Book Review: Children of Kali by Kevin Rushby

I have always been interested in the underdog, in the ‘alternate’ view, in the rebel’s passion and the so-called conspiracy theories,

This book presents such an alternate view of the thuggee cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee) that existed in India and was exterminated by the British masters during their colonial rule over India. The conventional view being that they were an Indian network of secret fraternities who were engaged in murdering and robbing travelers in the name of the Hindu tantric goddess Kali. Incidentally the word thug finds its derivation from ‘thuggee’.

Some key extracts from the book that throw light on thuggees

It was Sleeman’s grandson James who did the calculation in 1933. One thug strangling 8 men per month for 20 years, multiplied by all the thugs in India for all the years before anyone knew anything about it until its final demise in the 1840s equals, at a conservative estimate, 1 million murders.

The man who eradicated this criminal conspiracy became a hero of the British Raj. During the 1830s and 1840s, William Henry Sleeman supported by 17 assasins and about a 100 sepoys, hunted down and captured over 3000 thugs.

The word thug was punched deep into the English language …….soon to take the modified form of ‘ruffian’ rather then the original ‘deceiver’.

…..the road north from Nagpur to the Nerbudda, the most dangerous and thug-infested territory.

But the surprise of the book is the refutation of the conventional explanation of the religious background to this cult. The author expounds on the following

………….the thugs were drawn from all backgrounds and castes: there were Muslims and Hindus, Brahmins and untouchables, warriors and farmers……perhaps most surprising…..was that one thug was found to be British: a renegade soldier……

The arrival of the British had a huge effect on agriculture, starting the wave of tree clearances that have resulted in the open countryside of India today.

…One of the first acts of the British in their new dominions was to establish an opium monopoly in the suitable upland region of Malwa to the west of Jabalpur……….China had been supplied with the drug by European merchants for many years…….demand was increasing and British merchants saw an opportunity……..Huge areas of land began to go under poppy cultivation in Malwa.

As China became dependent on India chan du, British India developed an unhealthy addiction to the revenue raised……The system was that rich Bombay merchants would send money to buy the product in advance…….Jewels, dollars and gold mohurs came pouring across India into Malwa………The time to do this was shortly after the Dassera festival in mid-October, exactly the same time that all accounts gave as the onset of the thugs ‘hunting season’.

………the thugs were freebooters and to a great extent created by British conquests……….does not mention Kali or nationwide leaders or high levels of organization.

In the view of Stewart Gordon of the Univ.of Michigan, ‘It was the writing of William Sleeman and the evangelical, crusading tone of the British Indian administration of the 1830s that played up these locally-organized, small-scale marauding groups (given the name thugs by the British) into a hideous, widespread religious conspiracy, somehow typical of India and Indian “national character”.’

……….the drug-running East India Company also placed temptation under their noses, then hanged them without too much bothering with evidence. William Sleeman for his pains became a hero to the Raj.

………..The Criminal Tribes Act 1871 was repealed in 1952 soon after Independence being regarded as untenable in a civilized and egalitarian society. No one can now be legitimately described as of a criminal tribe or caste…………At its peak the Act is said to have encompassed 13 million people, all of them criminals by reason of birth……..their lot had been told……where they could and could not live, to be punished for movement outside boundaries, to have their children taken away, their marriages controlled and their men imprisoned. The rules were so stringest, the punishments so draconian that many honest individuals were driven to crime, a fact that was often held up as proof of their recidivist genetic tendencies.

While murder was certainly being done on India’s roads in the 1820s and thirties, the British reaction was partial, unbalanced and unjust. Thuggee was a social evil but it was not a religious cult: it was a threat to the opium trade.

(The Criminal Tribes Act)…….the forces unleashed in India dealt blows to the poorest and most defenceless people at the bottom of the caste system; and into the very foundations of the Indian police service it laid deep veins of corruption, bigotry and injustice that continue to poison its work 170 years later.

The unfortunate truth is that Indian history has been written and is being rewritten by its previous colonial master and their modern counterparts i.e. the British and the Western world. The further unfortunate aspect is that probably there is hardly any original research into such mass brainwashing. Whether it be the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT) or the thuggee cult or …………., the former slaves still follow the slavish theories of their former masters blindly.

A developing nation doesn’t really have the time to do an original and comprehensive study of its history. All it does and can do is following the established theories that are dumped on them. May the sun dawn on our history someday.