Thugs of Hindustan: Review of Siddhartha Sarma’s ‘Twilight in a Knotted World’

An unputdownable novel that is as much about today as about the past

December 05, 2020 04:00 pm | Updated December 06, 2020 07:50 am IST

A group of dacoits that strangles its victims, another that poisons its victims with datura, an investigator and his colleagues trying to track them down — sounds like an action-packed adventure, right? However, except for the opening chapter that offers a glimpse into the modus operandi of the phansigars , there’s not much excitement here. But that doesn’t mean Twilight in a Knotted World is boring. It’s actually quite unputdownable.

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Siddhartha Sarma spins an entire novel out of one of the achievements of William Bentinck, Governor General of India under the East India Company: his suppression of the thuggee cult. Of course, the achievement was Bentinck’s only insofar as he ordered it. The actual work was that of Captain William Henry Sleeman: when we first meet him in the novel, he is an amateur palaeontologist digging around in the hilly tracts of Jabalpur. Soon enough, he is called to Calcutta and “asked to examine the problem of the stranglers, tell us the extent of it and what needs to be done.”

Set in the mid-19th century, when the East India Company is consolidating its hold over Indian territories, the book brings alive all those dry-as-dust lines from history textbooks — whether about the struggle between the princely states of Bhopal and Gwalior, the banning of sati or the promotion of women’s education. The episode in which Sleeman reasons with a Brahmin widow not to commit sati lays out the problem: “It was not enough to expect a piece of legislation or law to change society.” Something we are still grappling with today.

Bentinck’s words about the police — “We must also change the way we approach the law… we need better enforcement of the law… and how the officers of the law connect with the people” — may well be applied to our police force today. With its informed depiction of regional and political struggles, caste and gender inequities, the circumstances that drive men to rob and murder, the novel is as much about India today as about an episode from history.

Twilight in a Knotted World; Siddhartha Sarma, Simon & Schuster, ₹599

krithika.r@thehindu.co.in

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