Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug. (2025)

Author(s): Kevin Frank

1. Sensual Repulsion

In ‘The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual’, Richard Vanderbeets asserts, ‘All CIVILIZED PEOPLES have recognised the value of tempering their joys with a play or story chronicling the misfortunes and tragedies of others’ (Vanderbeets 1972, p. 548). Here, the ‘civilised’ are Europeans expanding westward in the American colonies, who found a propagandistic efficacy in reporting on the misadventures of colonists taken captive by ‘uncivilised’ natives, with accompanying, petrifying details of their savagery, including scalping and cannibalism. When Vanderbeets refashions this essay, he is explicit about these narratives being ‘vehicles for anti-Indian propaganda’ (Vanderbeets [1972] 1999, p. 133). Though by ‘Indian’ Vanderbeets means Indigenous Americans, his prompt is equally applicable to natives of India depicted in Philip Meadows Taylor’s colonial crime novel, Confessions of a Thug. Joe Grixti contends that horror fiction offers readers a safe space for testing their intellectual and psychological fortitude by confronting their fears (Grixti 1982, pp. 245–46). His focus is adolescent horror, but the same is true for adult crime fiction such as Confessions of a Thug, which includes aspects of the horrific. Illustrating the symbiotic relationship between the press and the Victorian public’s perceptions of crime, Christopher Casey notes, ‘A survey of a nineteenth-century book index shows that between 1820 and 1870, the number of books printed in England with the word “murder” in the title averaged thirty-three per year—not including those books with even slightly more creative titles or those missing altogether from the index’. He adds, ‘Thousands of articles in hundreds of periodicals covered crime, violence, and murder, and circulated like the plague’ (Casey 2011, p. 375).1 This preoccupation with criminal violence, including slaughter, suggests that the English also found it serviceable to mollify their delight with a modicum of misfortune about others, in this case, including those like themselves as well as colonised Others.

The violent crime obsession Casey describes seems contiguous with what Susan Oliver identifies as the influence of Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, ‘a macabre dialogue about genre and literary affect in the 19th century periodical press’, with resonance in novel literary genres, including but not limited to the sensational (Oliver 2013, p. 44). While neither Casey nor Oliver engages with the colonial imagination, their accounts of nineteenth-century domestic English fixation with lurid crime underscore my exposition of the connections between the imperial gaze and catharsis on offer from Confessions of a Thug. After all, that gaze emanates from within the mother country, where the majority of the novel’s readers, those with the potential for catharsis, reside. An equally significant contemporary source of British fixation with violence is, arguably, Romantic ideology, including fallout from the French Revolution’s unchecked passion and terror. Alex Tickell sees Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful as a key text ‘in which British colonial identity is figured in something approaching a terror-aesthetics’ (Tickell 2011). Specifically on the sublime, Burke proclaims, Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful’. (Burke 1757, pp. 13–14) Undoubtedly, Burke’s understanding of proximity to peril or pain being unable to offer pleasure predates Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s introduction of sadism and masochism into the lexicon. However, his sense of the capacity of distant hazard or distress to induce ecstasy is consistent with joy negotiated through the agony of others or Others, as indicated above, the latter in particular making his reasoning on the sublime transferable to India.

Sara Suleri rightly exposes Burke as devising a vision of India so complex that ‘the Indian sublime becomes indistinguishable from the intimacy of colonial terror’ (Suleri 1992, p. 28). That is, when Burke paradoxically classifies India as unclassifiable, ‘All this vast mass, composed of so many orders, and classes again infinitely diversified by manners, by religion, by hereditary employment, through all their possible combinations’ (Burke 1901, p. 446), he renders its immense lands and distinctive peoples as incomprehensible to the colonial imagination: awesome, but also awful, and therefore capable of inducing anxiety akin to terror. My analysis of Confessions of a Thug is situated precisely in this context of Victorian imaginations saturated with stories of crime and punishment and influenced by Romantic horror and terror aesthetics involving the sublime. Robert Miles’ summary of the distinction between terror and horror stemming from figures like Burke and Ann Radcliffe is useful here, given the symbiosis of terror and horror in readers’ experiences: ‘Radcliffe begins with what it is that induces horror or terror in the viewer, where terror forms the basis of the sublime. An explicit representation of threat induces horror, whereas terror depends on obscurity. The difference turns on materiality. Terror is an affair of the mind, of the imagination; when the threat takes a concrete shape, it induces horror, or disgust’ (Miles 2012, p. 93). For readers, fear caused by fictive jeopardy results in dread and repulsion that operate sensually because they are vicarious, at a distance, and in the safety of a governed reading environment.

Published in 1839 and reissued in 1873, Confessions of a Thug is mainly a record of the protagonist Ameer Ali’s admission of ritualistic crimes involving deception, theft, and gruesome murder committed by himself and his fellow Thugs in India. Part of the novel’s horror, and part of its tragedy, is that Ali is himself a victim of Thuggee. At around the age of five, his own family (except his sister, who is not on the journey) is murdered by a band of Thugs, but he is spared, abducted, and adopted by their childless leader, Ismail. Indoctrinated into the Thuggee life, Ali becomes a supreme Thug with a tremendous record of related exploits. However, his vanity eventually leads to his capture by British colonisers, to whom he confesses his horrifying crimes, including the utmost calamity of unwittingly killing his sister. In fact, the horror of the first exhibition of Thuggee crime is enhanced by Ali’s devastation from the gruesomeness he witnesses when his relatives are slain: ‘The first objects which met my eyes were the bodies of my father and mother, with those of Chumpa and the palankeen-bearers, all lying confusedly on the ground. I cannot remember what my feelings were, but they must have been horrible. I only recollect throwing myself on my dead mother, whose face appeared dreadfully distorted, and again relapsing into insensibility’ (Taylor [1839] 1998, p. 21).2 At a pause in the criminal revelations, the framing English interlocutor comments on Ali’s impenitence: ‘Reader, these thoughts were passing in my mind, when at last I cried aloud, “Pshaw! ‘tis vain to attempt to account for it, but Thuggee seems to be the offspring of fatalism and superstition, cherished and perfected by the wildest excitement that ever urged human beings to deeds at which humanity shudders”’ (p. 264).3 When the servant fanning him interrupts, ‘Did the Sahib call?’ he replies, ‘Bid some one bring me a chillum. My nerves require to be composed’ (p. 264). In what follows, I will first delineate how realism is foregrounded in Taylor’s Confessions, appended to its intrinsic romanticism,4 in order to examine the following: first, if a man of his experience is so rattled by Ali’s apparent amorality, to the point that his nerves need composing, what are the psychological implications for readers back home in Britain? Second, how does this narrative of sensational lawlessness from colonised lands and people function for the colonising nation? In other words, what does the romantic-realism underlying the imperial gaze upon rampant criminality in Confessions of a Thug allow the gazers to realise and to restore about themselves? I argue the novel exhibits lawlessness and attendant horror through which Victorian readers could moderate both their joys and fears, as well as justify their colonial activities.

