With the rise of the British East India Company and the city of Calcutta being the headquarters of the colonial masters, the metropolis was a beacon of progress and better times. The city was laden with British architecture and exposed to the modern world due to its geographical advantage of being located near a bustling port.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

- Charles Dickens

Calcutta was a city rich in culture and was a breeding ground for new discoveries in fields of science and arts alike. This was an ideal condition for the emergence of a new class in Bengali society: 'Bhadralok', or the gentleman. With the Permanent Settlement Act (1793) giving the opulent Zamindars a stable source of income (rent), these people turned to pursuing Western education and earning "genteel" professions. Calcutta was the seat of British India, and Hindu College (1817), later Calcutta University (1857), produced a new class fluent in English, law, science, and Western liberal thought.

Education became the primary marker of status, replacing the traditional caste or land basis of prestige. Another key stimulant of the rise of the Bhadralok class was the 19th-century social and religious movements, also known as the Bengali Renaissance, which were largely Bhadralok-led. This gave the Bhadralok class a pre-eminent notion of being a custodian of Hindu society in general and Bengali society in particular, oftentimes reinforcing patriarchal controls even while claiming reform. With the thriving of the Bhadralok class, another section of the population was battling with the economics of survival in the underbelly of the great metropolis. Prostitution, property-related crimes, financial scams, and murderous raids on persons and property were a lived reality.

A teenage Brahmin girl from a small village in Bengal was married off to a man much older than her and was widowed in her teens. The society of her times treated her as a shadow deserving no respect, and the only person she found hope in showed her the dreams of city life but sold her off to the largest red-light area of Asia, residing in the heart of Calcutta – Sonagachi. From there began the story of a prostitute who would turn into a con woman and finally a brutal murderer – a woman whose history, or at least the men who wrote it, would come to call one of the world's first recorded serial killers: Troilokya Tarini.

The story of Troilokya Tarini survives, almost solely, through the pen of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, a detective with the Calcutta Police, in his magazine 'Darogar Daptar,' case number 78. Darogar Daptar is not a reliable crime reportage but acts as a window into how Calcutta's Bhadralok constructed and policed its own moral order with Priyanath as both narrator and enforcer of that order. His position on the factual accuracy of his stories is highly unstable. Priyanath moved between calling his stories ‘real’ and admitting inventions, changing periodically. He borrowed stylistically from European works like Vidocq's memoirs and drew plot structures from both Poe and Doyle in many of his works. He is seen protecting the identities and maintaining confidentiality when the accused belonged to the upper rung society or the Bhadralok class but was far less protective towards the poor, the sex workers, or the marginal class.

He used his tales to enforce patriarchal social orders by focusing on lust and social decay. Hindu Bengali widows were a recurring motif in his stories, and Troilokya's story fitted perfectly into this puzzle. Other sources of her story include the over-sensationalised colonial newspaper reports and the British court documents referring to her as "Troylucko Raur", or Troilokya, the Prostitute, in which the actual documents are only cited secondhand, not directly accessible. The only piece that survives as her own testimony is her mercy petition to the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Sir Augustus Rivers Thompson, seeking clemency, reportedly citing circumstance and desperation. This too survives through Priyanath's retelling of the case and not as firsthand evidence. This major evidentiary gap that exists in her case, with almost no testimony from the detainee's side, speaks volumes about the fundamental rights of women from her stratum of society and raises stark questions on the factual accuracy of the reportage by Mukhopadhyay, which was oftentimes narrated to cater to his Bhadralok audience.

Troilokya was born in a village in Bardhaman in rural Bengal in the early nineteenth century. She was married off to a man much older than her when she was still a child. She continued to live in her parents' house as per Kulin Brahmin polygamy norms and saw her husband just once before she was widowed. Widowhood in itself was a life sentence: the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act had been on the books since 1856, but in practice it changed almost nothing, since a widow who remarried forfeited whatever inheritance claim she still held on her dead husband's estate. The law offered a choice in name only: poverty with respectability, or property with disgrace.

Most families, Troilokya's included, made the choice for her by making sure she never had one. After that, she was treated with disdain by everyone around her, as was the norm of the society of her times. One apparently kind-hearted Vaishnavite woman took her in and introduced her to a young man with whom she fell in love. When the news of their affair spread in the village, they fled to Calcutta to escape dishonour and ostracism. But her lover deceived her and sold her off to Sonagachi, the largest red light area of Asia, where her bloody struggle for survival in the shadows of society began.

