This section, on The Deceivers, John Masters’s novel about thuggee, serves as a (deconstructive) supplement to the official narrative of the thug, in taking up some of the questions and figures that occupy a recessive status in that account. Here we see that if the thug of the archive provides one (admittedly slippery and fixed at the same time) model of staging identities, there is another model that is crucial for a comprehension of the thug-English engagement. This model is the obverse of the process that generates the mimic man of colonial discourse; it is the lure of going native. The term here both resonates with and fails to correspond to the mimetic model provided by Burton in the last chapter.[62] The will to mimicry governs (Indian) thug and Englishman alike, as we shall see in The Deceivers, where the plot is driven—as is the thug archive—by a fascination with the absent and never fully recuperable thug. In engaging this scenario, the novel also recasts the paradigmatic narrative of mimicry, in which the native may mimic the colonizer but without any access to essential Englishness, while the colonizer can trade identities freely, with no strings attached, without actually being interpellated as a colonized subject. The Deceivers makes manifest the precariousness of such self-possession. The dialectical dependence of the fantasy of complete knowledge on the paranoid fear of native inscrutability is staged in this novel, where there is a suturing of the ostensibly antithetical figures of the English policeman and the thug approver. This novel allows for an examination of the tension between the received wisdom about thuggee and some of the marginal issues located at the pressure points of the official discourse. This novel tells the story of William Savage, a mediocre and distinctly unheroic English magistrate. Wracked by sexual and professional anxieties, an alienated subject of the British colonial machine in India, and sneakingly sympathetic to such Indian customs as sati, he transforms himself into the exemplary colonial officer by taking on—albeit temporarily—the calling of the thug. At the urging of his young wife, Mary, he initially takes on the persona of the absent Gopal the weaver in order to save Gopal’s wife from sati; he, however, meets the renegade thug Hussein and decides to continue as Gopal in order to track down the thugs. Once he assumes the role, he finds himself powerfully drawn to the practice and goes on to become a noted thug leader. He does not continue as a thug, of course—even though at one point Hussein suggests to Savage that the East India Company become a sponsor of thugs, like the other rulers of the land; with a little help from his newly (re)constructed Englishness and his friends, he returns to propriety at the end. (The Merchant Ivory film production is even more skeptical than the novel is of the progressivist teleology of the civilizing mission, as well as of its “success”: in the film, George Angelsmith is led off in chains, but Savage, estranged from his wife and his Christian god and unable to prevent the sati that he has actually made possible, is destined to be perpetually haunted by Kali.) The Deceivers considers the unspoken and unspeakable possibility that subtends so much of colonial discourse: what if identity can be unhinged from race and national origin? And if (racial/national) identity is unstable and subject to negotiation with each crossing of a frontier, then in the name of what telos or destiny does Englishness speak? What if, as R. Radhakrishnan so compellingly asks, on the subject of diasporic, transnational culture, “identities and ethnicities are not a matter of fixed and stable selves but rather the results and products of fortuitous travels and recontextualizations?… Is ethnicity nothing but, to use the familiar formula, what ethnicity does?” [63] In the more lurid enactments of this alternative history, a Kurtz, representing the loftiest intellectual and ethical possibilities of the Enlightenment, can “go native” in the Dark Continent. But, closer to “home,” there were, as Arnold has revealed, more troubling English subjects—those poor white orphans and vagrants (who were to have their own moment of glory in Kim) who lived lives not often distinguishable from those of lower-class Indians.[64] William Savage, the protagonist of The Deceivers, is located somewhere between these two subject positions. Despite the putative restoration to wholeness, Englishness, and legality of William Savage at the close of the story, the narrative nonetheless opens up a space for investigating the “double and split subject” of the colonial enunciation, for what Bhabha calls—in the context of the nation’s fissured enunciation—“dissemi-nation”: “a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations.” [65] As in the case of so many other Englishmen, Savage will have to turn to Indianness in order to return to or consolidate or improve his English self; in doing so, he will come back as a new and more English Englishman, but he will also, temporarily at least, be transformed into a border subject, changed by his experience of Indianness, surrendering illusions of full autonomy and Englishness in the crossing of boundaries. Here I invoke Burton again as a point of reference. Burton had an occasionally vexed relationship with national identity: his ancestry was partly Irish and Welsh, and he grew up on the Continent, only coming to live in England in his late teens. Yet for him identity, whatever guises it might assume and however far it might roam, is usually more persuasively anchored than is that of Masters’s protagonist in an imperial Englishness. Burton can be, at different times, a West Asian merchant or a Muslim hajji, but his identities are clearly hierarchized and more manipulable than Savage’s. While the success of his passing is always, in a sense, conditional upon his being a man from elsewhere/nowhere, he can also claim nativeness as his own production, wrenching an (imaginary) autonomy from the dominion of necessity. Savage passes through Indianness en route to Englishness, but, unlike Burton, he cannot pass in and out without constraint. Indianness, while indispensable to Englishness, must also be violently cast out if Englishness is to be secure(d). In The Deceivers, identity is the locus of strain and contradiction. For Savage, identity cannot be expansive, assimilationist, and pluralist; each new identity competes with and displaces the last. That is why Savage can at the end afford to take no prisoners or recruit any approvers from among his erstwhile comrades; the thugs whom he has led and who are now pursuing him must be wiped out in an act of punitive and frenzied brutality that not only precludes the need for approvers but also does away with any witnesses against, and rem(a)inders of, his own thug self. The Deceivers stages, indeed foregrounds, the positionality and politics of that ordinarily self-effacing hero of thug narration, the investigator, and the plurality of determinations that produces him. In this context, Gayatri Spivak’s cautionary reminders about the urgent necessity of disallowing the neutrality of the intellectual or investigator should be borne in mind. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she proffers a critique of the sanctioned myopia of the Foucault and Deleuze of “Intellectuals and Power,” who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the complicity of the intellectual in the mechanisms that produce representations of subaltern subjects and groups and who fail to recognize that subaltern subjects are constrained to fashion themselves in terms of already scripted epistemologies.[66] Her introduction to Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” resonates with, and provides another useful point of entry into, this problematic of reading and engagement; the usefulness of deconstruction, she tells us, lies in “the recognition,…of provisional and intractable starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon ‘history’ and upon the ethico-political as the ‘trace’ of that complicity—the proof that we do not inhabit a clearly defined critical space free of such traces.” [67] Where in the archives the English scribe was progressively effaced from the scene of the crime as well as the scene of writing, no such modesty is permitted the protagonist of Masters’s novel. The novel accents above all his position of enunciation. He cannot be, as in the normative thug account, the neutral conduit of something clearly identified as a thug consciousness: the thug’s voice cannot but inscribe Savage as both subject and object of his own discourse. The central aspect of Savage’s mission is not merely to bear witness; he must above all produce a record, transform that irreducible obscurity, that absence that is Indian corporate criminal activity, into what Spivak terms an “interpretable text.” This of course was the primary gift of Sleeman and his associates to the criminal justice system in colonial India—to synthesize various and discrepant occurrences as a semiosis under centralized control; against thuggee— conceived of as a vast, well-articulated, and centralized conspiracy— could be opposed the concentrated power/knowledge of the state. What is required is a text and a model of reading that is reproducible in the different temporalities and contexts of the colonial polity in India. However, the novel intimates the limitations and complexities of authorial intention. Savage produces his account in a condition of profound subjective instability, opening his text up to multiple and mutually contentious readings: “He had met hundreds of other Deceivers, and the notes were a complete tale of all he had seen and heard and done; of all the Deceivers who had engaged in any action, with their descriptions, habits, and homes; of each murder, and how it had gone, and how it might have been prevented—or improved upon. The words could be read for either purpose, according to the spirit of the reader” (p. 223). Above all, Savage’s account draws attention to the transactional nature of reading. What ought to be a classic of information retrieval and a master text on thuggee for colonial authority is also a text for other thugs, a manual for reproducing thug practice. Savage’s text (within the text of the Masters novel), even though cast in the model of strict representational realism, is susceptible of an Other reading; its meanings are ambushed, deflected, and augmented en route to a destination it can never reach. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department strove to produce, in its extensive records on thug affiliation and activity, a text without nuances or fissures, something that was not susceptible of any misreadings or contesting interpretations. It sought, in its meticulous record keeping and its attempts to square all the approvers’ testimonies with each other and make them speak with one voice, to produce a record that would have what was presumed to be the authority of material fact. But for Savage, at least, it is impossible to engage in such an enterprise without also inscribing his own complicity in his testimonial. In this respect, he does approximate the classic approver of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, who cannot bear witness against others without simultaneously bearing witness against himself. While the novel insists that only impersonation can yield the truth, it also illuminates the heterodox desires that underlie the exercise of going native. Moreover, this impersonation is quite detached from any agency on the part of William Savage and from any sense of originary identity. Forced into the disguise of the Indian weaver Gopal (by the patel [village headman] Chandra Sen) in an unwilling and ultimately fruitless attempt to save a would-be sati, he is recognized as an impostor by Hussein. Hussein is ideal material for an approver: he has brains, courage, and resourcefulness, and he is remarkably eager to undo the institution of thuggee, but his testimony alone is not enough to compel belief in the practice. So he recruits an Englishman to the anti-thuggee cause, knowing that only he can be fully convincing as a figure of knowledge. And this knowledge can only be acquired experientially, and by going outside the law as currently constituted, as Savage learns when he follows the more conventional methods of information retrieval. As Hussein says, Several times some English official or other has got hold of information about us. Then he has chased us out of his district, and reported, I suppose. But they’ve never worked together, and it always blew over. They’ll never destroy us until one of them finds out everything, and forces the Lat Sahib [the governor-general] to believe everything, and plans a campaign to cover all India. And that one who finds out must fear Kali, or he will not understand her. But he must not love her. (p. 208) Unable to ignore the thugs as the other English functionaries are ready to do, eager to discard the Englishness he so uncomfortably inhabits, and pressured by Hussein and Mary, Savage decides to continue as Gopal the weaver, who, as it turns out, is also Gopal the thug. For an unsuccessful and insecure man like Savage, wracked by anxieties about (heterosexual) masculinity and Englishness, it is the very abdication of authority involved in playing a thug that is peculiarly attractive; inhabiting the subject position of the most criminalized and most scrutinized indigenous subject holds out the promise of psychic satisfactions not ordinarily available to colonial authority. The novel dallies with the idea (as many crime fictions often do, though less explicitly) of the fragility of the barriers that separate the custodian of law and morality from the criminal. It actually makes available the proposition (though it has to drop it at the end) that Savage is at heart a thug and that his initiation into thuggee by Hussein is no accident. He takes naturally to the trade, is attended by good omens, and enjoys a facility of thought, speech, and action that is alien to his English self. The idea of mimicry itself is transformed in his performance of it and begins to assume to assume the contours of possession, if not those of originary identity. There is no difference for him between the mimicry of an identity and the identity itself. In order to pass for an Indian or a thug (ultimately these two categories are collapsed, as we have seen in the other narratives of thuggee) Savage must slough off certain normative aspects of Englishness in the tropics—the militant Christianity, the revulsion against disease and cruelty, the reforming impulse. He must instead embrace what is described as the nondualistic moral economy of Hinduism that sees both creation and destruction as suffused with the divine. Needless to say, the psychic territory of “India” is always coextensive with Hinduism, despite the fact that Muslims as well as other religious groups are shown to practice thuggee as much as do Hindus; and this Hinduism is consistently and exclusively fetishized as blood lust and hyperbolic sexuality. As an Indian, and Hindu, and thug, Savage must participate in a series of paradoxes. He must be Indian, and thug, to return more securely to Englishness, and legitimacy; he must allow evil to be done in order to do good; and, since the contexts of legality are always shifting and are particularly in need of redefinition in India, he must go outside the law in order to uphold the law. Always relatively indifferent to the finer points of legal procedure and defendants’ rights (here written as an inaptitude for “paperwork”), the antithug drive allows him to rethink the concepts of justice and legality in the colonial context, where it is notoriously difficult to punish crime anyway: “What does justice mean?”…“Fair trial, the rules of evidence, no double hazard, no hearsay, and so on and so on? Or protection against injustice, against violence? The means, or the end?.…Oh, I know we have no evidence about them yet. That’s just what I mean. I tell you, sir, they cannot be run down within our rule of law. Indians aren’t English. “No man dies by the hand of man,” they think, so they won’t give evidence because they are not angry with the murderers. They think men who kill are driven by God to kill. And there are too many jurisdictions, too far to go to give evidence, too long to wait. We’ve got to go outside the law to catch them, to prevent more murders.” (pp. 128–29) Caught between a colonial government and an Indian populace unwilling, for different reasons, to do what is necessary to end thuggee and pressured, moreover, by Hussein, Savage becomes Gopal again, only more completely in earnest this time. In his new role Savage discovers that passing for a thug involves a radical (re)contextualization of his once and future Englishness. Moreover, as Gopal he has to inhabit a role and a history that is already in place. Impersonation involves not freedom but strict adherence to a scripted identity; he cannot start afresh, or make himself up as he goes along. He discovers that as Gopal, he is already an expert strangler and strategist, destined to be “the greatest the Deceivers have ever known” (p. 218). And once he participates in the sacramental ritual of gur-sharing and tastes the transubstantiated body of the goddess, his allegiance and destiny are fixed. Savage is born to thuggee, as his comfort in his role of thug demonstrates; indeed, his story undoes the usual weighting of “self” and “role” in the Englishman’s subjectivity, since he is more convincing (to himself, and apparently to Indians and Englishmen alike) and comfortable as Indian and thug than as Englishman and Christian. Hussein, who is more percipient than he about the complexities of subject formation, reminds him that “free will” is an adjunct (or an illusion) of Englishness alone. Savage must find out that intentions guarantee nothing; not even the Englishman, once he has decided to play the Indian, can escape the formulaic constraints of Indian/thug ontology: “You are a Deceiver, from this dawn on for ever. A strangler. Only stranglers may stand on the blanket: you stood on it. Only stranglers may take the consecrated sugar of communion: you took it. It doesn’t matter what a man thinks he is. When he eats consecrated sugar, on the blanket, in front of the pick-axe, he is a strangler, because Kali enters into him.” (p. 182) Such a script also demands of course that he confront his double, the original Gopal. In order to protect himself and in order to wrest some autonomy for himself, Savage strangles Gopal and thus becomes Gopal himself. But strangling the “real Gopal” only makes him more fully Gopal, for he can now develop into his predestined role. From this point on, all paradoxes are held in abeyance. From being complicit in murder through inaction Savage proceeds to strangulation himself and becomes, in an extraordinary take on the man-who-would-be-king vision that tropes so much colonial discourse, a noted leader of thugs. Like Burton the Muslim, Savage the thug is characterized not simply by mastery but by an extraordinary surplus of subject effects. (Unlike Burton, though, he is tempted, and he is corrupted—although not irredeemably.) The desire for Gopal, which is closely articulated with the desire to be Gopal, is mediated, interestingly enough, through the figure of the sati who frames the novel and who foregrounds the question of gender that has been bypassed or placed under erasure in the thuggee archives. I find the entry into thuggee through sati to be a particularly productive conjuncture for the problematic of mimicry, identity, and the colonizer’s desire. The sati, most obviously, provides an occasion for access to Gopal. The sati has to be set up in the beginning so that Savage can play Gopal; and then it has to be deferred so that he can continue to play Gopal and go in search of Gopal. Her presence in the novel displaces homoerotic desire and returns Savage to heterosexuality. It also ensures his successful miming of Indianness and Englishness. But the consolidation of heterosexuality, masculinity, and Englishness demands not simply her presence but her death. She is insistently narrativized as a voluntary sati; she is a romanticized figure, whose sacrifice Savage has no desire to thwart. He desires her, and his desire for her takes the form of wanting her to die for him, which he ensures by killing Gopal. In this way, he can enjoy the satisfactions of Indian as well as English masculinity. As an Indian, he can have the woman die for him (and deliver him of his sexual anxieties); but being fully Indian also means that he himself must die, for the sati requires a dead husband. As an Englishman, therefore, he can distance himself from the violent implications of Indianness. The sati’s death releases him from the exigent identity of the Indianness into which he had temporarily descended and frees him to enact the rituals of Englishness with greater plausibility. The most convincing Englishman—as indeed the most expert thug—turns out to be the mimic man after all. • • • Afterword Masters’s novel serves in many ways as the most apt of epilogues to the colonial accounts of thuggee, given its excavation of the erotic/ affective and metaphysical seductions of that institution—and of the thug—for English masculinity in the tropics and given its suggestion that the lure of the thug for the Englishman may be as compelling as that of thuggee for the (Indian) thug. It charges the project of unveiling and chastisement with a profusion of guilty, even delirious, appetites and obsessions that call for continual incitement and consummation. It does not, of course, fail to play upon the received colonial narrative of thuggee as timeless Indian duplicity; but it also reconfigures it as an erotic tale of the fraternal, closeted, and homicidal desire that drives Indian and English impersonation. Perhaps most remarkably, it showcases the seamless self-referentiality of the discourse on thuggee (as evidenced in an archive composed of biographies, histories, novels, legal records, and rumors) by collapsing the thug and the thug hunter into a single figure; with a literalism quite unprecedented in any of the other texts it confirms that wherever there is an Englishman there is a thug. Notes 1. Radhika Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (February 1993): 83. 