Confessions of a Thug

'I fear that I have often wearied you by the minute relation of my history; but I have told all, nor concealed from you one thought, one feeling, much less any act which at this distance of time I can remember. Possibly you may have recorded what may prove fearfully interesting to your friends. If it be so, your end is answered; you have given a faithful portrait of a Thug's life, his ceremonies, and his acts; whist I am proud that the world will know of thedeeds and adventures of Ameer Ali, the Thug.'Often overshadowed by Kipling's Kim or Forster's A Passage to India, Philip Meadows Taylor's 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 colonial expose. Confessions of a Thug offers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how theBritish 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 Taylor's narrative.