In 1830 an anonymous letter was published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette warning that India was being threatened by a horrifying cult of murderers. These stranglers were known as Thugs and according to the letter they represented the single greatest threat to law and order in the country. These Thugs apparently worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali and performed their crimes in her name. This letter motivated the British authorities to take immediate action against this group. However, many scholar think that the anonymous author, a British administrator named William Sleeman, may have exaggerated the Thug threat. Some have even argued that the Thugs never truly existed. What should we believe about this storied group of highway robbers? Tune-in and find out how sketchy confessions, Queen Victoria’s favorite book, and Indiana Jones all play a role in the story.

Works Cited

Dash, Mike.Thug: The True History of India’s Murderous Cult. London: Granta Books, 2005.

Macfie, A. L. “Thuggee: an orientalist construction?” Rethinking History, 12(3), 383–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642520802193262

Taylor, Meadows. Confessions of a Thug. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee : Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. 1st ed. 2007., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Wagner, Kim A. “The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 931–63. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3876674. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.

Woerkens, Martine Van. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.