Sunday, September 14, 2003		Books

Trailing thuggee in the land of Kali
Chetna Banerjee

Children of Kali
by Kevin Rushby. Penguin Books. Pages 292. Rs 350.

KEVIN Rushby’s Children of Kali is meant to be part travelogue, part revisiting of history, part personal account. More specifically, it is the author’s attempt to track down the thuggee cult in India, to peel off layer by layer the myth that this criminal movement of the British period lies wrapped in.

Rushby centres his account around William James Sleeman, the Britisher to whom went the major credit of crushing thuggee. His quest takes him through the prisons, museums, and institutions associated with Sleeman in the heart of India.

The author’s literary journey, much like his rides in country buses — described as "great rattling monsters" — gets off to a bumpy start. Setting off on the trail of thuggee and the legend that was Sleeman, Rushby gets off this track initially. He does, instead, a detour into the making of a contemporary bandit, Veerappan.

By weaving two distinct criminal legends — the ancient thugs and a modern bandit — into the same narrative, the author perhaps wished to draw parallels between the intrigue, the deceptions and socio-political forces that shaped the two evils. But he gets his perspective all wrong. For the sake of comparison, it would have made more sense if Rushby had burrowed into the dusty ravines of central India in search of the legends of Daku Man Singh, Malkhan Singh, Phoolan Devi or the dreaded Dadua of Bundelkhand. Rushby, however, is content giving these modern faces of thuggee only a fleeting reference.

He unnecessarily drags himself and the reader through the bylanes of Chennai, Mahedeshwara Malai, Mysore, Gopinattam (the native village of Veerappan) to the Hogenakkal Falls that lie on the fringe of the jungles that are home to the dreaded brigand and are described rather fancifully as a "barrier, border between good and evil." This trip to unmask the reality of Veerappan — is he an anti-hero or Robin Hood-like champion of the poor? — again gets stuck in irrelevant territory when the author goes soliciting reel-life baddie Gulshan Grover and director Mahesh Bhatt’s views on the real-life ‘villain.’

His subsequent conversations with STF men, villagers and ex-hostages — people who’ve had some direct or indirect contact with Veerappan — manage to get the derailed account back on track and bring some authenticity to his demystification of this modern-day criminal. Barring some passages that smack of a typically firang perception of India—as a place that’s exotic yet savage and stinking— Rushby is able to paint a progressive portrait of 21st century India with his deft imagery. He captures contemporary sights and sounds thus: "At the start of the new millennium... times had changed; the country was a major software producer with a growing middle class who preferred swanky new Toyotas and Suzukis to Raj-era trams and cast-iron bicycles." His familiarity with Indian names and terms is not as impeccable though. Dawood Ibrahim is spelt as Daud, Jayalalithaa as Jayalitha and paddy as padi.

Rushby’s southern excursions don’t yield much and he ends up disappointed at finding that the Robin Hood-like mystique surrounding Veerappan is misplaced and unreal.

He then meanders northwards in search of the Sleeman legend, weaving into his travels the myth of Kali and the exoticism that it lent to the thuggee cult. Legend has it that whenever Goddess Kali hacked a demon to death, the drops of his blood turned into new demons. To counter this, the Goddess created two men from the sweat on her brow and gave them scarves to strangle the demons. Thus, the thugs who waylaid unsuspecting travellers and strangled them with handkerchiefs, came to be regarded as the children of Kali and their exploits acquired the glamour of a fanatical, sacrificial cult.

His sojourns to Narsinghpur, Jabalpur, Sleemanabad, Jhansi and finally Kolkata are laced with thug stories culled from works of fiction and personal accounts of people he meets in the course of his open-ended travels. He dips liberally into Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor, John Master’s The Deceivers, Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections and other historical and fictional texts to feed the reader with images of the thuggee period.

Much as the idle ramblings of Rushby’s fellow travellers and acquaintances rob his thuggee accounts of forcefulness, the trips further into the heartland begin to deprive his exotic image of this criminal cult of its glamorous sheen. As he delves deeper into the tangled maze of history, he comes face to face with a reality that’s miles away from the romantic, colonial images of thuggee that he’d carried to India. The myth stands eroded: the thugs killed, not for Kali, but for riches. He unmasks the economic reality behind this exotic criminality thus, "`85the thugs were freebooters and to a great extent created by British conquests. Their opportunity for thievery was due to the opium trade...

Understandably so, Rushby winds up his travel in the city of Kali — Kolkata — a final tribute to "the great Goddess whose brooding bloody presence had hovered over" his journey.

As Rushby ends up disillusioned with the romantic images of thuggee, so does the reader feel disappointed with much of the ambling and rambling. Thankfully, some colourful pictures brighten up the volume. And, of course, there’s the bindaas Maddy, Rushby’s companion in half of the travels, to lend some bohemian cheer to what would have otherwise been a drab reading trip.