Thuggee, marginality and the state effect in colonial India, circa 1770–1840

Abstract

This essay explores the way that the ‘effect’ of a colonial state was achieved in India in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It does so by scrutinizing the East India Company's initiatives against what political, military and judicial officers termed ‘extraordinary’ crime; beginning with Warren Hastings’ attempts to tackle dacoity in late eighteenth-century Bengal and culminating with William Sleeman's notorious campaign to suppress ‘thuggee’ in the early-mid nineteenth-century, this essay surveys similarly extraordinary initiatives that were at first experimented with but gradually normalised in the course of British pursuit of bandits. An engagement with the recent work of Giorgio Agamben underpins the attempt to offer significant revisions to both the extant historiography on ‘thuggee’ and, more broadly, the idea of such a coherent, free-standing entity as the ‘colonial state’—as an abstracted force directing India social, economic, cultural and political life. Intrinsic to this attempt is the problematization of the elaboration and operation of government sovereignty in early colonial India.