2. Romantic-Realism inConfessions

Drawing from periodical commentaries, Mary Poovey determines that ‘English readers viewed Confessions of a Thug as a relatively truthful account’ (Poovey 2004, p. 4), which implies they found it generally realistic. However, an anonymous early book review in The Spectator suggests it straddles both realism and romanticism, by which I mean a coalescence of beliefs concerning romance and Romanticism.5 I am broadly in agreement with Northrop Frye that these terms are correlative, pointing to creative inclinations, and should not be viewed as vivid, precise adjectives (Frye [1957] 2020, p. 49). This means neither ‘romantic’ nor ‘realistic’ signifies inflexible, exact meanings in fiction, because works are ‘romantic’ or ‘realistic’ in comparison to and in contrast with their forerunners and offshoots. In the early review in The Spectator, speaking of Taylor, the unnamed critic opines, ‘We suspect that he has made a selection of the most striking confessions of the approvers, and animated them by dramatic action and discourse, derived in part perhaps from the viva voce narratives of the original actors; but that many of the incidents descriptive of Indian character, life, and manners, though drawn from reality, have no relation to the actual life of Ameer Ali’ (Anonymous 1839, p. 805). Contrarily, the unidentified writer of the same article declares, ‘The main story, however, has a general consistency, springing from truth; or Captain Taylor has a higher degree of structural art than we are inclined to give him credit for; the incidents being well connected, and the punishments of the Thug the consequences of his Thuggee’ (Anonymous 1839, p. 805). Another reviewer intimates that readers who carelessly skimmed the text ‘probably supposed it a romance, superinduced on a slender substratum of reality’, concluding it is ‘in sooth, in almost every incident of its fiendish narrative, “an ower true tale”’ (Holme 1841, p. 229).6 ‘Ower’ here seems to be the Scottish for over, as in above all, the translation, in effect, that Taylor offers a largely imaginative account. Among other considerations, reading a convergence of romanticism and realism in the novel makes sense in light of Padma Rangarajan’s observation that ‘fiction in the nineteenth century was considered a crucial if unstable interlocutor between unimaginable foreign mythoi and the modern domestic real’ (Rangarajan 2017, p. 1005). Borrowing from Jan-Melissa Schramm, she posits further, ‘As novels looked increasingly to the courts for narrative and formal inspiration, they increasingly incorporated testimony, self-analysis, and evidence into literature as models of reality’ (p. 1014). Despite these recognitions of the ‘real’ informing the work, she deduces that Taylor’s ‘turn to fiction befits his subsequent characterisation of the colonial association between Britain and India as a ‘“strange romance”’ (p. 1015). Romance is also a signal lens through which Tickell reads the novel: ‘The main strand in this interwoven literary discourse is the romance, which had an inherent formal affinity with mythical and fabular aspects of South-Asian narrative culture’ (Tickell 2011). I say romance is a (not ‘the’) main strand of the novel’s discourse, for realism is an equivalent discursive component.

Mary Rogers’ notion that invented literary rhetoric ‘comprises all those artifices making fictional worlds and characters plausible, on the one hand, and entertaining or stimulating on the other … moves, both intended and unintended, a novelist makes in strategic interaction or teamwork with readers’ (Rogers 1991, p. 196), is applicable to various articulations in Confessions of a Thug. Taylor introduces the story, declaring, ‘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’ (p. 5). Thus, from the outset, the author refers to one of realism’s ideals, truth. In what may be taken as both a downplaying of associations with gothic romance and an ironic distancing from his indulgence of readers’ relish for the macabre given existing ideals of propriety and restraint, he insists, The confessions I have recorded are not published to gratify the morbid taste in any one for tales of horror and of crime; they were written to expose, as fully as I was able, the practices of the Thugs, and to make the public of England more conversant with the subject than they can be at present, notwithstanding that some notice has been attracted to the subject by an able article in the Edinburgh Review upon Colonel Sleeman’s valuable and interesting work. (pp. 12–13) A fair amount of excellent scholarship exists on the influence of William H. Sleeman’s Ramaseeana (1836) upon Taylor’s Confessions, and I will forego summarising it here.7 Tickell considers this downplaying of satisfying appetites for the macabre objectionable, because of the violence’s potential to afford ‘a prurient “pleasurable” incitement to the reader’ (Tickell 2011). Rather than providing gratifying stimulus, do the novel’s images of ritual brutality instead impart terror, horror, dread, and abhorrence consistent with fear of the unfamiliar assailant, or the Other? Also consistent with our purpose is Taylor’s end to his introduction: I hope, however, that the form of the present work may be found more attractive and more generally interesting than an account of the superstitions and customs only of the Thugs; while for the accuracy of the pictures of the manners and habits of the natives, and the descriptions of places and scenes, I can only pledge the experience of fifteen years’ residence in India, and a constant and intimate association with its inhabitants. (p. 13) In other words, his intimacy with India is meant to shore up the appearance of narrative truth. As Rangarajan explains, in both his attempted de-emphasis regarding satiating ghoulish urges and his explanation of selecting fiction as his mode of content, Taylor engages a conventional cliché of orientalist writings wherein ‘fiction provides credibility, or at least readability, to the realities of the East’ (Rangarajan 2017, p. 1006). Associated with these notions of credibility and realities, Frye explains, ‘As the modes of fiction move from the mythical to the low mimetic and ironic, they approach a point of extreme “realism” or representative likeness to life’ (Frye [1957] 2020, p. 134). This likeness to life is commonly understood as verisimilitude in the realist context. Or, as Frye puts it, ‘Realism, or the art of verisimilitude, evokes the response “How like that is to what we know!”’ (p. 136). Specifically, the novel’s fiction mode depends upon what is depicted according with what its audience is acquainted, or presumes to be familiar with.

Narrative realism is further inscribed early in Confessions of a Thug when, apparently conscious of the potential for doubt, Ameer Ali declares: It will strike you perhaps as strange, Sahib, that I should remember so many particulars of the event I have described; but when I was imprisoned some years ago at Dehlie [sic], I used to endeavour, in my solitude, to recollect and arrange the past adventures of my life, one circumstance led me to the remembrance of another—for in solitude, if the mind seeks the occupation, it readily takes up the clue to past events, however distant, and thought brings them one by one before the imagination, as vividly fresh as the occurrence of yesterday—and from an old Thug’s adventures, which I heard during that imprisonment, I found my memory to serve me well. (p. 24) Though the reference to so many particulars connects to the ideal of details in realism, conversely, the simultaneous and second invocation of adventures (see also the quote above from p. 5) and the allusion to the imagination’s power connects his account to romanticism, both the chivalric romance tradition and late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Romanticism. When Walter Scott takes Samuel Johnson to task for defining romance as principally ‘“a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry”’, he concludes, ‘The “wild adventures” are almost the only absolutely essential ingredient’ (Scott 1887, p. 65). Supritha Rajan insightfully sees in this moment Scott’s definition of the realist novel through its opposition to romance, with its concentration on ‘“the ordinary train of human events”’. Thus, she concludes, ‘Then realism reveals something essential about our everyday ontological and epistemic orientation toward the world’ (Rajan 2017, p. 68). I contend that, as extraordinary and exotic as Ali’s adventurous narrative may appear—albeit ‘perverse adventure’ (Brantlinger 1988, p. 88)—the ritualistic nature in the repetition of a more or less similar sequence of events, leading to readers being audience to horror-inducing murder, makes such criminality appear to be quotidian among the colonised territory and people of India. Regarding such repetition in horror fiction, Grixti elucidates, ‘The tales themselves and the values they embody are also responsible for the process of conditioning involved: their very repetitiveness, which in its predictability can be reassuring, helps to create expectations which can be reinforced in variously loaded ways’. He rounds off: One need only think of the phenomenal success of a nauseating exercise like The Exorcist in this relation. The whole structure of that film can be seen as designed to progressively overwhelm the audience with superstition and a conviction of its helplessness, only to resolve the tension it generated by resorting to an unconvincing (an essentially superstitious) rendering of what the dedication to The Story Behind the Exorcist terms “the feeling that everything would finally be alright”. (Grixti 1982, p. 250) His assessment of the emotional release and restoration offered is analogous to my position about the cathartic feeling accessible to readers at the end of Taylor’s novel after their inundation and impotence in the face of serial Thuggee crime.

