ABSTRACT
The question of how a few dissolute thugs preying upon native travellers should have achieved such an effect is never developed by Freitag, but the question of how thuggee became, at a certain moment, and indeed so briefly, an object of governmental attention and popular interest will be a central concern of this chapter. Thuggee was a crime committed on the high roads, mainly of central India, though its spread was wide enough for it eventually to be represented as Sleeman does above as an all-India conspiracy. The historiography of the thug campaign that contemporary writing seeks to unsettle also has a distinct solidity to it. Codification of Hindu and Muslim personal law thus evinces a certain governmental style, connected with an explicit logic and calculus of interest. It was concerned with the social and with the immanence of native society, with that society's internal rules and its articulating logic.
