Woerkens, Martine Van. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India.(Book Review)

WOERKENS, MARTINE VAN. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xvi + 360 pages. Map, illustrations, thug lexicon, references, index. Paper US$24.00; 17.00 [pounds sterling]; ISBN 0-226-85086-2.

The Strangled Traveler is the latest addition in the scholarship on the Thugs of India. As the author mentions, the word "Thug" has found place in the English dictionary and in common international parlance signifies criminal acts executed by deception (116-7). The Thugs of India were brought to the notice of the world in the early nineteenth century by the British colonizers, specifically by Colonel Sleeman who headed a decade-long campaign to exterminate the Thugs and the practice of Thuggee. Since then it …