Tickell convincingly explicates certain romantic remodellings, reasoning, ‘The gothic led contemporary writers into new explorations of narrative interiority that exploited psychological effects and explored themes of personal guilt, exile and social dispossession’ (Tickell 2011). Of course, the concern with characters’ psychological drives, including but not limited to individual remorse, connects immediately to realism’s interest in a protagonist’s consciousness and conscience both. But a ready way of understanding the link between Ameer Ali’s consciousness and debate regarding the Romantic power of the imagination is through Wordsworth’s The Prelude, wherein the speaker alludes to the sublime with his mind overwhelmed by the majesty of nature in the form of the Alps: Imagination! Lifting up itselfBefore the eye and progress of my SongLike an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,In all the might of its endowments, cameAthwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,Halted, without a struggle to break through.And now recovering, to my Soul I sayI recognise thy glory; in such strengthOf usurpation, in such visitingsOf awful promise, when the light of senseGoes out in flashes that have shewn to usThe invisible world. (Wordsworth [1805] 1970, Book VI., lines 525–36) The limits of the imagination in confronting the magnitude of nature and the invocation of the Romantic sublime through nature are observable when Ali depicts his first time viewing the sea: I need not attempt to describe it, for you have sailed over it; but when I saw it first, methought I could have fallen down and worshipped it, it appeared so illimitable, its edge touching as it were the heavens, and spread out into an expanse which the utmost stretch of my imagination could not compass, a fit type, I thought, of the God of all people, whom every one thinks on, while the hoarse roar of the waves as they rolled on, mountain after mountain, and broke in angry fury against the shore, seemed to be a voice of Omnipotence which could not fail to awaken emotions of awe and dread in the most callous and unobservant! (p. 163). That the sea appears infinite to him, so much so that his mind can not comprehend it, and the pathetic fallacy in ascribing wrath to the waves which induce wonder and fear, all point to an overwhelming, soul-stirring encounter with nature. Moments like this give Tickell cause for seeing an entanglement of literary genres in the work. However, in referring to various strains informing the ‘complexity of “romance”’, while acknowledging the chivalric involving quest, adventure and the supernatural as well as the gothic coinciding uncomfortably ‘with the rise of realism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction’ (Tickell 2011), he misses the equally important, convergent influence of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its extolling of nature as a source of grandeur, among other things. This oversight seems consistent with Brantlinger’s observation that Confessions of a Thug is among the works which ‘standard histories of the Romantic movement either ignore’ or regard ‘as examples of literary exoticism’ (Brantlinger 1988, p. 24). In short, the Thug’s account operates as a hybrid narrative dependent on ideals of both romanticism and realism, hence my designation of it as romantic-realism.

The combination persists as Ameer Ali indicates his story merges mostly facts with some slight inventions of his imagination: ‘I was in possession of the whole of the facts, as I have related them to you, and I have only perhaps supplied the minor parts from my own mind’ (p. 24). In general, when Ali describes the landscape settings of his adventures as a Thug, he depicts minute details in the vein of a realistic painter: The banks of the rivulet were perhaps two or three yards high, and the bed was so narrow that but two persons could advance abreast. The creepers and trees were matted overhead, and the sides so thick that it was impossible that any one could have got down from above. The tangled character of the spot increased as we proceeded, until it became necessary to free our clothes from the thorns which caught us at every step. In a few moments we heard the sound of voices, and after creeping almost on all fours through a hole which had apparently been forced through the underwood, we came upon the grave. (p. 85) The measurement of the rivulet’s banks, the outline of the limited width of its bed, the density of the surrounding flora, and so on portray an elaborate, comprehensive scene. His account of exotic Thug attire also emphasises minuscule elements: Each of us had given a knowing cock to his turban; and mine, of the richest gold tissue, passing several times under my chin, set off my face, by giving me a particularly martial appearance. My arms were of the richest description; a sword with a hilt inlaid with gold, its scabbard covered with crimson velvet, with the ferrule to it of silver, of an open pattern, which covered nearly half of it. In my girdle, which was a cashmere shawl, were a pesh-kubs or knife, with an agate handle, inlaid also with gold, and a small jumbea or Arab dagger, also slightly ornamented with gold and silver. (p. 102) The turbans’ tilt, the superlative regarding the gold tissue, and the inlays of the weapons’ handles are bits of information serving the ideal of depicting as accurately as possible. The prominence of descriptive exactitude associated with realism is further conjured when, at one point, Ali asks, ‘But perhaps, Sahib, you are tired of my minuteness in describing all my interviews with the Moghulanee?’, and the English attender replies, ‘No, said I, Ameer Ali; I suppose you have some object in it, therefore go on’ (p. 314). Of course, these landscape and apparel details are concurrently connected to an aspect of colonial engagement with Asia, involving ‘the convention of the romantic East and depictions of the subcontinent as a place of marvellous or fantastical possibilities’ (Tickell 2011). The amazing particulars paradoxically reinforce both a sense of intimate knowingness and remote wonder, with the richness of detailed items (the gold, the silver, the cashmere) also suggesting the pecuniary possibilities of the colonial enterprise.

