The Racist Origins of the term “Thug”.

[El_Johns]

46. Yes, because it demonstrates that there is no such straight line between British usage during

the Indian colonial period & US usage today. Which is what the author is trying to claim.

(And the majority of Chandler's work was written in the late thirties and 40s, not the 50s.)

You do realize that the British killed off the thuggee in the 1830s, surely?

However they used the word, it was the result of British (and American) fictionalizations.

The first printed reference to a "thug" appeared in Ziau-d din Barni's History of Fīrūz Shāh, which was written in about 1356. However, the thuggees as a group weren't "discovered" by the British or even widely discussed until the 1830s. That's when the British governor-general of India, , and Capt. William Sleeman made a concerted effort to eradicate the thuggees from India.

Nearly 4,000 thugs were discovered and, of those, about 2,000 were convicted; the remaining were either sentenced to death or transported within the next six years. Sleeman then declared the thuggee to be completely eradicated.

"The system is destroyed, never again to be associated into a great corporate body. The craft and mystery of Thuggee will not be handed down from father to son," .

As Sleeman's use of the words "craft" and "mystery" hint at, the thuggees continued to capture a place in the British imagination even after they were eliminated. The 1839 novel , by Philip Meadows Taylor, quickly became a best-seller in England and beyond, and was instrumental in introducing the word "thug" to the greater population. Taylor's novel was a first-person narrative by Ameer Ali, as he lays bare the secrets of his life and his crimes. (Meadows Taylor had worked with Sleeman on the effort to eliminate the thuggees and claimed Ameer Ali was based on a man he had encountered.)

Mark Twain wrote extensively about the thuggees in two chapters of his classic 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator. As critic , Twain "found India a strange and sinister land," and these feelings are quite clear in his descriptions of Thuggees. Twain devotes page after page of the book to describing exactly how the Thugs killed their victims; one chapter is titled "Eradication of Thuggee."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/11/18/245953619/what-a-thugs-life-looked-like-in-nineteenth-century-india


I don't know why you're defending the OP article like it's gold; it's slight, bad research, stretching to make some non-existent linkage.

Twain in a non-racialized usage from his 1897 book:

Twain also draws a parallel between India's Thugs and Westerners :

"The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done — these are the traits of the human race at large. We White people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; Thugs who not long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the Roman arena ..."