeswell to Perry, Bengal Criminal and Judicial Consultations [hereafter,
BCJC], P/130/14, 30 Mar. 1810 (no. 38), OIOC; and ‘Trial of four thugs’, Bareilly Court of Circuit, 2nd
session of 1810, 9-11 and 16-17 Nov. 1810, enclosed in T. Brooke, Judge of Bareilly Court of Circuit, to
Dowdeswell, 21 Dec. 1810, BCJC, P/130/27, 18 Jan. 1811 (no. 46), OIOC [hereafter, ‘Trial of Four Thugs
(1810)’]. For the first British encounter with ‘thuggee’, see Wagner, Thuggee, pp. 36-66.
32 For Wright’s report, see W. Wright, Asst. Magt. Farrukhabad, to J. Miller, Magt. Farrukhabad, 12 Mar.
1810, BCJC, P/130/14, 30 Mar. 1810 (no. 6), OIOC. For the appointment of the superintendent, see
Regulation VIII of 1810, 16 Mar. 1810, V/8/18, 348-349, OIOC.
33 See Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.
25, no. 2 (1991), 237, 252; Freitag, ‘Collective Crime’, 141-2, and 159-162; Singha, A Despotism of Law,
esp. chs. 1-4.
34 T. Perry, Magt. Etawah, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy. JD, 17 May 1810, T. Perry Papers, Add. Mss. 5375,
CUL.
35 See also T. Perry, Magt. Etawah, to J. Shakespeare, Regr. of the Nizamat Adalat, 22 Apr. 1811, BCJC,
P/130/132, 14 May 1811 (no. 93), OIOC, in which Perry further pressed the case for magisterial
‘discretion, with respect to the release, and detention of persons of ‘bad character’.
36 For historical and etymological debates on the word ‘thug’, see Gordon, ‘Scarf and Sword’, pp. 408-9;
Wilhelm Halbfass, ‘Vedic Apologetics, Ritual Killing, and the Foundations of Ethics’, in Tradition and
Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992); Paul Dundas, ‘Some
Jain References to the Thags in the Sainsaramocaka’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 115,
no. 2 (1995), esp. pp. 281-4; Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 104; Van Woerkens, The Strangled
Traveler, pp. 116-7, 299.
37 T. Perry, Magt. Etawah, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy. JD, 11 Apr. 1810, quoted in Mike Dash, Thug: The
True Story of India’s Murderous Cult (London: Granta, 2005), pp. 30-31.
38 T. Perry, Magt. Etawah, to G. Dowdeswell, Secy. JD, 1 Mar. 1812, quoted in ibid., p. 34.
39 Trial of Four Thugs (1810), BCJC, P/130/27, 18 Jan. 1811 (no. 46), OIOC.
40 This was not, however, the last time the judges of the Nizamat Adalat were to come across Ghulam
Hussain. Perry continued to detain him, presumably on account of his ‘notoriety’ and because he would be
unable to find a guarantor for his bail on security of good behaviour, and used him to bring further trials,
which ultimately found their way to the superior court. In a trial of three suspected ‘thugs’ in 1812,
Ghulam’s evidence was again dismissed as unreliable by the Nizamat Adalat, since he could not give
specific details about single acts for which the accused would be culpable. (Perry’s other witness was an
eighty-four year old man, whom the Nizamat Adalat described as ‘almost devoid of intellect’ because of his
‘exceeding age’.) W. H. Macnaghten, Reports of Cases Determined in the Nizamat Adawlut: With Tables of
the Names of the Cases and Principal Matters, vol. I: 1805-19 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1827-8),
V/22/44/239-40, OIOC.
41 J. Shakespeare, Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces, Annual Report (1816), para. 76,
BCJC, P/132/44-5, 30 Aug. 1816, OIOC. This scepticism alerts us to the tension between the political or
executive and the judicial departments of the administration, brilliantly explored by Radhika Singha in the
context of the anti-‘thuggee’ operations of the 1830s in her article, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’.
42 Western Provinces Annual Police Report (1816), para. 89, BCJC, P/132/44-5, 30 Aug. 1816, OIOC. For
the attack on the village of Madnai, see Capt. Popham, Commander of Regiment no. 23 of the Native
Infantry at Sindouse, to Lieut. Col. G. H. Fagan, HQ Agra, 24 Dec. 1812, Military Department, 24 Dec.
1812 (nos. 10, respectively), National Archives of India (Delhi) [hereafter, NAI], cited in Wagner,
Thuggee, p. 82.
43 Regulation VI, 9 Feb. 1810, V/8/18, 345-7, OIOC.
44 Regulation VIII, 19 Sept. 1808, V/8/18, 289-92, OIOC; Regulation VIII, 28 Aug. 1818, V/8/19, OIOC;
Regulation III, 16 Apr. 1819, V/8/19, OIOC. The quotation is taken from Regulation III, 1819.