2. Guha, “Historiography of Colonial India.” 3. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Also see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 204. 5. This is not to suggest that Bhabha forecloses on any of these other possibilities. 6. James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen, 1857), 90–91. 7. Reproduced in George Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and Its Overthrow in British India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 13–26. 8. Philip Meadows Taylor, “Introduction,” in Confessions of a Thug (London: Richard Bentley, 1858 [1839]), 5. 9. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London: Robert Hale, 1959), 15. 10. See Francis C. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), 197–98. 11. Geoff Bennington, “Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 12. Sandria Freitag argues that thugs were—in contrast to members of criminal castes and tribes—regarded as “admirable and awesome opponents.” See her “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61. While some of this horrified admiration does inform Wightman and Meadows Taylor’s representations, such admiration is more usually carefully repressed; there is, in fact, an interesting tension between the awe-inspiring (if damnable) thug of these texts and the contemptible figure that the other texts strenuously accentuate. 13. James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1933 [1920]), 5. 14. Sir George MacMunn, The Religions and Hidden Cults of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), 172–73. See, too, Meadows Taylor, “Introduction,” i: At the present time it [the novel] may deserve a more attentive study; recent events will have too well prepared the Reader’s mind for implicit belief in all the systematic atrocities narrated.…It will scarcely fail to be remarked, with what consummate art such numerous bodies of men were organized, and for a long time kept absolutely unknown, while committing acts of cruelty and rapine hardly conceivable;…Captain Taylor’s Introduction…may…furnish some clue to the successful concealment of a rebellion, in the existence of which many of our oldest and most experienced officers, and men high in authority, absolutely withheld belief, till too late and too cruelly convinced of their fatal error. 15. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). 16. Hiralal Gupta, “A Critical Study of the Thugs and Their Activities,” Journal of Indian History, 37, part 2 (August 1959), serial no. 110: 169–77. 17. Sandria B. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority in North India,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand Yang (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 158–61. 18. Stewart N. Gordon, “Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State- Formation in 18th Century Malwa,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 6 (December 1969): 403–29. It should be noted that Gordon does not ascribe the activities of the marauding groups to “Oriental anarchy” or oppose “marauders” to “states,” arguing that both entities had the same ends in view and were using the same methods of legitimation, though with differing degrees of success. 19. J. Sleeman, Thug, 108. 20. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. He notes the transformation of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department into the Central Intelligence Department in 1904; this body shifted its initial focus on wandering gangs and criminals to “the collation of political intelligence, relaying information about political leaders and organizations to the various provinces concerned” (p. 187). 21. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 142. 22. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 230. 23. Ibid., 234. 24. Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (Karachi and London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1850]), 1: 153. 25. Kali became a figure of increasing respectability in the nineteenth century; before this she was a deity adored (in Bengal at least) largely though not exclusively by tribal and other subaltern subjects, including thugs and dacoits. It is not clear if Kali was identical with other female deities addressed as Devi or Bhawani. 26. See, for instance, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 59: “It is increasingly clear that colonialism in India produced new forms of society that have been taken to be traditional, and that caste itself as we now know it is not a residual survival of ancient India but a specifically colonial form of civil society. As such it both justifies and maintains the colonial vision of an India where religion transcends politics, society resists change, and the state awaits its virgin birth in the postcolonial era.” 27. This had not, of course, been entirely true for Burton, perhaps because of his sojourn in Sind or his early studies in Arabic. As might be expected, the particular discourse being engaged would determine the Hinduness, or otherwise, of the territory designated “India.” 28. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 29. John Masters, The Deceivers (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1952), 240. All further references to this novel will be incorporated parenthetically into the text. 30. Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (Being the Diary of a Year, Official and Particular, of an Officer of the Thuggee and Dacoitie Police) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892), 1: 50–51. 31. Ranjit Sen, Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary Resistance, 1757–1793 (Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1988), 2–3. 32. Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, no. 2 (1990): 131–64; 27, no. 3 (1990): 259–87. 33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1: 43. 34. Radhika Singha argues that “the introduction of laws dealing with ill-defined ‘criminal communities’ introduced certain fissures into the ideology of the equal, abstract and universal legal subject” (“‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 86, n. 10). 35. Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (London: W. H. Allen, 1837), 145–46. This frankness is relatively rare in the writings on thuggee; the issue of the genuineness of the confessions, though, is an issue in all, judging from the unfailing vehemence with which the method of conviction through approvers’ testimony is defended as just, if not unexceptionable. 36. Ibid., 374. 37. J. Sleeman, Thug, 120. 38. William H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan Press, 1836), 32–33. 39. Thornton, Illustrations, 70, 11. 40. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers, 112. 41. J. Sleeman, Thug, 106. 42. William H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession (Calcutta: J. C. Sherriff, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1849), 2–3. 43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 35. 44. Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility” and “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture. 45. See Mala Sen, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1991) for an example of the way in which the colonial discourse of thuggee (in this instance, Tukar’s Yellow Scarf) continues, in contemporary India, to frame the way in which certain forms of collective violence are understood by the law- and-order machinery of the state. 46. Tuker, Yellow Scarf, 38. 47. William H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, ed. Vincent A. Smith (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1915), 555. 48. Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 330. 49. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 3. 50. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 146. 51. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 84. 52. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 173. The thuggee act had the following provisions: 1.Whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the passing of this Act, to any gang of Thugs, either within or without the Territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, with hard labour. 2.And…every person accused of the offence…may be tried by any court, which would have been competent to try him, if his offence had been committed within the Zillah where that Court sits, any thing to the contrary, in any Regulation contained, notwithstanding. 3.And…no Court shall, on a trial of any person accused of the offence… require any Futwa from any Law Officer. 53. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 136–37. 54. J. Sleeman, Thug, 117. 55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 38. 56. Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura,” in Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 57. William H. Sleeman, Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1840). [BACK] 58. Bruce, Stranglers, 154. 59. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 303–5. 60. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 236. It is said that thugs had routinely existed in a symbiotic relationship with landlords, providing military protection and supplying booty from expeditions in return for land and respectability. [BACK] 61. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 186–87. 62. I should add here that the phrase going native is vested in my paper with a multiplicity of valences; for instance, it encompasses both the colonialist desire to “pass for” the native and the condition that signifies racial regression. 63. R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” Transition 54 (1991): 106. 64. David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2 (1979): 104–27. 65. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nations,” in Nation and Narration, 299. 66. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” See Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205– 17. 67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi,’ by Mahasweta Devi,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 180. turn of the century, is a highly unusual diary of one disciple’s encounters with his guru and with other disciples over the last four years (1882–1886) of Ramakrishna’s life. In this text, which is written in Bengali, Ramakrishna is referred to as thakur, which is both a common way of designating a Brahman as well as a word meaning god; “M,” who was a schoolteacher, is called “master” in this work. In the English translation of 1942 by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1973 [1942]), “the Master” is the standard appellation for Ramakrishna; this usage may have been popularized by Vivekananda. 3. Partha Chatterjee, “A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class,” Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65. 4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 219. 5. Quoted in ibid., 231. For further details, see Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda, 2 vols. (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1978 [1952]). 6. There were many references to the Paramhansa in Keshab’s journal, the New Dispensation, and in the late 1870s Keshab published Paramhanser Ukti, a ten-page Bengali booklet of Ramakrishna’s sayings. 7. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (London: Methuen, 1965), 141. [BACK] 8. Quoted in ibid., 124. 9. Cited in Brian K. Smith, “How Not to Be a Hindu: The Case of the Ramakrishna Mission,” in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed. Robert P. Baird (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 343–44. 10. Sumit Sarkar, “The Kathamrita as Text: Towards an Understanding of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa,” Occasional Paper 22 (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1985), 21 and passim. Also, see Sumit Sarkar, “‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His Times,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, 1543–66. Ramakrishna’s disciples claimed that he had gone through his “Muslim” and “Christian” phases before he met Keshab; please note that all the dates in Ramakrishna’s life are culled from accounts by devotees and admirers. 11. The term heterosexuality is here used catachrestically, since Ramakrishna seems to be obviously outside the formations within which we would situate “modern” Indian subjects, including Vivekananda. The very terms homosexuality/heterosexuality (and, indeed, transsexuality, which may also be said to resonate for Ramakrishna) are too western and modern to be completely adequate to the task of analysis. I use them very provisionally, in the absence of another vocabulary and epistemology that might enable me to understand premodern, Indian/ Hindu conceptualizations of sexuality. In this context, I am reminded of Diana Fuss’s generous and sensitive reading of Fanon’s claim (in Black Skin, White Masks) that there is no (male) homosexuality in the Antilles (“Interior Colonies,” 33): Fanon’s insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if by ‘homosexuality’ one understands the culturally specific social formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West, then they are indeed foreign to the Antilles.…Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such discursive translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual differences? Such a caution must be borne in mind, even as one cannot but deploy, however hesitantly, the idioms of modern western sexualities. See Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) for a careful and fascinating reading of the relationship of Ramakrishna’s “homosexuality” to his mysticism. I regret that I have not been able to make fuller use of the Kripal text, which was published after this chapter was written. 12. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 60–61. 13. S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 50–71. 14. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 45. Sumit Sarkar claims, moreover, that the period of Ramakrishna’s popularity coincided with a “kind of hiatus in bhadralok history,” when dreams of social reform had been frustrated, official racism was marked, and liberation through the overthrow of British rule not really conceivable (“‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti,’” 1547). 15. It is interesting to note that the disciples of Ramakrishna, notably Vivekananda, preferred the term kamkanchan, “lust-and-gold,” over the Master’s kaminikanchan and went to great lengths to explain that the sage’s “symbolic” use of the term did not imply any misogyny. 16. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 701. All subsequent references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text. 17. This insight derives in a general way from Carole-Anne Tyler’s reading of the ambivalent politics of gay drag (“Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1990]) as well from Kaja Silverman’s account of the mastery permitted by T. E. Lawrence’s reflexive masochism (“White Skin, Brown Masks”). In The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 103, Sudhir Kakar characterizes Hindu transvestism thus: “Rituals such as these represent not only the boy’s attempt to identify with his mother but also the man’s effort to free himself from her domination. By trying to be like women—wearing their clothes, acquiring their organs, giving birth—these men are also saying that they do not need women (mothers) any longer.” For a sympathetic psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna’s assumption of femininity, see Kakar, “Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience,” in The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 1–40. 18. Cited in S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 9. 19. D. S. Sarma, Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Benares: Benares Hindu University, 1944), 237. 20. I am grateful to Gayatri Spivak for pointing out to me the numerous, and discontinuous, ways in which the English term woman translates into Bengali (and/or Sanskrit). Even so, it is interesting to note how often other forms of femininity threaten for Ramakrishna to collapse into the figure of the kamini. Hence his warning to one of his young male disciples to beware of women who claim to be actuated by maternal feelings towards him. 21. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 113. 22. I put this term in quotation marks to indicate that is placed under erasure. One cannot assume that transvestism was inflected in the same way for a nineteenth-century (straight?) Hindu male as it might be for, say, a contemporary straight North American male. One has to concede that his masculinity might have been constituted differently, and in a different relationship to femininity, than might be the case for our hypothetical North American male. 23. I am thinking here of N. T. Rama Rao’s assumption of feminine attire, makeup, and jewelry, on one-half of his body in the days of his chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh, apparently in a bid to consolidate his political/spiritual power. Philip Spratt also provides detailed anthropological evidence of religious transvestic ceremonies all over India (Hindu Culture and Personality [Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966]). See, too, Kathryn Hansen’s splendid essay, “Making Women Visible: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in Silent Cinema” (unpublished manuscript). 24. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38. 25. Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 319. 27. Women could, on occasion, function as gurus; the Bhairavi Brahmani, for instance, was Ramakrishna’s first guru. Other historical and contemporary figures like Andal, Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, and Anandamoyi Ma come to mind as well. Sharada Devi (Ramakrishna’s wife) herself had several (female and male) disciples. I do not think, however, that this militates against my understanding of the guru- disciple relationship as functioning for the most part for and among males nor against my reading of its gendered significance in early nationalism. 28. I am obliged to Sandhya Shetty for pointing this out to me. The gurudakshina (the gift to the guru) is situated outside (economic) exchange and functions in a symbolic capacity only. The instance of Drona the archer and his low-caste disciple Eklavya, who had to sacrifice his thumb to ensure the superiority of the guru’s favorite pupil Arjuna, only demonstrates that in the guru-shishya configuration what is offered by the disciple is incommensurable with what is given by the guru. 29. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 296. 30. Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, ed. Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 13. 31. There is no “secular,” critical biography of Ramakrishna except that by Max Mueller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). While this inveighs against the miraculizing tendencies of Ramakrishna’s disciples, not excepting Vivekananda, and refuses to take Ramakrishna’s avatarhood seriously, it is nonetheless entirely reverential about the man himself. 32. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, 117. 35. Swami Chetanananda, ed. Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis, Mo.: Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 1990), 110. 36. Sumit Sarkar notes: “Girish Ghosh confessed that seeing Ramakrishna ‘playing’ with a young disciple made him recall a ‘terrible canard’ that he had once heard about the saint” (“Kathamrita as Text,” 103). 37. Sister Nivedita [Margaret E. Noble], The Master as I Saw Him (Calcutta: Udbodhan Office, 1910), 64. 38. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 204. 39. This is not, of course, to assert that the conflicts were unique to Naren; as we have seen, in terms of class position and intellectual training he appears to have been no different from the majority of the disciples. The others, however, appear to have been less outspoken in their skepticism than he was. I hardly need add that the memory and the narrative of these conflicts is overdetermined; if Naren had not become Vivekananda, we would probably have heard far less of his interactions with his guru. As it is, in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna his iconoclasticism is not as evident as that of, say, Bankim or Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar (neither of whom was a disciple). Nonetheless, he does seem to have been the unequivocal favorite of Ramakrishna. And it also seems clear that he was accorded a degree of freedom of speech and behavior not permitted most of the other disciples. (Girish Ghosh, who was notorious for his drinking, patronage of prostitutes, and occasional foul-mouthed invectives against the guru, was one of the very few others who was granted such a license.) 40. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” Sumit Sarkar emphasizes the saint’s determined pursuit of bhadralok disciples as well as his reticence about religious practices (of the Baul, Kartabhaja, and vamachari Tantric varieties) that might have offended their sensibilities (“The Kathamrita as Text,” 36). 41. Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him, 385–90. 42. My thanks to Inderpal Grewal for suggesting this possibility to me. 43. Hervey De Witt Griswold, Insights into Modern Hinduism (New York: Henry Holt, 1934), 58. 44. Nationalism’s dependence on colonialism has been extensively documented, to some degree by Nandy, Intimate Enemy, but most notably by Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Certainly nationalism-and- colonialism seems to function as one category for Vivekananda. 45. Not all Brahmos were as skeptical as Shibnath Shastri, who, much though he admired Ramakrishna, believed that the saint’s austerities at the beginning of his spiritual career had had deleterious effects on his mental state; Keshab for one seems to have been less incredulous of the spiritual nature of the saint’s trances. Sumit Sarkar points out, interestingly, that while Ramakrishna’s family and neighbors in Kamarpukur and Dakshineshwar attributed the trances to madness or “possession,” his bhadralok disciples and admirers described them as the samadhi state extolled by high Hindu doctrine. 46. Ramakrishna himself made conflicting assertions about his own avatarhood; at points he dismissed the possibility derisively, while at other times he claimed to be an avatar of Krishna, Chaitanya, and/ or Kali. 47. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 42. 48. It is not possible to establish whether any of the swami’s supporters were simply admirers or actually disciples. It is not inconceivable that they may have become disciples retroactively, following Vivekananda’s success in the west. 49. Sankari Prasad Basu and Sunil Bihari Ghosh, eds., Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers 1893–1902 (Calcutta: Dineshchandra Basu Bhattacharya, 1969), 9. 50. It should be noted that the swami’s Indian reputation was—to some degree, at least—induced by himself, as a defensive measure no doubt against the criticisms he encountered not only from Christian ministers in the United States but also from members of the Brahmo Samaj and perhaps the Theosophical Society as well. His early letters to his disciples in Madras were full of exhortations to them to hold a meeting in his honor and to proclaim him to the west as a true spokesperson of Hinduism. He was also careful to keep them informed about favorable reviews in the U.S. press. 51. Rakhal Chandra Nath, The New Hindu Movement 1886–1911 (Calcutta: Minerva, 1982), 126. 52. Ibid., 129. 53. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” 54. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 115. 55. Vivekananda was rarely consistent in this view; this was typical of him. At times he deployed the rhetoric of free trade to imply mutual and equal advantage to east and west; at other times he insisted that Indians were superior to the west in their indifference to material things and that in fact the west called out for spiritual conquest by an “aggressive Hinduism.” In this vacillation Vivekananda was not untypical of the bourgeois neo-Hindu nationalists of his time. [BACK] 56. He also enjoined his brother monks in India not to insist on the acceptance of Ramakrishna’s avatarhood in would-be devotees and disciples of the new order. 57. Harold W. French, The Swan’s Wide Waters: Ramakrishna and Western Culture (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), 58. 58. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 230. 59. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” 60. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 114. 61. Ibid., 17. Note that Bankim’s novel was undoubtedly the product of a distinctly westward-looking nationalism. Nath describes Aurobindo’s “Bhawani Mandir” as derived from Anandmath (and remarkably similar to Vivekananda’s own cult of the warlike monk) in its emphasis on manliness and in its devotion to Kali. [BACK] 62. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity,” 61. 63. Vivekananda, Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, 151. 64. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s cult of physical fitness and martial arts training has a great deal in common with Vivekananda’s endorsement of “beef, biceps, and Bhagavad-Gita.” 65. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western Admirers (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964 [1961]), 347. 66. At this point in Indian history, bourgeois and Hindu nationalisms— the first represented by “moderates” in the Congress Party calling for secular and constitutional reforms, the latter by Tilak, Bankim, and others—have assumed the status of two distinct categories, though quite often they function as one. I bear in mind also Sudipta Kaviraj’s important caveat against the conflation of distinct nationalisms (his own concern is with “early” and “mature” nationalisms), which must be seen as disjunct rather than articulated phenomena in Indian history; see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). 67. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 27. 68. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 231. 69. Ibid., 388 (emphases in the original). [ 70. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 252. The speaker in this instance was a woman, Constance Towne. 71. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 16. 72. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 14. 73. Swami Vivekananda and His Guru (London and Madras: Christian Literature Society for India, 1897), iv. 74. There is, to the uninstructed viewer, little if anything of the disarrangement of limbs or clothing that normally marked the sage’s experience of samadhi. 75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 264. 76. Nivedita functions here as a type of the western female disciple. 77. Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 244. 78. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda: His Second Visit to the West; New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1973). 79. Kakar, Inner World, 160. 80. See, for instance, Romila Thapar: “[The ascetic] is celibate and yet, at the same time, the most virile of men. The ascetic’s demonstration of sexual prowess is not a contradiction in terms: it is in fact a demonstration of his complete control over body functions, since ideally the emission of semen is prohibited to him” (“Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?” in Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations [Delhi: n.p., 1978], 94). Also see Joseph Alter: “The whole purpose of brahmacharya [celibacy] is to build up a resilient store of semen so that the body—in a holistic, psychosomatic sense—radiates an aura of vitality and strength” (“Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 [1994]: 51). 81. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277– 87. 82. Ibid., 286. 83. Swami Vivekananda, “The Future of India,” in Lectures from Colombo to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1956), 267. 84. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 196. Sister Christine (Christine Greenstidel) goes on to remark on the companionship of Sadananda and Vivekananda on their North Indian pilgrimage: “Both were artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in appearance. Artists raved about them.” Nivedita also confesses, though far more discreetly, that she was drawn to the swami by his “personality” rather his philosophy, which she initially found unoriginal. Her “biography” of him, The Master as I Saw Him, is remarkable for its reticence about his corporeality. 85. That such a construction of femininity was not necessarily exclusive to Hindu reformers/revivalists is borne out by Faisal Fatehali Devji: “[Muslim] reformist literature replaces the aggressive sexual woman with the pathetic or suffering woman-as-mother” (“Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900,” South Asia, 14, no. 1 [1991], 151). 86. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237. 87. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (London: William Heinemann, 1904), 32–45. 88. See, among others, Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments; and Madhu Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” Economic and Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, 1691–1702. 89. Monier Monier-Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974 [1883]), 184–85. Also see David R. Kinsley, “Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place,” in Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996); and Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force (New York: Destiny Books, 1988). 90. Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 158. 91. Ramakrishna was married at the age of twenty-three to Sharadamoni Debi, a child-bride of five. According to custom, she remained in her natal home, while Ramakrishna continued his spiritual disciplines at Dakshineshwar, forgetful of her existence. At eighteen she sought him out at Dakshineshwar and acceded to his request that their marriage remain unconsummated. Over the remaining decade and a half of Ramakrishna’s life, she spent extended periods at Dakshineshwar, doing his housekeeping and cooking and (usually) living in a separate building in the temple complex. [BACK] 92. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 65. 93. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 244. [BACK] 94. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 83. 95. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 242. 96. Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 167–68. 97. Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922) was a notable scholar and a Hindu widow who converted to Christianity during a visit to England and dedicated her life to the uplift of young Hindu widows. Her book, The High-Caste Hindu Woman (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), as well as her travels in England and the United States, gained her sympathy from feminists as well as Christian missionaries abroad and censure from Hindu conservatives at home. Her shelter for widows, the Sharda Sadan in Pune, was supported in large part by funds raised by Ramabai Circles in the United States and England. Her travels in the United States in the 1880s received extensive coverage in the U.S. press. 98. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 421–68. 99. This is necessarily a simplification of Vivekananda’s very complicated responses to the issues of (gender and other) reform, nationalism, and colonialism. The split was not simply between “home” (where reform had to endorsed) and abroad (where Hinduism had to be defended); even at “home” he had decidedly mixed responses to reform and (religious and social) orthodoxy. 100. The phrase is Nivedita’s (The Master as I Saw Him, 124). In an interesting departure from the hagiographical tradition in which accounts of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are produced (and in which tradition Nivedita’s own work uneasily belongs), she emphasizes not the continuity of their respective “gospels” but their distinctness from each other. She does this, besides, in a fashion that highlights the swami’s struggles and doubts: “Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the Swami himself said once of him, ‘like a flower,’ living apart in the garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought to dismiss its very memory. It was at one the greatness and the tragedy of my own Master’s life that he was not of this type. His was the modern mind in its completeness.…His hope could not pass by unheeded,…the hope of men of the nineteenth century” (The Master as I Saw Him, 124–25). 101. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution,” 237–38. 102. She was not, however, recognizably a nineteenth-century British feminist—at least from the evidence of her early writings—even though much has been made in the biographies of her feminism and other “excesses.” Apparently Vivekananda himself made fun of her putative feminism. 103. Quoted in Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 32–33. 104. Quoted in Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 121. 105. Sharada Devi seems to have been a figure who was not unequivocally reverenced by the followers of Ramakrishna. Many devotees visited her at Jayrambati and Kamarpukur, and she initiated several people into discipleship. She was sometimes spoken of as an avatar—like her husband—and the heiress to his spiritual kingdom. But she was also often accused of being excessively worldly. Ramakrishna’s most prominent disciples visited her only rarely; Swami Nikhilananda says that this was because they hesitated to “[make] a display of their spiritual fervour.” See his Holy Mother: Being the Life of Sri Sarada Devi, Wife of Sri Ramakrishna and Helpmate in His Mission (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Spivak speaks of the way in which her official biographer, Swami Gambhirananda, staged her as “a counter-echo to what he perceived as the strong voice of the Western Narcissus” (“Asked to Talk about Myself…,” Third Text 19 [Summer 1992]: 17). I would argue that this could only happen retrospectively, and at a later moment from the one that Vivekananda inhabits. 106. See, for instance, Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshashi, Bangladesh: Sahitya Samsad, 1983); and Kumar, History of Doing, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 107. The Indian woman was, obviously, recast in the nationalist moment— as was the Indian man; but recast and fixed, with little room for negotiation after the recasting had been effected. For an analysis of a nationalist woman’s struggles with gendered identities in nationalism, see chapter 5. 108. Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1947), 152, n. 2. 109. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 136–37. 110. Quoted in Pravrajika Atmaprana, Sister Nivedita of Ramakrishna- Vivekananda (Calcutta: Sister Nivedita Girls’ School, 1961), 30. 111. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 128. 112. Rakhal Nath maintains that the Ramakrishna Mission was the only non-political body to come out of the “New Hindu” or Hindu revivalist movement (Nath, New Hindu Movement). [BACK] 113. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 136. 114. Ibid., 150–51. 115. Barbara N. Ramusack, “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865– 1945,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 130. 116. S. B. Mookherjee, “Nivedita and Indian Womanhood,” in Nivedita Commemoration Volume, ed. Amiya Kumar Majumdar (Calcutta: Dhiraj Basu, 1968), 244. 117. She met Gandhi briefly in Calcutta, in the early years of the century. Gandhi (who in so many ways would grow to resemble the figure of Ramakrishna) admired her Hindu partisanship but was unable to agree with her on nationalist politics. The Congress Party under Gandhi had a profoundly uneasy relationship with militant nationalist women like Nivedita and the Rani of Jhansi. 118. Lizelle Reymond’s The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (New York: John Day, 1953) also helped disseminate this image, though its factual claims have since been contested. Kumari Jayawardena’s chapter on Nivedita (“Irish Rebellion and ‘Muscular Hinduism,’” in White Woman’s Other Burden) describes the contradictory ways in which the disciple of Vivekananda is remembered. 119. My thanks to Carole-Anne Tyler Vivekananda was forwardness in the female disciple. [BACK]

