Victorian pretenders to punkhood

Imagine standing in a room filled with mirrors. You are confronted by countless reflections of yourself. By a trick of light and distortion, each mirror reflects a slightly altered version of yourself.

These distortions are further compounded in the reflections of the reflections — until, at last, your eye, travelling along the line of reflections that stretches to infinity, alights upon a monster — your own mishapen, unrecognisable likeness.

Well, that’s what it’s like to read Tabish Khair’s novel The Thing About Thugs. It’s a slim work but that can be misleading, for it contains a mind-boggling number of literary styles (from the epistolary to the Victorian), literary references, and narrative voices.

Some context may be useful: the term thug, derived from the Hindi t’ag slipped into English when the British encountered the thuggee cult in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era.

Bands of ‘thugs’ with certain distinct religious practices roamed the paths between cities, robbing and strangling travellers. The original term carried connotations of cunning, concealment and deception — quite at odds with the image of brute force that the term conjures today.

The original aspect of deception is integral to understanding Khair’s novel. The purported thug, Syed Amir Ali, has been brought to England sometime around 1839 by an officer, Captain William Meadows, who wishes to chronicle Ali’s sensationalist account of the thuggee cult and activities.

This text, a transcript of the conversation between Meadows and Ali, forms one of the many narratives threaded through Khair’s novel. As the blurb on the back helpfully informs us, it’s also a reference (or, as this reviewer would imagine it, a slightly warped reflection) of a real, existing text, Confessions Of A Thug, which featured an Ameer Ali and was written by a Captain Philip Meadows Taylor.

Khair’s novel abounds with other literary references. One of his most intriguing characters is a Punjabi woman, a former ayah, known as Qui Hy, a Chinese-sounding bastardisation of Koi Hai. It’s evident that complex wordplay is intended here — perhaps Qui Hy is a reference to the invisible, voiceless yet subversive ‘subaltern’ of post-colonial studies. Qui Hy is the queen of London’s invisible Indians — ayahs, lascars and other riffraff.

She plots justice in her dhaba, surrounded by her followers as she stitches pockets on dresses for English gentry. Does this sound familiar? It seems that Khair is paying tribute to Dickens’ powerful character from A Tale of Two Cities — the revolutionary Madame Defarge, who constantly knits as she dispenses vengeance.

As Khair’s novel progresses, we realise that Amir Ali is deceiving Meadows, he is not truly a thug, but pretends to be one. As a result, his account of the thuggee life and system is a wildly fantastical invention, designed to appeal to the histrionic tastes of his audience. In due course, Amir Ali begins to realise that he is becoming the very thing that he pretends to be but is not — a thug, a deceiver.

The plot thickens. After a series of gruesome, thug-like beheadings in London, the authorities suspect that the perpetrator of these murders is, as the newspapers suggest, a Thug — perhaps even Amir Ali.

These murders evoke for Amir Ali the realisation that the imagined India of the English that he and Meadows have helped create has come “alive here in the streets of London.” This imagined India, Khair seems to suggest, is no more than a warped reflection of English desires that comes to exist because colonial writers (such as Meadows) project their fantasies onto the colonised (like Ali), who obligingly, but fraudulently, reflect these
fantasies back — creating a series of endless reflections.

If that sounds intimidating, still, don’t be put off — the great ‘thing’ about Khair’s novel is his ability to construct a narrative that works on multiple levels. If the idea of Victorian-era tale of adventure appeals to you, featuring thugs, a profusion of misshapen skulls, masked aristocrats, gruesome murders, opium dens and tragic romance — The Thing About Thugs is just that. Yet, at the same time, Khair’s novel offers a profound, even esoteric, meditation on colonial and post-colonial literature, the act of reading, and the complex, reflexive relationship between the coloniser and
the colonised.