From all appearances, the Thuggee narrator’s role is to tell a story of adventurous, exotic escapades, which simultaneously contains much ‘truth’ for the British audience. Ameer Ali concludes his tale with yet another realist reference through emphasis on the tiniest of details: ‘I fear that I have often wearied you by the minute relation of my history, but I have told all, nor concealed from you one thought, one feeling, much less any act which at this distance of time I can remember’. He persists to the interlocutor: ‘Possibly you may have recorded what may prove fearfully interesting to your friends’ (p. 550). His story is certainly exciting, and part of the excitement is that it is arguably more terrifying than absorbing, or, perhaps, more absorbing because so horrifying. The novel’s parade of violent death arrests readers’ attention, especially when concretised through characters’ eyes. One such morbid exhibition is the immobilising death stare in Ismael’s account of his father’s demise: I have seen death in many, many forms since, but never have I seen anything that I could compare with my remembrance of my father’s appearance. His features were pinched up, his lips drawn tightly across his mouth, showing his upper and under teeth; his eyes were wide open, for they could not be closed; and the flaring light, now rising now sinking, as it was agitated by the wind, caused an appearance as if of the features moving and gibbering, with that ghastly expression on them. I could not take my eyes off them, and lay gazing at them till the day broke. (p. 71) Later, Ali describes, Little time therefore remained to me; and as soon as I possibly could I took Bhudrinath and Motee-ram with me, and we went into the city. We sat down on the steps of the Char Minar. Wonderful indeed were the stories we heard of our skirmish with the kotwal’s soldiers; the accounts of the killed and wounded on each side were ludicrously inconsistent, and you may imagine how we enjoyed the various relations we heard, all either from persons who declared they had been eye-witnesses of the matter, or who had heard of it from undoubted authority. But it was not our errand to waste time by listening to idle tales, not one of which contained a word of truth. (pp. 211–12) This distinction between useless tales, whether imaginative or intentionally untrue, and those purportedly trustworthy and therefore useful, indeed this apparent acquiescence to the truth ideal, is a method of connoting that his confession about his daring, perilous exploits is realistic.

3. Simultaneous Othering and Identification

When David Arnold acknowledges, ‘Binary divisions and dichotomous ideas may have passed out of favour of late among historians, with a growing barrage of attacks on Edward Said’, he simultaneously cautions, ‘But even if Orientalism provides an unreliable guide to the complex heterogeneity of imperial history, there is an equal danger that, in reacting so strongly against ideas of “otherness”, historians may too readily overlook or unduly diminish the ways in which ideas of difference were mobilized, in ideology and in practice, in the service of an imperial power’ (Arnold 2004, p. 254). Through the lens of heterogeneity in the coloniser-colonised relationship, Tickell postulates Ameer Ali’s position in Confessions of a Thug is not ‘that of an absolute Other, since it is impossible for cultural alterity or Otherness to be comprehended “maximally”’. Influenced by Gayatri Spivak, he explains further, ‘Indeed, to become cognitively manageable, difference must be assimilated to some degree and the Other must be turned into “something like the self”’ (Tickell 2011). Such critical insights developed in the late twentieth century are reasonable enough. However, I am inclined to agree with Arnold that ‘in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no small part of the European sense of “otherness” with regard to India was grounded in place. Indeed, at times the power of place, particularly as manifested through the perceived influences of climate and disease, appeared almost overwhelming’ (Arnold 2004, p. 254). Looking at otherness through the lens of the time period in which Taylor’s novel is set, the matter appears less complicated.

Per Mary Rogers’ concept of artifices mentioned above, one basic mode of othering occurs when the English narrator pronounces that Thug criminality is ‘of the most revolting nature’ (p. 335). This excessive language is a stylistic feature of Victorian crime fiction, such as Sikes’ description in Oliver Twist, growling, ‘with the most desperate ferocity that his desperate nature was capable of’ (Dickens 1966, p. 254). However, via the rhetorical superlative, the Englishman’s assertion of natural revulsion is likely to strengthen readers’ disgust. Repugnance is a recognised attribute of othering, and the English audience would likely be inclined to greater concord with the English narrator. This understanding is consistent with Rogers’ theory of social rhetoric, consisting of ‘moves that together persuade readers to adopt a viewpoint, even though the author apparently did not intend those cumulative effects’ (Rogers 1991, p. 196). Another straightforward mode of othering operates through generalised disparity, via religious representation. At a respite in Ameer Ali’s confession, the controlling narrator editorializes on the Thug’s remorselessness: ‘In the Hindoo perhaps it is not to be wondered at, as the goddess who protects him is one whom all castes regard with reverence and hold in the utmost dread; but as for the Moslem, unless his conduct springs from that terrible doctrine of fatalism, with which every true believer is thoroughly imbued from the first dawn of his reason, it is difficult to assign a reason for the horrible pursuit he has engaged in’ (pp. 263–64). His emphasis on true belief alludes to ‘true faith’, and that, along with his reference to reason, connotes that both Muslims and Hindus are abominable. I quote ‘true faith’ to call the bias into question. Though the English narrator is speaking of Muslims here, there is a cryptic, connotative message available to British readers via pathos in that the imaged difference between Hinduism and Islam appeals to those readers’ sense of duty to their own faith, Christianity. Arousing the value of their own faith, the allusion to true belief puts the British audience in a certain frame of mind in which their Christianity stands in contrast with both Hinduism and Islam.

This type of othering is already inscribed through Thuggee’s hybrid religious roots. Ameer Ali’s adoptive father, Ismael, explains the sacred origin of the profession, ‘Which is intimately connected with the faith of the Hindoos’, and through whom the ‘Moosulmans have been instructed in the art of Thuggee’, but admits his inability to resolve the complication when Ali asks, ‘How do you reconcile any connection between the faith of unbelievers and that of the blessed prophet?’ (p. 46). Part of the complexity is that for those of Abrahamic and therefore monotheistic faiths, being guided by those of a polytheistic faith should be anathema. To British Christian readers, the hybrid religious collusion makes all distinct and unworthy, thus inferior. Given the tendency to conflate ‘race’ and religion, I disagree with Matthew Kaiser’s sense that Taylor’s novel dissects the ‘imperial logic, of racial superiority’ (Kaiser 2009, p. 73). Moreover, Terence Thomas places nineteenth-century British perspectives of religions in two camps: ‘There is the apologetic type in which the intention is to prove the supremacy of Christianity over other religions. Such apologetic material divides into two sub-types, one of a rather polemical nature, the other of a more eirenic nature … Both kinds of apologetic, which had been directed almost exclusively against Islam for many centuries, were now directed in addition against Hinduism’ (Thomas 1988, p. 75). That sacred ministers of Islam are themselves Thugs, something Ali finds ‘most extraordinary’ (p. 79), is a further condemnation of the faith and its practitioners, othering them.

Othering in an uncomplicated vein also occurs at the same moment of Ameer Ali’s rest from his story when, offering his perspective inclined to shape readers’ interpretation, the English auditor intimates both the account’s horror and realism by remarking, A strange page in the book of human life is this! thought I, as he left the room. That man, the perpetrator of so many hundred murders, thinks on the past with satisfaction and pleasure; nay he takes a pride in recalling the events of his life, almost every one of which is a murder, and glories in describing the minutest particulars of his victims, and the share he had in their destruction, with scarcely a symptom of remorse! Once or twice only has he winced while telling his fearful story, and what agitated him most at the commencement of his tale I have yet to hear’ (pp. 262–63). Rangarajan interprets this lack of remorse as a mere exception to otherwise seeing Thugs as praiseworthy, given their supposedly unforced confessions (Rangarajan 2017, p. 1014). But if she is correct that such confessions in the context of Anti-Thug Campaigns operated as a form of supremacy wherein ‘the perceived ubiquitousness and cultural unintelligibility of thagi produced a different kind of confession: not a voluntary avowal of personal misdeed but an ethnographic record of collective crime’ (p. 1015), then this ethnography and collectivism mutually serve the othering process by categorising an entire group of people per their adjudged fundamental difference. In this case, the distinctness is the representative Thug’s/Indian’s lack of capacity for remorse in the English narrator’s view, with his framing influencing how readers see. Rangarajan does note the work’s various ‘flirtations with the possibility of repentance call attention to an inherent difference between the oriental other and the western reader’ (p. 1018). However extraordinary Ali may be as a Thug, the depicted commonplace, methodical nature of his crimes renders him and his crimes emblematic of Indians and Indian society. As Kaiser appropriately puts it while summarising Brantlinger’s reading of the novel from the perspective of utilitarianism and imperialism, Thuggee operates ‘as a stand-in for India itself’ (Kaiser 2009, p. 70). They are othered by their apparent incapacity for remorse and their religious inferiority. They confirm or recertify virtues of the ‘home’ nation, generally informed by Western Christianity, therefore opposed to the non-Western and non-Christian.

