This book is about the Thugs of India. Little known to most, the word 'thug' entered the English language from the self-designated name of a murderous fraternity of Indian robbers. They were quite unlike other robbers in their mode of action. Their victims were travellers, who the Thugs used to befriend. Then all of a sudden, at an opportune moment, the Thugs would strike. They would strangle their victims - seldom using any other weapon - and then rob them, before carefully disposing of their bodies.

A huge campaign in the early 19th century to end the practice of 'Thugee' finished their existence. Anybody suspected of being a Thug was tried and executed. The campaign to eradicate the Thugs was indiscriminate and innocent men were executed in the process, but at least the roads of India were freed from these gangs, whose victims must have numbered tens of thousands in the three or four centuries which they had been in existence.

During the encounters between the Thugs and the British, the Thugs were widely discussed in newspaper stories and even became the subject of popular plays and novels, which in turn made them infamous in Britain. This led to the incorporation of the word into the English language, as a derogatory word referring to any 'violent rogue'. However in recent times the word 'thug' has had somewhat better fortune thanks to the popularisation of gangster-rap music, which often uses the word in an honorific sense. Tupac Shakur's music, for example, made a whole generation of young people from all races actually want to call themselves thugs. Little do most of them know that they are calling themselves the name of an old Indian fraternity of trickster-robber-murderers!

Authentic information about the Thugs is somewhat hard to come by. Early British and European writings were generally quite dramatic and contained liberal doses of exaggeration. For example, they exaggerated the religious motive in the Thug's activities. Some Thug's used to sacrifice their victims to Goddess Kali. So the novels and plays of the 19th and early 20th century really emphasised this element and gave the impression that the primary motive for Thugs, that made them act the way they did, was their devotion to Kali. This was the inspiration behind the plot of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'.

In actual fact, a closer examination of primary sources, which this book is based on, shows that the Thugs were primarily driven by financial reward, with little or no religious motive. In fact, the various Thug gangs were often a heterogeneous mix of Hindus and Muslims, whose customs and culture varied from region to region (the Thugs were not a single well knit fraternity, but many separate gangs that existed in several parts of India). They used to participate in the religious life of their area and community, but this used to be incidental rather than an intrinsic component of Thugee.

Later writings about the Thugs in post-Independence India put a more realistic picture into place, according to Mike Dash. However these writings are quite restricted to scholarly circles. The current book draws on primary sources as well as later research to build its account but at the same time is not written in a purely scholarly way. It is in written more like a suspense novel rather than a factual account. This is presumably done to add flavour to the account, making the book more readable for a wider audience. However the mixture of scholarship and story doesn't blend too well in this case. To build up the story, the author talks about things that are outside his realm of knowledge, and therefore makes quite a few small and but significant geographical and cultural errors in the narrative. This may get past a western audience who know little about India, but to somebody in the know it downgrades the quality of the entire book.

All in all, 'Thug' succeeds in providing well-researched information about the 'Thugs' of India, but is an unsatisfying read, with too may boring and irrelevant bits. An intelligent person could probably find the information doing a Google search on the subject, which would probably save you time and money.

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