{"id":9236,"date":"2013-11-26T14:14:36","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T22:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desihiphop.com\/?p=9236"},"modified":"2013-11-26T14:17:16","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T22:17:16","slug":"thug-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/thug-life\/361414","title":{"rendered":"“Thug Life” Started On The Streets of India"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThug Life! A phrase most commonly associated with Tupac and HipHop has very uncommon origins. \u00a0Did you know that the word Thug originated from the Sanskrit word Sthaga, which refers to an organized gang of assassins?\u00a0Thugs travelled in groups across India for several hundred years.\u00a0Hindus appear to have been associated with them at an early period as worshipers of\u00a0K\u0101l\u012b<\/a>, the Hindu goddess of destruction. \u00a0The fraternity possessed a jargon of its own,\u00a0Ramasi, and signs by which its members recognized each other. \u00a0The first mentions of this word can be found in the written\u00a0History of F\u012br\u016bz Sh\u0101h dated around 1356.<\/p>\n

In the reign of that sultan\u00a0(about 1290)<\/i>, some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be conveyed into the lower country, to the neighbourhood of\u00a0Lakhnauti<\/a>, where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighbourhood of Delhi any more.\u00a0\u2014Sir HM Elliot,\u00a0History of India<\/i>, iii. 141.<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Thugs would join travelers and gain their confidence. This would allow them to then surprise and strangle their victims by pulling a handkerchief or noose tight around their necks. They would then rob their victims of valuables and bury their bodies.<\/p>\n

Some historians now argue that the Thug Cult was in many ways an invention of the British colonizers as a way to better control India. Historian\u00a0Martine van Woerkens<\/a>\u00a0argues in her bookThe Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India\u00a0<\/a>that the Thugs may have been the result of “colonial imaginings,” and that the brutality used to suppress the group has been overlooked. \u00a0The story of Thuggee was popularized by books such as Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel\u00a0Confessions of a Thug<\/a><\/i>, 1839, leading to the word “thug” entering the English language. Ameer Ali, the\u00a0protagonist<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Confessions of a Thug<\/i>\u00a0was said to be based on a real Thug called Syeed Amir Ali.<\/p>\n

\"thuglife\"Here in the United States, the word\u00a0thug<\/em>\u00a0has long been a staple in rap lyrics. According to the invaluable site Rap Genius, “thug” appears in either the name of the artist or in the lyrics\u00a0of over 4,800 songs.<\/a>\u00a0And Tupac Shakur famously had “Thug Life” tattooed across his abdomen. \u00a0Not everyone is happy with the prevalence of thug culture in hip-hop. As Tricia Rose writes in her book\u00a0The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters<\/em>: “The thug both represents a product of discriminatory conditions and embodies behaviors that injure the very communities from which it comes.” \u00a0Check out what Tupac has to say about “Thug Life”<\/p>\n

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What do you think? \u00a0To Thug or Not to Thug?<\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Thug Life! A phrase most commonly associated with Tupac and HipHop has very uncommon origins. \u00a0Did you know that the word Thug originated from the Sanskrit word Sthaga, which refers to an organized gang of assassins?\u00a0Thugs travelled in groups…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9237,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[231],"tags":[7933,8328,8190],"class_list":["post-9236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-spotlight","tag-thug","tag-tupac"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcsoftwaresolution.com\/desihiphop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}