45 T. Perry, Magt. Etawah, to G. D. Guthrie, Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces, 27 July
1812, T. Perry Papers, Add. Mss. 5378, CUL, quoted in Wagner, Thuggee, p. 66.
46 For statistics on ‘thugs’ in indefinite detention in the late 1810s and in the 1820s, see W. Ewer,
Superintendent of Police for the Lower Provinces, to W. B. Bayley, Secy. JD, 6 Apr. 1819, BCJC, P/134/6,
16 Apr. 1819 (no. 6), OIOC; and F. C. Smith, Agent to the Governor General, Sagar and Narmada
Territories [hereafter, AGG S&NT], to H. J. Prinsep, Secy. Political Department [hereafter, PD], 19 Nov.
1830, BC, F/4/1309/52131, OIOC. See also Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 112. The first ‘thug’
trial that resulted in conviction and sentencing was in Sagar in 1826, which is why Meadows Taylor’s
statistical table of the results of ‘thug’ trials runs 1826-41. See Sleeman, Ramaseeana, Appendix C, pp. 46-
53; and ‘Tabular Statement’, in Meadows Taylor, ‘State of Thuggee in India’, p. 293.
47 Singha, A Despotism of Law, p. 33.
48 This, ultimately, returns us to the definition of the sovereign figure or sovereign power as that which does
not need law to create law. See Schmitt, Political Theology; Agamben, Homo Sacer, esp. pp. 15-21, and 27.
49 F. J. Shore, Offg. Commissioner S&NT, to Secy. Sadar Board of Revenue, Allahabad, 7 May 1836,
Home Misc. vol. 790, India Office Library (London) [hereafter, IOL], p. 422, quoted in Singha,
‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 90. The non-regulation tracts of the Bengal Presidency were Delhi
(added in 1803), the Sagar and Narmada Territories (1818), and Assam, Arakan and Tenasserim (1824).
50 G. W. Swinton, Chief Secy. GG, to Maj. J. Stewart, Offg. Res. Indore, 23 Oct. 1829, in N. K. Sinha (ed.),
Selected Records Collected From the Central Provinces and Berar Secretariat Relating to the Suppression
of Thuggee 1829-1832 (Nagpur: Government Printing Central Provinces and Berar, 1939) [hereafter, SRT],
pp. 12-13. For the ‘thug’-informers’ accounts of the attacks, and records of the recovered loot, see ibid., pp.
15-40.
51 Capt. W. Borthwick, Political Agent, Mahidpur, to Maj. J. Stewart, Offg. Res. Indore, 7 Feb. 1830,
Extract Bengal Political Consultations, 5 Mar. 1830 (enclosed in no. 46), BC, F/4/1251/50480(1), OIOC.
52 H. T. Prinsep, Secy. GG PD, to G. Swinton, Chief Secy. GG, 27 Dec. 1830, BC, F/4/1309/52131 (no. 1),
OIOC, cited in Wagner, Thuggee, p. 132.
53 G. W. Swinton, Chief Secy. GG, to F. C. Smith, AGG S&NT, 8 Oct. 1830, in SRT, p. 10.
54 For example, see J. Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India, vol. I, (London: 1823), pp. 173-4. Cf. F. C.
Smith, AGG S&NT, to G. Swinton, Chief Secy. GG, 5 July 1830, quoted in Bruce, Stranglers, p. 79.
55 F. C. Smith, AGG S&NT, to H. T. Prinsep, Secy. GG PD, 19 Nov. 1830, in SRT, p. 53.
56 Though it did not affect the ATC (owing to Smith’s intervention), in 1831, Bentinck transferred the
Sagar and Narmada Territories’ administration to the newly formed North-Western Provinces and declared
them subject to the Nizamat Adalat stationed at Allahabad in the criminal department. For Smith’s slander
of native rulers and argument that prosecuting ‘thuggee’ was a matter for the political department, see F. C.
Smith, AGG S&NT, to H. T. Prinsep, Secy. GG PD, 19 Nov. 1830, in SRT, pp. 45-55.
57 ‘Well over half’: 1,892 out of 3,437, or 55 per cent, of ‘thug’ trials took place between 1826 and 1835
(inclusive). The acquittal rate is based on the following calculation: a total of 1,892 ‘thugs’ were arrested
circa 1826-35. 134 escaped from jail or died before sentencing. Of the remaining 1,758 people, 21 were
acquitted (1.1 per cent of the total tried), with the remainder receiving anything from the death penalty to
conditional release pending the arrival of someone putting up security for them. All percentages are
rounded to one decimal place. Calculated from ‘Tabular Statement’, in Meadows Taylor, ‘State of Thuggee
in India’, p. 293.