This section, on The Deceivers, John Masters’s novel about thuggee,
serves as a (deconstructive) supplement to the official narrative of
the thug, in taking up some of the questions and figures that occupy a
recessive status in that account. Here we see that if the thug of the
archive provides one (admittedly slippery and fixed at the same time)
model of staging identities, there is another model that is crucial
for a comprehension of the thug-English engagement. This model is the
obverse of the process that generates the mimic man of colonial
discourse; it is the lure of going native. The term here both
resonates with and fails to correspond to the mimetic model provided
by Burton in the last chapter.[62] The will to mimicry governs
(Indian) thug and Englishman alike, as we shall see in The Deceivers,
where the plot is driven—as is the thug archive—by a fascination with
the absent and never fully recuperable thug. In engaging this
scenario, the novel also recasts the paradigmatic narrative of
mimicry, in which the native may mimic the colonizer but without any
access to essential Englishness, while the colonizer can trade
identities freely, with no strings attached, without actually being
interpellated as a colonized subject. The Deceivers makes manifest the
precariousness of such self-possession.

The dialectical dependence of the fantasy of complete knowledge on the
paranoid fear of native inscrutability is staged in this novel, where
there is a suturing of the ostensibly antithetical figures of the
English policeman and the thug approver. This novel allows for an
examination of the tension between the received wisdom about thuggee
and some of the marginal issues located at the pressure points of the
official discourse. This novel tells the story of William Savage, a
mediocre and distinctly unheroic English magistrate. Wracked by sexual
and professional anxieties, an alienated subject of the British
colonial machine in India, and sneakingly sympathetic to such Indian
customs as sati, he transforms himself into the exemplary colonial
officer by taking on—albeit temporarily—the calling of the thug. At
the urging of his young wife, Mary, he initially takes on the persona
of the absent Gopal the weaver in order to save Gopal’s wife from
sati; he, however, meets the renegade thug Hussein and decides to
continue as Gopal in order to track down the thugs. Once he assumes
the role, he finds himself powerfully drawn to the practice and goes
on to become a noted thug leader. He does not continue as a thug, of
course—even though at one point Hussein suggests to Savage that the
East India Company become a sponsor of thugs, like the other rulers of
the land; with a little help from his newly (re)constructed
Englishness and his friends, he returns to propriety at the end. (The
Merchant Ivory film production is even more skeptical than the novel
is of the progressivist teleology of the civilizing mission, as well
as of its “success”: in the film, George Angelsmith is led off in
chains, but Savage, estranged from his wife and his Christian god and
unable to prevent the sati that he has actually made possible, is
destined to be perpetually haunted by Kali.)