Troilokya was a beautiful young girl whose youth brought her fortune in Sonagachi. She bought a mansion and a chariot, but as her youth faded, her fortune began to dwindle, and her real struggle began. She fell in love with a widower, Kali Babu, and adopted his son, Hari. Kali Babu's constant presence meant she could no longer make money from prostitution as before, and Hari's education and other expenses made her increasingly anxious. In this desperation, she became a con woman.

At first, Troilokya and Kali Babu targeted a very specific type of victim: young, wealthy men from Calcutta's best families, the type who would fancy an all-night party where not even names would reach anyone else's ears. She would lure them into her house promising an unforgettable evening, plying them with drinks laced with a small amount of cigar ash to intoxicate them, then take their money and jewels, leaving them out on the streets. She needed no further help, because Calcutta's police made sure her job was done. The confused young gentleman found lying on the road would be jailed for public drunkenness.

What made this scheme work was not just greed but class immunity: a rich man robbed had a reputation to protect, and that fear of scandal, more than Troilokya's cunning, kept him silent. Even the police, quick to jail a "drunk" off the street, never asked why so many young gentlemen kept turning up robbed and disoriented. Investigating properly would have meant naming names Calcutta's elite preferred buried. This invisible class hierarchy was the weapon Troilokya used.

Rumours spread quickly in Calcutta, however, and soon the scheme stopped paying dividends as too many gentlemen had compared notes. Troilokya and her associate turned to a more sophisticated robbery, one independent of alcohol or ashes. The unique social custom of the Shrotriya Brahmins stipulated that the groom's family, not the bride's, paid the dowry, usually at a hefty cost, since a shortage of suitable brides let families dictate terms to potential grooms. This reversal looked, on its surface, like a rare concession to women's worth; in reality it was born of caste endogamy so rigid that scarcity, not mutual respect, dictated terms. Troilokya simply redirected a system already built on trading women for status and lineage.

Through Kali Babu's associate, the duo identified a family of Shrotriya Brahmins in the countryside struggling to marry off their son. Having leased an apartment far from their usual turf, Troilokya and her colleague gathered a set of made-up relatives and received the groom's family as honoured guests. The role of the bride went to a juvenile sex worker, trained to look like a shy, good catch. The groom's family was thoroughly impressed and readily accepted the proposal. Within a month the wedding was held, expenses shouldered entirely by the groom's family, down to the gold jewellery the "bride" wore into their village, accompanied by two accomplices posing as maidservant and uncle. When, a month later, she expressed a wish to visit relatives in Calcutta, no questions were asked, and the husband accompanied her on the train only to lose sight of her along the way and fail to find her again. Everything valuable was pawned, the profit shared, and the runaway was never found. The scam was repeated several times until the girl impersonating the bride grew too old to pass for thirteen.

Then came something more sinister: Troilokya and Kali Babu took to kidnapping girls off Calcutta's streets. Brahmin families in East Bengal villages were equally keen to find a "suitable" daughter-in-law, and the pair exploited this shamelessly, forcing kidnapped children to submit and marrying them off in exchange for money. There is a darker irony here: a woman discarded by this very social order – widowed, dispossessed, sold once herself – went on to sell other women and children through the same mechanisms once used against her. Troilokya did not dismantle the system that broke her; she learnt its logic well enough to run it herself. Children with even less power than she once possessed absorbed the violence she redirected downward, rather than at the world that had produced her. Only when the kidnappings became newspaper fodder did the two have to stop.

Troilokya's escapades then turned to murder, though the first attempt went wrong. Kali Babu, acting as an agent for a Raja from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, arranged to receive jewellery from a Barabazaar store through their helper, promising payment on receipt. Instead, he killed the helper and buried the body under the floor of a rented house, then sent the jewellery on and collected payment. Mukhopadhyay traced the rented house and found the body; Kali Babu was arrested and hanged, though Troilokya's role in the incident could never be proven in court.

With no option but to sell her property and jewels, a desperate Troilokya began contacting former acquaintances in Sonagachi - women like her, ageing and apprehensive about the future. She told them of a holy man who could remove their worries for good: if they wore all their jewellery to visit him, he would bless them and double their wealth. Over three years, Troilokya separately brought five women to a dilapidated garden house near Maniktala, where a large pond stood. The women stripped their jewellery before bathing, and while they bathed, Troilokya drowned them. She was once caught in the act, as a passer-by witnessed her attempted drowning. The surviving victim and witness brought her to the nearest police station, but Troilokya charmed the ageing officer into releasing her.

