And yet there are claims that thuggee was merely a case of ‘Orientalism’ – the way of seeing something that exaggerates and ultimately distorts the difference of (in this case) India as compared with the West, the native culture implicitly uncivilized and at times dangerous. In other words, colonial imaginings. Further, there are claims that Sleeman himself exaggerated – indeed, invented – the phenomenon of thuggee simply to advance his own career.

I do not think this can stand. There were others engaged in the suppression of thuggee earlier and independently, notably Thomas Perry at Ettawah and William Borthwick at Indore. Besides, there was printed reference to ‘thugs’ as early as the fourteenth century. What is without doubt is that Sleeman got the bit between his teeth, and the governor-general – Bentinck – was pleased to give him his head, for reports from the Company’s officials were becoming alarming.

In fact there has of late been a rather virulent bout of anti-colonialism among some historians, who paint a picture of rampant rapacity on the part of the Company – to the point of suggesting, if only implicitly, that India would have been better off if the British had never gone there. But better for whom? The transfer of wealth from a corrupt and sometimes cruel Indian to a corrupt and sometimes arrogant Englishman was no doubt a sin, but not one – it seems to me – that a poor ryot would have thought a very great one, especially when weighing it in the scales with the Company’s pax; indeed, the Pax Britannica.

For the pax was a noble venture – of that I’m certain – if at times losing its way a little, and occasionally woefully. And the men who brought it, though not all of them worthy, were on the whole remarkably selfless and lacking in venality. They would of course have thought themselves superior to those in their charge – racially superior, not just by religion and education – but most would have given their lives for them, and frequently did. Philip Mason describes this magnificently in The Men Who Ruled India (written under the pseudonym ‘Philip Woodruff’), especially the first volume, The Founders (1954), and in his study of the Indian Army, A Matter of Honour (1974). After Balliol, Mason served with the Indian Civil Service for twenty years until Independence. He is neither sentimental nor condescending, nor blind to corruption and misgovernment. He writes that ‘in the end a man must be judged not by his worst so much as by his best, and in the end not even by his best but by what he aimed at. And so English rule in India is to be judged by the conscious will of England expressed in Parliament and by the aims of a good district officer, not by the nasty little atavistic impulses that came wriggling up from the subconscious when an official at the Treasury scored a departmental triumph over the India Office, or when a merchant fixed something over an opulent lunch.’