The Deceivers considers the unspoken and unspeakable possibility that
subtends so much of colonial discourse: what if identity can be
unhinged from race and national origin? And if (racial/national)
identity is unstable and subject to negotiation with each crossing of
a frontier, then in the name of what telos or destiny does Englishness
speak? What if, as R. Radhakrishnan so compellingly asks, on the
subject of diasporic, transnational culture, “identities and
ethnicities are not a matter of fixed and stable selves but rather the
results and products of fortuitous travels and recontextualizations?…
Is ethnicity nothing but, to use the familiar formula, what ethnicity
does?” [63] In the more lurid enactments of this alternative history,
a Kurtz, representing the loftiest intellectual and ethical
possibilities of the Enlightenment, can “go native” in the Dark
Continent. But, closer to “home,” there were, as Arnold has revealed,
more troubling English subjects—those poor white orphans and vagrants
(who were to have their own moment of glory in Kim) who lived lives
not often distinguishable from those of lower-class Indians.[64]
William Savage, the protagonist of The Deceivers, is located somewhere
between these two subject positions.

Despite the putative restoration to wholeness, Englishness, and
legality of William Savage at the close of the story, the narrative
nonetheless opens up a space for investigating the “double and split
subject” of the colonial enunciation, for what Bhabha calls—in the
context of the nation’s fissured enunciation—“dissemi-nation”: “a
space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the
heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic
authorities, and tense cultural locations.” [65] As in the case of so
many other Englishmen, Savage will have to turn to Indianness in order
to return to or consolidate or improve his English self; in doing so,
he will come back as a new and more English Englishman, but he will
also, temporarily at least, be transformed into a border subject,
changed by his experience of Indianness, surrendering illusions of
full autonomy and Englishness in the crossing of boundaries. Here I
invoke Burton again as a point of reference. Burton had an
occasionally vexed relationship with national identity: his ancestry
was partly Irish and Welsh, and he grew up on the Continent, only
coming to live in England in his late teens. Yet for him identity,
whatever guises it might assume and however far it might roam, is
usually more persuasively anchored than is that of Masters’s
protagonist in an imperial Englishness. Burton can be, at different
times, a West Asian merchant or a Muslim hajji, but his identities are
clearly hierarchized and more manipulable than Savage’s. While the
success of his passing is always, in a sense, conditional upon his
being a man from elsewhere/nowhere, he can also claim nativeness as
his own production, wrenching an (imaginary) autonomy from the
dominion of necessity. Savage passes through Indianness en route to
Englishness, but, unlike Burton, he cannot pass in and out without
constraint. Indianness, while indispensable to Englishness, must also
be violently cast out if Englishness is to be secure(d). In The
Deceivers, identity is the locus of strain and contradiction. For
Savage, identity cannot be expansive, assimilationist, and pluralist;
each new identity competes with and displaces the last. That is why
Savage can at the end afford to take no prisoners or recruit any
approvers from among his erstwhile comrades; the thugs whom he has led
and who are now pursuing him must be wiped out in an act of punitive
and frenzied brutality that not only precludes the need for approvers
but also does away with any witnesses against, and rem(a)inders of,
his own thug self.

The Deceivers stages, indeed foregrounds, the positionality and
politics of that ordinarily self-effacing hero of thug narration, the
investigator, and the plurality of determinations that produces him.
In this context, Gayatri Spivak’s cautionary reminders about the
urgent necessity of disallowing the neutrality of the intellectual or
investigator should be borne in mind. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
she proffers a critique of the sanctioned myopia of the Foucault and
Deleuze of “Intellectuals and Power,” who are unable or unwilling to
acknowledge the complicity of the intellectual in the mechanisms that
produce representations of subaltern subjects and groups and who fail
to recognize that subaltern subjects are constrained to fashion
themselves in terms of already scripted epistemologies.[66] Her
introduction to Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” resonates with, and
provides another useful point of entry into, this problematic of
reading and engagement; the usefulness of deconstruction, she tells
us, lies in “the recognition,…of provisional and intractable starting
points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities
where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence
that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself
complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon ‘history’
and upon the ethico-political as the ‘trace’ of that complicity—the
proof that we do not inhabit a clearly defined critical space free of
such traces.” [67] Where in the archives the English scribe was
progressively effaced from the scene of the crime as well as the scene
of writing, no such modesty is permitted the protagonist of Masters’s
novel. The novel accents above all his position of enunciation. He
cannot be, as in the normative thug account, the neutral conduit of
something clearly identified as a thug consciousness: the thug’s voice
cannot but inscribe Savage as both subject and object of his own
discourse.

The central aspect of Savage’s mission is not merely to bear witness;
he must above all produce a record, transform that irreducible
obscurity, that absence that is Indian corporate criminal activity,
into what Spivak terms an “interpretable text.” This of course was the
primary gift of Sleeman and his associates to the criminal justice
system in colonial India—to synthesize various and discrepant
occurrences as a semiosis under centralized control; against thuggee—
conceived of as a vast, well-articulated, and centralized conspiracy—
could be opposed the concentrated power/knowledge of the state. What
is required is a text and a model of reading that is reproducible in
the different temporalities and contexts of the colonial polity in
India. However, the novel intimates the limitations and complexities
of authorial intention. Savage produces his account in a condition of
profound subjective instability, opening his text up to multiple and
mutually contentious readings: “He had met hundreds of other
Deceivers, and the notes were a complete tale of all he had seen and
heard and done; of all the Deceivers who had engaged in any action,
with their descriptions, habits, and homes; of each murder, and how it
had gone, and how it might have been prevented—or improved upon. The
words could be read for either purpose, according to the spirit of the
reader” (p. 223). Above all, Savage’s account draws attention to the
transactional nature of reading. What ought to be a classic of
information retrieval and a master text on thuggee for colonial
authority is also a text for other thugs, a manual for reproducing
thug practice. Savage’s text (within the text of the Masters novel),
even though cast in the model of strict representational realism, is
susceptible of an Other reading; its meanings are ambushed, deflected,
and augmented en route to a destination it can never reach. The
Thuggee and Dacoity Department strove to produce, in its extensive
records on thug affiliation and activity, a text without nuances or
fissures, something that was not susceptible of any misreadings or
contesting interpretations. It sought, in its meticulous record
keeping and its attempts to square all the approvers’ testimonies with
each other and make them speak with one voice, to produce a record
that would have what was presumed to be the authority of material
fact. But for Savage, at least, it is impossible to engage in such an
enterprise without also inscribing his own complicity in his
testimonial. In this respect, he does approximate the classic approver
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, who cannot bear witness against
others without simultaneously bearing witness against himself.

While the novel insists that only impersonation can yield the truth,
it also illuminates the heterodox desires that underlie the exercise
of going native. Moreover, this impersonation is quite detached from
any agency on the part of William Savage and from any sense of
originary identity. Forced into the disguise of the Indian weaver
Gopal (by the patel [village headman] Chandra Sen) in an unwilling and
ultimately fruitless attempt to save a would-be sati, he is recognized
as an impostor by Hussein. Hussein is ideal material for an approver:
he has brains, courage, and resourcefulness, and he is remarkably
eager to undo the institution of thuggee, but his testimony alone is
not enough to compel belief in the practice. So he recruits an
Englishman to the anti-thuggee cause, knowing that only he can be
fully convincing as a figure of knowledge. And this knowledge can only
be acquired experientially, and by going outside the law as currently
constituted, as Savage learns when he follows the more conventional
methods of information retrieval. As Hussein says,

Several times some English official or other has got hold of
information about us. Then he has chased us out of his district, and
reported, I suppose. But they’ve never worked together, and it always
blew over. They’ll never destroy us until one of them finds out
everything, and forces the Lat Sahib [the governor-general] to believe
everything, and plans a campaign to cover all India. And that one who
finds out must fear Kali, or he will not understand her. But he must
not love her. (p. 208)

Unable to ignore the thugs as the other English functionaries are
ready to do, eager to discard the Englishness he so uncomfortably
inhabits, and pressured by Hussein and Mary, Savage decides to
continue as Gopal the weaver, who, as it turns out, is also Gopal the
thug. For an unsuccessful and insecure man like Savage, wracked by
anxieties about (heterosexual) masculinity and Englishness, it is the
very abdication of authority involved in playing a thug that is
peculiarly attractive; inhabiting the subject position of the most
criminalized and most scrutinized indigenous subject holds out the
promise of psychic satisfactions not ordinarily available to colonial
authority.

The novel dallies with the idea (as many crime fictions often do,
though less explicitly) of the fragility of the barriers that separate
the custodian of law and morality from the criminal. It actually makes
available the proposition (though it has to drop it at the end) that
Savage is at heart a thug and that his initiation into thuggee by
Hussein is no accident. He takes naturally to the trade, is attended
by good omens, and enjoys a facility of thought, speech, and action
that is alien to his English self. The idea of mimicry itself is
transformed in his performance of it and begins to assume to assume
the contours of possession, if not those of originary identity. There
is no difference for him between the mimicry of an identity and the
identity itself.

