Sleeman, W. H. Sir, 1788-1856

Sir William Henry Sleeman (8 August 1788 – 10 February 1856) was a British officer and administrator in Company-ruled India, best known for his leading role in the Anti-Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s against what he represented as a pan-Indian fraternity of ritual stranglers. Sleeman served as General Superintendent of the Thuggee Department from 1835 to 1855 and published his main work on thuggee, entitled Ramaseeana, in 1836. His writings served as the foundation for the colonial-era representation of thuggee and formed the basis of Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug. Sleeman joined the Bengal Army of the East India Company in 1809 and served during the Gorkha War from 1814 to 1816. He joined the Company's political service in 1820 as an assistant to the Agent of the Governor-General in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, remaining in central India for the Anti-Thuggee Campaign. Sleeman's work saw the extension of policing powers over itinerant communities, which later culminated in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Between 1843 and 1849, Sleeman served as the British Resident in Gwalior, and from 1849 to 1854 in Lucknow. He toured the Kingdom of Oudh in 1849–1850, and his subsequent report to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (published in 1858 as A Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude) proved instrumental in justifying its annexation in 1856. Sleeman's health collapsed in 1854 and he died at sea in 1856, en route to London. Sleeman himself strongly argued against the annexation of the native states, cautioning Lord Dalhousie that it could lead the Company's sepoys to mutiny. His correspondence on the matter was published posthumously in The Times in 1857 and together with his 1849–1850 report in 1858. Sleeman also published works on political economy in which he criticised the Company's high taxes and lack of investment in the local population, viewing the policies as detrimental to British rule. He inadvertently made the first discovery of dinosaur bones on the Indian subcontinent in 1828, proposed in 1877 as Titanosaurus indicus, and his reports on feral children raised by wolves are thought to have inspired the character of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's 1894 novel The Jungle Book.