Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  It was in these circumstances that Thomas Perry arrived in Etawah in the year 1811. Perry was a Londoner, an experienced Company magistrate who had first come to India more than a decade before his posting to the Doab. He had a good deal more experience of the interior of India than was common at the time, spoke the local languages well, and knew something of the difficulties of governing difficult and fractious territories. But the task confronting him was nonetheless a daunting one. For one thing, Perry reached Etawah to find that the town’s first British Collector, WO Salmon, had left the place in ‘a very disorganized and impoverished state’. Salmon had been forced by the Company’s incessant demands for revenue to auction off large swathes of the land around the city, and fear of seeing their established rights snatched away by wealthier rivals had led many desperate landholders to offer ‘a much larger sum that the estates could have yielded without all sorts of oppression’. Before long several Etawahan notables had failed to make good their guarantees and been dispossessed; others had resorted to extorting the required excess from their increasingly distressed tenants. A short while later Salmon’s successor, a Mr Batson, had further increased rents in several districts, so that ‘revenues had been run up to a ruinous extent’.

  The consequences were predictable. Several more important men were ruined, and others driven into poverty. Company rule in Etawah became increasingly unpopular, and there was a good deal of unrest. ‘During the short period that I have been in charge of this office,’ Perry was forced to report to his superiors, ‘almost daily reports have reached me of the commission of offences of the most heinous and aggravated nature.’

  This might not have mattered so much in Bengal, where the bulk of the Company’s army was based, but Perry was almost wholly isolated. The nearest large military station was at Roy Barelly, several hundred miles away, and communication with Calcutta took weeks and sometimes months. The few assistants posted to the city with him were young and lacked experience of service in the mofussil, as the interior of India was known. Yet the magistrate was expected not only to impose the Company’s regulations upon the half-million people of the district and suppress the rising tide of banditry and violence sweeping up from the Maratha lands, but also to control the unrest festering within the town itself.

  It was for these reasons that Perry was concerned by the discovery of so many unknown corpses in his jurisdiction. Keeping the peace in Etawah was a hard enough job in normal circumstances. The last thing he needed was dead bodies in the wells.

  * At this time the great plain of the Doab, which stretched east from Etawah’s city walls, was renowned for its baking winds – said to be the worst to be encountered anywhere in India – which, during the hot weather, blew from dawn till dusk, and sometimes through the night as well, carrying with them choking clouds of dust and practically roasting the inhabitants. ‘Every article of furniture,’ one visitor to Etawah reported, ‘is burning to the touch; the hardest of wood, if not well covered with blankets, will split with a report like a pistol.’ The nights, the same writer added, ‘are terrible, every apartment may be compared to a hot oven’, while the transition to the monsoon was via a ‘furious tornado’, with winds so loud that they drowned out the sound of thunder, and rains so thick that even lightning failed to penetrate the murk.

  * The lands between the rivers Ganges and Jumna. The word means ‘two rivers’.

  * Bombay became British in 1661, when it passed to Charles II as part of the dowry of his Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza. Finding the cost of maintaining the place entirely prohibitive, the Merry Monarch leased it to the East India Company in 1668. ‘The actual transfer,’ one historian records, ‘was by letters patent which, presumably for reasons of bureaucratic convenience, described Bombay as being “in the Manor of East Greenwich in the County of Kent”.’

  * Or, to be exact, the right to raise revenues from designated tracts of land – which in eighteenth-century India amounted to much the same thing.

  * He was the elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, whose own military skills were largely honed campaigning in central India.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘An Independent Race of Men’

  ‘kullooee – to steal’

  The city that Perry was having so much difficulty governing was a strange and unique place. It lurked around a sharp bend in the Jumna, squatting along the edge of a line of cliffs that tumbled down towards the muddy, sacred waters far below, and it was quartered by precipitous ravines. Although a few narrow, fragile-looking bridges had been thrown this way and that across the chasms, linking the more important public buildings on their pinnacles of higher ground, most of the inhabitants dwelled down among the ravines themselves, where clusters of their low, brick, whitewashed houses clung like limpets to every niche and ledge. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the place had acquired a faded look. Its buildings were ramshackle and ageing. Even along the cliff tops, where many of its richer merchants lived, the flights of wooden steps that led down to bathing platforms at the river’s edge were ragged and decaying, and the skeletons of numerous abandoned temples offered mute testimony to the failing fortunes of a once-great city.

  To the east, it is true, the land was civilized and cultivated. The monsoon greened the Doab so rapidly that it was said that any interested observer with two hours to spare in the vicinity could literally watch grass grow, and a profusion of orchards and melon groves stretched away from Etawah’s mud-brick walls, speckling the edges of the road that ran towards the city of Allahabad. But the land to the west, on the far bank of the Jumna, was bleak as anywhere in India: a sparsely inhabited wilderness of bare rock, cliffs and crevices with ‘only here and there a patch of culturable ground’.

