The figure of the bandit hero in the literature of British India has its origins not in India, but in the Europe of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the spread of nationalist movements across the continent gave rise to literary representations by writers such as Schiller, Scott and Byron of the tension and conflict inherent in the opposition between individual and /or national liberty and the maintenance of state or imperial authority. The final episode of the Anglo- Maratha Wars (1817–18) ended with the British exercising direct or indirect control over most of north and central India. Among the consequences was a breakdown in the social and economic order across this landscape: indigenous ruling groups were dispersed, and unemployed soldiers from the East India Company's armies joined increasing numbers of dispossessed or landless people who had no role in the new social organisation. A contemporary observer, W. H. Sleeman, connects this transfer of power directly with increased criminality, writing that ‘we [the Company state] do the soldier's work with one- tenth of the number of those who had been employed to do it under the former rule’; leaving those disbanded soldiers with ‘nothing which a soldier delights in to do, unless perchance they have turned robbers’. Against this backdrop, the incidence of predatory crime – carried out by bandits, dacoits and thugs – became a problem of policing for the Company, but also an opportunity to widen its sphere of influence by extending that policing into ‘native states’ where indigenous authorities were accused of sheltering criminal gangs.

The publicity generated by campaigns against thugs and dacoits, first in the Sagar and Narmada territories and later across much of India, brought the problem of banditry, and the figure of the bandit, to public notice from the 1820s onwards. The practice of recording evidence taken from ‘approvers’ – or informers – and circulating extracts from this evidence in the periodical press focused attention on prisoners’ accounts of their own criminal acts. Works such as Sleeman's Ramaseeana (on thugs) and Report on Budhuk Decoits developed a narrative of these criminals as set apart by heredity and religious affiliation from ordinary Indian society, and as uniquely threatening to both that society and British authority in India.