Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The farmer, Perry heard, had gone to a well to draw water for his animals. But the bucket, lying at the bottom of the well shaft, some 10 or 15 feet below him, had refused to rise. No matter how hard the farmer tugged upon the rope, it had remained resolutely stuck. At length, he had clambered down into the water, reaching into the muddy shallows to feel for the obstruction. His fingers had closed around something large and soft; an object had broken the surface; and as it did so, the stench of rotting flesh had struck his nostrils. Had some animal fallen into the well and drowned there? Heaving again at the heavy burden, the man had at last succeeded in hauling the obstruction into his bucket. It was slippery and yielding, and even in the gloomy dankness of the well it was all too obvious that it was no animal. It was the bloated body of a middle-aged man: broken, naked, and quite dead.

  The farmer’s deposition completed, Perry dismissed the witness and laid down his pen. The discovery of corpses in the local wells was scarcely a novelty; innumerable farm animals, and even a handful of unlucky travellers, stumbled into such shafts each year and drowned. But there was no room to doubt that this was a case of murder. If the corpse’s nakedness suggested it, the terrible wounds the body bore confirmed it. Telltale blotches around the throat hinted at death by strangulation. Worse, having suffered the indignity of being stripped of its clothes, the dead man’s body had been savagely mutilated. His unknown killers had carved jagged gashes across his belly, exposing the stomach and the folds of the intestines, and then gouged out both his eyes.

  Dully, Perry reviewed the evidence scattered about him. There was little enough of it. The dead man’s name was quite unknown; there were no identifying marks upon the body, no possessions that might be traced back to their owner. Since no local people had been reported missing, he had almost certainly been a stranger to Etawah, probably a traveller without friends or relatives in the district to raise the alarm when he failed to return home. Nor was there anything about the torn remains to suggest the dead man’s profession. He might have been a soldier going home on leave or a merchant travelling to a distant market, but there was not a single witness to help trace the victim’s progress or point out his next of kin. ‘The inhuman precaution,’ Perry scribbled in his letter-book, ‘of the Perpetrators of this crime by destroying all living testimony to the fact precluded the possibility of any complaints being preferred to the Magistrates or the local Police Office.’

  The identity of the murderers themselves was equally mysterious. Their motive, apparently, was robbery; no valuables had been found on the body or in the well, and the dead man’s missing clothes had no doubt been taken by his killers. That apart, however, there were practically no clues. The dead man’s assassins had taken every care to leave no trace of their presence. Perry could not even find witnesses who recalled the appearance of a group of strangers in the district, or remembered anything that might point to the assassins’ current whereabouts. Both the killers and their victim seemed to have come from nowhere and, the deed done, the murderers had swiftly disappeared.

  The one thing that Perry knew for certain was that this had been no isolated crime. East India Company officers in the Etawah district had long been plagued by the discovery of unidentifiable corpses along the district’s dusty roads. No fewer than 28 had been found in 1808, and another 39 the next year – so many that, bizarrely, the number of murders committed around the town dwarfed the total of common-or-garden robberies, assaults and petty crimes reported during the same period. Half a dozen of the bodies had been found roughly concealed beside the roads themselves. The rest – 60 or more corpses – had been hauled, like this most recent discovery, from ‘wells adjacent to the High Road’. Not a single victim had been identified; nor had any of the murderers been caught. Every one of the dead men, Perry was compelled to admit, had been ‘murdered in circumstances which defied detection’. And there was no reason to believe that this latest mystery would prove any easier to solve.