Undeterred, the plaintiffs approached Mukhopadhyay, whose investigation concluded she was guilty, and he ordered her arrest. Luck was again on her side: the officer who had freed her, now dismissed from his post and fearing further consequences, funded her defence and possibly hampered the prosecution. Still, the hearing generated enough negative publicity that Troilokya was forced to relocate to Panchu Dhobani Lane in Chitpur. What differentiated this scheme from her earlier ones is the identity of her victims; unlike her upper-class or upper-caste targets before, she now preyed on women who shared her own history. Whether this reflects calculated opportunism, knowing exactly which fears would work because she felt them herself, or something closer to a survival instinct turned inward against her own kind, is not a question the record lets us answer cleanly.

As her earlier earnings depleted, Troilokya searched for another victim. One prostitute in the same house, Rajkumari, possessed plenty of gold ornaments. Troilokya tried to drug her twice without success, then strangled her and stole her ornaments. Mukhopadhyay arrived at the scene days later and, discovering Troilokya shared the household, knew she was responsible. In a story titled "Shesh Leela" (The Last Act), he recounted setting a trap by accusing her adopted son Hari of the murder. When Hari appeared in handcuffs, Troilokya confessed everything, surrendering the gold hidden behind a wooden cupboard. It is worth pausing on how this confession was won: not through evidence, but through the threat of harm to the one person she seems to have unambiguously loved.

Mukhopadhyay's own account frames this as clever detective work; read differently, it is the exploitation of a mother's fear for her child, a tactic that says as much about the detective's methods as about Troilokya's guilt. Her cooperation didn't last; on realizing she had fallen for a trick, she rebelled. The case went to the High Court, and the conviction was upheld. Troilokya wrote a mercy plea to the Lieutenant Governor, but her time had run out. As she awaited execution, Mukhopadhyay visited her cell, torn between having caught a famous murderer and knowing his work would soon cause her death. Troilokya was hanged in 1884.

A critical examination beyond the social and economic lens reveals a psychological trajectory far more complex than a simple villain narrative allows. An innocent village girl, subjected to child marriage and widowhood in her teens, turned into a prostitute in the very city she had dreamed would offer her a better life. Transitioning from a con woman exploiting the loopholes of social order to a desperate murderer fighting for survival, she escaped legal punishment for years before finally falling prey to her own motherly love. We observe a woman who does not fit neatly into either role - victim or predator - because she occupied both, and the second grew directly out of the first.

The same precarity that pushed her into prostitution and crime gave her the insight into what kind of fears and insecurities to exploit in the women from similar conditions as her. The women at Maniktala, aging and afraid for their futures, were targeted precisely because Troilokya recognized those fears as her own. She did not escape the system that broke her; she deciphered its logic and used the same instruments on those with even less power than she had. This is not a case of circumstance excusing cruelty, nor of innate malice erasing circumstance; it is what happens when structural violence, left unaddressed, gets passed downward rather than dismantled. Mukhopadhyay, telling her story for an audience who had their literary taste shaped by Poe and Doyle, had little consideration for this complexity.

It was simpler, and far more marketable, to press her into the shape of a femme fatale - seductive, calculating, dangerous by nature - than to sit with a woman whose violence was inherited rather than innate. The archetype flattened her into a villain his readers could safely condemn, at the cost of the very contradictions that made her human.  We are forced to ask whether she was a serial killer by nature, as the narrative projects, or a victim of circumstance possessing the same capacity for tenderness as any ordinary woman; one who, whenever she let her softer feelings take control, was deceived anew by society. Mukhopadhyay's own reports record her last words: "I am leaving Hari behind… Please look after him so that he does not get into trouble." Those words carry the weight of a deep, humane, motherly concern for a child she treated as her own, one for whom she risked her life.

Whatever is known of this notorious woman comes through the pen of the men who brought her to trial; there is little to no evidence of her testimony in her own voice. Framing her as one of the world's first serial killers, preceding Jack the Ripper by nearly seven years, is what the narrative would like us to believe, while silencing the deeper social issues of the era, some facets of which persist today. Priyanath's writings show a selective sheltering of the privileged Bhadralok class to which he himself belonged, alongside a particular interest in exposing the vulnerabilities and dark lives of those living in society's shadows. Was Troilokya a product of a regressive colonial society struggling with the economics of survival, or a born criminal with a malicious mind? Where does desperation cross the line between right and wrong? Is the absence of any testimony from her side a casual oversight, or does it stem from deeper misogynist and patriarchal ideas embedded within Bhadralok society?

It is often said history is written by the victors. Troilokya's case suggests a sharper truth: history is written by whoever holds the pen, and the times in which she struggled to live, and was hanged to die, made sure the pen never reached her hand.