  Here were the notorious Chambel ravines, an all but impenetrable maze of steep-sided channels and gorges carved out over millennia by the monsoon rains. The ravine country stretched away south of Etawah for miles, butting up against the Maratha lands and running along both sides of the Chambel river. Two other, lesser streams, the Sindh and the Coharry, also threaded their way through the district. For much of the Chambel’s journey through the district, the Company’s border with Maharajah Sindhia’s territories ran down the middle of the river. But south of Etawah itself, the boundary shifted further south, to the banks of the Coharry.

  It was here that Perry’s efforts to pacify and regulate his district were most bitterly resented. The lands south of the Jumna were, the magistrate informed his superiors soon after his arrival in the city, among the most difficult and dangerous in India. The district had been inhabited for the best part of a thousand years by a people known as the Parihars – ‘always a desperate and lawless community’ – and they had never submitted willingly to Oudh or to the Maratha armies. The inhabitants paid rents and taxes for their lands only sporadically, concealing much of their wealth. The whole district, in short, was peopled by what Perry came to recognize as ‘a bold, spirited and independent race of men … accustomed to submit to no authority but that of the sword’, in which ‘the greater part of the inhabitants are extremely averse and in fact openly hostile to the forms and principles of our Government’. Secure in their remote fastnesses, tucked away in fortified villages concealed amidst the gorges, the men of the ravine country proved almost impossible to bring to heel. As late as 1812, a few pockets of nominally British territory still seethed with men of ‘very turbulent and criminal habits’ and remained ‘hardly conquered’.

  The ravine country was poor and unproductive land, and few of the inhabitants were farmers with fields to till or animals to herd. Some had always made their living as sepoys, selling their services as mercenaries to the Marathas or the King of Oudh. These men had done well for much of the eighteenth century, fighting and plundering their way across Hindustan as sepoys in one or other of the armies carving up the Mughal Empire. But ever since the Company had first appeared along the River Jumna, it had become harder and harder for t
he soldiers of the ravines to find employment. Most of the rulers who employed them had been defeated by the British armies and disarmed by British diplomacy. The Company itself recruited its sepoys predominantly from Oudh, regarding the soldiers of the ravine district as too ill-disciplined and venal to make good troops.

  By the first years of the new century, then, many of the soldiers of the Chambel valley found themselves destitute and desperate for work. A good number of them turned naturally to the other occupation for which the men of their district were known. For generations, hundreds, perhaps thousands of the most determined bandits and robbers of India had made their homes in the Chambel ravines, where they were difficult to find and felt safe from pursuit. Now, their ranks swollen by unemployed soldiers, these men did what they had always done: they left their homes and went out on the roads to steal.

  India had long been plagued by highwaymen and thieves.

  The very earliest texts referred to it. The Vedas – that vast collection of Sanskrit hymns compiled around 1000 BC – included several tales of the god Rudra that portray him as both a robber and lord of highwaymen, and the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang, whose description of the 15 years he spent crisscrossing Hindustan in search of Buddhist manuscripts is one of the earliest accounts we have of India, narrowly escaped a violent death at the hands of river pirates in the seventh century AD. Little seems to have changed in the millennium that followed, for bandits continued to loom large in the histories of the Subcontinent. A handful were do-gooders, robbing the rich to feed the poor or resisting invaders and alien rule, but most were little more than ambitious mercenaries, out to enrich themselves and often willing to sell their services to the highest bidder. The most notorious were men so powerful that their hordes of followers numbered in the thousands. Leaders of this sort could and did loot entire towns, and their exploits, real and imagined, became the subject of folk tales and ballads that are still told and sung today.

  Not even the greatest of the Mughal Emperors could guarantee safe passage through the interior of India. Travel on the busiest of roads was so notoriously risky that William Hawkins, a British merchant making his way inland from the port of Surat in the year 1609, was forced to hire a troop of 50 soldiers to protect his caravan, since ‘the country is so full of outlaws and thieves that a man cannot stir out of doors without great forces’. These same precautions were not enough to save his colleague Nicholas Withington a few years later; on his journey to Agra, Withington was not only set upon by a large gang of highwaymen but attacked by his own guards, who held up the merchants they were supposed to be protecting, took the Englishman prisoner, and robbed and hanged three Indian traders riding with the party. Native caravans, too, were seldom safe in the interior. In one infamous incident, which occurred around the year 1700, a substantial Mughal convoy protected by a numerous armed guard was cut to pieces only 60 miles from Delhi. Not a single member of the party escaped with his life.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, brigandage was already so common throughout the Subcontinent that thousands of men earned their living entirely from robbery, and roving gangs were a common feature of life in the mofussil. Most of these bandits were dacoits,* members of large and well-disciplined gangs of burglars and thieves who operated, more or less openly, in many towns and villages. Some were highway robbers, stealing from merchants and other travellers on the roads. Others again were both.