  Etawah had long possessed a reputation as a lawless place. It stood at one of the historic crossroads of India, just to the east of the parched lands of Rajpootana and to the north of the holy river Jumna. There the high road from the great cities of Delhi and Agra met routes that led into the central provinces of India. Etawah was a natural gateway to the Doab* – which, despite its inclement climate, was one of the richest and most fertile provinces in the Subcontinent – and to the wealthy Kingdom of Oudh, 50 miles to the east. But by 1810 the city’s great days were long past. Etawah had reached the peak of its prosperity in the time of the Delhi Sultanate, a state that had ruled much of northern India from the twelfth century to the sixteenth. After 1550 it had become a stronghold of the Great Mughals, Muslim emperors belonging to the last and most magnificent of the dynasties of India. But as successive Mughal rulers pushed the borders of their empire east and south, until eventually they controlled nine-tenths of the Subcontinent, Etawah lost much of its raison d’être. A merchant passing through in 1608 found its citadel and walls lying in ruins. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the city had declined into a place of little importance: a mere market town renowned for oils and sweetmeats, grains and cloths, standing secure at the very heart of one of the richest, most powerful and celebrated empires that the world had ever seen. There was no longer any need for elaborate fortifications when the Mughal Emperors ruled over more than 200 million subjects, enjoyed an annual income estimated at 230 million rupees, and commanded what was probably the largest army on earth.

  In the years of the Mughals’ pomp, so far as one can tell, Etawah’s history was little different to that of any other modest Indian town. But even the immense and wealthy Mughal Empire could not grow indefinitely, and although the last of its great rulers, Aurangzeb, extended the boundaries of the state as far south as Mysore, his four decades of ceaseless campaigning drained the imperial treasury almost dry. When the old man died, aged nearly 90, in 1707, he left his country weaker, in important respects, than it had ever been before.

  The Empire had grown too large and too diverse. Its ruler’s Muslim religion was alien to two-thirds of his subjects; its heavily equipped armies moved at a snail’s pace; its finances were in a state of disrepair. Most important of all, so much power was reserved to the monarch himself that only a man of the greatest ability and energy could govern successfully. Over six generations and 180 years, the Mughals had produced half a dozen such rulers. But Aurangzeb’s successors were mere ciphers. With his death, the Empire entered into steep decline.

  The eighteenth century thus proved to be a turbulent time for India. In only a few short decades, Aurangzeb’s creation disintegrated, to be replaced by a land of warring independent princedoms much like the one that had existed before the Mughals first appeared in Hindustan. As early as 1720, many of the imperial checkpoints on the Grand Trunk Road that ran all the way from the Afghan border to Bengal were lying empty, abandoned by officers who had received no pay and been deserted by their men. By 1750, the Empire’s richest provinces had broken away altogether, their governors setting themselves up as rulers on their own account and paying little more than lip service to a feeble young Emperor whose writ now barely ran outside the walls of his capital. The Marathas – warlike Hindus from central India whom even Aurangzeb had never completely subdued – were busy carving out lands of their own east of Bombay. Dozens of petty rajahs and small city states scrabbled over what remained of the old Emperor’s inheritance.

  Etawah suffered as much as any other part of India in the confusion of these times. The city changed hands on no fewer than 10 occasions in the course of the century, passing from Mughal control into the possession of a dynasty of Afghan adventurers, and thence to the Marathas, before finally falling under the sway of the King of Oudh in 1773. The last quarter of the century witnessed a small recovery under the benign and able rule of a vizier named Mian Almas Ali Khan, who – having no children of his own – devoted his considerable wealth to building projects designed to help th
e people of the district. But for all these ministrations, Etawah remained a poor and ruined place, bypassed by the construction of the Grand Trunk Road, which ran some 20 miles to the north of the city. A handful of its inhabitants might be comparatively wealthy, and there was a small class of merchants and farmers who owed their livelihood to the philanthropy of Ali Khan, but the remainder of the population was far from rich. Almost every Etawahan family suffered amid the tumult of the late eighteenth century.

  It is hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that the number of burglaries, murders and other acts of violence committed in the district rose sharply during the final years of the old century. But those who deplored this inexorable rise in crime invariably assumed the problem was a local one, and that the robbers, murderers and thieves who ranged themselves along the roads were isolated bands of limited sophistication. The Mughals had believed this, as had the King of Oudh. And when in 1803 Etawah fell under British sway, the new rulers of the city thought so too.

