So, there are thugs in Baltimore!

By Marianne Esders

So, there are thugs in Baltimore. Thugs!

I visited Baltimore when I was twenty. My great-grandfather’s cousin had migrated there from Germany something like a century earlier and that is how I found myself in Maryland in the early 21^st century visiting some distant relatives that I felt I should get to know.

I remember the city had issues with racism: White people were scared to get mugged by black people and many other things I do not want to repeat here. Some people slept with a pistol in the bedside drawer. I was told I was crazy to walk around in the streets of Baltimore and explore the city on my own. Still I did explore on my own. Nothing happened. I never felt threatened anytime by anyone, except by the pistol in the bedside drawer (I imagined getting accidentally shot because someone might confuse me with a mugger when I innocently entered a house from the backside door – thus I decided that it was naive to enter a house from the backdoor in Baltimore and made it a point to always first ring at the frontdoor before visiting someone, even my relatives).

Now, I might have been naïve in Baltimore and those telling me might have been right, because these days I hear that there are thugs in Baltimore.

The origins of the word ‘thug’

Kali stepping on Shiva

(Kalighat painting blending traditional Bengali folk style and European painting)

So then, who are these thugs in Baltimore, and what do they actually do and aim for? The origins of the word thug can be traced back to 19^th century India (or even earlier but to that I am ignorant), when all over the British News it was reported that thousands of such so called thugs, who were said to be Kali worshipers (Kali depictions can look pretty dark and frightening, especially to foreigners, who were not used to seeing a black goddess step on a god (Shiva) while wearing a necklace of heads – men’s chopped off heads – and who then, naturally, alienated the whole Hinduism thing in their own distorted manner), were killing innocent people, mostly Englishmen, who were innocent travelers (right!). Thugs never made use of knifes or other weapons, strangulated their victims after befriending them and then dumped the dead and robbed bodies in a well or some other pit hole, untraceably gone.

This all sounds very very serious and perfidiously evil: anyone befriending you might actually want to kill you. Any stranger welcoming you or trying to be helpful could be a thug! I wonder how with this mindset British and Indians of that time could form any kind of friendly relationship at all. No use of weapons meant that these Indian thugs hardly left any evidence. It was difficult to prove their guilt. On the other hand, that also made it pretty easy to convict them – one just needed to be persistent.

Some time back I read about the thugs of that time in Fanny Parkes’ diaries. Fanny was a Welsh woman living in India in the 19th century. As William Dalrymple, the editor of Fanny Parkes’ diaries, writes on page xx of the introduction to his and her book:

[M]ost modern historians now believe that the British officials put in charge of the ‘Suppression of Thuggee’  hugely exaggerated the scale of the problem and created a mythical All-India Thug Conspiracy where in reality there were only scattered groups of robbers and impoverished highwaymen. Some historians also allege that the British used the suppression of Thuggee as an excuse and a justification for widening their area of rule. […] Fanny sounds a note of caution, remarking on hearing about the mass execution of a group of twenty-five thugs that ‘it cannot but be lamented that the course of justice is slow; as these men, who were this day executed, have been in prison more than eight years for want of sufficient evidence’. So saying, she leaves a question hanging in the air. If the thugs were so guilty, how come there was so little evidence? It was certainly an apposite query. In normal circumstances, courts in India did not accept the statements of informers who turned ‘King’s Evidence’ on their fellow captives; but in the case of thugs, the colonial laws were altered to allow the conviction of thugs on evidence which would in other circumstances be regarded as wholly suspect and inadequate. The result was that accused thugs hoping for a pardon would produce lengthy and dramatic testimonials, giving evidence against scores of men they alleged to be former colleagues. The parallels with the Salem witch trials are obvious – and alarming.” (Dalrymple 2002, xx f.)

Is there something to learn here?

Reading this, I wonder, are there any parallels to be drawn between the All-India Thug Conspiracy and the more or less recent happenings in the United States? When it comes to name-calling then who is calling whom, maybe even themselves, ‘thugs’ or ‘thugz’ and for what purpose – not only in testimonials but all over the net, blogs, facebook, twitter, the newspapers, radio, on TV, maybe even face to face?

