CHILDREN OF KALI
Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult and the British Raj
By KEVIN RUSHBY
New York: Walker and Company, 2002. 292 pages, $27

reviewed by Arshia Sattar

It is always interesting to read travelogues about one's own country, to see one's mundane and ordinary surroundings transformed into the exciting and the extraordinary through the eyes of an outsider. A good travelogue should allow both the reader ("native" or not) and the traveler some moments of self-discovery.

English author Kevin Rushby's new book on India, Children of Kali, is about himself. I mean this in the best sense; Rushby conforms to the basic idea of the traveler being a seeker, an internal seeker and an external one. It is the search for an internal, personal truth that frames the external and official intent of this book, i.e., the search for the truth about the notorious Thuggee movement in nineteenth-century India. The Thugs were seen by the British as a cult and a caste, as lawless killers who roamed the Indian wilderness, inspired by the bloodthirsty goddess Kali. They killed for pleasure and for ritual, and were, therefore, dangerous and evil, as were the religion and the society that nurtured them. In the 1830s and 1840s, William Henry Sleeman, a civil servant, hunted down the Thugs with missionary zeal and destroyed the cult. He captured the leaders of the Thugs by using informers and spies. He had many of them hung and others imprisoned for life, all the time playing one member of the cult off against the other.

By tracing Sleeman's career and his footsteps in India, Rushby examines the myth and the mystique of this cult, portrayed as a group of highway robbers who killed without shedding blood, strangling their victims with silken handkerchiefs. He places the story of the Thugs in the context of Orientalism, showing how the British establishment created an enemy, a threat to civilization, in accordance with their image of the Orient as a lawless place of magic and danger ruled by demonic gods and venal kings.

But Rushby has a contemporary quest as well: to find out more about the bandit Veerappan, a modern-day outlaw, a poacher of elephants and sandalwood, a born-again nationalist for the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a pan-Tamil, separatist movement among the ethnic Hindu Tamil majority of northern Sri Lanka), who has carved out a kingdom for himself in the forest lands of the south, in the game reserves that span the borders of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Veerappan, who made international headlines in 2000 when he kidnaped the popular Indian film star Rajakumar, does not have the silken image of the Thugs. On the contrary, he has a bloody history of murders and decapitations, of looting and plunder. But even Veerappan has his magical side: he can speak the language of birds and animals, he walks the forest without leaving tracks. The local people see him as a Robin Hood figure, an enemy of the state perhaps, but not an enemy of the people. His humble origins ally him with the marginalized sections of society; the Indian government has a special commando force that has been trying to hunt him down for the last decade.

As Rushby thinks about cult murders in India and nationalist-minded poachers, he examines the idea of evil and the need that we have to place evil outside ourselves, in "others" whom we imagine to be the very opposite of who "we" are. In this meditation on evil, Rushby calls upon us to consider that ruling elites, too, have to create "outsiders" who are a threat. Hence, the magnification of the Thugs and even of Veerappan. When these outsiders are subjugated, or brought to justice, there is a sense that order has been restored.

In the same way, the Hindu spiritual quest is to restore internal order through the subjugation of external elements that create disorder and disturbance. And Rushby attempts that in the last and final section of the book. He confronts the demons within himself, the "lawless outsiders" that are located within, the intimate enemies that we all carry with us through our lives. At the end of his journey, he has made some sort of peace with his demons and restored a measure of internal equilibrium

While Rushby's excavation of the Thuggee cult is completely fascinating, his observations of contemporary India and his internal quest, remain, sadly, less than interesting. Since "India" has been the object of so many imaginations over the centuries, and the subject of so many travelogues, it is critical that a very new book on the subcontinent find a new space of exploration. Half of Rushby's book does that, the other half does not.