In order to pass for an Indian or a thug (ultimately these two
categories are collapsed, as we have seen in the other narratives of
thuggee) Savage must slough off certain normative aspects of
Englishness in the tropics—the militant Christianity, the revulsion
against disease and cruelty, the reforming impulse. He must instead
embrace what is described as the nondualistic moral economy of
Hinduism that sees both creation and destruction as suffused with the
divine. Needless to say, the psychic territory of “India” is always
coextensive with Hinduism, despite the fact that Muslims as well as
other religious groups are shown to practice thuggee as much as do
Hindus; and this Hinduism is consistently and exclusively fetishized
as blood lust and hyperbolic sexuality. As an Indian, and Hindu, and
thug, Savage must participate in a series of paradoxes. He must be
Indian, and thug, to return more securely to Englishness, and
legitimacy; he must allow evil to be done in order to do good; and,
since the contexts of legality are always shifting and are
particularly in need of redefinition in India, he must go outside the
law in order to upholdr the law. Always relatively indifferent to the
finer points of legal pocedure and defendants’ rights (here written
as an inaptitude for “paperwork”), the antithug drive allows him to
rethink the concepts of justice and legality in the colonial context,
where it is notoriously difficult to punish crime anyway:

“What does justice mean?”…“Fair trial, the rules of evidence, no
double hazard, no hearsay, and so on and so on? Or protection against
injustice, against violence? The means, or the end?.…Oh, I know we
have no evidence about them yet. That’s just what I mean. I tell you,
sir, they cannot be run down within our rule of law. Indians aren’t
English. “No man dies by the hand of man,” they think, so they won’t
give evidence because they are not angry with the murderers. They
think men who kill are driven by God to kill. And there are too many
jurisdictions, too far to go to give evidence, too long to wait. We’ve
got to go outside the law to catch them, to prevent more
murders.” (pp. 128–29)


Caught between a colonial government and an Indian populace unwilling,
for different reasons, to do what is necessary to end thuggee and
pressured, moreover, by Hussein, Savage becomes Gopal again, only more
completely in earnest this time. In his new role Savage discovers that
passing for a thug involves a radical (re)contextualization of his
once and future Englishness. Moreover, as Gopal he has to inhabit a
role and a history that is already in place. Impersonation involves
not freedom but strict adherence to a scripted identity; he cannot
start afresh, or make himself up as he goes along. He discovers that
as Gopal, he is already an expert strangler and strategist, destined
to be “the greatest the Deceivers have ever known” (p. 218). And once
he participates in the sacramental ritual of gur-sharing and tastes
the transubstantiated body of the goddess, his allegiance and destiny
are fixed. Savage is born to thuggee, as his comfort in his role of
thug demonstrates; indeed, his story undoes the usual weighting of
“self” and “role” in the Englishman’s subjectivity, since he is more
convincing (to himself, and apparently to Indians and Englishmen
alike) and comfortable as Indian and thug than as Englishman and
Christian. Hussein, who is more percipient than he about the
complexities of subject formation, reminds him that “free will” is an
adjunct (or an illusion) of Englishness alone. Savage must find out
that intentions guarantee nothing; not even the Englishman, once he
has decided to play the Indian, can escape the formulaic constraints
of Indian/thug ontology: “You are a Deceiver, from this dawn on for
ever. A strangler. Only stranglers may stand on the blanket: you stood
on it. Only stranglers may take the consecrated sugar of communion:
you took it. It doesn’t matter what a man thinks he is. When he eats
consecrated sugar, on the blanket, in front of the pick-axe, he is a
strangler, because Kali enters into him.” (p. 182)

Such a script also demands of course that he confront his double, the
original Gopal. In order to protect himself and in order to wrest some
autonomy for himself, Savage strangles Gopal and thus becomes Gopal
himself. But strangling the “real Gopal” only makes him more fully
Gopal, for he can now develop into his predestined role. From this
point on, all paradoxes are held in abeyance. From being complicit in
murder through inaction Savage proceeds to strangulation himself and
becomes, in an extraordinary take on the man-who-would-be-king vision
that tropes so much colonial discourse, a noted leader of thugs. Like
Burton the Muslim, Savage the thug is characterized not simply by
mastery but by an extraordinary surplus of subject effects. (Unlike
Burton, though, he is tempted, and he is corrupted—although not
irredeemably.)

The desire for Gopal, which is closely articulated with the desire to
be Gopal, is mediated, interestingly enough, through the figure of the
sati who frames the novel and who foregrounds the question of gender
that has been bypassed or placed under erasure in the thuggee
archives. I find the entry into thuggee through sati to be a
particularly productive conjuncture for the problematic of mimicry,
identity, and the colonizer’s desire. The sati, most obviously,
provides an occasion for access to Gopal. The sati has to be set up in
the beginning so that Savage can play Gopal; and then it has to be
deferred so that he can continue to play Gopal and go in search of
Gopal. Her presence in the novel displaces homoerotic desire and
returns Savage to heterosexuality. It also ensures his successful
miming of Indianness and Englishness. But the consolidation of
heterosexuality, masculinity, and Englishness demands not simply her
presence but her death. She is insistently narrativized as a voluntary
sati; she is a romanticized figure, whose sacrifice Savage has no
desire to thwart. He desires her, and his desire for her takes the
form of wanting her to die for him, which he ensures by killing Gopal.
In this way, he can enjoy the satisfactions of Indian as well as
English masculinity. As an Indian, he can have the woman die for him
(and deliver him of his sexual anxieties); but being fully Indian also
means that he himself must die, for the sati requires a dead husband.
As an Englishman, therefore, he can distance himself from the violent
implications of Indianness. The sati’s death releases him from the
exigent identity of the Indianness into which he had temporarily
descended and frees him to enact the rituals of Englishness with
greater plausibility. The most convincing Englishman—as indeed the
most expert thug—turns out to be the mimic man after all.

• • •

Afterword

Masters’s novel serves in many ways as the most apt of epilogues to
the colonial accounts of thuggee, given its excavation of the erotic/
affective and metaphysical seductions of that institution—and of the
thug—for English masculinity in the tropics and given its suggestion
that the lure of the thug for the Englishman may be as compelling as
that of thuggee for the (Indian) thug. It charges the project of
unveiling and chastisement with a profusion of guilty, even delirious,
appetites and obsessions that call for continual incitement and
consummation. It does not, of course, fail to play upon the received
colonial narrative of thuggee as timeless Indian duplicity; but it
also reconfigures it as an erotic tale of the fraternal, closeted, and
homicidal desire that drives Indian and English impersonation. Perhaps
most remarkably, it showcases the seamless self-referentiality of the
discourse on thuggee (as evidenced in an archive composed of
biographies, histories, novels, legal records, and rumors) by
collapsing the thug and the thug hunter into a single figure; with a
literalism quite unprecedented in any of the other texts it confirms
that wherever there is an Englishman there is a thug.

Notes

1. Radhika Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign
of the 1830s and Legal Innovation,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (February
1993): 83.

2. Guha, “Historiography of Colonial India.”

3. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern
Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit
Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Also see Ranajit
Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” in In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987), 204.

5. This is not to suggest that Bhabha forecloses on any of these other
possibilities.

6. James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the
Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen,
1857), 90–91.

7. Reproduced in George Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and
Its Overthrow in British India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968), 13–26.

8. Philip Meadows Taylor, “Introduction,” in Confessions of a Thug
(London: Richard Bentley, 1858 [1839]), 5.

9. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London: Robert Hale,
1959), 15.

10. See Francis C. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of
Thuggee Sleeman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), 197–98.

11. Geoff Bennington, “Postal Politics and the Institution of the
Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990).

12. Sandria Freitag argues that thugs were—in contrast to members of
criminal castes and tribes—regarded as “admirable and awesome
opponents.” See her “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North
India,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61. While some of
this horrified admiration does inform Wightman and Meadows Taylor’s
representations, such admiration is more usually carefully repressed;
there is, in fact, an interesting tension between the awe-inspiring
(if damnable) thug of these texts and the contemptible figure that the
other texts strenuously accentuate.

13. James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1933 [1920]), 5.

14. Sir George MacMunn, The Religions and Hidden Cults of India
(London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), 172–73. See, too, Meadows
Taylor, “Introduction,” i:

At the present time it [the novel] may deserve a more attentive study;
recent events will have too well prepared the Reader’s mind for
implicit belief in all the systematic atrocities narrated.…It will
scarcely fail to be remarked, with what consummate art such numerous
bodies of men were organized, and for a long time kept absolutely
unknown, while committing acts of cruelty and rapine hardly
conceivable;…Captain Taylor’s Introduction…may…furnish some clue to
the successful concealment of a rebellion, in the existence of which
many of our oldest and most experienced officers, and men high in
authority, absolutely withheld belief, till too late and too cruelly
convinced of their fatal error.

15. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).

16. Hiralal Gupta, “A Critical Study of the Thugs and Their
Activities,” Journal of Indian History, 37, part 2 (August 1959),
serial no. 110: 169–77.

17. Sandria B. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority in North
India,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand Yang
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 158–61.

18. Stewart N. Gordon, “Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-
Formation in 18th Century Malwa,” Indian Economic and Social History
Review 6 (December 1969): 403–29. It should be noted that Gordon does
not ascribe the activities of the marauding groups to “Oriental
anarchy” or oppose “marauders” to “states,” arguing that both entities
had the same ends in view and were using the same methods of
legitimation, though with differing degrees of success.

19. J. Sleeman, Thug, 108.

20. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. He notes the transformation
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department into the Central Intelligence
Department in 1904; this body shifted its initial focus on wandering
gangs and criminals to “the collation of political intelligence,
relaying information about political leaders and organizations to the
various provinces concerned” (p. 187).

21. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 142.

22. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 230.

23. Ibid., 234.

24. Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
(Karachi and London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1850]), 1: 153.

25. Kali became a figure of increasing respectability in the
nineteenth century; before this she was a deity adored (in Bengal at
least) largely though not exclusively by tribal and other subaltern
subjects, including thugs and dacoits. It is not clear if Kali was
identical with other female deities addressed as Devi or Bhawani.

26. See, for instance, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,”
Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 59: “It is increasingly clear that
colonialism in India produced new forms of society that have been
taken to be traditional, and that caste itself as we now know it is
not a residual survival of ancient India but a specifically colonial
form of civil society. As such it both justifies and maintains the
colonial vision of an India where religion transcends politics,
society resists change, and the state awaits its virgin birth in the
postcolonial era.”

27. This had not, of course, been entirely true for Burton, perhaps
because of his sojourn in Sind or his early studies in Arabic. As
might be expected, the particular discourse being engaged would
determine the Hinduness, or otherwise, of the territory designated
“India.”

28. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions,” in The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).

29. John Masters, The Deceivers (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1952),
240. All further references to this novel will be incorporated
parenthetically into the text.

30. Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (Being the Diary of a Year,
Official and Particular, of an Officer of the Thuggee and Dacoitie
Police) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892), 1: 50–51.

31. Ranjit Sen, Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary
Resistance, 1757–1793 (Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1988), 2–3.

32. Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by
Birth,’” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, no. 2 (1990):
131–64; 27, no. 3 (1990): 259–87.

33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1: 43.

34. Radhika Singha argues that “the introduction of laws dealing with
ill-defined ‘criminal communities’ introduced certain fissures into
the ideology of the equal, abstract and universal legal
subject” (“‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 86, n. 10).

35. Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the
Thugs (London: W. H. Allen, 1837), 145–46. This frankness is
relatively rare in the writings on thuggee; the issue of the
genuineness of the confessions, though, is an issue in all, judging
from the unfailing vehemence with which the method of conviction
through approvers’ testimony is defended as just, if not
unexceptionable.

36. Ibid., 374.

37. J. Sleeman, Thug, 120.

38. William H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar
Language Used by the Thugs (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan
Press, 1836), 32–33.

39. Thornton, Illustrations, 70, 11.

40. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers, 112.

41. J. Sleeman, Thug, 106.

42. William H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and
Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession (Calcutta: J. C. Sherriff,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1849), 2–3.

43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 35.

44. Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility” and “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The
Location of Culture.

45. See Mala Sen, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi
(New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1991) for an example of the way in
which the colonial discourse of thuggee (in this instance, Tukar’s
Yellow Scarf) continues, in contemporary India, to frame the way in
which certain forms of collective violence are understood by the law-
and-order machinery of the state.

46. Tuker, Yellow Scarf, 38.

47. William H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian
Official, ed. Vincent A. Smith (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford
University Press, 1915), 555.

48. Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 330.

49. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 3.

50. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 146.

51. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 84.

52. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 173. The thuggee act had the
following provisions:

1.Whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the
passing of this Act, to any gang of Thugs, either within or without
the Territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with
imprisonment for life, with hard labour.