  The British were no strangers to India. Several European states – first Portugal, then Britain, the Netherlands and France – had long maintained a presence on the fringes of the Subcontinent. The first Englishmen had appeared along the coast during the sixteenth century, coming as traders to purchase spice and other eastern luxuries and even seeking grants of land on which to build their warehouses and forts. In time the merchants of the English East India Company established themselves at Madras, Bombay* and Calcutta. But for more than a hundred years, no European wielded any influence over local affairs. For all their wealth and grand ambitions, the few hundred Britons scattered across India were, as one of their own number admitted, no more than ‘fleas on the back of the imperial elephant’.

  All this changed with Aurangzeb’s death. The decay of the Mughal Empire was bad for business, and as parts of the interior descended into civil war and chaos, the trading companies dotted around India became concerned for their profits. At the same time, rapid advances in Western military tactics and technology began to offer even small detachments of European soldiers decisive advantages over local troops. Improved muskets, better doctrine and, in particular, rapid-firing artillery meant that a well-led force of a few thousand men could defeat an army 20 times as large and, by the 1750s, when the final disintegration of the Mughal state began, both the English and the French East India companies had transformed themselves into minor powers along the coast. Their actual possessions were still minimal: a few strips of land around their ports and a handful of isolated trading posts in the interior. But both companies were shipping regiments of their own soldiers out from Europe, and both recruited sepoys (native infantry) whom they equipped and trained to fight alongside their own troops.

  The first British conquests in India dated from 1756, when, in one lightning campaign – the ‘Famous Two Hundred Days’, it became known – Robert Clive and a mixed force of British troops and sepoys routed a large Indian army and took possession of Bengal. The Company ruled the province through a puppet nawab, who depended almost entirely on British arms to quash intrigue and oppose the horde of rival states emerging from the ruins of the Mughal Empire. Clive and his successors were happy to oblige him, maintaining a large standing army that was – at least in theory – at the new ruler’s command. But British help came at a considerable cost. In order to fund the upkeep of his European regiments, the new nawab was forced to transfer ever larger portions of his dominions to the Company’s control. The rising British Empire in India was thus based not so much on conquest as on gifts of land* and trading rights made, reluctantly, by native rulers in return for military service.

  This simple formula served the East India Company well for many years. By the 1790s Bengal had passed entirely under its control. Several incursions from the inland provinces of Bihar and Oudh were beaten off, with the consequence that the Company began acquiring lands and interests deep in the interior. It was firmly established in the city of Benares and had been gifted territory along the north bank of the Ganges in wealthy and populous Oudh. By the time the process had run its course, the Company’s influence stretched across almost the whole of Hindustan. Its most distant outposts lay within 200 miles of Delhi. And the profits it was extracting from its lands and its new privileges far outweighed existing revenues from trade.

  The transformation of the English East India Company from a merchant venturer into what amounted to an imperial power took a long time and was far from easy. The Company of 1756 had excelled at trading, shipping and generating enormous dividends for its investors, and was developing a fair degree of competence in military affairs. But it utterly lacked the infrastructure required to run any country, much less one as huge as India. In not much more than half a century, it was forced to develop an entirely new administrative system, one peopled with governors and political officers, ‘Collectors’ to assess and gather revenues, magistrates and police to keep the peace, and hundreds of clerks to labour over a vast mountain of paperwork. This it was plainly ill equipped to do, and it was only with the passage of the India Act of 1784, which placed the directors of the East India Company under the supervision of a government-appointed Board of Control and made it in effect an arm of the British state, that affairs in Bengal were fully regulated.