58 Quoted in Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 122, n.159 and n.160. The TD’s expenses were
accounted to the Sagar and Narmada Territories alone until 1835.
59 ‘Doab’ refers to the land between the Ganges and Jamuna rivers. The ‘Deccan’ is a plains region in
central India.
60 See Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 111; Sleeman, Ramaseeana, Introduction, p. 56-7; Dash,
Thug, pp. 193-4. For a selection of the correspondence explaining the expansion of the ATC in the early
1830s, see F. C. Smith, AGG S&NT, to G. Swinton, Chief Secy. GG, 25 Mar. 1832; Smith to Macnaghten,
Secy. GG, 24 Apr. and 29 May 1832; and Macnaghten to G. Swinton, 25 Jun. 1832, in SRT, pp. 73-5, 80-
81, 90-91.
61 Ramaseeana was not only a retrospective justification and glorification of the work of Sleeman and
Smith in the early 1830s, nor a pre-emptive attempt to deflect criticism that had come their way from
Residents in Princely States who were alarmed at the impositions and offence caused by ‘thuggee’ arrests
in these jurisdictions, but also a manual for the apprehension of ‘thugs’ circulated to all officers connected
with the suppression campaign. See Maíre Ní Flathuín, ‘The Travels of M. de Thévenot through the Thug
archive’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, no. 1 (2001), p. 34.
62 This is Van Woerkens phrase, and a useful one, for it draws attention to the patchwork-quilt of political
dominions existent in the subcontinent (such that the terms ‘India’ and ‘Indian’ are problematic) in the
early nineteenth-century, of which ‘British colonial’/’Company Raj’ was only one, itself constituted in
three semi-autonomous fragments. Van Woerkens, Strangled Traveler, p. 47. For more on the relationship
between ‘thuggee’ and the elaboration of British paramountcy—as a ‘suprajustice’ to rule the newlyimagined
‘supranation’ of ‘India’, as van Woerkens has it—see W. H. Macnaghten, Secy. GG Pol. Dept., to
R. Cavendish, Res. Gwalior, 24 June 1832, in SRT, p. 88.
63 Sleeman, introduction to Ramaseeana, p. 49. Cf. ‘Bentinck’s minute on the defence of India’, in C. H.
Phillips (ed.), The Correspondence of … Bentinck, vol. II, pp. 846-7.
64 In particular, the need for formal legislation was a means to extend the ATC into the Bengal Presidency
to combat the newly-discovered problem of ‘river thuggee’—for which conventional proof of murder was
even harder to find than for its terrestrial equivalent. Evidence to prove murder was harder to find because
bodies were allegedly thrown overboard by ‘thugs’ operating aboard boats on the river Ganges. W. H.
Sleeman, General Superintendent of Operations for the Suppression of Thuggee in India, to W. H.
Macnaghten, Chief Secretary to the Governor General, 8 Sept. 1836, BC, F/4/1685/67998, OIOC. For
contemporary concerns about the ATC raised by members of the colonial establishment, see Extract letter
from Court of Directors, 298 Nov. 1832, no. 11, Home Dept, Thagi & Dakaiti, List 1, Cons B.2, Sl. No. 3,
1833, NAI; R. Cavendish, Res. Gwalior, to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy. GG, 17 May 1832; G. T. Lushington,
Political Agent, Bharatpur, to F. C. Smith, AGG S&NT, 13 June 1832; A. Lockett, AGG Rajputana, to W.
H. Macnaghten, Secy. GG, 23 June 1832, all in SRT, pp. 89-96.
65 The third paragraph sanctioned Company courts to punish ‘thugs’ without the fatwa of an Islamic legal
officer, thus enacting Hastings’ wishes of 1772. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk alias Bagree Decoits
(Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1849), p. 353. All anti-‘thug’ and anti-dacoit legislation passed between
1836 and 1848 can be found in ibid., p. 353-62.
66 Failing this, the provisions of Regulation VIII of 1818 could be invoked. As Sleeman pointed out to one
TD officer, just because there was insufficient evidence to commit a suspect on a charge of ‘thuggee’—be
it association with a gang, robbery, or murder—it remained TD-officials’ ‘duty’ to detain them, so long as
they were ‘morally’ satisfied of the suspect’s guilt. See Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, pp. 134-5,
n. 214. For the mooting of punishments for different ‘thug’ offences, see G. Swinton, Chief Secretary to the
Governor General, to Major J. Stewart, Officiating Resident, Indore, 23 Oct. 1829, in SRT, p. 13.
67 Ibid., p. 353. Sleeman had effectively advertised for Act XIX of 1837 in the introduction to Ramaseeana,
pp. 51-4.
