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elametly_2787's review against another edition
4.0
After i saw a recent Tamil movie called "Theeran: Adhiyayam ondru", i started reading about the Thugs and their history and came to know that Aamir Khan's next movie "Thugs of Hindostan" is based on this book "Confessions of a Thug" which was written around 1830s when Thuggee was demolished by British in India. Then i searched for it and found it online. When i started reading, it was really unbelievable that these kinds of people existed in India at that time. First few murders shocked me and from then on its just the Ameer Ali(lead role)'s confession of murders after murders all his life. Though i was shocked about the murders initially, after reading more and more about it, the shock reduced gradually and i got used to reading about them, the same way Ameer Ali got used to killing people. But at many stage of the book i thought this would be end of it and he will seek redemption from henceforth, he kept doing his deed again and again and he never had any remorse for it and he really did it as a job or as he is addicted to it. I could relate this tale to many of the gangster saga i have seen such as Goodfellas(climax is almost as same), Breaking Bad (How Walter White became drug lord and he liked it) etc. Once i completed the book, i was not shocked by all the murders i came across, but by how men can do these many murders and still have no remorse about it.
rosekk's review against another edition
3.0
I'm not sure what to make of this book. When I picked it up I had no idea what it was about (I didn't know the origins of the word 'thug' and assumed the word had the same meaning it commonly has now). So I did learn something from the book... I just found reading it a very strange experience. There's an inconsistency in the narrator; he appears remorseful in parts of the narrative, and completely merciless in others. One could argue that that's deliberate, and not a strange decision regarding character who is a murderer. I wonder if the inconsistency isn't caused by something else though - trying to write a character who is appealing and understandable, while also trying to write about something fraught with colonial fears - resulting in a character whose monstrous at times, because of the writers bias regarding the subject matter, and understandable at other times because of the writers instinct to create a relatable character... The whole thing feels very odd.
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