Meadows has grand plans for Ali: after all, Ali is a reformed thug, and Meadows is writing a book based on his life and his insights into the secretive, strange cult of Thuggery. Meadows is quickly becoming the toast of English high society for his work, earning the envy of other groups who are struggling for recognition.
It’s the sort of scene we’ve seen before in a lot of Raj-era and colonial fiction: the savage, brought into civilised society, slowly learning to use his critical faculties. But there’s something subtly wrong with this picture. For one, we’re hearing this story through Amir Ali’s notes, written in cultured Farsi. Ali refers to William Meadows as Wali Mian Khet-Khaliyaan, betraying his understanding of English. And we find that Ali seems to be pretending to be a thug, for his own purposes.
The society that Ali finds himself in also doesn’t quite present the picture of a superior culture. The ‘scientific’ society du jour is the Phrenological Society (Phrenology being the divination of a man’s nature through the shape of his skull). London abounds with rumours of Mole People who live in the sewers and kidnap passers-by.
Amir Ali himself finds that, “The odours of London houses are stronger and more basic… than respectable houses in his village, which are open to the cleansing air, purified by agarbattis.” And the other British characters we meet are decidedly unsavory: grave-robbers, common muggers, self-centered lords. The press superstitiously ascribes crimes to cults and foreigners.
In fact, as the story progresses, the character stereotypes are reversed as well: When a strange series of murders take place, the ‘natives’ are unable to solve it. It requires an Indian’s innate wisdom to do the investigation. There’s also an entire backup cadre of Indian-origin specialists to help: the forger, the slumlord, the street-smart beggar, some part-Indian sailors. The other Indians that Amir Ali interacts with seem fully informed about British society and more broadminded than the British.
There’s another hint to push us in the right direction: the story is being narrated by an unnamed narrator in small-town Bihar, who confesses to making up the parts of the story that he can’t find in Amir Ali’s old notes.
Now we see it: the roles in the story are reversed. The narrator sees Ali as the cultured man, navigating the savage land of London and trying not to get into trouble. It's a neat redefinition of the ‘normal’ and the ‘exotic’ in Raj-era tales. Khair is telling us that normalcy is in the eyes of the beholder. All this is not to say that the book is dry and intellectual.
Thugs is a period thriller with an engaging (if somewhat grisly) plot, revolving around the aforementioned murders. Hitchcock would have been proud of the way Khair leads ordinary people to crime (and how others decide to solve them).
Equal time is devoted to the villains of the story here. London comes across as a spooky, strange place where anything could happen, and every character we encounter is interesting enough to hold his place.
The Thing About Thugs is definitely a book worthy of more attention. It’s already been shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize this year, and deserves to go far.
The Thing about Thugs
Tabish Khair
Harper Collins
2010, pp 256, Rs 399
Deccan Herald is on WhatsApp Channels| Join now for Breaking News & Editor's Picks