The Phenomenon of Thuggee and Colonial Knowledge Production: The Journey of an Inconsistent, Overlapping Colonial Project on Indigenous Criminality in Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract

Thuggee remains one of the most contested subjects in the historiography of nineteenth-century colonial India. British colonial administrators sought to construct a quasi-historical lineage for Thuggee, drawing on history, mythology, genealogy, and ethnology to establish its existence as a pre-colonial phenomenon. This search for antiquity was central to colonial knowledge production on Indian criminality, whose principal aim was to fabricate the image of a blood-thirsty, hereditary criminal fraternity. This project, however, never rested on accurate information about India's political and socio-economic realities; the resulting knowledge was muddled, inconsistent, and overlapping, yet it deliberately preserved an exotic, mysterious, and menacing portrait of Thuggee. That portrait was strategically useful: ‘Thuggee phobia’ helped legitimise colonial rule. This paper argues that despite — or rather because of — its evidentiary failures, colonial knowledge production on Thuggee succeeded precisely where it mattered most to the colonial state: in securing its own political interest.