LIKE any great city, London provides a vast landscape for its chroniclers to explore and make their own. With a long and rich literary history and citizens of almost every nationality, it looms large in the global imagination. Despite never having lived in London, Tabish Khair chose the city as the setting for his third novel “The Thing About Thugs”, because, he says, London does not force you to conform.
In 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, Amir Ali, a “thug”, travels to London from the badlands of Bihar with Captain William Meadows, a former officer of the East India Company who is chronicling Ali’s wayward life and the cult of thuggery. This mirrors the true story of Captain Meadows Taylor who published “Confessions of a Thug” in 1839, a bestseller based on a murderous highwayman named Ameer Ali.
Thuggee was a cult of assassins who roamed India for centuries before they were suppressed by the British in the 1830s. Stories about these murderers became popular in 19th-century Britain, introducing the word “thug” (from the Hindi “thuggee”) into the English language. The intrigue was such that even Queen Victoria requested an advance copy of Captain Taylor’s book.
In Mr Khair’s version of Victorian London enthralled by tales of thuggery, someone is murdering the city’s non-conformists—beggars, opium sellers, itinerant sailors, vagrants—and beheading them. Suspicion inevitably falls on Amir Ali, who is by now well-known as an oriental with a taste for blood. But it is clear early on that the murders are at the behest of Lord Batterstone, a peer with an interest in phrenology who is building up a collection of odd skulls. Captain Meadows is interested in phrenology too—a pseudoscience much in vogue at the time—but unlike Lord Batterstone, he does not believe a man’s fate is written in the contours of his skull. Nor does he pay thugs large sums of money for decapitated heads in order to prove this theory.
