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Between Admiration and Administration:
Code-switching, Style-shifting, and
Sociolinguistic Crossing in Philip Meadows
Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug
NOA REICH
University of Toronto
Introduction
WHEN PHILIP MEADOWS TAYLOR PUBLISHED CONFESSIONS OF A THUG IN 1839, he helped
construct and familiarize the English reading public with the identity of an Indian criminal
profession that had been ‘discovered’ by the British as recently as the last few decades. At its
most sensationalized, the word Thug was used to describe the member of a secretive, cult-like
organization that transcended the barriers of caste and religion, worshipping the goddess Kali
by conning, strangling, and robbing travellers (Wagner 2009, 2, 29, 33). 1 Beginning in the initial
decades of the nineteenth century, the British launched an anti-Thuggee campaign which
reached its peak in the 1830s under Captain Sleeman’s direction (Poovey 2004, 10). Taylor’s
extremely popular2 Confessions can be read as largely according with the sensationalized
perception of Thuggee (Wagner 2009, 36; Brantlinger 1988, 89), and this is how contemporary
reviewers generally viewed the novel (Poovey 2004, 4). More recent critics such as Mary Poovey
and Pablo Mukherjee have drawn attention to ways in which the text is rather more complex
and ambivalent (Poovey 2004; Mukherjee 2003). This paper explores this ambivalence by
examining more closely what Javed Majeed recognizes as the novel’s complex exploration of
linguistic diversity (Majeed 1996, 94). I aim to bring into sharper focus the role of code-
switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing in the novel, contextualizing it in view of
the role played by language in British attempts to suppress Thuggee. Attending to these
1 The OED defines Thug as ‘One of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who
strangled their victims; a p'hansigar’ (‘thug’ n, a.). The word derives from the Hindi word thag or thak
meaning ‘a cheat, a swindler’, and only later came to mean ‘robber’ or ‘assassin’, and to be associated
with the word phanseegar, meaning ‘strangler’ (Yule and Burnell 1886, 115-16; Wagner 2009, 3). 2 Confessions of a Thug was very successful. Taylor claims that ‘Queen Victoria herself had ordered the
publishers to send her the sheets as they were being revised, because she could not wait for them to be
published’ (Mukherjee 2003, 107). The novel came out in two editions already in the first four months,
and went through four more reprints between 1887 to 1897 (107).
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linguistic aspects highlights the ways in which the novel represents the diverse social
organization, diffuse governing structures, complex religious practices, and myriad languages
of India as a ripe environment for Thuggee’s contradictory practices: criminal, often violent, yet
in some ways also honourable. More specifically, the novel’s exploration of linguistic diversity
displays a tension between the linguistic scholar’s and imaginative writer’s fascination with the
Thug’s artful linguistic performance, and the colonial administrator’s disposition to view this
performance as a practice that should be emulated as a means to achieving fuller control.
A Short History of Thuggee In order to understand Confessions of a Thug and the importance of linguistic aspects
such as code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing in the novel, it is necessary to
trace some of the history of Thuggee and the ideological contexts of the campaign for its
suppression. In 1809 and 1810 the first British reports appear mentioning ‘a set of people’ or a
‘detestable race of monsters’ called ‘T(,)ugs’ who are said to murder travellers by night (Wagner
2009, 67-8).3 Initially, ‘Thuggee’ was ‘perceived as yet another type of crime’, alongside other
instances of ‘indigenous criminality’ that were tied to specific ethnicities (Wagner 2009, 22). In
1810 the first suggestions of prosecuting these ‘offenders’ appear, followed by the first judicial
regulation that mentions ‘Thugs’ as ‘public robbers’ alongside other criminal groups, and in
1829 the India Office gave two Company officials, T. C. Smith and William Sleeman official
permission to carry on the campaign against Thugs (Wagner 2009, 70-74).4
From its very beginnings, with the reduction of multiple words (phanseegar, dacoit, and
others) to one key term, ‘Thug’, the history of Thuggee displays a process of simplification,
homogenization, and sensationalization, not just of words, but also of practices, social groups,
geographical locations, and religious beliefs. An examination of the official British documents
that mention Thuggee suggests that a considerable degree of interpretation and some
imagination were involved in the production of what came to constitute the dominant
perception of the ‘Thug’. By the publication of W. H. Sleeman’s anonymous letter to the Calcutta
Literary Gazette of 1830, followed by his hugely influential 1836 Ramaseeana, Thuggee had been
turned into a uniform, coherent system, purported to span the Indian subcontinent, and
elements such as the ‘belief in religious sanction and breach of caste and the religious hierarchy
supposedly governing all Indians’ had been added, rendering it ‘an extraordinary practice even
by Indian standards’ (Wagner 2009 23).5 The implications of this campaign for the British
3 Report of O.W. Steer, 18 November 1809, and report of J. Law, 23 December 1809, respectively (quoted
in Wagner 209, 67-8). 4 Between 1826 and 1832 ‘the division that later became the Thuggee and Dacoity Department captured
and tried 1,562 men for the crime of Thuggee’ (Poovey 2004, 10). Other scholars provide slightly different
figures. According to Shwarz, by 1840, ‘466 had been hanged, 1,504 transported for life, 933 sentenced to
life imprisonment, and 208 died in jail before trial’ (Shwarz 2010, 8). According to Lloyd, ‘Between 1826–
41, 3064 indigenes were accused of ‘thuggee’, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment,
transportation or execution’ (Lloyd 2007, 363). 5 Sleeman’s prosecution of the Thugs was set against the background of parliamentary debates about the
renewal of the Company’s charter and about William Bentinck’s appointment, in 1828, as Governor-
General of India. These debates appeared in the press between 1825-33 and expressed concerns over the
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public’s perception of India are not to be underestimated. Texts like the article that appeared in
1833 in the New Monthly Magazine, Thornton’s 1837 Illustrations of the History and Practices of the
Thugs, and an 1841 article in Blackwood’s Magazine equated ‘The eastern/Indian character’ and
‘the entire history of Asia’ with ‘the figure of the Thug’ and used it as a justification or British
rule (Mukherjee 2003, 102). For example, Frederick Holme, a well-known Greek scholar,
claimed in Blackwood’s that if the British Government in India were able to ‘eradicat[e]’
Thuggee,, it would earn ‘a title…to the gratitude of the natives of India, which will alone make
the benefits of our later administration more than atone for the injustices and rapacity which
marked our early acquisitions of Indian territory’ (244, qtd. in Poovey 2004, 4). ‘Using [Thuggee]
as a rubric’, Mukherjee argues, ‘the colonial rulers could draw conclusions about the ‘Indian
mind’ that would serve every administrator of that country’, rendering ‘the continent itself as
ripe for the thrust of British reforms’ (Mukherjee 2003, 102). The public furor over Thuggee
helped reinforce the perception that India was in dire need of penal and legal reforms that
could only be achieved through British intervention.
