Rushby dashes around India with his thug-radar tuned high, desperate for clues to help him in his quest: to Bombay to meet "reel-life" baddie Gulshan Grover; to Bangalore where road workers use the same kind of pick-axe as thugs used to dig their victims’ graves; to Tamil Nadu jungles on the trail of Veerappan, a modern-day dacoit and "working-caste hero".
The story of how the British created and destroyed the thug cult in the 1830s is a fascinating one, and Rushby’s telling of it is gripping. But ultimately, he’s more backpacker than factpacker. He has all the foibles of a westerner newly discovering the east: a travelogue peppered with eccentric characters who speak odd argot ("No hard cheddar"); finding the slogans on the back of trucks and odd spellings in restaurant menus amusing; and contributing a few strange spellings of his own (ruppees, ghoor). "The romance and fictions of thuggee were seductive," he says with a supreme lack of self-awareness, "but they were not part of the truth, only serving a European desire for India to be exotic, mysterious and dangerous." While condemning such Orientalism in his Victorian forebears, Rushby himself does nothing to dispel the myth.
