Have you watched the movie , “Indiana Jones and the  Temple of Doom” or the

movie “Gunga Din” (In 19th century India, three British soldiers and a native water

bearer must stop a secret mass revival of the murderous Thuggee cult before it

can rampage across the land.

Those stories are based on  the alleged history of the Hindu goddess Kali

worshiping “Thugee cult” of Bengal. The English word “Thug” derives from this.

alleged “history”. You can google for this and get plenty of stories, almost always

written by non Indians and non Hindus in particular. To summarize,  supposedly

there  was a roving band of bandits who went about murdering, and committing

the most heinous crimes of slitting the throats of  passerby and tourists  and

robbing them. They were all allegedly  dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Kali who

loved blood and human sacrifice.  The embellishment of this legend took a shape

of its own during the Victorian England and it has kind of carried forward today by

some idiots. There are “documented” cases of these stories by English soldiers

and officers.

It went something like this.

For the members of Thuggee, murder was both a way of life and a religious duty.

They believed their killings were a means of worshiping the Hindu goddess Kali,

who was honored at each stage of the murder by a vast and complex system of

rituals and superstitions. Thugs were guided to their victims by omens observed

in nature, and once the deed was done, the graves and bodies were prepared

according to strict ceremonies. A sacrificial rite would be conducted after the

burial involving the consecration of sugar and of the sacred pickax, the tool the

brotherhood believed was given to them by Kali to dig the graves of their prey.

Thugs were certainly not above robbing their victims, but traditionally a portion of

the spoils would be set aside for the goddess.

Is there any truth to this “Thugee” culture of India? How much of this really

happened and how much of this is made up? And what was the motive for the

English to make up such a bizarre story?

No one can prove that there were no gangs that roamed the streets to rob

people.. India is a large country and I am sure like anywhere else there were

robbers. IT would be impossible to prove there were no robbers. But this idea of

linking this to the Hindu religion and the Hindu Goddess is what makes me sit up

and take notice that its all made up and a lie. Especially the English had an

ulterior motive to make this shit up

With these lines, the British officer, Captain James Paton, introduced the

interviews he conducted with captured ‘Thugs’ at Lucknow in northern India in

1836, emphasising the spontaneity of the exchange and authenticity of the

responses. The British believed the ‘Thugs’ to be a sect of prolific murderers who

operated in secret along the highways of the subcontinent, guided by a deadly

devotion to Hindu goddess-worship. Ostensibly, the purpose of Paton’s

conversations was merely to demonstrate the ‘diabolical nature’ of the practice of

‘Thuggee’ and of the ‘Thugs’ themselves. Such revelations, however, implicitly

provided justification for British rule in India, and the ability of colonial officers to

penetrate the secrets of the Indian underworld was regarded as the finest

validation of their complete knowledge of the land. From the 1830s onwards,

colonial rule in India was in fact precipitated upon the gathering of information

about its peoples and customs.3 For John Kaye, the in-house historian of the East

India Company, the discovery and suppression of ‘Thuggee’ thus constituted

indisputable proof that British rule in India had progressed from the non-

intervention policies of a disinterested armchair administration:  Approvers and

the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in nineteenth-century India1 Kim A.

Wagner, Queen Mary, University of London (k.wagner@qmul.ac.uk)

Prof. Kim A.Wagner in his  book “Thuggee,  Banditry and the British in Early

Nineteenth-Century India”  punches the holes to a large extend to this myth of the

Thugee.

One of the  main witness to this alleged “Thuggee cult” is  a Muslim man by the

name Ameer Ali who “confesses” to the British officers.  The Idea of Muslims

worshiping  the Hindu Goddess  Kali is as real as a $3 bill. It may have gotten

traction during the British Raj along with the stories of one Mrs. Mortimer who

made up such stories to scare British children of the 18th century even though

Mrs Mortimer never visited India.

Wagner continues.. “The tale of crime which forms the subject of the following

pages is alas! almost all true; what there is of fiction has been supplied only to

connect the events, and make the adventures of Ameer Ali as interesting as the

nature of his horrible profession would permit me. I became acquainted with this

person in 1832. He was one of the approvers or informers who were sent to the

Nizam’s territories from Saugor, and whose appalling disclosures caused an

excitement in the country which can never be forgotten.13 The historical Ameer

Alee had actually been captured and taken on as an approver by the famous

officer, William Henry Sleeman, who was in charge of the operations at Sagar

that had been established in 1829.14 In the absence of circumstantial evidence,

the colonial authorities relied extensively on captured ‘Thugs’ who were willing to

provide information and testify against their accomplices in return for a pardon. In

order to be granted a pardon and accepted as a ‘king’s evidence’ according to

Regulation VI of 1796, the approver had first to make a full confession, which

implicated himself in the crimes of which he had been accused.15 In subsequent

depositions, the approvers would then denounce accomplices and later identify

those individuals who were put on trial.16 Special legislation had been introduced

to put an end to what was perceived as an unprecedented threat to colonial

authority, and several thousand suspects were tried as ‘Thugs’ and either hanged

or imprisoned on the basis of approver testimonies.17 The information derived

from the approvers thus constituted the very backbone of colonial knowledge of

‘Thuggee’.  – Prof., Kim Wanger 

In the movie “Gunga Din”, most astute observers would notice the patriotic

speech of the main villain before he jumps into a pit of snakes and “dies for HIS

country”. During the British Raj there were many resisters who didn’t care for the

white trash British rule and violently resisted, which of course pissed off the

tyrants . And benefited them to tell  such stories to rationalize, to their homies

back home, about their rule in India.

Prof., Kim Wanger says the following

“British knowledge of the ‘Thugs’ was deeply entangled in the imperial project

and characterised by the need to assert the authority and legitimise the

expansion of the burgeoning colonial state of the East India Company. Invariably

coloured by Orientalist tropes and stereotypes, the primary sources relating to

‘Thuggee’ are accordingly extremely dubious and the very existence of a social

practice resembling that described by the British has been called into question by

later historians. 6 Even when British officers like Paton recorded their

conversations with ‘Thug’ informers, or approvers as they were called, the

suspicion is still that the informants were merely responding to the questions and

expectations of the colonial interlocutor. Rather than being untainted records of

‘truth’, these conversations elicited specific information that could easily be made

to conform to the official narrative of ‘Thuggee’.7 An inquiry into the subject of

‘Thuggee’ is thus largely defined by the very procedures and institutions that

produced such knowledge. Given the nature of the evidence, is it at all possible to

examine the subject without, in one way or the other, simply reiterating the

judgment of the colonial authorities?“