Colonial Rule, Colonial ‘Knowledge’, and Linguistic Diversity In addition to situating the novel in the context of the political and ideological aims of
the Thuggee campaign, it is important to contextualize Confessions in terms of the East India
Company’s epistemological and administrative approaches to India’s cultural and linguistic
diversity. The novel was published during a time when strategies for controlling the ‘complex
cultural, linguistic, and communal heterogeneity of the subcontinent’ through surveillance and
information gathering were seen as crucial for British rule (Majeed 1996, 88; Mukherjee 2003;
Wagner 2009). Thuggee was one of the ways of representing India that ‘could justify the
massive incursion of the colonialist administrative panoply in the name of constructing an
archival ‘knowledge’ about the essence of the country’ (Mukherjee 2003, 101), and judicial
reforms provided some of the means for this construction. Another important means of
constructing this sort of archival knowledge—and one in which Taylor himself participated—
was through British Orientalist scholarship.
In the late eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth century, the Company
founded a number of schools and funded some Orientalist research, hoping it might have
practical benefits to its rule (Thiessen 1992, 4). ‘In Anglo-Indian practice’, ‘“orientalism” was
directly linked to a mastery of Indian languages; an “orientalist” was first and foremost a
linguist’ (31). Orientalist scholars, who were overwhelmingly Company men, prided
themselves on learning what, from the Anglo-Indian perspective, were four main groups of
languages: Hindostanee, seen as the ‘lingua-franca’ and used by Company armies; Persian, the
official language of the Sultanate, and the language of legal record; the Indo-European
languages; and the Dravidian languages (32). According to Shuchi Kapila, Taylor himself was a
bit of an ‘anomal[y] for a nineteenth-century colonial ideologue’, displaying a ‘true’ eighteenth-
alarming debt of the Indian government, which was not being balanced by the Company’s profits. An
important role of the campaign was to manifest ‘the kind of fiscal and judicial efficiency that the English
government was demanding of the Company’ (Poovey 11).
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century style ‘Orientalist spirit’ in his proficiency in the local languages and customs (Kapila
1998, 218).
Beginning around 1833, however, the Company decreased support for the Orientalist
community and promoted liberal education, Westernization, and Christianization (Thiessen
1992, 2). Macaulay’s Education Minute of 1835, which heralded the beginning of a systematic
effort to incorporate English and English literature in Indian institutions of higher education,
marks an important shift in approaches to governing the Indian population (Majeed 1996, 96).
During the Orientalist period of scholarship, however, the ability to translate between English
and these languages was cultivated as a skill both for its own sake, and in the hopes that it
would improve the Company’s ability to understand the local culture and enable it to improve
its administrative rule (Thiessen 1992, 34-5). For example, the journal Asiatick Researches, the
journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, was started as part of this trend; it would publish
Sherwood’s article on ‘The P’hansigars’ in 1816, an article that claims evidence for the practice
back to the Muslim conquest of India and even Hindu mythology (Wagner 2009). The belief in
the importance of acquiring and disseminating this linguistic knowledge in the period leading
up to the 1830s is manifested in the proliferation of translations of texts, glossaries, and
dictionaries.
Sleeman’s Ramaseeana, published in 1836, and ‘the source for nearly everything
subsequently published about Thuggee, including Taylor’s novel’ (Poovey 2004, 10), is a later
instance of this trend. It is also an example of the British attraction to the notion of Indian
culture as characterized by secrecy—as seen in the popularity of the representation of the thugs
as a secret cult or society. The British colonial imagination was obsessed with the notion of a
secret language; gaining knowledge over the secret language of the Thugs, as Sleeman presents
it in his incredibly influential Ramaseeana, was an important step, if not the key, to capturing the
criminals (Sleeman 1836, 88). Sleeman displays the colonial desire to control through a kind of
totalizing knowledge of the language and culture of the region. He claims that he ‘has entered
into this Vocabulary everything to which the Thugs in any part of India have thought it
necessary to assign a term’, and that he is ‘satisfied that there is no term, no rite, no ceremony,
no omen or usage that’ has been concealed and not recorded, or at least none of importance (3).
Sleeman also stresses the specialized knowledge that underpins this text: every word recorded
is ‘Ramasee in the sense assigned to it’, although of the words, ‘but few of them are to be found
at all in any language with which [he is] acquainted’ (3).
As we can see, the study of India’s myriad languages played a crucial role in British rule
in the period leading up to the novel’s publication, although the form of this study underwent
various changes in emphasis. My consideration of the role of code-switching, style-shifting, and
sociolinguistic crossing in Confessions of a Thug will show the influence of these different
emphases, including traces of Taylor’s Orientalist leanings, as well as the impact of Sleeman’s
concern with the linguistic secrecy of the Thugs.
‘Capable of Exciting the Mind So Strongly’: Linguistic Diversity
in Confessions of a Thug
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This historical context makes clear that Taylor’s novel was published during a period of legal
and penal reform, and the implementation of new policing strategies (Mukherjee 2003, 108).
British colonialists constructed Thuggee as an all-pervasive organization based in secret forms
of communication, disguise, and criminality, which in turn is representative of Indian culture
more generally. To a certain extent Taylor’s novel reflects this representation. Confessions of a
Thug is a fictionalized confession of Ameer Ali, a Thug cum informant, or ‘approver’, to the
British authorities. He narrates his life to a ‘Sahib’, apparently an officer of the British East India
Company, whose voice intrudes only occasionally in brief comments and questions.
