Confessions of a Thug

Price: 495.00 INR

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ISBN:

9780198854647

Publication date:

07/05/2025

Paperback

608 pages

Price: 495.00 INR

We sell our titles through other companies
Disclaimer :You will be redirected to a third party website.The sole responsibility of supplies, condition of the product, availability of stock, date of delivery, mode of payment will be as promised by the said third party only. Prices and specifications may vary from the OUP India site.

ISBN:

9780198854647

Publication date:

07/05/2025

Paperback

608 pages

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

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.

Rights:  World Rights

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

Description

'You have given a faithful portrait of a Thug's life, his ceremonies, and his acts'

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 exposéConfessions of a Thug offers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how the British 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.

Kim A. Wagner is Professor of Global and Imperial History at Queen Mary, University of London. His research is situated at the cusp of Imperial and Global history, focussing on knowledge, crime and resistance in British India, and on colonial violence and warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. His publications include Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Palgrave, 2007); Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (OUP India, 2009); The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Peter Lang, 2010); The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Hurst/OUP/Penguin, 2017); and Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale, 2019).

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

Table of contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Philip Meadows Taylor
THE CONFESSIONS OF A THUG
Appendix
Glossary
Explanatory Notes

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

Features

  • This new edition is based on the original 3-volume first edition from 1839 published by Oxford University Press, which is now extremely rare
  • One of the most important novels of British India, and comparable to Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924)
  • Two original sources carefully transcribed as appendices further explore the Thuggee
  • Introduction, comprehensive annotation, select bibliography and chronology of the author

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

Review

"I strongly recommend the purchase of this novel to casual readers who want to enjoy an adventure that has some hints of history." -- Pennsylvania Literary Journal

Philip Meadows Taylor Edited by Kim A. Wagner

Description

'You have given a faithful portrait of a Thug's life, his ceremonies, and his acts'

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 exposéConfessions of a Thug offers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how the British 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.

Kim A. Wagner is Professor of Global and Imperial History at Queen Mary, University of London. His research is situated at the cusp of Imperial and Global history, focussing on knowledge, crime and resistance in British India, and on colonial violence and warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. His publications include Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Palgrave, 2007); Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (OUP India, 2009); The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Peter Lang, 2010); The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Hurst/OUP/Penguin, 2017); and Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale, 2019).

Table of contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Philip Meadows Taylor
THE CONFESSIONS OF A THUG
Appendix
Glossary
Explanatory Notes