Newgate Novels, Confessions of a Thug and the Narrative of Oriental Criminality

Abstract

In this paper, the author compares the novel Confessions of a Thug (1839), written by a colonial official named Philip Meadows Taylor, with Newgate novels in general and the novel Jack Sheppard (1839) by William Harrison Ainsworth in particular. During the first half of the nineteenth century, two English colonial administrators named Philip Meadows Taylor and Colonel William Henry Sleeman published two works named Confessions of a Thug (1839) and Ramaseeana (1836). These two works popularised the notion that a religiously motivated murderous cult named 'thugs' operated on the roads of India, and they strangled and looted the unfortunate travelers. However, studies by Postcolonial scholars such as Kim A Wagner (2004), Aijaz Ahmed (1991), Maire Ni Fhlathuin (2001), and Amal Chatterjee (1998) questioned the veracity of the phenomenon of 'thuggee' and especially its supposed religious foundation. Ajay Dandekar (2014) notably considered thuggee and its religious associations to be a fictional creation of Sleeman and Taylor that led to the Inhuman Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. In this paper, the author analyzes the contradictions within the narrative of Confessions of a Thug and proves how the novel’s similarity with Newgate novels effectively negates the colonial narrative that portrays criminality and lawlessness as something unique to Asian and African nations. This paper also clarifies that the different critical receptions of Confessions of a Thug and Jack Sheppard, despite similar themes, effectively illustrate the argument of Edward Said that no knowledge is non-political.