Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  It is customary for the Fauseegars to pretend friendship for travellers, and going with them a short distance, to strangle them with their Dhoties. When the cloth is thrown round the neck, the travellers are seized by their legs, and kicked upon their private parts, and their dead bodies are cut open, and the limbs divided, to prevent their swelling and emitting a smell through the crevices formed in the ground … It is also the custom of the Fauseegars to select a man especially to cut the corpse so, and to give him an additional share of plundered property.

  Like their counterparts in the north of India, the Phansigars were careful never to kill the people of the districts they passed through, preferring to attack travellers whose disappearance was unlikely to be noticed for some time. Other than that, though, Wright found them to be indiscriminate. ‘They murder,’ he wrote, ‘even Coolies, Palanqueen boys, Fakirs and Byragees* – no one escapes whom they have an opportunity of murdering – the chance is that every man has a rupee or two about him in money or cloths, and with them the most trifling sum is a sufficient inducement to commit murder.’

  Gradually, Wright learned enough about the Phansigars to arrest the leaders of some other gangs. Large groups of stranglers were tried at Chittoor in 1809, and as late as 1812 at least 40 alleged Phansigars were still being held in the Company prison there, although they had been acquitted in the district court. Wright refused to release them until they lodged substantial bonds, called ‘securities’, to guarantee their future good behaviour – a ruse commonly used in India to detain prisoners whom the authorities suspected might be dangerous. The magistrate remained untroubled that supposedly innocent men were languishing in prison. ‘Of their guilt,’ he insisted, ‘not a shadow of doubt exists.’

  Wright’s reports received scant attention when they were first compiled. Probably they were initially restricted to a small group of administrators in Madras, and there is certainly no evidence that Thomas Perry was aware of them as he struggled with the mystery of the Thugs. From these small beginnings, however, the Company’s knowledge of the strangling gangs did gradually expand. In the second decade of the century, word of the Thugs’ existence spread slowly east along the Jumna. This was probably a consequence of the pursuit of the Murnae gangs. After 1810 the new Superintendent of Police for the western, or inland, provinces of northern India became the first British officer to be formally charged with responsibility for combating Thuggee. From then on the forms used to compile crime statistics in the interior included a space for listing ‘murders by Thugs’, and the addition of this category allowed Calcutta to estimate, however incompletely, the incidence of Thug crime. The essential details of Wright’s reports became known in the Bengal Presidency by 1811–12, when they were at last circulated to local magistrates. Information gleaned from Perry’s interrogations of Gholam Hossyn was also copied for the use of other magistrates and the police.

  These early bulletins were still very much provisional. Thuggee was not formally defined for several years; nor was there as yet any tendency to see all stranglers as practically identical, or as members of a single, rigidly controlled fraternity. George Stockwell, writing from Etawah during the monsoon of 1815, was of the opinion that ‘the Thugs who have been in the habit of infesting this part of the Company’s Provinces may … be divided into three classes, entirely unconnected with each other.’*

  The most important reason for this upsurge of interest in India’s stranglers was the Company’s belated recognition that large numbers of its sepoys were falling prey to Thugs. Soldiers were – as we have seen – favourite targets of the various Thug bands. Not only did they travel home on leave each year taking large sums of money to their families, their disappearance was unlikely to be noticed until the expiration of their leave. The first general warning that gangs of stranglers were active in the interior was issued in April 1810, just a month after the Company’s first encounter with Gholam Hossyn, by the officer commanding the British armies of Bengal. In an Order of the Day, Major General William St Leger not only drew his men’s attention to this hitherto unknown danger but detailed what was known of the Thugs’ appearance and methods. He described the manner in which their inveiglers contrived to fall in with strangers on the road, and sepoys were urged not to partake in conversation with other parties whom they might meet on the roads. The men were particularly warned not to leave their camping grounds before dawn or allow others to lead them to ‘some solitary spot’, and ordered never to accept food or drink from strangers and to stay together on the road. Attempts were also made to end the soldiers’ habit of setting out for home carrying their arrears of pay. A new system, involving the issuing of what amounted to cheques that could be cashed by applying to the British Residents at Delhi and Lucknow, or to various Collectors of Revenue, was introduced. This, it was hoped, would reduce the sepoys’ reliance on cash and make them less appealing targets.

