Crime, Thuggee

Abstract

Abstract “ Thuggee ” refers to bands of criminals who were said to have moved about India's highways in the precolonial and colonial eras. According to colonial histories, these highway brigands were reputed to perform highly ritualized depredations on lonely travelers, including strangulation and body mutilation, in the service of a patron goddess. In the early nineteenth century, the British administration identified thuggee as a problematic social grouping and carried out campaigns to extirpate this perceived threat, resulting in anti‐thuggee legislation that criminalized entire social groupings. In the past two decades, historians have complicated colonial narratives by seeking information beyond the colonial archive, and historicizing the circumstances within which social solidarities took to migratory labor or highway brigandage. Though the origins of the phenomenon of thuggee are opaque, new readings offer alternative contemplations of its epistemological terrain, as loci of power at the periphery of the colonial infrastructure, or sites of political contestation.