Engaging the Colonial ‘Archives of Repression’

The first and most immediate obstacle that faces the historian of thuggee is the fact that the thugs did not leave us any written sources of their own. They did not have any religious texts, iconography or artefacts that related specifically to thuggee and which would allow us to examine their practices independently. With few exceptions, the material we have was produced by British officials with — at best — a limited knowledge of the language and culture, and they were by definition prejudiced and negatively inclined towards the very practice it was their task to eradicate.2 However, the primary sources on thuggee offer a rare insight into parts of Indian society and history about which we otherwise know very little. For more than 30 years the British collected the depositions and testimonies of thousands of Indians, most of whom were illiterate, from all corners of the continent and all rungs of society.3 In the process the British also gathered a huge amount of information not directly pertaining to thuggee, thereby documenting a vast range of socio-economic and religious issues and aspects of Indian rural life.KeywordsReligious TextReligious IssueBritish AuthorityColonial ProjectDiscursive ContextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Iconography · Obstacle · Task (project management) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Engineering · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

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