ABSTRACT
It must be a source of unfeigned satisfaction to know that […] blood-thirstiness has ceased to disgrace the people of the East, as far at least as English influence prevails amongst them. The rite of Suttee has been abandoned for nearly thirty years. This great revolution was effected when Lord William Bentinck was Governor-General of India, and will ever be regarded as the brightest act of his reign. The colossal chariot-wheels of Juggernaut have not rolled over a human victim for a quarter of a century; and, thanks to the late Sir William Sleeman, and a devoted band of colleagues, the Thugs have been regularly hunted down […] It was not till long after Colonel Sleeman had commenced his most successful crusade against the Thugs, that it became known to the Government that other forms of this sanguinary superstition, as we have already described, were flourishing to a frightful extent in an almost inaccessible mountainous district stretching along the coast, part lying within the Bengal, and part within the Madras territory. Our little war with Goomsur, in 1836, may, therefore, so far be considered fortunate, inasmuch as it first made the government acquainted with the fact that in the hill tribes of Orissa there were two forms of cruel superstition, exemplified, first, in the murder of female infants, and secondly, in the slaughter of human victims under circumstances of intolerable barbarity, thus rendering it imperative that immediate measures should be taken for the suppression of cruelties at which the human mind revolted. (John Campbell A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service Against the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice 1864: 158–59)