Whilst this othering is easy to perceive, it is just as easy to see a concurrent painting of Ameer Ali as someone with whom readers may identify on some level. Rangarajan reads this as ‘the author’s act of prosopopoeia, his humanizing of the signifier thug’, contradictory to the novel’s ‘colonial imperative’ (Rangarajan 2017, p. 1007). She continues, ‘In its ideal form, the confession effects the socialization and reintegration of the criminal into secular and/or spiritual society by alleviating the aggrieved conscience through either repentance or punishment under the gaze of a higher power’. Her point is that moments of softening him are at odds with ‘the impossibility of his reformation’ (p. 1016). I would argue the goal is not Ali’s reformation, but making him recognisable enough for the gaze of the higher power, the British audience, to see him as what Homi Bhabha designates a ‘“partial” presence’ in the fluctuation of colonial apery, wherein the colonised subject is ‘almost the same, but not quite’, simultaneously facsimile and threat (Bhabha 1994, p. 86). In the framework of said mimicry, Poovey is an early critic to recognise resemblances between the confessor and English examiner, but whereas she finds inconsistencies that threaten the story’s cohesion in these moments (Poovey 2004, pp. 6–7), I understand them as congruent with colonial mimicry’s slippages. The first moment she points to concerns Ali’s reaction to inadvertently killing his forgotten sister, arguably the greatest tragedy of his life, and an experience through which some readers may sympathise with him. The misfortune is actually foreshadowed when he recalls events leading up to his parents’ murder: ‘I remember too giving an old battered rupee to be delivered to my little sister, and of saying she was to hang it with the other charms and coins about her neck, to remind her of me. I found it again, Sahib; but, ah! Under what circumstances!’ Related to these exclamations, the regnant chronicler interjects, ‘At this period of his narrative, Ameer Ali seemed to shudder; a strong spasm shot through his frame’ (p. 19). Much later, after disclosing specifics of the circumstances earlier alluded to, generating shame he will carry to his death, Ali admits, I live, and I have borne my misery as best I could; to most I appear calm and cheerful, but the wound rankles in my heart; and could you but know my sufferings, Sahib, you would perhaps pity me. Not in the daytime is my mind disturbed by the thoughts of the past; it is at night, when all is still around me, and sleep falls not on my weary eyelids, that I see again before me the form of my unfortunate sister: again I fancy my hands busy with her beautiful neck, and the vile piece of coin for which I killed her seems again in my grasp as I tore it from her warm bosom. Sahib, there is no respite from these hideous thoughts; if I eat opium which I do in large quantities, to produce temporary oblivion I behold the same scene in the dreams which it causes, and it is distorted and exaggerated by the effects of the drug. (p. 530) Recognising his agency in the tragedy, he adds, ‘You know the worst, Sahib think of me as you will, I deserve it. I cannot justify the deed to myself, much less to you; and the only consolation I have that it was the work of fate, of unerring destiny is but a weak one, that gives way before the conviction of my own guilt’ (p. 531). Of this moment, Poovey declares, ‘The Indian narrator explicitly expresses the remorse that the Englishman elsewhere claims Thugs cannot feel’ (Poovey 2004, p. 5). However, the other passage serving as the basis for her claim does not comport with her assertion. With respect to his role as translator of Ali’s story, which he labels ‘a strange and horrible page in the varied record of humanity’, the English narrator comments further, ‘Such are the descriptions we have heard and read of murderers, but these Thugs are unlike any others [murderers]. No remorse seems to possess their souls’ (p. 263). The key difference in implication, the slipperiness related to mimicry, is in the word ‘seems’. With that word, the sentence’s signification is very different than if it read, ‘No remorse possesses their souls’. Seems signifies the English narrator’s impression at that moment in Ali’s revelations. His earlier comment is a reflection on Ali’s report told to him up to that point, without a seeming sense of remorse, and that regret only comes later in Ali’s disclosure. While the two narrators may approximate each other regarding artifice or stratagem (Poovey 2004, pp. 5–6), the second moment she refers to need not be seen as a ‘blatant contradiction of the Englishman’s claim’ about Thugs’ capacity for being remorseful.

In the second extract Poovey points to, the English auditor confronts Ameer Ali after catering to the conjectural wish of readers to learn of his appearance. She is correct that this is an instance of the controlling narrator ‘enlisting the reader’s sympathetic engagement’ by encrypting Ali ‘as quasi white’ (Poovey 2004, p. 6) when describing his forehead as ‘high and broad’, and his complexion as ‘fair for a native’ (p. 265). I will return in the next section to this moment involving the recorder asking readers to assimilate his encoding of Ali—‘Reader, if you can embody these descriptions, you have Ameer Ali before you’ (p. 266)—specific to my interpretation of the reader’s gaze. But for now, the focus remains Poovey’s assessment of narrative disparity, such as in the English translator’s representation of the trustworthiness of his portrayal with Ali’s declaration, ‘It is a faithful picture, such as I behold myself when I look in a glass. You have omitted nothing, even to the most trifling particulars; nay, I may even say my lord has flattered me’ (p. 267). The Englishman reports, ‘No, said I, I have not flattered your external appearance, which is prepossessing; but of your heart I fear those who read will judge for themselves, and their opinions will not be such as you could wish, but such as you deserve’ (p. 267). When Ali asks the Englishman if he thinks he has an evil heart, the Englishman responds affirmatively, but the Thug challenges this, arguing, ‘Have I not ever been a kind husband and a faithful friend? Did I not love my children and wife while He who is above spared them to me? And do I not even now bitterly mourn their deaths? Where is the man existing who can say a word against Ameer Ali’s honour, which ever has been and ever will remain pure and unsullied?’ (p. 267). Poovey avows, ‘The narrator is completely silenced by the Thug’s observation’ (Poovey 2004, p. 6), but this is contravened by his retort, ‘But the seven hundred murders, Ameer Ali, what can you say to them? They make a fearful balance against you in the other scale’ (p. 267). Besides, Poovey proposes, ‘The reader is left free to see—and to judge as she will—the resemblance between the Englishman who claims to revere life and the Thug whom he has described as taking it so lightly’ (Poovey 2004, p. 6). Yet her sense of contradiction between the English narrator’s verdict and what readers find depends upon readers agreeing with him per racial (including national) affinity when a distinct outcome possible through slippage is readers seeing Ali’s kindness, faithfulness, and familial love as not precluding his evil (the issue at hand) in the Thuggee context. I say national affinity because the enlistment of reader sympathy also occurs by describing Ali in light of associated ideals such as his attire being ‘always scrupulously neat and clean’ and ‘his waist tightly girded with an English shawl’ (p. 265). Again, readers’ ability to experience catharsis as audience to colonial Thugs’ staged crimes depends upon a modicum of empathy for the signifying Thug. This means Ali cannot be completely othered: he must be both othered and identifiable with, albeit sympathetic to a lesser degree.

