Rewriting the Colonial Archive: Historiography and Counter-Narrative in Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs

Abstract

The paper explores The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair as a powerful postcolonial counter narrative that interrogates, deconstructs, and subverts the authority of the colonial archive. Set in 19th century London yet written with a contemporary postcolonial consciousness, the novel challenges the dominant imperial historiography that shaped the image of the Indian 'thug' as a racialized and criminalized other. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theories of discourse, power/knowledge, and subjugated knowledges, Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and the colonial gaze, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and the Third Space, this study argues that Khair’s text dismantles colonial truth-claims and exposes the ideological underpinnings of British imperial narratives. By incorporating fragmented storytelling, multiple unreliable narrators, pseudo-scientific documents, and marginalized voices, the novel foregrounds the constructive nature of historical “truth” and opens up a pluralistic space for alternative perspectives. Amir Ali, the central character, resists being reduced to a stereotype, instead asserting agency through mimicry, irony, and narrative performance. Through its metafictional form and its critique of representation, The Thing About Thugs not only reclaims narrative authority for subaltern voices but also becomes a radical intervention in the politics of memory, identity,
and historical production in postcolonial literature.