Shouldn’t it be Britishery?
The question here is where does the reference thuggery
come from? How did it get into English? Thug in hindi means cheating, and is
commonly used. There is no word as thuggery in hindi it’s a british
creation. Thug gets its reference from medieval times when small time highway
robbers looted and strangulated travelers. When Britishers started to colonize
the region through East India Company they exaggerated these and portrayed them
as blood thirsty monsters in the process the racist colonizing exploiters were
positioned as benign protectors. Many of these highway murderers were
classified as criminal tribes and the tribe members prosecuted for no reason. Studies
points to these portrayals as mostly a construct -based on no empirical
evidences, by cunning britishers with narrative control ably helped by caste
cannibals -playing the traditional role of enthusiastic sycophants to power. Britishers
therefore created Thug Department (the irony!) in 1830s to demonize and contain
these threats. These small-time criminals were isolated from their socio-economic
conditions into monsters who believed in divine sanction for killing as some
kind of ritual. It’s quite obvious that the myth of divine sanction can only succeed
socio-economic factors, it can easily be understood as an attempt to moralize their
transgress. Thug narration was worked as metaphor of other -the unpredictable
sinister natives. This gave colonizers a moral authority to justify acquisition
and exploitations. After transfer of power Castetva forces instead of
rectifying these grievous mistakes continued with these brutalities. Ganesh
Devy (in a study conducted in as late as 2000) notes that some of these tribes continue to suffer from human right violations that in many
cases go unchecked by the law enforcement authorities -the police, the continued
teaching of the Criminal Tribes Act in the curriculum for police training is
cited as a major reason. He claims that the police are “taught” to believe that
they are born criminals, leading to their continued persecution in spite of
legal safeguards against the same.
In a much reasonable narration thugs can be
viewed as those who rebelled against the system of exploitation and exacted
what they thought appropriate in their circumstance. Thugs did in open what
squatters did inside sanctum. Thugs sacrificed humans while squatters
sacrificed souls. The audacity of colonizers to classify thugs as criminal
tribes while they themselves were racist murderous exploiters spanning the
globe needs special attention. All these elaborate ruses were hinged on
something called justice system that they conceived. These were meant to
streamline exploitation while giving the semblance of propriety -which was to
be taken as justice. These famously harmonized with squatter’s cannibalistic framework.
Therefore, the critical and common-sense question of how justice can prevail in
injustice system was never confronted. There is a reason why Indians took up to
becoming lawyers and ended up serving the colonizers with gusto (one fellow
even went all the way to South Africa). Even now the tardiest and one of the
most incompetent judicial system on earth has lawyer luminaries many of whom
control power at the top most level while the society suffer.
The question that bothers me though is why the
word thuggery was accepted into English without any challenge. It shows amazing
level of moral vacuum among Indian elite who actively connived to normalize these
(ofcourse there are worst references from putrid pit into English which is as worse
as racism but still normalized, these should be expunged at the earliest). Why is that racist colonizer Britain doesn’t have any reference in English that is concomitant
with its past brutalities?
Why is thuggery a word in English while britishery isn’t? Boris Johnson represents the britishery.
