Clip of the Day 8/23/2021

I read an interesting piece in the Juggernaut today about the history of the “thuggee” in India and felt inspired to share a relevant clip! Background from the article for those unfamiliar:

There is a village in Madhya Pradesh called Sleemanabad, named after Sir William Henry Sleeman, a major-general in the British army. A photo of Sleeman — ruddy-faced, over-the-top sideburns, a pinched expression as if he had smelled something really bad — is said to still hang in the local thaana. Sleeman is famous for two things: discovering a dinosaur specimen in Jabalpur in 1828 and for ridding India of the supposedly millennia-old contagion of thuggee— and, in the process, irrevocably transforming ideas of criminality and the law of the land. 

In the winter of 1830, Sleeman apprehended a man called Syed Ameer Ali, alias Feringhea. The alleged thuggee leader promptly buckled under interrogation, pointed Sleeman toward some mass graves, then agreed to become an informer for the British in exchange for his life. Feringhea was the smoking gun Sleeman and others had been waiting for: proof of the existence of the thuggee and justification for concerted action against it. In the ensuing years, the East India Company dove headfirst into the pursuit: it established a Thuggee and Dacoity Department and Sleeman became its head. Under Sleeman’s supervision, the department tried, convicted, and hanged 4,000 alleged members.

A frame from a comic titled "Backward India,” published in The Evening Star on August 12, 1934. This comic was part of a series called "High Lights of History" By J. Carroll Mansfield:

:”One of the greatest services the British rendered India was the stamping out of the thugs, a murderous cult, devotees of Siva, the Hindu goddess of destructions”

An article published in the Tacoma Times in 1939:

“When news of an attack on a British patrol in the vicinity of the Khyber pass reaches military headquarters of Murt, the commanding officer there realizes that the disciples of Thuggee, the cult of the murderous worshippers of the goddess Kali, are on the warpath”

And one more, from a “Foreign Missionary Chroncile” on the the goddess Kali published in the Cheraw Gazette on October 4, 1837:

“Nothing which the missionaries ever alleged against it is as conclusive as this. Thuggee is a religious system, and the Thugs practice murder just as Christians do charity, in obedience to the will of their god”