Now to the politicians, media, etc. loosely using the word thug to refer to those who are rioting and looting (loot btw is a word also originating in British India) in Baltimore: The word thug also has a different meaning that deviates from that of British-India’s murdering robbers. Thug in more recent times has been in use in American rap lyrics such as in Tupac’s Thugz Mansion. Here, it rather expresses the bottom-up version of being a thug, i.e. of being an outcast, maybe also of being a scapegoat of those authorities who have been labeling and murdering innocent people as thugs.

That means there are at least two context-specific meanings of the word thug. Its top-down meaning of murderer and thief and its bottom-up meaning of outcast and scapegoat emphasised in American Hip-Hop culture.

Depending on at which point of time in history who is using the word to call whom a thug, it alters its meaning. And sometimes it may have several meanings at the same time.

We are all thugz
If it is used top-down, as it has recently happened in Baltimore, then it labels those criminals as thugs who were looting during the riots. But not only. It also labels all those as criminals who identify themselves as thugz in the second sense, bottom-up. Many who identify with the lyrics and music of Tupac’s Thugz Mansion identify themselves as belonging to a community of thugz. Thus labeling the rioters as thugs discriminates those who identify themselves as thugz.

Calling someone who is rioting a thug in the traditional sense seems valid if that person is acting out of some inferior motive. This however, distracts from the deeper question of why people actually are rioting. No excuse for violence, but even if those who loot do it out of inferior motives, there remains the question of what has caused this inferior motive. Where does this unbearable frustration that expresses itself in such forms originate? In that sense, calling the Baltimore rioters thugs seems to be valid as they seem to be scapegoats of some bigger, invisible and underlying forces and implications.

Demonising rioters automatically intensifies the negative implications of thug-calling: the authorities are looking for scapegoats, the authorities will find their scapegoats. We are all thugz at one point of time or the other. And thereby, one, willingly or unwillingly, also includes those who show solidarity by identifying with outcasts and scapegoats, by identifying with being thugz in general. They feel let down and discriminated too. Calling rioters thugs in the sense of criminals thus obviously leads to clashes with those who identify themselves as a community of thugz. Scapegoats because they are forced to be scapegoats. Thugs because they are forced to be thugs.

But then again, I am just a visitor, an observer and not someone who is directly involved in the recent happenings in Baltimore. From this outsider’s perspective, it might be difficult to understand certain sentiments. What I however remember very well from my time in Baltimore is that many things that initially seemed small could get amplified to such an extent that they suddenly seemed exaggeratedly big. Why don’t we just call rioters rioters instead of calling them thugs? And if we do call them thugs, why don’t we make sure to take into consideration underlying causes and implications that turned them into thugs?

And maybe thug-calling is just the right thing here, because it reflects the complexities and tensions of decades and throughout history not only in Baltimore and India but anywhere in this world that caused thugs to appear seemingly out of nowhere. Tensions between common people and authority, between lower class and upper class, between poor and rich, between those who are vulnerable and those who have power, between black and white and all the others shades of colour, between people and people and people and … If there is one thing that all of us have in common then that we are people. Maybe we can find some common ground in that.

Maybe humans actually are capable of learning from history. But for seeing patterns and learning from history, we, obviously, first need a critical mindset to engage and understand history. For instance we could start reading lyrics and ask why American Hip Hop speaks of Thug Life and worships songs like Thugz Mansion (RIP Tupac). Or we could read the diaries of Fanny Parkes. (By the way, Fanny was a woman traveling by herself in 19th century India. Anyone interested in reading a woman’s travel-(b)log, taking it serious and analysing it critically? We might actually learn something here.)

Some references:

Begums, Thugs and Englishmen: The Journals of Fanny Parkes by Fanny Parkes and William Dalrymple (2002)
Between Nepal and Baltimore by Omid Safi (3oth April 2015) in ON BEING
Kalighat Painting – Wikipedia
The East India Company: The original corporate raiders by William Dalrymple (15th March 2015), in The Guardian
The Westernization of Hinduism and its Alienating Consequences  by Nicholas O’Connell (8th August 2014) in Videshi Sutra 
Thug Life – Wikipedia 
Thugz Mansion by Tupac