The introduction to the novel, signed by Taylor, claims that it is based on conversations
that took place between Taylor himself and a real Thug. Most scholars agree that Taylor
probably relied to a large extent upon Captain Sleeman’s and James Paton’s interviews with
Thug informers, many of which were published in Sleeman’s Ramaseeana in 1836 (Majeed 1996;
Poovey 2004; Wagner 2009). Taylor frames the narrative as a truthful record of the captured
Ali’s narration of his life, and largely effaces the role of the Sahib as interviewer, so that the
impression is of direct and transparent access to Ali’s words. Ali’s story rehearses in many ways
the sensationalized version of Thuggee, emphasizing the apparent contradiction between
religiosity and observance of rituals and omens alongside cold-blooded murder, the way the
‘profession’ unites Muslim and Hindu, and the use of disguise to con incompetent or corrupt
local authority figures.
As I will suggest, however, Taylor’s attention to, and display of his own knowledge of
the linguistic plurality of India in the novel, both embodies and exceeds the kind of narrow
concern with cultural administration represented by texts like the Ramaseeana. The novel
displays a rich exploration of a range of linguistic practices: it references, and in some cases
makes crucial to the plot, several of the numerous languages in usage in the region, including
Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Gujarati, Marathi, Arabic, as well as different local patois; it dramatizes
Sleeman’s emphasis on the role of the secret language of the Ramasee; and it deploys various
styles and genres of English—archaic, elevated, flowery, sentimental, etc. Majeed has discussed
the novel’s engagement with India’s ‘linguistic diversity’ as an attempt to negotiate one of the
main sources of contemporary colonial anxiety (Majeed 1996, 94). Yet while Majeed draws
attention to the importance of language in the novel, he does not quite pinpoint the nuances
that arise from the novel’s use of code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing. I
suggest that more detailed attention to these linguistic aspects contributes to an understanding
of the novel’s ambivalent relationship to the colonial project of suppressing Thuggee and
gaining epistemological and administrative control over the Orient. While Sleeman presents
knowledge of the secret language of the Thugs as crucial to controlling them, for example, the
novel paints the Thug world in a far more complex manner as a world richly textured with
code-switching and linguistic performance. Further, in its sheer exploration of linguistic
hybridity, the novel seems to take pleasure in this density, and to admire Ameer’s skill in
manipulating it. However, in giving the impression of an almost transparent transmission of the
Thug’s linguistic performance in his confessions, the novel itself becomes an exhibition of
Taylor’s own skill with languages. Indeed, I suggest that the very obfuscation of the Sahib’s role
as mediator and of Taylor’s as animator reinforces the parallel between Taylor’s and the Thug’s
roles as linguistic performers. Ultimately, then, the novel presents an ambivalent position: on
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the one hand, Taylor displays an imitative admiration of the Thug’s linguistic performance; on
the other, he invites the conclusion that it is this very linguistic prowess which must be outdone
if India is to be mastered by British rule.
‘The Old…Story’: Disguise and Linguistic Performance Before turning to look at more specific instances of linguistic performance, it is helpful to
situate Confessions within Taylor’s more general portrayal of Thuggee, and particularly his
representation of the role of disguise in the ‘profession’. The novel focuses on the Thugs’
impersonation of members of different tribes, castes, and professions. In treating this practice,
Taylor displays a complicated attitude: his introduction takes the hegemonic British attitude
towards Thuggee, but the narrative and particularly the representation of Ameer’s character
blurs clear moral lines. This strategy is perhaps in part a way of making Ali’s character more
sympathetic to the reader, but it also offers a view of disguise and the taking on of different
identities as not intrinsically wrong or evil, setting up a more nuanced context for the novel’s
engagement with linguistic performance. In representing Ali’s performance of different identities, Taylor seems to oscillate
between casting him as a cynical impersonator of religious figures, on the one hand, and on the
other, as genuinely honourable and even pious. For example, Ali disguises himself more than
once as a fakeer; in various instances ‘the religious vagrants and mendicants who throng every
village are shown to liaise with the Thugs’ (Mukherjee 2003, 108; Majeed 1996, 89); and at one
point Ameer discovers there are ‘sacred ministers of our faith [who are] Thugs as well as
ourselves’ (Taylor 1998, 79). To a certain extent, then, the novel presents the ‘false religion’ of
the land as complicit in the ‘network of criminality’ that spans the entire region (Mukherjee
108), reinforcing the view Taylor espouses in his Introduction. However, in other places Ameer
seems to display piety. For example, Ameer regretfully exclaims, ‘Would to God I had become a
Moola’, a learned and pious Muslim such as the man who taught him Qusrut, and describes
praying at saints’ shrines and mosques during the Thugs’ journeys (for example Taylor 1998, 27;
for example, 242). At the beginning of the narrative, Ameer overhears Thugs discussing how
they might induce him to join their profession, and they consider Ameer’s faith as a major
means of enticement. Ameer also ascribes his path in life to ‘Fate’, claiming that he ‘ought not to
murmur at the decrees of Providence’ (30). In this sense, the emphasis on Ameer’s religiosity
contributes to Taylor’s portrayal of him as an essentially honourable, moral person, if misled by
his beliefs. This not only complicates a reading of the representation of religion as simply
aligned with deceit and criminality—it also makes it difficult to view his impersonating habits
as completely at odds with a respect for religion.
The Thugs’ other disguises are also presented in a complicated manner, in part
reiterating the stereotypical presentations of Thugs as highway thieves, which Taylor presents
in the Introduction, and in part highlighting a more sophisticated linguistic ability. Taylor’s
Introduction claims that ‘the unruly conditions of the roads’, and the nomadic lifestyle of many
of the native groups, afford ‘every temptation and opportunity...for plunderers of all
descriptions to make travellers their prey’ (Taylor 1998, 6). More specifically, it suggests that the
diversity of social groups compounds the problem, because ‘the greatest facility of disguise
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among thieves and Thugs exist in the endless division of the people into tribes, castes, and
professions’ (6). In the novel, the Thugs often exploit the conditions of the roads and the
‘endless division of the people’ by pretending to be honest travellers and offering fellow
travellers protection from thieves. They also don other, sometimes more complicated personas.