4. Gazing at Terror, Testing Inner Strength, Reaffirming Humanity, and the Colonial Cause

We now turn more specifically to contemporary Victorian readers of Confessions of a Thug to theorise in greater detail about both the affect and effect of terror and horror resulting from their viewing of crimes exhibited. Speaking of the Thug informant being a vassal of imperial authority, Brantlinger observes, ‘Ultimately Ameer Ali is also subject to the judgment of a presumably rational authority thousands of miles across the ocean, an authority far more powerful than Kali: the British reading public’ (Brantlinger 1988, p. 89). Authority assumes having power to control, or being in charge, and from the perspective of being simpatico with the controlling English auditor, one could view the novel’s British reading audience as vicariously in a similar position. However, from an emotional response viewpoint, the effect of the staging—indeed, repetitive production of terrifying and horrifying crime spectacles—it is reasonable to imagine readers not being entirely in control. Readers of fiction are no different from theatre or film audiences who must suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy the experience, including, through such suspension, empathising with the emotions of characters with whom they identify. If, as established at the outset of this essay, at the time the novel appeared, the minds of the British reading public were immersed in stories of crime, then given the work’s both othering of and, to a subsidiary extent, sympathy with Indians, readers may at the very least have identified with and been both terrorised and terrified by the grisly victimhood repeatedly on display therein. The template of such emotional distress is established early in the work, such as when Ameer Ali details the head of one victim, Syud Mohamed Ali, also known as Kumal Khan: ‘I recoiled from it with loathing, for the eyes were protruding from the sockets and the mouth open, and the expression of the features was hideous in the extreme’ (p. 159). At this point, just as Ali is still in some ways being initiated into Thugee, readers are being inducted. Thus, his aversion is likely to trigger theirs, which would mean they are not actually in control.

Again, the controlling British narrator also appeals directly to readers’ imaginations when he details Ameer Ali’s visage—‘The reader will perhaps like to know something of the appearance of the man with whom he and I have had these long conversations’ (p. 265)—and realistic portrayal is the central tenet, so much so that when he shares with Ali his description of him, Ali declares, ‘It is a faithful picture, such as I behold myself when I look in the glass. You have omitted nothing, even to the most trifling particulars’ (p. 267). In other words, the native informant confirms the realism of the British recorder’s portrayal. The interlocutor’s conclusion of this moment also acknowledges the narrative’s catering to the gaze of British readers: Reader, if you can embody these descriptions, you have Ameer Ali before you; and while you gaze on the picture in your imagination and look on the mild and expressive face you may have fancied, you, as I was, would be the last person to think that he was a professed murderer, and one who in the course of his life has committed upwards of seven hundred murders. I mean by this, that he has been actively and personally engaged in the destruction of that number of human beings. (p. 266) If Ameer Ali functions representatively, one way of translating this statement’s signification to readers is that these natives may appear exotic and nice, but they are bloody murderers! The gaze is clearly through the colonial lens, for as the auditor remarks, ‘Any of my readers who may have been in India, and become acquainted with its nobles and men of rank, will estimate at once how high is the meed of praise on this score which I give to Ameer Ali’ (p. 266). But if Ali and other Thugs are engaged in large-scale homicide, the ‘civilising mission’ shields British colonisers from questions about their destruction.

Imaginative horror and terror for readers is also plausible when Ameer Ali describes the reaction of direct witnesses to their crimes: ‘We were so busily engaged in stripping the dead, that no one observed the approach of two travellers, who had come upon us unawares. Never shall I forget their horror when they saw our occupation; they were rooted to the spot from extreme terror; they spoke not, but their eyes glared wildly as they gazed, now at us and now at the dead’ (p. 275). In essence, the British readers are imaginative travellers who experience these moments of crime vicariously, psychologically. Beholding these crimes dramaturgically in various gripping moments of tension through narrative art, they may ultimately be renewed spiritually upon the release of their emotions as reading witnesses at the conclusion of each tense, dramatic encounter. The novel is a theatre of the imagination, and each of its crime chapters is like an act in a tragic play, with attendant scenes. The recurring scenes of concurrent deception, robbery, and homicide entail dramatic irony in readers’ cognisance of the victims’ fate. With this awareness and witnessing of imminent doom, readers undergo an arousal of negative emotions (fear, anger, nervousness, disgust, pity, and so on). But, as in a theatre, this occurs in a safe, controlled environment—likely a domestic reading space. Just as a play’s finale marks the termination of the dramatic spectacle engendering tense emotions, the novel comes to an end. Moreover, readers may close the book (bring the curtain down) at any time, after any scene, thereby interrupting the spectacle and occasioning emotional and mental mollification. More than the affliction of literal and vicarious travellers, if the hardened, callous heart of a super Thug like Ameer Ali palpitates sometimes with ‘anxiety and apprehension’ (p. 293), if he shudders at the thought of his wife ever being within touching distance of other members of his profession (p. 302), as he does at the recollection of killing his sister, what about the hearts of British readers? Among other things, their ability to shiver at such thoughts reaffirms their humanity by denoting their affinity with what affects even their colonial Others. At the same time, their apprehension becomes part of the justification for British colonisation in attempting to bring British ‘order’ to Indian sublime ‘chaos’.

