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'You have given a faithful portrait of a Thug's life, his
ceremonies, and his acts' Often overshadowed by Kipling's Kim or
Forster's A Passage to India, Philip Meadows Taylor's forgotten
classic, Confessions of a Thug (1839), is nevertheless the most
influential novel of early nineteenth-century British India. This
was the first dramatic account to expose a European readership to
the fantastic world of the murderous Thugs, or highway robbers, who
strangled their victims and who have ever since been a stable of
Western popular culture. Writing in the voice of a captured Thug,
Taylor presents an Orientalist fantasy that is part picaresque
adventure and part colonial exposé. Confessions of a Thug offers a
unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how
the British imagined themselves to be omniscient and in complete
control of their Indian subjects. This unique critical edition
makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire
writing, in addition to excerpts from the original colonial texts
that inspired Taylor's narrative.
In 1963, a human skull was discovered in a pub in south-east
England. The handwritten note found inside revealed it to be that
of Alum Bheg, an Indian soldier in British service who had been
blown from a cannon for his role in the 1857 Uprising, his head
brought back as a grisly war-trophy by an Irish officer present at
his execution. The skull is a troublesome relic of both
anti-colonial violence and the brutality and spectacle of British
retribution. Kim Wagner presents an intimate and vivid account of
life and death in British India in the throes of the largest
rebellion of the nineteenth century. Examining the Victorians'
macabre fetish for collecting and exhibiting body parts, the book
also offers a critical assessment of British imperialism that
speaks to contemporary debates about the legacies of Empire and the
myth of the 'Mutiny'.
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