2.And…every person accused of the offence…may be tried by any court,
which would have been competent to try him, if his offence had been
committed within the Zillah where that Court sits, any thing to the
contrary, in any Regulation contained, notwithstanding.

3.And…no Court shall, on a trial of any person accused of the offence…
require any Futwa from any Law Officer.


53. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 136–37.

54. J. Sleeman, Thug, 117.

55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), 38.

56. Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case
of Chauri Chaura,” in Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1987).

57. William H. Sleeman, Report on the Depredations Committed by the
Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1840). [BACK]

58. Bruce, Stranglers, 154.

59. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 303–5.

60. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 236. It is said that thugs
had routinely existed in a symbiotic relationship with landlords,
providing military protection and supplying booty from expeditions in
return for land and respectability. [BACK]

61. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 186–87.

62. I should add here that the phrase going native is vested in my
paper with a multiplicity of valences; for instance, it encompasses
both the colonialist desire to “pass for” the native and the condition
that signifies racial regression.

63. R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” Transition 54
(1991): 106.

64. David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7,
no. 2 (1979): 104–27.

65. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins
of the Modern Nations,” in Nation and Narration, 299.

66. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” See Michel Foucault,
“Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and
Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–
17.

67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi,’
by Mahasweta Devi,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
(New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 180.

turn of the century, is a highly unusual diary of one disciple’s
encounters with his guru and with other disciples over the last four
years (1882–1886) of Ramakrishna’s life. In this text, which is
written in Bengali, Ramakrishna is referred to as thakur, which is
both a common way of designating a Brahman as well as a word meaning
god; “M,” who was a schoolteacher, is called “master” in this work. In
the English translation of 1942 by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1973
[1942]), “the Master” is the standard appellation for Ramakrishna;
this usage may have been popularized by Vivekananda.

3. Partha Chatterjee, “A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri
Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class,” Subaltern Studies VII:
Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and
Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65.

4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988),
219.

5. Quoted in ibid., 231. For further details, see Swami Saradananda,
Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda, 2 vols.
(Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1978 [1952]).

6. There were many references to the Paramhansa in Keshab’s journal,
the New Dispensation, and in the late 1870s Keshab published
Paramhanser Ukti, a ten-page Bengali booklet of Ramakrishna’s sayings.

7. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (London:
Methuen, 1965), 141. [BACK]

8. Quoted in ibid., 124.

9. Cited in Brian K. Smith, “How Not to Be a Hindu: The Case of the
Ramakrishna Mission,” in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed.
Robert P. Baird (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 343–44.

10. Sumit Sarkar, “The Kathamrita as Text: Towards an Understanding of
Ramakrishna Paramhamsa,” Occasional Paper 22 (New Delhi: Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, 1985), 21 and passim. Also, see Sumit
Sarkar, “‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His
Times,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, 1543–66.
Ramakrishna’s disciples claimed that he had gone through his “Muslim”
and “Christian” phases before he met Keshab; please note that all the
dates in Ramakrishna’s life are culled from accounts by devotees and
admirers.

11. The term heterosexuality is here used catachrestically, since
Ramakrishna seems to be obviously outside the formations within which
we would situate “modern” Indian subjects, including Vivekananda. The
very terms homosexuality/heterosexuality (and, indeed, transsexuality,
which may also be said to resonate for Ramakrishna) are too western
and modern to be completely adequate to the task of analysis. I use
them very provisionally, in the absence of another vocabulary and
epistemology that might enable me to understand premodern, Indian/
Hindu conceptualizations of sexuality. In this context, I am reminded
of Diana Fuss’s generous and sensitive reading of Fanon’s claim (in
Black Skin, White Masks) that there is no (male) homosexuality in the
Antilles (“Interior Colonies,” 33):

Fanon’s insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may
convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if
by ‘homosexuality’ one understands the culturally specific social
formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West,
then they are indeed foreign to the Antilles.…Can one generalize from
the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to
sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such discursive
translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual differences?

Such a caution must be borne in mind, even as one cannot but deploy,
however hesitantly, the idioms of modern western sexualities. See
Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life
and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1995) for a careful and fascinating reading of the
relationship of Ramakrishna’s “homosexuality” to his mysticism. I
regret that I have not been able to make fuller use of the Kripal
text, which was published after this chapter was written.

12. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 60–61.

13. S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 50–71.

14. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 45. Sumit Sarkar
claims, moreover, that the period of Ramakrishna’s popularity
coincided with a “kind of hiatus in bhadralok history,” when dreams of
social reform had been frustrated, official racism was marked, and
liberation through the overthrow of British rule not really
conceivable (“‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti,’” 1547).

15. It is interesting to note that the disciples of Ramakrishna,
notably Vivekananda, preferred the term kamkanchan, “lust-and-gold,”
over the Master’s kaminikanchan and went to great lengths to explain
that the sage’s “symbolic” use of the term did not imply any
misogyny.

16. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 701. All subsequent
references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text.

17. This insight derives in a general way from Carole-Anne Tyler’s
reading of the ambivalent politics of gay drag (“Boys Will Be Girls:
The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1990]) as well from
Kaja Silverman’s account of the mastery permitted by T. E. Lawrence’s
reflexive masochism (“White Skin, Brown Masks”). In The Inner World: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 103, Sudhir Kakar characterizes Hindu
transvestism thus: “Rituals such as these represent not only the boy’s
attempt to identify with his mother but also the man’s effort to free
himself from her domination. By trying to be like women—wearing their
clothes, acquiring their organs, giving birth—these men are also
saying that they do not need women (mothers) any longer.” For a
sympathetic psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna’s assumption of
femininity, see Kakar, “Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience,” in
The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and
Mysticism (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 1–40.

18. Cited in S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 9.

19. D. S. Sarma, Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Benares: Benares Hindu University,
1944), 237.

20. I am grateful to Gayatri Spivak for pointing out to me the
numerous, and discontinuous, ways in which the English term woman
translates into Bengali (and/or Sanskrit). Even so, it is interesting
to note how often other forms of femininity threaten for Ramakrishna
to collapse into the figure of the kamini. Hence his warning to one of
his young male disciples to beware of women who claim to be actuated
by maternal feelings towards him.

21. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 113.

22. I put this term in quotation marks to indicate that is placed
under erasure. One cannot assume that transvestism was inflected in
the same way for a nineteenth-century (straight?) Hindu male as it
might be for, say, a contemporary straight North American male. One
has to concede that his masculinity might have been constituted
differently, and in a different relationship to femininity, than might
be the case for our hypothetical North American male.

23. I am thinking here of N. T. Rama Rao’s assumption of feminine
attire, makeup, and jewelry, on one-half of his body in the days of
his chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh, apparently in a bid to
consolidate his political/spiritual power. Philip Spratt also provides
detailed anthropological evidence of religious transvestic ceremonies
all over India (Hindu Culture and Personality [Bombay: Manaktalas,
1966]). See, too, Kathryn Hansen’s splendid essay, “Making Women
Visible: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in
Silent Cinema” (unpublished manuscript).

24. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and
Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.

25. Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 319.


27. Women could, on occasion, function as gurus; the Bhairavi
Brahmani, for instance, was Ramakrishna’s first guru. Other historical
and contemporary figures like Andal, Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, and
Anandamoyi Ma come to mind as well. Sharada Devi (Ramakrishna’s wife)
herself had several (female and male) disciples. I do not think,
however, that this militates against my understanding of the guru-
disciple relationship as functioning for the most part for and among
males nor against my reading of its gendered significance in early
nationalism.

28. I am obliged to Sandhya Shetty for pointing this out to me. The
gurudakshina (the gift to the guru) is situated outside (economic)
exchange and functions in a symbolic capacity only. The instance of
Drona the archer and his low-caste disciple Eklavya, who had to
sacrifice his thumb to ensure the superiority of the guru’s favorite
pupil Arjuna, only demonstrates that in the guru-shishya configuration
what is offered by the disciple is incommensurable with what is given
by the guru.

29. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 296.

30. Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, ed.
Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953),
13.

31. There is no “secular,” critical biography of Ramakrishna except
that by Max Mueller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). While this inveighs against the
miraculizing tendencies of Ramakrishna’s disciples, not excepting
Vivekananda, and refuses to take Ramakrishna’s avatarhood seriously,
it is nonetheless entirely reverential about the man himself.

32. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, 117.

35. Swami Chetanananda, ed. Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis, Mo.:
Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 1990), 110.

36. Sumit Sarkar notes: “Girish Ghosh confessed that seeing
Ramakrishna ‘playing’ with a young disciple made him recall a
‘terrible canard’ that he had once heard about the saint” (“Kathamrita
as Text,” 103).

37. Sister Nivedita [Margaret E. Noble], The Master as I Saw Him
(Calcutta: Udbodhan Office, 1910), 64.

38. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 204.

39. This is not, of course, to assert that the conflicts were unique
to Naren; as we have seen, in terms of class position and intellectual
training he appears to have been no different from the majority of the
disciples. The others, however, appear to have been less outspoken in
their skepticism than he was. I hardly need add that the memory and
the narrative of these conflicts is overdetermined; if Naren had not
become Vivekananda, we would probably have heard far less of his
interactions with his guru. As it is, in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
his iconoclasticism is not as evident as that of, say, Bankim or Dr.
Mahendralal Sarkar (neither of whom was a disciple). Nonetheless, he
does seem to have been the unequivocal favorite of Ramakrishna. And it
also seems clear that he was accorded a degree of freedom of speech
and behavior not permitted most of the other disciples. (Girish Ghosh,
who was notorious for his drinking, patronage of prostitutes, and
occasional foul-mouthed invectives against the guru, was one of the
very few others who was granted such a license.)

40. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” Sumit Sarkar
emphasizes the saint’s determined pursuit of bhadralok disciples as
well as his reticence about religious practices (of the Baul,
Kartabhaja, and vamachari Tantric varieties) that might have offended
their sensibilities (“The Kathamrita as Text,” 36).

41. Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him, 385–90.

42. My thanks to Inderpal Grewal for suggesting this possibility to
me.

43. Hervey De Witt Griswold, Insights into Modern Hinduism (New York:
Henry Holt, 1934), 58.

44. Nationalism’s dependence on colonialism has been extensively
documented, to some degree by Nandy, Intimate Enemy, but most notably
by Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Certainly nationalism-and-
colonialism seems to function as one category for Vivekananda.

45. Not all Brahmos were as skeptical as Shibnath Shastri, who, much
though he admired Ramakrishna, believed that the saint’s austerities
at the beginning of his spiritual career had had deleterious effects
on his mental state; Keshab for one seems to have been less
incredulous of the spiritual nature of the saint’s trances. Sumit
Sarkar points out, interestingly, that while Ramakrishna’s family and
neighbors in Kamarpukur and Dakshineshwar attributed the trances to
madness or “possession,” his bhadralok disciples and admirers
described them as the samadhi state extolled by high Hindu doctrine.

46. Ramakrishna himself made conflicting assertions about his own
avatarhood; at points he dismissed the possibility derisively, while
at other times he claimed to be an avatar of Krishna, Chaitanya, and/
or Kali.

47. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York:
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 42.

48. It is not possible to establish whether any of the swami’s
supporters were simply admirers or actually disciples. It is not
inconceivable that they may have become disciples retroactively,
following Vivekananda’s success in the west.