For instance, a common disguise deployed by Ali and his father is that of merchants—a con
referred to in brief as ‘the old Oomerkher story’ (148)—in order to be able to sell the goods that
they have stolen without causing suspicion. In other instances, Ali pretends to be ‘but a poor
soldier, a Syud by birth’ (103), or a horse-dealer (242). At another point, when one of the victims
of the Thugs turns out to have been traveling under alibi to hide the fact that he is a revenue
collector wanted for taking off with the money he’d collected, Ali is himself commissioned by
the village Aumil—who takes him for a trustworthy man—to assist in arresting the collector
and bringing him to justice (150). Here the Thugs’ criminal actions are unexpectedly made to
overlap with a sort of vigilante restoration of the law. Having stolen bills of exchange and a
personal seal that were found on the victim’s person, Ali impersonates the ‘Syud’s confidential
agent’ and manages to fool the dealer who owed the man the money into paying him (214). In
what becomes a quite elaborate scheme, Ameer’s knowledge of both Persian and Hindoostanee
is crucial, because it is what enables him to understand and manipulate the bills of exchange.
This is just one of several instances where his success as a Thug hinges on his ability to read
documents in both Persian and Hindoostanee.
This example is also illustrative of the way Taylor weakens sharp lines of distinction
between legal and criminal, moral and corrupt. The local authorities are presented as either
corrupt or incompetent and helpless. Ameer’s adoptive father is repeatedly shown to be
speaking the truth when he claims that ‘No one can withstand the sight of gold: from the prince
on the throne to the meanest peasant is the same’, and goes on to list the effect of money on all
ranks, ages and genders (235). That so many of the people the Thugs encounter—even the non-
Thugs—are corrupt or scandalous has at least two effects: on the one hand, it makes the Thugs’
duplicitousness seem less blameworthy, and on the other, it suggests that perhaps such double-
dealing is unavoidable under such circumstances. Yet, if this might be seen as inviting a more
lenient view of the Thugs, it also aligns comfortably with the view of the anti-Thuggee
campaign that ‘the duty of the colonialist authority’ is ‘to suspect everyone in the colony, for all
are potentially disguised criminals in the pay of the native rulers’ (Mukherjee 2003, 108).
Nevertheless, even as Taylor’s representation lends itself to justifications of legal and
penal reform, it also seems to insist on portraying Ali and at least some of the other Thugs as
abiding by a recognizable code of honour. In the context of the novel’s depiction of helpless or
despotic local rulers, such as the Aumil who enlists Ali’s help, or the Nuwab who holds a girl
against her wishes, Ali’s intercessions emerge as extralegal but frequently moral. Capturing an
embezzler, helping an oppressed woman escape, and, eventually, revenging himself on his
parents’ murderer, Ganesha, Ali is the more sympathetic criminal within a world of criminals, a
kind of arbiter of justice in a world devoid of the rule of law. Indeed, in one of the novel’s rare
mentions of non-natives, it appears that they too are morally questionable: the ‘Europeans
[who] had got a footing in the country’, and whose ‘authorities were suspicious and inquisitive’
are influenced by ‘bullying’ and ‘bribes’ (461-2). The novel even draws certain parallels between
the Thugs’ business practices and those of the East India Company men (who were merchants);
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as Poovey points out, both organizations view themselves as ‘free-traders’ who ‘obey a strict set
of laws intrinsic to their trade’, ‘follow established trade routes… and keep their own trade
secrets, both through disguise and through the language unique to their community’ (Poovey
2004, 13). Finally, the capture of Ali and other Thugs at the end of the novel is only possible
because the English authorities manage to get certain Thugs to betray their brotherhood (Taylor
1998, 492, 542). Not only then does the novel draw similarities between the Thugs and the
Company men, the English are here associated with a corruption of the Thugs’ code of honour.
Against this background, Ali, and by extension the successful impersonating practices of
the Thugs, appear to have redeemable qualities. While the novel presents the world of India as
criss-crossed by criminal networks, the Thug gang’s network is painted in a somewhat positive
light as an honourable brotherhood that transcends the various ‘divisions of the people’. As one
Thug explains, in Thuggee, ‘the Hindoo and the Muslim both unite as brothers.... a sure proof
that our calling is blessed and sanctioned by the divine authority.... From the lowest to the
highest among us…go where we will we find the same brotherhood’ (Taylor 1998, 33). This
type of moral code and welcoming spirit are ‘conspicuously absent from the “policing” society’
(Mukherjee 2003, 108). Taylor has Ali protest directly against being perceived as evil, asking his
interviewer to recognize points of the code of honour by which he has abided:
Have I not ever been a kind husband and a faithful friend? Where is the man existing
who can say a word against Ameer Ali’s honour, which ever has been and ever will
remain pure and unsullied? Have I ever broken a social tie?.... Ever neglected a rite or
ceremony of my religion? (Taylor 1998, 267).
Ali’s defiance against British law goes hand in hand with his defense of the honour of his
‘profession’ against British attempts to quell it: ‘Thuggee, capable of exciting the mind so
strongly, will not, cannot be annihilated. Look at the hundreds who have suffered for this
profession; does the number of your prisoners decrease?’ (Taylor 1998, 15). Taylor seems to be
inviting admiration for Ali’s spirit, an attitude that will make the reader more comfortable in
appreciating his linguistic skills. Indeed, Ali here seems to capture at least one aspect of Taylor’s
attitude towards Thuggee: the ‘profession’, and specifically its expert linguistic performance, is
‘capable of exciting the mind so strongly’.
