Confessions of a Thug (Doughty Library)

"Confessions of a Thug" is a real-life account of a thug as told to the author Meadows Taylor in 1820.
"A strange page in the book of human life is this! Thought I, as he left the room. That man, the perpetrator of so many hundred murders, thinks on the past with satisfaction and pleasure; nay, he takes a pride in recalling the events of his life, almost every one of which is a murder, and glories in describing the minutest particulars of his victims, and the share he had in their destruction, with scarcely a symptom of remorse! Once or twice only has he winced while telling his fearful story; and what agitated him most at the commencement of his tale I have yet to hear ..." writes Meadows Taylor.

Who were the thugs? How did they look? What were the appearances of their victims. It is to address these questions that illustrations have been included in this publication. Two sources – both contemporary to Confessions of a Thug – have been relied upon for this purpose : pen and ink drawings by J.Lockwood Kipling (father of Rudyard Kipling) and water color portraits from an album commissioned by Colonel James Skinner - the illustrated "Tashrih al-aqvam" (an account of origins and occupations of some of the sects, castes, and tribes of India). These illustrations give valuable details of features, appearance, mode of dressing and the immediate surroundings of a variety of subjects one would find in Northern India in the early 1800’s.

Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor CSI (September 25, 1808 May 13, 1876 in Menton), an administrator and novelist, was born in Liverpool, England.At the age of fifteen he was sent out to India to become a clerk to a Bombay merchant. The merchant was in financial difficulties, though. In 1824, Taylor gladly accepted a commission in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, to which service he remained devotedly attached throughout his long career. He was speedily transferred from military duty to a civil appointment, and in this capacity he acquired a knowledge of the languages and the people of southern India which has seldom been equalled. He studied the laws, geology, and the antiquities of the country, being one of the foremost early experts on megaliths.[1] He was alternately judge, engineer, artist, and man of letters. While on furlough in England in 1840, he published the first of his Indian novels, Confessions of a Thug, in which he reproduced the scenes which he had heard about the Thuggee cult, described by the chief actors in them. This book was followed by a series of tales, Tippoo Sultaun (1840), Tara (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), Seeta (1872), and A Noble Queen (1878), all illustrating periods of Indian history and society, and giving a prominent place to the native character, for which and the native institutions and traditions he had a great regard and respect. Seeta in particular was remarkable for its sympathetic and romantic portrayal of the marriage between a British civil servant and a Hindu widow just before the Indian Mutiny. Taylor himself had married Mary Palmer, the Eurasian granddaughter of William Palmer, the East India Company's Resident at Hyderabad (who had married "one of the Princesses of the Royal House of Delhi").[2] Returning to India he acted from 1840 to 1853 as correspondent for The Times. He also wrote a Student's Manual of the History of India (1870).