  As late as 1790 there was no great wish, either in parliament or in the Company’s headquarters at East India House, to see British rule stretch across the whole of India. Indeed the costs of conquering and holding down the whole of the Subcontinent were so obviously colossal that streams of orders enjoining caution and strict economy flowed from London to Calcutta. The most valuable British territories, notably Bengal, were to be surrounded by pacified client states that would guarantee their security, but that was all. There were to be no further wars of conquest in the interior.

  Unfortunately for the Company’s directors, two substantial obstacles now arose to prevent this moderate policy from being carried through. The first, for which they themselves were responsible, was the appointment of the bellicose Richard Wellesley* as Governor General of British India. Wellesley, a brilliant and ambitious nobleman, was sent out to Calcutta in 1798 with strict orders to keep the peace. But – much to the Company’s dismay – he soon showed himself to be a determined empire-builder so anxious to destroy the surviving native states that he ‘had barely touched Indian soil before he was preparing for battle’. In his path stood the second great barrier to peace in the Subcontinent: the Maratha warlords of the central provinces, whose aggressive posturings now provided Wellesley with the excuse he needed to plunge the Company into another Indian campaign.

  The principal Maratha leaders were Sindhia of Gwalior – who had already conquered Delhi and subdued so many enemies that his lands now butted up against the British territories in Oudh – and the Holkar of Indore, whose own domain stretched as far as the borders of Bengal. Sindhia and Holkar were bitter rivals, and at least as likely to go to war against each other as they were to attack the Company’s possessions. But both possessed formidable armies, and Wellesley quickly became convinced that the threat they posed was very real.

  The secret of the Marathas’ military success lay in their willingness to wage war in the Western style. Both Sindhia and Holkar had made it their business to recruit European mercenaries – the men they hired were mostly French, but they included a few British officers as well – to purchase the latest guns and cannon and to train their sepoys to fight like the Company’s own infantry. Their new regiments were highly effective and conquered much of central and northern India; even the British regarded them as dangerous. But they were so expensive that it proved to be quite beyond the capacity of either ruler to support them.

  Some older Maratha states had developed sophisticated administrations and ruled with fairness and even leniency over some of the richest lands in India. But Sindhia and Holkar could only maintain their armies by using them to extort taxes from their own subjects and ordering a never-ending cycle of attacks on other ru
lers. Starting with their nearest neighbours in the last years of the eighteenth century, the Marathas proceeded to devastate much of central India with such thoroughness that the land took decades to recover. By 1802, most of the territory east of Delhi had been ravaged by Sindhia’s men, while Holkar’s armies had left ‘not a stick standing within 150 miles of Poona; the forage and grain were consumed, the houses pulled down for fuel, and the inhabitants with their cattle compelled to fly from the destruction that threatened them’. The Marathas’ next target was Bihar, on the borders of Bengal. Inevitably, Sindhia’s raiders soon exceeded their orders and crossed into British territory, too.

  The consequences were catastrophic. Wellesley seized the longed-for opportunity to make war. Company armies from Bengal and Bombay drove into the interior and the Marathas’ well-trained regiments were destroyed in a series of hard-fought battles. By 1804, both Sindhia and Holkar had been compelled to accept alliances with the British and the unwelcome presence of ‘Residents’ – political officers whose purpose was to keep Indian rulers in line – in their capitals. Only the displeasure of the Company’s directors, shocked by the horrific cost of Wellesley’s campaign, saved their lands from outright annexation.

  For the people of the central provinces, the wars were even more disastrous. Great swathes of territory had been looted and burned, often more than once. Crops had been seized and forts, workshops and looms destroyed. Mile after mile of countryside had been depopulated. And – with Wellesley recalled to London in disgrace – most of the lands overrun by the Company’s armies were now abandoned so hastily that they fell into what amounted to a state of anarchy. The British did retain the Doab, and they guarded their flank by taking possession of Delhi, Agra and Etawah. But the thousands of square miles to the south were left effectively ungoverned, prey to famine, newly unemployed sepoys, rapacious local rajahs and bankrupt landholders forced to earn a living by their swords.