Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug
Abstract
:1. Sensual Repulsion
The root of all evil is the perverted idea of humanity and political freedom, which is gaining favour in England, and the consequent laxity of the executive and the helplessness of the law. Colonel Sleeman and those who had been associated with him would not have succeeded in eradicating Thuggism from India if such notions and niceties of law were prevalent in his time. ‘Murder of William Curzon Wyllie—letter by Maharajah of Benares’, 14 July 1909
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.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’.
2. Romantic-Realism in Confessions
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: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)
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.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)
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: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)
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.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”.
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: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)
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.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).
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: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 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.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)
Later, Ali describes,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)
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.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)
3. Simultaneous Othering and Identification
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.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).
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.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)
4. Gazing at Terror, Testing Inner Strength, Reaffirming Humanity, and the Colonial Cause
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.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)
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: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.
I should have mentioned that an English gentleman some time after my arrival came to Jhalone; and in the many conferences he held in secret with the Rajah, we were given to understand that a treaty of some kind or other had been made, and that he had placed himself under the protection of the English government. I thought not of it: yet even then a system was working silently yet surely which for a time struck at the power and confederacy of the Thugs, a blow as severe, nay more so, as being more lasting, than any they had yet experienced.(p. 492)
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Conflicts 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. |
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Frank, K. Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug. Humanities 2025, 14, 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020024
Frank K. Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug. Humanities. 2025; 14(2):24. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020024
Chicago/Turabian StyleFrank, Kevin. 2025. "Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug" Humanities 14, no. 2: 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020024
APA StyleFrank, K. (2025). Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug. Humanities, 14(2), 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020024