ठगी

Thuggee comes from Hindi ṭhagī (ठगी), the practice of a ṭhag (ठग) — a cheat, swindler, or robber. The root is Sanskrit sthaga, meaning cunning or deceitful. In the early 19th century, British administrators in India identified networks of highway robbers who allegedly strangled travelers and stole their possessions as devotees of the goddess Kali. William Henry Sleeman, a British officer, led the campaign to suppress these groups starting in 1835.

Sleeman's campaign was thorough and brutal. His department, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, arrested thousands and executed or transported hundreds. The suppression of thuggee became one of the moral pillars of British rule in India — proof, the colonizers argued, that British governance was civilizing a savage land. Philip Meadows Taylor's novel Confessions of a Thug (1839) turned thuggee into a sensation in London.

Modern historians have questioned how much of the thuggee narrative was real and how much was colonial construction. Kim Wagner, in his 2007 study Thuggee, argued that the British exaggerated the religious dimension and the organizational coherence of highway robbery to justify expanded policing powers. Real robbery existed, but the British turned scattered criminal gangs into a monolithic cult because a cult was more useful for imperial propaganda than ordinary crime.

English got two words from this episode: thug and thuggee. Thug has become one of the most common English words for a violent person — completely detached from its Indian origins. Thuggee remains more specialized, used by historians and in popular culture. The Indiana Jones franchise brought thuggee to a new generation in 1984, repeating most of the colonial myths without qualification.