Confessions of A Thug

Ameer Ali recounts his life to a colonial official, and what emerges is a first-person account of the Thuggee bands that travelled the roads of early nineteenth-century India. Philip Meadows Taylor drew on his own service in India and on recorded testimony, producing a novel that was enormously popular in its day and remains a source for how the British administration understood and portrayed the groups it set out to suppress. Read now, it is as much a document of colonial attitudes as an adventure narrative. Why it still gets read: • A nineteenth-century classic told as a confession to an interrogator • Historical fiction rooted in the author's years of service in India • Themes of loyalty, ritual, justice and moral compromise • Valuable as evidence of how colonial writers framed their subjects For readers of classic literature, colonial-era history and Indian historical fiction, available in English at Boipoka.