68 Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, esp. pp. 134-7.
69 Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order’, esp. p. 231.
70 For example, see W. H. Sleeman, A Report on the System of Megpunnaism (Calcutta: The Serampore
Press, 1839). For the reports of TD officials relating to religious mendicants suspected of ‘thuggee’, see
Capt. Reynolds, Offg. General Superintendent [hereafter, GS], to T. H. Baber, Political Assistant Dharwar,
31 Dec. 1836, Home Dept, T&D, Dec. 1836-May 1837, NAI; W. H. Sleeman, GS Operations to Suppress
Thuggee, to Lt. Birch, 27 Dec. 1837, and Sleeman to Lt. Burrows, Asst. GS Dharwar, 17 Dec. 1837, Home
Dept, T&D, G.4, Sept. 1836-March 1838, NAI; Sleeman to Burrows, 27 March 1838, Home Dept, T&D,
Cons G.5, Sept 1836-Feb. 1836, NAI; Capt. J. Vallancy to Sleeman, 14 Oct. 1839, and Sleeman to T. H.
Maddock, Secy. PD, 26 Nov. 1839, Foreign Pol., 22 Jan. 1840, no. 78, NAI; Offg. Secy., Government of
India, to Sleeman, 17 Jan. 1839, Home Dept, 1839, Thagi and Dakaiti, Cons B.2, no. 16, NAI, cited in
Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances’, p. 139, n. 224-227, and p. 142, n. 242. See also van Woerkens,
Strangled Traveler, pp. 101-4.
71 J. R. Lumley to Magt. Ahmednuggur, Dec. 1837, ‘Letters from the Assistant General Superintendent at
Shorapur to the General Superintendent and others between October 1836 and December 1837’, I1, fo. 261,
NAI, quoted in Van Woerkens, Strangled Traveler, p. 102.
72 J. R. Lumley to Magt. Ahmednuggur, Dec. 1837, ‘Letters from the Assistant General Superintendent at
Shorapur to the General Superintendent and others between October 1836 and December 1837’, I1, fos
262-263, NAI, quoted in ibid., 101-2.
73 W. H. Sleeman, GS Operations to Suppress Thuggee, to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy. GG, 3 Feb. 1838,
Thagi & Dakaiti, G5, fo. 107, NAI; Sleeman to Lieut. Reynolds, Hyderabad, 6 Apr. 1838, G5, fo. 112,
NAI, quoted in ibid., p. 102.
74 Sleeman, Report on the System of Megpunnaism, p. 9. ‘Datura poisoners’, as they were widely called,
had fallen under colonial suspicion since Perry’s encounters with ‘thuggee’ circa 1808-15.
75 Ibid., p. 11.
76 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 183-4.
77 Cf. ibid., pp. 183-4.
78 F. C. Smith, AGG S&NT, to H. T. Prinsep, Secy. GG Pol. Dept., 19 Nov. 1830, in SRT, p. 50.
79 The figuring of ‘thugs’ as ‘inhuman’ was in fact one of many culturally-contingent representations of
their Otherness, which elsewhere pinpointed their alleged religious subculture (as members of a Kali-cult
who sacrificed travellers to the goddess), ascribed them as wanderers (who preyed on mainstream society),
and alleged their ‘caste-like’ formation into a fraternity of hereditary criminals’ whose ‘trade’ was robbery
and murder as registers of their difference, and justifications for their suppression. For a more sustained
exploration of these representations, see Tom Lloyd, ‘Acting in the “Theatre of Anarchy”: The Anti-Thug
Campaign and Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Edinburgh Papers in
South Asian Studies, no. 19 (2006).
80 Sleeman, Report on Budhuk alias Bagree Decoits, p. 357.
81 Cf. B. Neeladri, ‘Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern
India’, in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Society and
Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750-1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black,
2003), pp. 193, 195; and C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars in North Indian Society in the Age of
British Expansion 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 219.
82 For further reflection on the growth of ‘the exception’, or at any rate the expansion of British legislative
intervention to control ‘marginal’ and typically criminalized groups of the ‘subject’ population, I direct the
reader to the following, excellent body of academic literature on the infamous Criminal Tribes legislation
(beginning in 1871): Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals by birth”, Part 1: The Making
of a Colonial Stereotype – the Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (1990), pp. 131-64; Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals
by birth”, Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871-1900’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (1990), pp. 257-287; Andrew J. Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes in
Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the ‘Dangerous Classes’, Modern Asian Studies,
vol. 33, no. 3 (1999), pp. 657-88; Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ and
British Colonial Policy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001); and Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against
State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
83 [My italics.] Talal Asad, ‘What Are the Margins of the State?’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.),
Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), p. 281-2.



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