  Thus by the year 1812 knowledge of the Thugs was at last growing within the ranks of the Company and its army. However, civilians in India, as well as newspapers and magazines in Asia or at home, still paid little attention to the stranglers. The honour of introducing Thuggee to this broader audience fell to another Madras magistrate – an acquaintance of Wright’s – by the name of Richard Sherwood, who, adapting his friend’s various reports, produced a highly influential article titled ‘Of the murderers called Phansigars’ in the year 1816. This paper’s first appearance, in the pages of the obscure Madras Literary Gazette, aroused little comment. But in 1820 the same article was reprinted in Asiatick Researches, a respected academic journal produced in Calcutta. Asiatick Researches had a larger circulation than the Literary Gazette and its readers included some of the most senior men in the Company’s service and a significant number of subscribers in Britain itself. This time Sherwood’s information was noticed.

  A few other officers had taken an interest in the subject. John Shakespear, the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces, published a short description of Thugs and dacoits, based on one of his official reports, in the same issue of Asiatick Researches. A paper describing ‘The habits and character of the Thugs’, and based on the statements made by three stranglers arrested on their way across Gwalior, was sent to the then Governor General by the Resident at Sindhia’s court in the same year. And John Malcolm, one of the most able British officers stationed in the central provinces of India in the mid 1810s,* encountered a group of Thugs in the course of his service in Malwa and wrote an instructive account of them in memoirs that he published in 1823.

  None of these new sources of information added greatly to what was already known. The Resident at Gwalior confirmed that ‘the race of Thugs’ travelled in large gangs – the three men captured had been members of a group of 300 murderers – and ‘employed both the sword and the noose’ in the course of excursions that took them from the Ganges into the Deccan. They were thorough; it was by now ‘well known’ that Thug gangs ‘act in parties and scour all the parallel and cross roads on the route which they take. These parties bring in and give account of their respective acquisitions, after which a fair distribution of the whole is made.’

  The Thugs’ ‘principal residences’, added Malcolm, were still in the Chambel ravine country, where they ‘usually maintain a connexion, or at least an understanding, with the manager of the district’. His estimate of Thug numbers was quite low; there were, he thought, no more than 300 stranglers at large in the central provinces, selecting wealthy victims when they could, and killing by strangulation or by using datura. ‘Some of them have horses, camels and tents, and are equipped like merchants; others are dressed like soldiers going under a leader to take service; some affect to be Mahommedan beggars … or holy mendicants: they assume, in short, every disguise.’

  Perhaps the most interesting fragments of new intelligence, however, emerged from the depositions of the Thugs captured in Gwalior. These revealed a picture of men driven by extremes of poverty to join Thug gangs. The first prisone
r, a man named Heera, was nominally a cowherd but, ‘forced by hunger’, he had left his village in search of a better living and been lured into the company of a group of stranglers by a jemadar who ‘said he would feed me if I accompanied the Thugs’. Heera’s statement also painted a revealing picture of the gang’s dependence on the zamindar of their home village, a man whose protection cost these Thugs no less than half of all the plunder they took on every expedition.

  The slow accumulation of information on the Thugs had one important effect. It was not until about 1820 – as Shakespear pointed out in his report on the subject – that the existence of Thug gangs became generally accepted by Company officers whose duties had never brought them into contact with such men. As late as 1815, Shakespear said, ‘much scepticism [had] still prevailed regarding the existence of any distinct class of people who are designated “T’hegs”’. He himself, he would admit, had long supposed that they were no more than highway robbers who occasionally employed brutal tactics.

  Even after 1820 a number of Company magistrates shared Shakespear’s early doubts. As the men most directly concerned with the quality of the evidence that could be mustered against supposed Thugs, they found it particularly hard to accept prosecutions based upon circumstantial evidence and the confessions of informants whose motives were seldom entirely praiseworthy. The sceptical magistrates’ position was perhaps most clearly put by Thomas Ernst, of the Hooghly court, who protested vigorously at plans to recruit ‘spies and common prostitutes’ to inform against suspected stranglers. Such evidence, Ernst asserted, could never be reliable, and his own investigations led him to believe that magistrates such as Wright were exaggerating the threat posed by the Thugs and overstating the uniqueness of their methods.* A similar scepticism remained prevalent in other towns. In Gorruckpore, on the far eastern border of Oudh, a persistent informer named Khodabux Khan attempted to bring charges against the members of a local gang of stranglers on no fewer than three occasions over the course of nearly a decade, only to have the depositions he had sworn rejected out of hand. In 1814 Khan was imprisoned for three months for giving false evidence, and a year or two later he was murdered by the men he had informed against. It was another dozen years before the unlucky Khan was vindicated by the conviction of the very Thugs he had offered evidence against as early as 1809.

