Confessions Of a Thug

Often overshadowed by KiplingsKimor ForstersA Passage to India, Philip Meadows Taylors forgotten classic,Confessions of a Thug(1839), is nevertheless the most influential novel of early nineteenth-century British India.

This was the first dramatic account to expose a European readership to the fantastic world of the murderous Thugs, or highway robbers, who strangled their victims and who have ever since been a stable of Western popular culture. Writing in the voice of a captured Thug, Taylor presents an Orientalist fantasy that is part picaresque adventure and part colonialexposé.Confessions of a Thugoffers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how the British imagined themselves to be omniscient and in complete control of their Indian subjects. This unique critical edition makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire writing, in addition to excerpts from the original colonial texts that inspired Taylors narrative.