‘Words of Recognition’: Code-switching and Style-shifting The prevalence of disguise and linguistic impersonation among the Thugs means that
code-switching and style-shifting play a central role in the novel. I use code-switching to
designate ‘the systematic alternation of two or more languages during a conversation’
(Mahootian 2006, 511). The switches in Confessions occur in Ameer’s speech and in the
conversations he recounts, and alternate between English, Hindostanee, Persian, Ramasee, other
Indian languages, and various registers of English. Transitions between registers of language
may also be considered style-shifts. Code-switching and style-shifting in Confessions of a Thug
highlights India’s linguistic diversity and, more specifically, suggests that the Thugs’ success is
largely based on their successful manipulation of linguistic practices. Yet over and above these
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functions, they offer an opportunity to explore the complexities of linguistic performance,
which appears as a both a potential barrier to understanding and a means to covert practices,
and as an admirable, even desirable, skill. Linguists most commonly discuss code-switching as a feature of oral discourse, and less
commonly as a fictional device. As part of a narrative, code-switching in Confessions operates
under different rules than in spontaneous bilingual oral discourse. In this sense, it can be
considered an instance of what Susan Ferguson calls ‘ficto-linguistics’, referring to ‘systems of
language that appear in novels and both deviate from accepted or expected sociolinguistic
patterns and indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional
world’ (Ferguson 1998, par. 11). Fittingly, the overwhelming majority of code-switches in the
novel occur in the direct speech recounted by Ameer as having taken place between himself and
other people, rather than in his narration of events. Thus the novel retains the oral quality of
code-switching. At the same time, Ali’s narration is generally in Standard English, which is
congruent with the tendency of Victorian authors to represent the speech of major characters in
Standard English, rather than dialect, even if this constitutes a deviation from the ‘expected
sociolinguistic pattern’ (Ferguson 1998). As a ficto-linguistic device, code-switching in
Confessions serves particular purposes, some of which overlap with the functions linguists
identify in oral code-switching—specifically marking the speaker as a member of a certain
community; and some of which are specific to the novel’s form and themes—for example,
establishing the authenticity of the fictional world. Significant for my purposes, however, is the
way in which these aspects of code-switching function to engage representations of India’s
linguistic diversity, and to construct stereotypical, sensationalized representations of Thuggee,
but also to complicate them. On a basic level, the novel’s use of code-switching serves to convey a sense of
authenticity, and to produce the ‘extrinsic’ effect—i.e., one directed at a community of non-
native speakers—of ‘giving local colour’, and creating a dense layering of local languages and
dialects (Gordon and Williams 1998, 80). At the same time, Taylor takes care that the code-
switches won’t impede the non-expert reader’s comprehension. The novel typically deploys
‘intrasentential switches’, or switches ‘within a clause involving a phrase, a single word or
across morpheme boundaries’, including lexical as well as grammatical switches, rather than
including larger and potentially more opaque sections of switches (Mahootian 2006, 512). Often
just single non-English words, typically nouns, are incorporated into Ali’s narration. Thus, for
example, Ali recounts the speech of other characters as direct speech in which a non-English
word appears while clarifying the word through context. For instance: ‘would you not like
some sweetmeat? See how tempting those julabees look at the Hulwaee’s’ (Taylor 1998, 18). At
other times, Ali uses the word and then defines it (and we might understand the informant to
be explaining the term to his interlocutor): ‘Persian mootsuddee, or writer in the service of the
Rajah of Nagpoor’ (53). In other instances, which more clearly betray the written status of the
text, Taylor uses parenthesis following a word that might be unknown to his reader: ‘“Bhilla
manjeh?” (have you cleared the hole?) he eagerly inquired’ (83). Less typically, words are
untranslated, and in these cases it seems to be important to the narrative to convey the
impression of a chaotic side of Indian culture. Thus for instance, the tumultuous public
spectacle of the ‘festival of the Mohorum’ is conveyed by description not only of the visual
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aspects of the parade, the crowds and the elephants, for instance, but also by an auditory
account of the ‘jeers and abuse of the multitude’, and of the ‘cries’—which go untranslated—of
‘“Hassan! Hoosein! Doola! Deen! Deen!”’ (Taylor 1998, 166; see also Majeed 1996, 94).
As this last example suggests, another function of the code-switching appears to be to
reinforce Taylor’s views about the challenges of managing India. In his introduction to the
novel, Taylor endeavours to explain ‘[h]ow the system of Thuggee could have become so
prevalent, [yet] remain unknown to, and unsuspected by, the public of India, among whom the
professors of it were living in constant association’, by conjuring up the ‘vast[ness of the]
continent’ of India (Taylor 1998, 5). Ali’s narrative references specific geographic locations, the
names of cities and villages, particular tribes and ethnic groups, and contemporary political
struggles such as the ‘wars of Holkar and Sindea with the Feringhees’ (36). To an educated
reader familiar with India’s geography, history, and politics, these details index a far more
fleshed out world; to an unfamiliar reader, they create a sense of the overwhelming size and
complexity of the subcontinent. In both cases, this attention to geography contributes to the
impression that Thuggee was made possible on such wide scale because of the difficulty in
managing such a large area, especially as it was ‘portioned out into territories, the possessions
of many princes and chieftains—each with supreme and irresponsible power in his own
dominions, having most lax and inefficient governments’ (5). To an extent, then, these instances
of code-switching might be taken to reflect the notion, influenced by the ‘new policing
strategies’ of the time, that Indian criminality is almost unavoidable as a result of its
sociolinguistic diversity, which in turn is the result of the size of the region (Mukherjee 2003,
108).
However, Taylor’s deployment of code-switching in the novel does more than just
illustrate the political, administrative argument he outlines in the Introduction; it suggests an
attempt to engage with, while actively reinforcing, a sense of the figurative excess that linguistic
performances, especially linguistically diverse performances, can give rise to. This is apparent in
the type of code-switching that involves the use of phrases and idioms, a linguistic usage that is
inherently far more difficult to explain or translate. Ameer is fond of referring to the ‘carpet of
patience’, for example; as in, ‘“we sat down on the carpet of patience, to smoke the pipe of
regret, and to drown our affliction in the best way we could”’ (Taylor 1998, 71). At another
point an old woman says to him, ‘“You know the old proverb, ‘Kubootur bu kubootur, bāz bu
bāz’—pigeons mate with pigeons, and hawks with hawks”’ (113). These idioms add a more
textured layer to the textual representation of India’s complex cultures and languages, indexing
and producing a sense of a larger culture with a signifying system unfamiliar to native English
language users. Indeed, the Sahib himself acknowledges the challenges posed by idiomatic
speech and style-shifts. Referring to Ameer’s style, he notes that ‘his eloquence kindles and
bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language, which it would be impossible to render into
English, or, if it were rendered, would appear to the English reader, unused to such forms of
speech, highly exaggerated and absurd’ (266). As this comment acknowledges, figurative and
stylized modes of language are difficult to translate, but they are central to Ali’s speech;
attempts to convey them to the English reader may render them ‘absurd’, but they are really
‘eloquent’. The idiomatic passages might seem reductive or trite attempts to portray a
stereotyped picturesque linguistic culture. Nevertheless, at the same time, the Sahib’s reference
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 11
to the difficulty in translating Ameer’s speech directs the reader’s attention to the effect of the
strangeness of the phrases, and the palpable difficulty in translating idioms, reminding the
reader of the limits to his or her ability to grasp the world depicted in the text.
