Children of Kali

Veerappan is India's most wanted man, and is responsible for over 100 murders. Kevin Rushby investigates the dark side of India, embarking on a quest to find Veerappan and the origins of thuggism. He is led to prisons and gangster hideouts, to probe the nature of crime and punishment.

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They murdered more than a million travellers without spilling a drop of blood. They were inspired by religious fanaticism, yet came from many faiths. Their weapon was the handkerchief, their sacrament sugar, and their goddess Kali. They were the thugs. He is responsible for more than a 100 murders. He lives in the deepest jungles left in India and avoids capture, his followers claim, by magical powers. Some say he is a freedom fighter, others that he is a vicious hoodlum. He is Veerappan, India's most wanted man, and the most famous member of the modern thug cult. In this work, Kevin Rushby investigates this dark side of India. His quest to find Veerappan and the origins of thuggism takes him to prisons and gangster hideouts, probing the nature of crime and punishment in a country where the distinction between good and evil can be as murky as the Ganges. Rulers with underworld connections, politicians without scruples, bandits as social workers and heroes - all the elements of misrule are here.
In towns and villages where the thugs were hunted down in the 1830s, he finds that the British view of the cult was moulded by imperialistic and orientalist needs; the truth was far less palatable (especially for the young Queen Victoria who took a keen interest). It was the religious perversions that allowed thugs to sacrifice travellers to Kali, which still exist and inspire criminals to this day.