  There is no doubt that the dacoits were more greatly feared than any other group. Although in no sense part of any grand confederacy, most dacoit gangs used similar techniques to terrorize their victims. They generally worked by night. A gang, numbering anywhere from 50 to 300 men, would assemble at a predetermined place, armed with spears, swords, guns and torches. Its target might be a specific house – perhaps the fortified home of a rich merchant or banker – or an entire village. Most were taken by a frontal assault, launched without warning and carried through with considerable daring. It was rare for such gangs to pay more than lip service to careful planning, or devote any effort to subtlety or concealment. They relied, instead, on sheer numbers and their own fearsome reputations to cow their enemies.

  Dacoits moved ‘with incredible rapidity’, one contemporary observed. They ‘would sweep down on some distant town or village, plunder some house previously selected for the purpose, and before any pursuit could be organized they were far advanced on their homeward journey’. Larger gangs sometimes attacked well-defended targets – in 1818 one group, 80 strong, assaulted a fort outside the city of Lucknow and stole treasure valued at 6,500 rupees from under the noses of its escort of 30 regular soldiers. When they had plundered what they could, the members of a dacoit band would disperse and reassemble at some prearranged meeting spot to divide their loot. It was almost impossible, in such circumstances, to pursue them effectively. In the words of one official who tried, they were like ‘a ball of quicksilver, which, if pressed by the finger, divides into many globules, all certain to come together again and cohere as firmly as before’.

  Such bandit gangs were unsparingly violent, even though they did not plan to kill their victims and there are accounts of dacoits loading their muskets with shot rather than ball so as to maim, not murder. They ruthlessly disposed of those who dared to resist them, and never flinched at brutally interrogating prisoners in their search for hidden valuables. Blazing torches were the preferred implements of torture, but some gangs would open deep cuts with a spear or knife and rub mustard seeds or chillis into the exposed wound. Another favourite technique was to force a cotton bag filled with hot ash over some victim’s head until he had inhaled the burning cinders. In some gangs the application of torture was known colloquially as tuhsul kurro, a phrase that means ‘to make the revenue collection’.

  In Mughal times, dacoit gangs had sometimes hidden out, like outlaws, ‘in colonies in the midst of wild jungles difficult of access’. Others had been formed from ‘tribals’ and ‘foresters’ – indigenous peoples who inhabited the remoter hills and more impenetrable jungles of India, kept themselves largely to themselves, supported their families by hunting, and emerged occasionally from their hiding places to raid the people of the plains. But amid the chaos of the eighteenth century, most were composed of ordinary peasants, who lived and worked among the people that they robbed. Almost all operated with the approval of the local rajah or one of the many village landholders – known as zamindars in northern India and as polygars in the south – whose revenues had been badly dented by the wars. The zamindars offered the dacoits a secure base and protection against arrest, commonly employing them as village watchmen, guarding fields, or as lathials (‘clubmen’): enforcers who worked as revenue collectors and formed what amounted to a village militia. In return, the bandits’ protectors claimed a large share of their loot, often well in excess of a quarter – so much, indeed, that one robber complained that were it not for this informal tax, ‘we would undoubtedly, in a couple or three years, become men of fortune and there would be no more necessity for our stealing any more’.

  The attractions of dacoity were obvious. Impoverished peasants and labourers could earn far more, more easily, by theft than they could on ravaged and depopulated farms. They were most unlikely to be punished; even in the relatively well-policed districts of lower Bengal only a minuscule proportion – it was thought less than six per cent – were ever caught and tried. The profession of dacoity, with its attendant risks, was even seen as a prestigious one, akin to soldiering in the minds of the robbers’ less daring neighbours. Since dacoits contributed a good deal to the local economy, bringing home quantities of loot and cash that could never be generated within their village themselves, they were often well respected in their own communities and in many cases robber bands doubled as a sort of local defence force, raiding rival towns and settlements, protecting their own homes from other gangs, and even collecting rents and taxes for their zamindars. As one policeman wearily explained:

  A crime committed by an i
ndividual of a village is perfectly disregarded by the rest unless it be against the community. If a man perpetrates a highway robbery in sight of his village he is as well received as before, and if he gives away part of the plunder, he is a patron.

  For all these reasons, dacoity had long been common in India, even at the height of the Mughal Empire. But it became considerably more widespread during and after the Maratha wars, and particularly with the advent of a British rule, which so often entailed sharp increases in demands for rent. Figures from the Company’s possessions in Bengal suggest that violent crimes rose rapidly after 1793, the number of people tried for what were then termed ‘heinous offences’ increasing by nearly a third between 1794 and 1801. It seems entirely likely that robbery and violence were even more prevalent in the Doab and among the central provinces of India, where the authorities were weaker, the police almost non-existent, the lot of the peasantry considerably worse and the bandits of the Chambal ravines lurked.