Ayusman Chakraborty
Assistant Professor of English (W.B.E.S), Taki Government College, New Town. Rajarhat, Kolkata. ORCID: 0000-0003-0641-0652. Email: hinduayusman@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.12
Abstract:
This article examines how some colonial fictions intertwine historically unconnected Thuggee and the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to make sense of Indian resistance to British rule. This was done by only a few writers. The article tries to find out what led these colonial writers to link the two unconnected events. To do this, representations of Thuggee and the Mutiny in the works of Captain Meadows Taylor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Emilio Salgari are scrutinized. The article also considers other relevant works, like those by Sir George MacMunn, Hermann Goedsche, Jules Verne and Francisco Luis Gomes. It tries to ascertain whether a writer’s nationality affected his conceptualization of the relationship between Thuggee and the Mutiny in any significant way. In doing so, it seeks to highlight how representations of Indian insurgency in colonial writings varied in accordance with the writer’s nationality and outlook vis-à-vis British colonialism in India.
Keywords: Thuggee, Sepoy Mutiny, Insurgency, Colonial Fiction, Meadows Taylor, Doyle, Salgari.