Taylor also emphasizes Ali’s ability to style-shift—to transition into different registers of
linguistic usage—and to understand other characters’ usage of different linguistic styles, as
demonstrating a sophistication that goes beyond basic communication skills. Thus, throughout
the novel, Ali gains favour in the eyes of various powerful figures—Nuwabs, Aumils,
merchants and Moolas, through his use of elaborate and deferential speech that emulates
codified linguistic practices, easily mimicking the ‘polished Persianised etiquette of the courts of
Hindostan’ (Majeed 1996, 93). This suggests that there is an art to Ali’s linguistic performance,
one that Taylor, as the author of these convincing style-shifts, clearly appreciates.
Another important function of the style-shifts, which is a particularly ficto-linguistic
role, is characterization—that is, marking characters in terms of personality and class. These
style-shifts often group together. In the speech of the old woman who serves Ameer’s first love
interest, non-standard or archaic English vernacular appears, apparently to mark her class
status: ‘“My blessings on ye that ye are come”’ (Taylor 1998, 128); ‘“Ay, that she is; I warrant the
hours have gone as slowly with her as with me”’ (128); ‘”methinks sir”’ (130). At other points,
the grouping of discourse markers, a sense of translated syntax, and idioms appear in the
speech of certain characters that are somewhat caricatured. For example, Dildar Khan, an
arrogant but cowardly tiger hunter, is fond of ‘Inshalla’ and speaking of himself in the third
person. His comic speech is accompanied by the twisting of his mustachios, ‘twirling round and
round, and leaping in every possible direction’, and braggadocio: ‘“we have determined that
the brute dies today. Many a tiger has fallen from a shot from my good gun, and what is this
brute that it should escape? May its sister be defiled; the only fear is, that it will not stand to allow us
to prove that we are men, and not dogs before it”’ (37 emphasis added).
A broader form of style-shifting, I suggest, is exhibited in the novel’s shifts between
‘Oriental’ and ‘English’ genres, and this style-shifting contributes on another level to my
reading of the novel as ambivalently resistant to hegemonic and totalizing portrayals of India’s
linguistic diversity as merely a source of chaos and criminality. For example, at one point,
Ameer recognizes a woman’s coded appeal to him in the form of a Persian ‘Ghuzul’, or love
song, because he, unlike his Hindu Thug partner, ‘understand[s] Persian, thanks to the old
Moola [his] teacher’ (Taylor 1998, 113). The use of the Oriental genre of the ‘Ghuzul’ is also
significant here, insofar as it appears to influence much of Ali’s romantic discourse, rendering it
particularly elevated and sentimental. On listening to the appealing woman, for example,
Ameer narrates, ‘I listened till I could have fallen at her feet, and worshipped her as a Peri from
heaven. My soul was so intoxicated with the blessed sounds I heard, that I was insensible to all
around me’ (107). Here the style-shift has nothing to do with deception or criminality, but
rather expresses elevated feelings, a kind of spiritual aesthetic appreciation. In addition to
allusions to Oriental genres such as the language of the ‘Ghuzul’, and comparisons of Ameer’s
speech to the verses of the Arabic poet Hafiz (474), Taylor inserts epigraphs from Shakespeare
and other English plays at the start of certain chapters. In this way Taylor seems to ‘pit’, as
Majeed notes, the high literary Oriental form against the traditional English one, while
displaying his own facility in moving between these traditions (Majeed 1996, 95).
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 12
The potential as well as limitations arising from linguistic diversity are explored from
another angle in terms of the role played by code-switches and secret forms of communication
within the Thug community. The commands of the Thugs are usually recorded as code-
switches; for example, a repeated phrase is: ‘Tumbako lao (bring tobacco)’, which is ‘the signal!’
to attack their victims (Taylor 1998, 56). Their omens are usually referred to by their Ramasee
names: ‘the Pilhaoo, or omen on the left hand, was vouchsafed: a jackass brayed, and was
almost instantly answered by one on the right, which was the Thibaoo’ (51; also 412). Certain
objects of symbolic importance to the Thugs are referred to in Ramasee; for example, ‘the
nishan, the pickaxe’, ‘was now called, having been consecrated, khusee’ (52). And at one point
Ameer identifies another Thug by testing his response to the Thug ‘words of recognition’: ‘“Ali
Khan Bhaee Salam!”’Ameer says, and the Thug responds correctly: ‘“Salam Aleikoom!”’ (416).
The Thug then mentions ‘the goor of the Toupounee’, to which Ameer replies, ‘“Then you have
eaten it?”’ The man responds in the affirmative (416). ‘“Enough”’, Ameer cries; ‘“I have met
with a friend”’ (416).
Passages representing the secret communication system of the Thugs often refer to ‘the
Goor’, and this initially obscure reference comes to serve as a metonym for belonging to the
Thuggee community. The phrase appears at first without explanation. For example, Ameer
overhears men mentioning ‘eat[ing] the Goor’ (Taylor 1998, 26), and someone saying, ‘you
know I have eaten the Goor, and cannot change’ (30); in both these instances, in contrast to most
other code-switches, Ali does not translate ‘Goor’ or explain what ‘eating the Goor’ might mean.
At the time when he heard these references, Ali the character did not know what they meant;
but the fact that as a retrospective narrator he withholds any explanation until the moment in
his story when he discovered what the ‘Goor’ was about invests the term with an esoteric
quality, which is typical of sensationalized representations of Thuggee as a secretive cult and
contributes to its association with obscurity. It eventually becomes apparent that the Goor is
sugar eaten as part of the ritual by which one becomes a Thug (49). The Goor is also eaten again
at the ‘sacrifice of the Tupounee’ that is made post-killing (57). Eating the Goor comes to take on
greater symbolic significance when Ali’s father and Thug jemadar, or captain, says:
You have eaten the goor, and are now a Thug in your heart; were you to desire to forsake
us you could not, such is the power it has when consecrated as you have seen it over the
hearts of men. Were any one to find a portion and eat it, whatever might be his rank or
condition in life, he would assuredly become a Thug, he could not avoid it, the power it
would exercise over him would be irresistible. (58)
Although Ali describes several rituals leading up to becoming a full Thug, the ‘eating of the
Goor’ stands metonymically for the whole process and the mystery that accompanies its first
appearance as an opaque code-switch imbues Thuggee practices more generally with an air of
secrecy.