Arguably, the greatest bearing of witness to horror through Thugee crime occurs when Alum Khan, a boy Peer Khan adopts, is so stricken when accidentally witnessing the Thugs in action that he first falls senseless from his pony, then dies after hours of catatonia, not from the fall, but because ‘the delicate flower had been blighted, and was fast withering under the terror which possessed him’. Speaking of Alum’s condition, Ameer Ali bemoans, ‘I had never seen such terror before, nor could I have believed that it would have had such an effect on any one’ (p. 439). That effect follows ‘the look of horror to which his countenance was instantly changed when he saw what was going on!’ (pp. 437–38), and readers may suffer similar anguish knowing that what the boy sees includes men ‘writhing in in the agonies of death’, and ‘one of them too was shrieking’ (p. 437). Tickell finds the novel’s structure of the recurrent violence peculiar, arguing, Conventionally, the plot-arrangement of the early gothic novel postpones death, or the fearful threat of suffering, in order to build narrative anticipation as a terror-effect. However, in Meadows Taylor’s work the reverse is the case: narrative-as-deception leads inexorably to a graphic, horrifying death, and the reader encounters none of the careful deferral mechanisms of the gothic novel or its crime-fiction successors. Like a psychological repetition-compulsion, or a disturbing pornography of violence, the narrative returns obsessively, again and again, to the same scene, the strangling of the thugs’ victims, until these murders run together, becoming almost indistinguishable from one another. (Tickell 2011) I see this structure as an important aspect of suffocating, almost strangling readers’ imaginations and emotions to the point of asphyxia, before releasing the hold. To borrow from Rogers on the rhetoric of fiction (Rogers 1991, p. 196), it is part of the artifice that helps make the work invigorating, as well as a precondition for cathartic release. After all, English readers also bear witness to this boy’s and all the other moments of terror, albeit second-hand, through the narrative, and their dread in anticipation of atrocious experiences transmutes into horror in the revulsion following the atrocities. But their anxiety can be purged through the knowledge that English soldiers and administrators in India are making progress in suppressing such crimes. Though accepting bribes to help the Thugs, fearful of British colonial justice, the chieftain of Biseynee pleads with Ameer Ali to refrain from violence in his village: ‘“If the Europeans heard of violence having been done, they would turn me out of my place”’ (p. 445). His concern confirms for readers that the colonisers are bringing order out of Thug chaos. Ali affirms this ideal later:

The British colonial system is represented as doing good in combating the terroristic, criminal Thugs. For instance, when Ameer Ali’s father feels the village where they resided for a long time is no longer safe because of information acquired by English officers, finding a new refuge means scouring for ‘different states as yet independent of the English’ (p. 335). This is a clear indication of English colonial incursion, with law and justice as its cover. Only toward the conclusion of Ali’s confessions are there two brief references to the economic exploitation incentive. Recalling the period before his third and final arrest, Ali describes his time among Ramdeen’s Thug party as fairly fruitless for the Thugs, partly because they are careful to avoid ‘the Company’s territories’ (p. 535). He also describes falling in with his old nemesis, Ganesha, and, in turn, forming his own new band of Thugs, by which time the English set a bounty of five hundred rupees for his capture. A sign of the hubris informing his ultimate fall, he ignores the obvious risk of ‘apprehension in the districts of the Company’s territories, where operations against Thugs were being carried out with much success’ (p. 536). The Company in these moments is obviously a reference to the British East India Company.

In a version of Edward Said’s notion of the Other, the South Asian in this case, speaking ‘through and by virtue of the European imagination’ (Said 1977, p. 56), via subaltern ventriloquism, jemadar and Thug, Soobhan Khan, verifies for the British what they would likely wish to hear about themselves as colonisers when he recounts how he came to serve them in Bombay: ‘I came here as the servant to a Sahoukar of Indoor. I liked the place, and not long after got employment as a government Peon, in the service of the English. They have been kind and generous masters to me; I have served them well, and have risen by degrees to the rank I now hold, which is that of Jemadar’ (p. 417). The colonial masters are represented as considerate and benevolent, with opportunities to advance in their civil service, even for a native. This articulation of benign colonisation helps clear those of the colonising nation of any potential guilt and is therefore a form of catharsis. It is a sort of romantic view that obfuscates the reality of colonisation, informed, for instance, by the sober implications of the colonisers’ warships, such as the one Ameer Ali tours with Soobhan Khan: ‘We rowed, for the wind was against us, close round several of the ships which lay at anchor; and at last ascended, with the permission of a Feringhee officer who was on board, the side of an immense ship, which my friend told me was one of war, and belonged to the king of England’ (p. 416). The Feringhee (European officer) and warships are part of the colonial military apparatus for suppressing Indian resistance, or, at the very least, warning against such resistance. But even in providing details about the portentous nature of the ships given the size of their guns, Ameer Ali articulates ideals the colonisers would be pleased to hear: ‘After looking over the upper part, a small gratuity of two rupees to a sailor enabled us to proceed below to see the guns. I was astonished at their size, and at the exactness with which everything was fitted; the ropes even were twisted down into coils, like huge snakes sleeping, and the whole was a picture of neatness and cleanliness which I little expected to have seen’ (p. 416). In contrast to the messiness of the Thugs’ killings, ideals of exactness, neatness, and cleanliness sanitise killings done by the colonial war machine and offer release from potential consternation. Therefore, it would be comforting for readers to also learn from a subaltern deputy officer of one of the tribal armies, Narrayun Das, of European colonial progress without having to worry much about the mechanisms and machinations of achieving such headway: ‘“While they confined themselves to the fort of Bombay it was all very well, and I remember the time when they had hardly a foot of ground beyond it, but now, little by little they have advanced, until they have upset the Mahratta empire, and are in a fair way to take it”’ (p. 424).

The English colonisers are seen as chivalrous, therefore, apparently, above reproach when Das adds, ‘“I never heard of thieves on the road, though my kafila would have been worth plundering. But now I am under the protection of the Sahib-logue, I care not; they will soon have all the country, and there will be no danger in another year”’ (p. 424). This protection of the Sahib-logue (English gentleman) is more or less the same as the general account of the English from a Moonshee (secretary) in their employment. When speaking of them, ‘He spoke in terms of the highest praise, and undeceived us as to many particulars we had heard of them, and materially removed many of our prejudices against them’ (p. 442). He continues, ‘I respected them more from what he said than I had ever done before; for though every one acknowledged they were good and brave soldiers, it was said they were vicious and debauched, and drunken’(p. 442). All this confirms what English readers would best like to hear. To borrow again from Said, it is a form of the proximity between narrative statecraft and Orientalism (Said 1977, p. 96), wherein fictional impressions could be put to civic use regarding thoughts and feelings about Indian colonisation. Though in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ Gayatri Spivak is mainly concerned with the intellectual’s or theorist’s formation of the Other (Spivak 1988, p. 280), there is some resonance here for a novelist and creative work operating similarly as an attribute of the ‘palimpsestic narrative of imperialism’ (Spivak 1988, p. 281), by which British readers locate their subjectivity and affirm their colonial authority through the voice of the colonised native. Here, in another iteration of colonial mimicry, Ameer Ali, Soobhan Khan, Narrayun Das, and the Moonshee are native informants, but as both ‘voice of the Other’ (Spivak 1988, p. 284) and voice of the British Self.

