joined one kingdom or another during the pre-British era, with the main income of many armies coming from plunder. After being dismissed from military service, they turned to robbery as a means of subsistence. He also contested whether the thugs mentioned by Firuz Shah Tughlaq's biography were actually the same Thugs the British authorities fought against. Sagnik Bhattacharya agrees with the sceptics and claims the thug-phenomenon to be nothing but a manifestation of the fear of the unknown that dawned on the British Raj at the thought of being alone in the wilderness of Central India. Using literary and legal sources, he has connected the "information panic" of the thug-phenomenon to the limitations of British demographic models that fell short of truly capturing the ethnic diversity of India. He explains the thug panic of the 1830s as being caused by the Raj's angst at realizing its own ignorance of local society. In popular culture One of the c. 1600 Janamsakhis fictionalizing the life of Sikh Guru Nanak describes an encounter with a Thug, Sheikh Sajjan, whom the guru reforms. The 1826 novel Pandurang Hari, or Memoirs of a Hindoo by William Browne Hockley provides in Chapter 11 the earliest British fictional account of the Thugs. But they are depicted only as thieves, not as murderers. The 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor is based on the Thuggee cult, revolving around a fictional Thug who is named Ameer Ali. The novel popularized the word "thug" in the English language. Several of Emilio Salgari's Sandokan novels describe a struggle with the Thugs. Many of his novels are about Sandokan's adventures, and feature the Thug as enemies of the heroes. The first of them – I misteri della jungla nera (1887) – was originally published with the title Gli strangolatori del Gange ("The stranglers of the Ganges"). His novel I misteri della giungla nera (1895) revolves around the main character Tremal Naik's fight to save Ada Corisant, the daughter of a British officer, who has been kidnapped by the Thugs. The 1886 novel Kalee's Shrine by Grant Allen and May Cotes features a British female Thug. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduces the Thugs in his 1887 short story "Uncle Jeremy's Household". Miss Warrender, the Anglo-Indian governess in this story, is the daughter of the fictional Thug prince Achmet Genghis Khan. The 1931 crime novel The Case of the Frightened