Ameer’s first mature encounter with Thuggee (he was kidnapped by Thugs as a young
boy) is also representative of the novel’s linguistic concerns insofar as it is framed as the
experience of covertly overhearing an unknown language, a code-switching Ali found
incomprehensible. I suggest that Ameer’s initial contact with Thuggee and its secret form of
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 13
communication models the reader’s positioning by the narrative as obtaining some kind of
privileged access, from behind a comfortable screen, into a mysterious, exciting, and largely
incomprehensible world of intrigue. The youthful Ameer hears this language one night when
he decides to spy on his adoptive father Ismail and his mysterious guests for the evening,
hiding behind a ‘Purdah or screen’ (Taylor 1998, 25). He hears the men ‘conversing in a
language [he] only partially understood, and [he] thought this strange, as [he] knew
Hindoostanee and the common dialect [him]self, having picked up the latter by associating with
the boys of the town’ (26). Ameer watches as Ismail divides up valuables, and then the men
‘speak in Hindoostanee, a language [he] underst[ands]’ (26). A reader who has some
background on Thugs will know of Ramasee, and it will later become clear that the Thugs
communicate in this special dialect and use special signs, and that Ameer himself has become
competent in it. The narrative form, however, emphasizes not so much demystifying the
language, or how Ameer learns it, but rather the sense of opacity and mystery experienced by
Ameer—and by extension the reader as well—on first hearing it. Later on, a Thug stresses the
Thugs’ ability to communicate amongst themselves through Ramasee: ‘“Go where we will, we
find homes open to us, and a welcome greeting among tribes even of whose language we of
Hindostan are ignorant; yet their signs of recognition are the same as ours”’ (33). Taylor thus
represents Thuggee as an organization defined by the ability of its members to communicate in
a secret lingua-franca. Yet the excitement and frustration represented by the doubly layered
experience—the young Ali’s, and indirectly, the reader’s—of initial exclusion from the
mysterious linguistic organization, followed by but partial incorporation—partial because,
unlike Ali, the reader only has access to that which Ali chooses to divulge—exceeds the
stereotypical, and, I would argue, is representative of the novel’s more complex engagement
with linguistic diversity.
As this foundational event in the novel suggests, code-switching in Confessions helps
create an ambivalent sense of India’s linguistic diversity as both chaotic and exciting; as
partially glimpsed through the medium of the fiction, but ultimately inaccessible. A related
ambivalence surrounds Taylor’s representation of Ameer’s style-shifting as part of his depiction
of Thuggee as a rather sophisticated profession of performance. As I will suggest, Taylor’s own
participation in linguistic performance, and his evident appreciation for the power it potentially
offers, further complicates this aspect of his depiction.
‘Impossible to Render into English’: Style-shifting and Sociolinguistic
Crossing As we have seen, Taylor’s novel frequently portrays Ali and other characters code-
switching and style-shifting, and more broadly taking on other linguistic personas. In this
regard, I now want to suggest, the novel is engaging issues of ‘sociolinguistic crossing’, both in
terms of the fictional world it describes, and in terms of its formal structure, which effaces the
roles of the Sahib (the fictional interviewer), and Taylor (the author) in mediating the linguistic
performances presented in the novel. ‘Sociolinguistic crossing’ is particularly useful for
identifying certain types of linguistic crossings that occur in the narrative, which stand out from
the rest because ‘the code-switching speaker stylizes a typical speaker of the owning group’,
often ‘us[ing] a mock form of that variety or language’ (Auer 2006, 490). In these cases,
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 14
[t]he current speaker... animates another past or future, factual or fictitious, generic or
individualized speaker, giving him or her a typified or even stereotypical representation
through language choice, accent, prosody, or any kind of social-communicative style
that is not associated with the teller’s own social persona. (490)
Some of the examples of style-shifting I have considered, such as Ameer’s polished etiquette,
his elevated love discourse, and Dildar Khan’s braggadocio, can be viewed as instances of
playful ‘sociolinguistic crossing’. In the novel, Ameer’s amorous discourse is presented as
sincere, but Taylor may be somewhat parodying his imitation of the literary form (and possibly
the form itself). Ameer’s diplomatic flattery to various figures of power may be taken as more
consciously imitative and mocking. His representation of Dildar Khan’s speech, finally, is most
blatantly an instance of sociolinguistic crossing in that it is a stereotypical and mocking
animation of a communicative style that is certainly not Ameer’s own. It is in such instances of
linguistic performance—augmented by the novelistic form and literary elements such as
characterization and parody—that Taylor’s exploration of linguistic diversity goes beyond an
over-determining ideological representation of Thuggee and India.
More importantly perhaps, but less explicitly, sociolinguistic crossing is embedded in
the very structure of the novel itself. As noted above, Taylor keeps the role of the interviewing
‘Sahib’ quite minimal. The first pages contain a few short exchanges between the Thug and the
Sahib, mostly conveying the interlocutor’s condemnation of Thuggee, assertions about how the
Government’s ‘heart[y]’ pursuit of Thugs will lead to their speedy obliteration, or the occasional
appeal to Ali’s conscience (Taylor 1998). But as the novel begins with, and overwhelmingly
presents Ali’s voice speaking in the first person, his ‘I’ seems to become the dominant subject
position of the text, and the ‘Sahib’ is relegated almost entirely to Ali’s rather frequent addresses
(such as, ‘You see, Sahib’, or ‘You may believe, Sahib’). The Sahib, while implicitly aligned with
Taylor himself, never provides any details about himself; thus he remains a kind of cipher.