Some years ago, regarding an excerpt from Louise Linton’s memoir published in The Telegraph, Hassan Ghedi Santur observed, ‘For many westerners, Africa has long been a faraway place of romantic adventures and self-discovery; a place to test their inner strength and reaffirm their humanity. But their stories of Africa often have nothing to do with Africans. In fact, in most cases, Africans are at best totally absent and at worst, deadly obstacles’ (Santur 2016). He could easily have substituted India and Indians among such faraway places and people for the nineteenth-century British. Ultimately, Confessions of a Thug is in part a tragedy in which a young boy is the victim of abduction after his family’s murder, is arguably conscripted into the Thuggee way of life (for what other option does he really have given his circumstances), becomes a paramount Thug, and through hubris is caught and imprisoned after the ultimate tragedy of unknowingly killing his long-lost sister. Readers who identify in any way with these aspects of Ameer Ali’s dreadful life may experience catharsis in keeping with the Aristotelian model, the release from fear and pity through identifying with Ali’s misfortunes or fate to a renewed thoughtfulness about their own lives, presumably with attendant joy associated with the sublime. Readers who experience Ameer Ali only as a colonial Other through colonial mimicry may also experience a form of purgation I designate colonial catharsis—an experience of being released from fears about various forms of violence committed on their nation’s behalf in the colonisation process, or fears about potential violence against those from their nation. When the grip upon their imaginations from ritual Thuggee crime is released, readers’ minds may return to the ease of everything being all right with the world, so brought back to order by the judicial, British colonial system.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article, further inquiries can be directed to the author.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

1 The astute observer, aware common literacy was low in England until later in the nineteenth century, might rightly be suspicious of this claim about widespread influence upon the reading public. Adopting from scholarship of Robert K. Webb, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Edna Einsiedel, and Alan J. Lee, among others, Casey assuages this concern by reminding that ‘many of those who were illiterate had the opportunity to hear the most compelling stories of the day (which were probably, due to their content, stories containing violence) read aloud to them in public’ (Casey 2011, p. 374).

2 Subsequent references to this edition of the novel are cited by page number only.

3 In the narrative scheme, the novel’s confessions are essentially Ameer Ali’s disclosures to a British colonial administrator who listens to, collects, and later shares them as Confessions of a Thug. Hence, it makes sense to see Ameer Ali as narrator and the colonial administrator as interlocutor or auditor. Ali may also rightly be referred to as the first-person or Indian narrator, and the administrator as the English, or controlling, or overseeing narrator.

4 By romanticism I mean a combination of thoughts aligned with values in which assumptions of romance and Romanticism come together. As Donald Stone posits, ‘The Victorian novelist was affected by the themes of chivalric and Eastern romance as well as by those of Romantic poetry and the resultant combination of romance and Romanticism is often so tangled as to make it difficult to dissociate one from the other’ (Stone 1980, p. 8). I indicate this mixture with romanticism in this essay, and use Romanticism to signify ideals concerning nature, the imagination, and the individual/self, among others, more associated with the movement beginning in the eighteenth century.

5 This review in The Spectator has no named author, and I therefore reference it as ‘Anonymous’. See note 4 for a fuller discussion of the distinctions between romanticism and Romanticism.

6 Tickell credits this passage to Frederick Holme, but to date I have been unable to verify Holme as author.

7 See for example Javed Majeed (1996), I‘Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: The Anglo-Indian Novel as a Genre in the Making’, in Writing India 1757–1990, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Martin van Woerkins and Catherine Tihanyi (2002), The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Mary Poovey (2004), ‘Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting “Confessions of a Thug”’, Narrative, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 3–21; Wagner Kim (2009), Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, New York: Oxford University Press; Alex Tickell (2011); Padma Rangarajan (2017), Thug Life: Confession, Subjectivity, Sovereignty. ELH, Vol. 84, No. 4, pp. 1005–28. Regarding nineteenth-century British ideals of propriety and restraint, see Richard D. Altick (1986), Deadly Encounters, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 6.

References

Captain Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (Book Review). The Spectator 12.582: 804–6. Periodicals Archive Online. 1839,. Available online: https://www.proquest.com/docview/1295197487/fulltextPDF/1EAEB6BC26B6440FPQ/1?accountid=8500&sourcetype=Magazines <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-02">(accessed on 2 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

David Arnold Race, Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-century India., 2004, 77,pp. 254-73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0950-3471.2004.00209.x.

Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge: New York, 1994,

Patrick Brantlinger, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1988,

Edmund Burke, R. and J. Dodsley: London, 1757,. Available online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t7zk5bx69&seq=33 <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-12-30">(accessed on 30 December 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Edmund Burke, Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1901,. Available online: https://archive.org/details/writingsspeeches0002unse/page/n9/mode/2up?view=theater <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-19">(accessed on 19 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Christopher A. Casey Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime., 2011, 41,pp. 367-91. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_a_00106.

Charles Dickens, Penguin: New York, 1966,. First published as a serial, 1837–1839

Northrop Frye, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2020,. First published 1957

Joe Grixti Fear, Fiction and the Adolescent., 1982, 36,pp. 243-52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1982.tb01334.x.

Frederick Holme The Secret Societies of Asia—The Assassins and Thugs. 1841., 1841, 49,pp. 229-44.. Available online: https://archive.org/details/sim_blackwoods-magazine_1841-02_49_304/page/228/mode/2up?view=theater <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-02">(accessed on 2 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Matthew Kaiser Facing the Mirror: Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug and the Politics of Imperial Self-Incrimination., University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2009,pp. 70-88.

Robert Miles Ann Radcliff and Matthew Lewis., Wiley Blackwell: West Sussex, 2012,pp. 93-109.. Available online: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444354959 <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-07">(accessed on 7 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Susan Oliver De Quincey’s ‘On Murder’: The Generic Conflict., 2013, 44,pp. 44-51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045876.

Mary Poovey Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug., 2004, 12,pp. 3-21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2003.0025.

Supritha Rajan The Epistemology of Trust and Realist Effect in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House., 2017, 72,pp. 64-106. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2017.72.1.64.

Padma Rangarajan Thug Life: Confession, Subjectivity, Sovereignty., 2017, 84,pp. 1005-28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2017.0038.

Mary F. Rogers, State University of New York Press: Albany, 1991,

Edward Said, Penguin: London, 1977,. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/40071430/Said_Edward_1977_Orientalism_London_Penguin <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-12-17">(accessed on 17 December 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Hasan Ghedhi Santur Challenging the White Gaze: Refresh, Reboot, Rewrite Africa. 2016,. Available online: https://www.warscapes.com/opinion/challenging-white-gaze-refresh-reboot-rewrite-africa <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-15">(accessed on 15 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Walter Scott, Frederick Warne and Co.: London, 1887,. First published as a serial, 1815–1824

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak?., Macmillan: London, 1988,pp. 271-313.

Donald D. Stone, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1980,

Sara Suleri, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992,

Philip Meadows Taylor, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998,. Available online: https://archive.org/details/confessionsofthu00tayl/mode/2up <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-06-12">(accessed on 12 June 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Terence Thomas, Routledge: Oxfordshire, 1988,

Alex Tickell, Routledge: New York, 2011,. Available online: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/terrorism-insurgency-and/9780415877152/06_Contents.xhtml <date-in-citation content-type="access-date" iso-8601-date="2024-03-01">(accessed on 1 March 2024)</date-in-citation>.

Richard Vanderbeets The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual., 1972, 43,pp. 548-62. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2924653.

Richard Vanderbeets ‘A Thirst for Empire’: The Indian Captivity Narrative as Propaganda., 1999, 80,pp. 132-37.. First published 1972

William Wordsworth, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1970,. First published 1805

Author Affiliation(s):

Department of English, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, City University of New York, 1 Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010, USA; kevin.frank@baruch.cuny.edu

DOI: 10.3390/h14020024