49. Sankari Prasad Basu and Sunil Bihari Ghosh, eds., Vivekananda in
Indian Newspapers 1893–1902 (Calcutta: Dineshchandra Basu
Bhattacharya, 1969), 9.

50. It should be noted that the swami’s Indian reputation was—to some
degree, at least—induced by himself, as a defensive measure no doubt
against the criticisms he encountered not only from Christian
ministers in the United States but also from members of the Brahmo
Samaj and perhaps the Theosophical Society as well. His early letters
to his disciples in Madras were full of exhortations to them to hold a
meeting in his honor and to proclaim him to the west as a true
spokesperson of Hinduism. He was also careful to keep them informed
about favorable reviews in the U.S. press.

51. Rakhal Chandra Nath, The New Hindu Movement 1886–1911 (Calcutta:
Minerva, 1982), 126.

52. Ibid., 129.

53. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”

54. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 115.

55. Vivekananda was rarely consistent in this view; this was typical
of him. At times he deployed the rhetoric of free trade to imply
mutual and equal advantage to east and west; at other times he
insisted that Indians were superior to the west in their indifference
to material things and that in fact the west called out for spiritual
conquest by an “aggressive Hinduism.” In this vacillation Vivekananda
was not untypical of the bourgeois neo-Hindu nationalists of his time.
[BACK]

56. He also enjoined his brother monks in India not to insist on the
acceptance of Ramakrishna’s avatarhood in would-be devotees and
disciples of the new order.

57. Harold W. French, The Swan’s Wide Waters: Ramakrishna and Western
Culture (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), 58.

58. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 230.

59. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”

60. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 114.

61. Ibid., 17. Note that Bankim’s novel was undoubtedly the product of
a distinctly westward-looking nationalism. Nath describes Aurobindo’s
“Bhawani Mandir” as derived from Anandmath (and remarkably similar to
Vivekananda’s own cult of the warlike monk) in its emphasis on
manliness and in its devotion to Kali. [BACK]

62. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity,” 61.

63. Vivekananda, Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, 151.

64. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s cult of physical fitness and
martial arts training has a great deal in common with Vivekananda’s
endorsement of “beef, biceps, and Bhagavad-Gita.”

65. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western
Admirers (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964 [1961]), 347.

66. At this point in Indian history, bourgeois and Hindu nationalisms—
the first represented by “moderates” in the Congress Party calling for
secular and constitutional reforms, the latter by Tilak, Bankim, and
others—have assumed the status of two distinct categories, though
quite often they function as one. I bear in mind also Sudipta
Kaviraj’s important caveat against the conflation of distinct
nationalisms (his own concern is with “early” and “mature”
nationalisms), which must be seen as disjunct rather than articulated
phenomena in Indian history; see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary
Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

67. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 27.

68. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 231.

69. Ibid., 388 (emphases in the original). [

70. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 252. The speaker in this
instance was a woman, Constance Towne.

71. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 16.

72. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 14.

73. Swami Vivekananda and His Guru (London and Madras: Christian
Literature Society for India, 1897), iv.

74. There is, to the uninstructed viewer, little if anything of the
disarrangement of limbs or clothing that normally marked the sage’s
experience of samadhi.

75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1987),
264.

76. Nivedita functions here as a type of the western female disciple.

77. Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and
Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in Femmes
Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 244.

78. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda: His Second Visit to the
West; New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1973).

79. Kakar, Inner World, 160.

80. See, for instance, Romila Thapar: “[The ascetic] is celibate and
yet, at the same time, the most virile of men. The ascetic’s
demonstration of sexual prowess is not a contradiction in terms: it is
in fact a demonstration of his complete control over body functions,
since ideally the emission of semen is prohibited to
him” (“Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?” in Ancient
Indian Social History: Some Interpretations [Delhi: n.p., 1978], 94).
Also see Joseph Alter: “The whole purpose of brahmacharya [celibacy]
is to build up a resilient store of semen so that the body—in a
holistic, psychosomatic sense—radiates an aura of vitality and
strength” (“Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into
Nationalism in North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1
[1994]: 51).

81. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in The Sexual Subject: A
Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–
87.

82. Ibid., 286.

83. Swami Vivekananda, “The Future of India,” in Lectures from Colombo
to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1956), 267.

84. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 196. Sister Christine
(Christine Greenstidel) goes on to remark on the companionship of
Sadananda and Vivekananda on their North Indian pilgrimage: “Both were
artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in
appearance. Artists raved about them.”

Nivedita also confesses, though far more discreetly, that she was
drawn to the swami by his “personality” rather his philosophy, which
she initially found unoriginal. Her “biography” of him, The Master as
I Saw Him, is remarkable for its reticence about his corporeality.

85. That such a construction of femininity was not necessarily
exclusive to Hindu reformers/revivalists is borne out by Faisal
Fatehali Devji: “[Muslim] reformist literature replaces the aggressive
sexual woman with the pathetic or suffering woman-as-mother” (“Gender
and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim
India, 1857–1900,” South Asia, 14, no. 1 [1991], 151).

86. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s
Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed.
Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), 237.

87. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (London: William
Heinemann, 1904), 32–45.

88. See, among others, Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate
on Sati in Colonial India,” in The Nature and Context of Minority
Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds.,
Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Chatterjee, Nation and Its
Fragments; and Madhu Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” Economic and
Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, 1691–1702.

89. Monier Monier-Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (New
Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974 [1883]), 184–85. Also
see David R. Kinsley, “Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place,” in Devi:
Goddesses of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1996); and Ajit Mookerjee,
Kali: The Feminine Force (New York: Destiny Books, 1988).

90. Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in
Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian
Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 158.

91. Ramakrishna was married at the age of twenty-three to Sharadamoni
Debi, a child-bride of five. According to custom, she remained in her
natal home, while Ramakrishna continued his spiritual disciplines at
Dakshineshwar, forgetful of her existence. At eighteen she sought him
out at Dakshineshwar and acceded to his request that their marriage
remain unconsummated. Over the remaining decade and a half of
Ramakrishna’s life, she spent extended periods at Dakshineshwar, doing
his housekeeping and cooking and (usually) living in a separate
building in the temple complex. [BACK]

92. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 65.

93. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York
and London: Routledge, 1987), 244. [BACK]

94. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 83.

95. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 242.

96. Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita
Ashrama, 1964), 167–68.

97. Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922) was a notable scholar and a
Hindu widow who converted to Christianity during a visit to England
and dedicated her life to the uplift of young Hindu widows. Her book,
The High-Caste Hindu Woman (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), as
well as her travels in England and the United States, gained her
sympathy from feminists as well as Christian missionaries abroad and
censure from Hindu conservatives at home. Her shelter for widows, the
Sharda Sadan in Pune, was supported in large part by funds raised by
Ramabai Circles in the United States and England. Her travels in the
United States in the 1880s received extensive coverage in the U.S.
press.

98. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 421–68.

99. This is necessarily a simplification of Vivekananda’s very
complicated responses to the issues of (gender and other) reform,
nationalism, and colonialism. The split was not simply between
“home” (where reform had to endorsed) and abroad (where Hinduism had
to be defended); even at “home” he had decidedly mixed responses to
reform and (religious and social) orthodoxy.

100. The phrase is Nivedita’s (The Master as I Saw Him, 124). In an
interesting departure from the hagiographical tradition in which
accounts of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are produced (and in which
tradition Nivedita’s own work uneasily belongs), she emphasizes not
the continuity of their respective “gospels” but their distinctness
from each other. She does this, besides, in a fashion that highlights
the swami’s struggles and doubts: “Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the
Swami himself said once of him, ‘like a flower,’ living apart in the
garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old
time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought
to dismiss its very memory. It was at one the greatness and the
tragedy of my own Master’s life that he was not of this type. His was
the modern mind in its completeness.…His hope could not pass by
unheeded,…the hope of men of the nineteenth century” (The Master as I
Saw Him, 124–25).

101. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution,” 237–38.

102. She was not, however, recognizably a nineteenth-century British
feminist—at least from the evidence of her early writings—even though
much has been made in the biographies of her feminism and other
“excesses.” Apparently Vivekananda himself made fun of her putative
feminism.

103. Quoted in Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of
Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 32–33.

104. Quoted in Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and
History (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 121.

105. Sharada Devi seems to have been a figure who was not
unequivocally reverenced by the followers of Ramakrishna. Many
devotees visited her at Jayrambati and Kamarpukur, and she initiated
several people into discipleship. She was sometimes spoken of as an
avatar—like her husband—and the heiress to his spiritual kingdom. But
she was also often accused of being excessively worldly. Ramakrishna’s
most prominent disciples visited her only rarely; Swami Nikhilananda
says that this was because they hesitated to “[make] a display of
their spiritual fervour.” See his Holy Mother: Being the Life of Sri
Sarada Devi, Wife of Sri Ramakrishna and Helpmate in His Mission
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Spivak speaks of the way in
which her official biographer, Swami Gambhirananda, staged her as “a
counter-echo to what he perceived as the strong voice of the Western
Narcissus” (“Asked to Talk about Myself…,” Third Text 19 [Summer
1992]: 17). I would argue that this could only happen retrospectively,
and at a later moment from the one that Vivekananda inhabits.

106. See, for instance, Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women
in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante:
Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshashi,
Bangladesh: Sahitya Samsad, 1983); and Kumar, History of Doing, esp.
chaps. 2 and 3.

107. The Indian woman was, obviously, recast in the nationalist moment—
as was the Indian man; but recast and fixed, with little room for
negotiation after the recasting had been effected. For an analysis of
a nationalist woman’s struggles with gendered identities in
nationalism, see chapter 5.

108. Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel,
trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1947),
152, n. 2.

109. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 136–37.

110. Quoted in Pravrajika Atmaprana, Sister Nivedita of Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda (Calcutta: Sister Nivedita Girls’ School, 1961), 30.

111. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 128.

112. Rakhal Nath maintains that the Ramakrishna Mission was the only
non-political body to come out of the “New Hindu” or Hindu revivalist
movement (Nath, New Hindu Movement). [BACK]

113. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 136.

114. Ibid., 150–51.

115. Barbara N. Ramusack, “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal
Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–
1945,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance,
ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 130.

116. S. B. Mookherjee, “Nivedita and Indian Womanhood,” in Nivedita
Commemoration Volume, ed. Amiya Kumar Majumdar (Calcutta: Dhiraj Basu,
1968), 244.

117. She met Gandhi briefly in Calcutta, in the early years of the
century. Gandhi (who in so many ways would grow to resemble the figure
of Ramakrishna) admired her Hindu partisanship but was unable to agree
with her on nationalist politics. The Congress Party under Gandhi had
a profoundly uneasy relationship with militant nationalist women like
Nivedita and the Rani of Jhansi.

118. Lizelle Reymond’s The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (New
York: John Day, 1953) also helped disseminate this image, though its
factual claims have since been contested. Kumari Jayawardena’s chapter
on Nivedita (“Irish Rebellion and ‘Muscular Hinduism,’” in White
Woman’s Other Burden) describes the contradictory ways in which the
disciple of Vivekananda is remembered.

119. My thanks to Carole-Anne Tyler for sensitizing me to this
possibility. [BACK]

120. Foxe’s biography, Long Journey Home, is particularly derisive in
this regard. What had been admirable “manliness” in Vivekananda was
forwardness in the female disciple. [BACK]