Murder, he wrote and wrote

Confessions of a Thug offers few aesthetic rewards to readers drawn to stylistic beauty or formal innovation. First published in 1839, Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel appeals (or fails to) solely on the basis of its content, which consists of an ethnographic account of Thuggee (derived from the Hindi for “deceiver”) – a religious sect of highwaymen in nineteenth-century India who strangled their victims and buried them in shallow roadside graves (bhils). Disguised as soldiers or vulnerable fellow travellers seeking safety in numbers, Thugs identified targets (bunij) in towns and caravanserais along a route that they had determined through the consultation of omens. They then lured these victims into accompanying them on their onward journey, plundering and murdering them in remote spots where their bodies were unlikely to be discovered.

Confessions is part madcap picaresque, part Bildungsroman, part Dickensian parentage plot (there are traces of Oliver Twist in the orphaned Ameer Ali and his Fagin-esque adoptive father), part gruesome true-crime thriller, part patriarchal romance and part proto-naturalist battle between fate and free will. It is not, however, a conventional literary confession à la Augustine or De Quincey. Remorse is not high on its agenda; its protagonist regrets, albeit profoundly, just one of the hundreds of murders he has committed over the years (that of his sister, whom he does not recognize as such until long after he has garrotted her); and, while he acknowledges discrete instances of sacrilege toward the Thuggee goddess Bhowanee, he considers himself for the most part her loyal votary.

The book enjoyed tremendous popularity in its own time, quickly becoming a bestseller. The freshly crowned Queen Victoria was a fan, and it’s not hard to fathom why it was received with such enthusiasm by the British public. Just a couple of decades earlier its government had consolidated dominance over a far-flung Asian subcontinent that was inhabited, in the metropole’s prevalent cultural imaginary, by uncivilized savages. Confessions satisfied a mainstream appetite for tales from the lawless edges of empire, where safety and moral decency were seen to depend on Britain’s edifying intervention. Indeed, Taylor based his protagonist’s point of view almost entirely on the testimony of Indian informants subjected to interrogation while in British custody – specifically that of the real Ameer Ali, recorded by William Henry Sleeman in 1832. This results in a precision, specificity and ostensible transparency that presumably struck contemporary readers as “authentic”, despite being grounded in primary sources that were the product of coercion (and possibly torture).

Taylor was born in Liverpool in 1808 and moved to Bombay at the age of sixteen, working briefly for an East India Company merchant before relocating to Hyderabad. He spent his career there as an imperial administrator. He remained in India – barring furloughs – until his early fifties, when he retired back to England. While he married into elite Anglo-Indian society, he is said to have socialized widely beyond it, becoming familiar with the local languages and cultures of the Deccan plateau. He parlayed this knowledge and experience into several other orientalist novels, in addition to Confessions of a Thug, and his memoirs were published posthumously in 1877. Confessions was reissued in the wake of the rebellion of 1857 as a means of contextualizing the widespread revolt against the East India Company that directly preceded the establishment of the centralized Raj (though Thuggee is not understood to have played a meaningful role in the unrest). But it thereafter fell into obscurity, and Taylor remains to this day less well known than authors of orientalist fictions such as E. M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling, whose work the cover blurb of the Oxford World’s Classics edition cites as comparable. Confessions is enjoying this reboot for the twenty-first century, according to the introduction by the historian Kim A. Wagner, in order to show how “the relative weakness of colonial rule” was “resolved … through a literary re-imagining of surveillance – a reassuring fantasy of colonial knowledge that combined … rationality … with the intimacy of personal experience”.

Yet even as the novel is enabled by, and seeks to defend, imperial systems of intelligence-gathering and criminal justice, it is curiously reluctant to indulge in narrative omniscience. It unfolds, rather, as an extended oration by the imprisoned Ameer. His monologue – occasionally interrupted by a question or reproach from his interlocutor, Sahib (a thinly veiled proxy for Taylor) – accommodates internal dialogue or stories within stories, but the novel’s voice and perspective are predominantly first-person. Ameer is the protégé of a famous Thug captain who killed his parents and took him under his wing when he was a small child. Trained from adolescence to become a bhuttote, or executioner, he becomes renowned for his skill with the rumāl – a traditional Sikh handkerchief fashioned into a noose – and leads countless expeditions before being seized by the Europeans.

At more than 500 pages, though, Ameer’s account of his exploits becomes redundant and tedious. At a certain point even serial killing loses its thrill factor when recounted ad nauseam in exhaustive detail, with little variation in tone or idiosyncrasy of manner. In the end the relentless “I” becomes the perspectival equivalent of the cell to which Ameer is confined: narrow and claustrophobic, unrelieved by the aerations of free indirect discourse or lyricism.

Elizabeth Brogden is a writer and editor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts

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