Note 42 — ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES.[38]

In the text “Thag,” our English “Thug,” often pronounced moreover by the Briton with the sibilant “th.” It means simply a cheat: you say to your servant “Tú bará Thag hai” = thou art a precious rascal; but it has also the secondary meaning of robber, assassin, and the tertiary of Bhawáni-worshippers who offer indiscriminate human sacrifices to the Deëss of Destruction. The word and the thing have been made popular in England through the “Confessions of a Thug” by my late friend Meadows Taylor; and I may record my conviction that were the English driven out of India, “Thuggee,” like piracy in Cutch and in the Persian Gulf, would revive at the shortest possible time.