Only mid-way through the narrative, after almost 250 pages of mostly silence on the
part of the Sahib, the narrative suddenly pauses, and the Sahib addresses the ‘Reader’ directly,
describing for his or benefit Ameer’s appearance (‘gentlemanlike’ and mild, if a bit self-
important) and, more importantly, his speech (Taylor 1998, 265). First he tells us, in a passage
quoted earlier, that ‘his eloquence kindles and bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language,
which it would be impossible to render into English, or, if it were rendered, would appear to
the English reader, unused to such forms of speech, highly exaggerated and absurd’ (266). This,
however, still does not tell us exactly what language Ali is speaking. Only after describing Ali’s
appearance, does the Sahib give us more precise information:
His language is pure and fluent, perhaps a little affected from his knowledge of Persian,
which, though slight, is sufficient to enable him to introduce words and expressions in
that language, often when they are not needed, but still it is pure Oordoo; he prides
himself upon it, and holds in supreme contempt those who speak the corrupt patois of
the Dukhun, or the still worse one of Hindostan. (266)
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 15
It thus becomes apparent to the reader for the first time that Ali’s narrative has been translated,
that it is mediated by the Englishman.
The significance of this linguistic mediation has not been remarked upon by critics of the
novel, and I suggest it needs to be considered as an important aspect of the novel’s textual,
linguistic layering. It is an instance of sociolinguistic crossing, in the sense of a linguistic usage
that arises when ‘one of the languages or varieties used in the bilingual encounter does not
belong to the speaker’ (Auer 2006, 490). One linguistic layer arises from Ameer’s fictional
animation of the speech of the various characters he encounters, which itself can be considered
an example of imitative, even playful crossing. Indeed, as Auer notes, broadly speaking, such
crossing ‘may be involved in any quotation of another voice’ (490). However, frequently, ‘its use
implies a transgression, an act of trespassing into the linguistic territory of another group of
speakers who have privileged or sole access to it, by a speaker who is not an accepted member
of that group’ (490). It is the latter kind of sociolinguistic crossing that occurs in the Sahib’s
(fictional) translation and mediation, as well as in the (authorial) ventriloquizing on the part of
Taylor, of speakers of Indian languages. The novel constitutes a dense layering of reported
speech: Taylor purports to report a Sahib reporting Ameer’s speech, while Ameer himself
reports extensively other characters’ speech, and occasionally recounts other characters’
narratives. All of these linguistic acts entail a transgression of the boundaries of the speaker’s
linguistic territory, but the sociolinguistic crossing of the Sahib as translator, and of Taylor as
author, is de-accentuated, rendered almost invisible in comparison with the ostentatious
performance associated with Ali.
It seems to me that this contrast is significant, and it has to do with the ambivalence of
Taylor’s treatment of linguistic performance, which is torn between the appreciation of a
scholar and a fictional writer, and the suspicion of a colonial official who identifies at least in
part with the British stance towards ruling India. Taylor is caught, in other words, between
admiration and administration. In effacing the role of the Sahib’s translation and mediation of
Ali’s words, he seems to strive towards a kind of ideal sociolinguistic crossing, a kind of perfect
‘passing’. The exceptional moment in the narrative when he does acknowledge that Ali’s words
are not only translated from ‘Oordoo’, but that they are in a sense untranslatable—’his eloquence
kindles and bursts forth in a torrent of figurative language, which it would be impossible to
render into English’—is a rather paradoxical attempt to highlight the Sahib’s (and Taylor’s)
linguistic facility insofar as it remains exceptional and, moreover, the measure of this facility is
that its operation largely succeeds in going unnoticed (Taylor 1998, 266). In this sense, it is as
though Taylor is seeking to out-Thug the Thug himself as a linguistic performer.
I have suggested that there is something transgressive about Taylor’s linguistic crossing.
This transgressive quality is more clearly discernible in the context of Taylor’s explicitly colonial
attitude in the Introduction to the novel: its emphasis on issues of administrative and
epistemological control situates Taylor’s exploration of linguistic performance within the
project of colonial mastery. Thus, even as Taylor displays an imitative admiration of the Thug’s
linguistic performance, he invites the conclusion that it is this very linguistic prowess which
must be outdone if India is to be mastered by British rule.
Taylor’s appreciation for India’s linguistic diversity—evident in the rampant code-
switching of the text, as well as in the crucial role played by the characters’ deployment of their
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 16
linguistic abilities at various moments in the plot—aligns the novel with the Orientalist project.
This engagement with the relationship between the Oriental and English literary traditions can
be partly understood, I suggest, as a response towards a shift in the administrative approach of
the East India Company towards ‘Oriental’ culture. As discussed earlier, the 1830s were the
start of a decline in appreciation for the value of Oriental scholarship, and the beginning of the
tendency to implement English as a tool of cultural administration. The novel was published
towards the waning end of the East India Company’s interest in Orientalist scholarship of India.
However, as noted above, Taylor himself displayed an Orientalist spirit, taking seriously the
study of local languages and customs. That support for such intellectual pursuits was waning
on the part of the Company in the 1830s may be seen as part of what prompts Taylor’s emphasis
on these issues, rendering the novel in this sense implicitly polemical towards emerging British
strategies that would work to diminish the value ascribed to ‘Oriental’ languages and cultures.
Confessions suggests that for Taylor, to out-Thug the Thug in one’s ‘Oriental’ knowledge, would
not only be an impressive achievement of linguistic proficiency, but would also constitute a
more promising strategy for addressing India’s complicated and apparently ‘unruly’ ‘division
of peoples’.
Conclusion
My analysis of Confessions of a Thug has explored the novel’s ambivalent relationship to the
British representation of and campaign against Thuggee, and the implicit challenge of India’s
linguistic diversity and ‘Oriental’ traditions. By configuring India’s heterogeneity as directly
linked to deceitfulness and criminality, the novel participates, to a certain extent, in the
ideological work served by the Thuggee campaign more generally. However, my analysis has
suggested that although the narrative depiction of disguise, style-shifting and sociolinguistic
crossing as strategies of Thuggee aligns this density with criminality, it also blurs the
distinctions between the legal and the criminal, and the moral and immoral insofar as the
Thugs’ actions are often coded as honourable. Further, by attending to the linguistic aspects of
code-switching, style-shifting, and sociolinguistic crossing, I have presented a more complex
reading of Taylor’s representation of these issues, identifying an ambivalent appreciation of
Thuggee as a form of linguistic performance which is both impressive in its own right, and an
achievement worthy of emulation by British colonial administrators.
Between Admiration and Administration NOA REICH 17
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