A Thug Resurrected

Tabish Khair’s new novel is a well told tale about the Thuggee. Now, if only he’d left his academic interests aside.

Consider what Tabish Khair has going against him: his name is invoked far too often by the book bloggers’ back-scratching club; he was recently said to be in conversation with William Dalrymple in Delhi (risking my ticket to Jaipur, am I the only one who thinks Delhi would be better off not seeing or hearing Dalrymple for a while?); and he has authored a book, and I am not making this up, titled The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness.  

It is only the word ‘thug’ in the title that made me read this book. I am glad I did. Tabish’s book may be a homage to texts of the past and it may deconstruct a key narrative that established the word thug in the Western mind, but it works even in the face of such post-modern handicaps. It works because it is a well told tale. If post-modernism cannot serve up a good tale with a beginning, middle and an end, then so much the worse for post-modernism. 

Tabish’s subversive take involves an old ‘Orientalist’ text—Phillip Taylor Meadows’ Confession of a Thug, published in 1839, which by the way is still a fun read. In Tabish’s telling, the thug—Amir (Ameer in the original) Ali—accompanies a Captain Meadows to London to help him complete a book that, if not quite the same, is similar. 

The narrator begins his story with Amir Ali’s letters in Persian from London, which have found their way to his grandfather’s library in Bihar. With the help of the books that surround him in the library, the narrator re-imagines Amir Ali’s life in London. The 1830s London we encounter is one spun out of books in the library, ranging from Charles Dickens to Henry Mathew, co-founder of Punch and chronicler of London and its poor. The Indians in Amir Ali’s world are peopled through texts such as Rozina Visram’s Asians In Britain: 400 years of History. It is a tribute to Tabish’s strength as a storyteller that he has brought to life a convincing city and an interesting cast of characters out of such material. 

If the book has a failing, it is that it is written with clear good intentions best left behind in the academic world that Tabish otherwise inhabits. Amir Ali’s Persian letters are juxtaposed with pages from Meadows’ ‘book’, and this juxtaposition seeks to question the entire idea of the Thuggee. On such matters, it depends where you stand. Those interested in the debate can consult Mike Dash’s Thug, but as far as I am concerned, the prejudices of a reporter are a far better guide to life than the pontifications of an academic. As an administrator, William H Sleeman, the suppressor of Thuggees, was hardly a reporter in the modern sense, but he travelled, observed and wrote. From insights into geology, the discovery of dinosaur remains in the Lameta formations along the Narmada, to his tales of sati and famine, Sleeman comes across as an acute observer. It is perhaps plausible that he misconstrued certain aspects of the Thuggee, but he certainly didn’t conjure up the phenomenon. 

Given his obvious talent, it is a shame Tabish is so well intentioned. If only he would pay heed to what the poet Swinburne said about Wilkie Collins, one of the authors whose works he has drawn upon in this book: ‘What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! have a mission.’’ Even so, this book has persuaded me to go back and read all that Tabish has written, though I think I will still give The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness a miss.

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