Thuggee: an orientalist construction?

Abstract

This article surveys the historiography of thuggee, the system of mass murder supposedly discovered by the British in India in the nineteenth century. In particular, it asks how far the thuggee archive, created by William Sleeman, the British official mainly concerned, can be considered reliable, and how far it should be seen as an orientalist construct. At the same time the article looks briefly at the way thuggee appears from time to time in western literature and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a significant image representing oriental (Indian) backwardness and barbarity.