  The use of Thug informers – ‘approvers’, they were called at the time, because they confirmed the tentative identification of captured stranglers – provoked controversy for years. Magistrates convinced of the existence of the Thugs, endlessly frustrated by the lack of living witnesses, favoured the employment of approvers. An officer named William Wright – not the same man as the Madras magistrate – appears to have been the first to make systematic use of such prisoners; with their help he rounded up nearly 200 Oudh and Doab Thugs and sent them to Bengal for trial in 1814. But the results were the same as they had been two years earlier, when Perry had sent his prisoners before the Nizamat Adalat; much of the approvers’ testimony was struck out, and the remaining case collapsed for lack of evidence. After that, interest in the use of informants lapsed for several years.

  Few magistrates had better luck than Wright. For years, all sorts of problems bedevilled attempts to bring suspected Thugs to trial. A magistrate named Gregory was dismissed from his post in Madras in 1819 after arresting nearly 200 suspected Phansigars, together with their families, when it emerged that his conduct towards the prisoners had been ‘marked by great injustice and violence’. A few years later, in the northern town of Patna, an approver recruited by a British civil servant, JA Pringle, came up before the local commissioner, John Elliot. Elliott was another disbeliever in the Thugs, and more difficulties ensued as the trial began. As one of the prisoners involved in the case recalled:

  The property of the murdered [man] was produced in Court, and his wife came forward to recognise it. Mr Elliot told her that if she did not speak the truth she would be punished, upon which she took fright and would say nothing, although she knew the property to be that of her husband … There was no [other] evidence but the depositions of the approvers, and the case was not proved, and the approvers were sentenced to 15 lashes, five years’ imprisonment, and to be taken round the City mounted on asses for five days. The rest of the Thugs were released. Mr Elliot told the Nazir of the Court who had arrested the Thugs that he was ruining the country by seizing innocent people, and sentenced him to 14 years imprisonment; when in confinement the Nazir swallowed some piece of diamond by which he caused his death.

  Even Pringle, the magistrate, did not escape from the case unscathed. His ‘own conduct was visited with the severest censure, and both the Government and the Nizamat Adalat were led into a belief that there was no such gang of Thugs, and that the crime, if it existed at all, was very limited in its extent’.

  It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that British officers rarely found it worthwhile to pursue Thug gangs, and that most of the encounters between British magistrates and Thugs in the first quarter of the century occurred by chance. Either a gang of stranglers would be arrested on general suspicion by authorities alarmed at the discovery of murdered bodies in their districts, or one or more of a gang’s own members would betray the group as the result of some quarrel. There were several such incidents. Thug bands were detained at Jhalna in 1821, at Seonee in 1822, and at Mozuffurpore in 1826. At Jhalna, British officers in a nearby cantonment mounted a search after hearing reports from local villagers of murders committed in the area. At Seonee, nearly 60 Thugs were detained after a chance discovery. In the Mozuffurpore case, a gang of 15 robbers who had strangled a party of travellers fell out over the ownership of a coral necklace and one, ‘in a passion’, turned the others in to the local police.* Success in cases of this sort owed nothing to any concerted effort on the part of the Company authorities. There was no particular pattern to the encounters, nor any attempt by senior officers to draw lessons from what had been learned or to coordinate further action against the gangs.

  Little or nothing, then, was done in the years that followed Halhed’s assault on Murnae to build on Wright’s and Perry’s pioneering work. British knowledge of the Thugs, their methods and their plans remained partial at best, and clues that might have led to the gangs’ destruction were undoubtedly missed. Had the magistrates and district officers scattered through the mofussil understood the stranglers better, they might have enjoyed greater success in tackling them. As it was, however, some of the darkest secrets of the infamous system of Thuggee remained known only to the Thugs themselves.

  * That is, Gujerat, a province in northwest India.

  * That is, labourers, litter bearers, wandering ascetics and cattle drovers – the poorest of the poor.

  * Stockwell’s categories were the predominantly Muslim Etawah and Allyghur Thugs, who lived on large landed estates under the protection of various rajahs; the more numerous Hindu Lodhee Thugs of Cawnpore; and the gangs formerly based in Sindouse and Gwalior, who were the most numerous of all and who travelled together in larger numbers than the other Thugs.

  * Although known as ‘Boy’ Malcolm for his infectious high spirits and rumbustious enthusiasm for hunting, shooting and all manner of outdoor pursuits, Malcolm proved to be an able administrator and was among the principal architects of a settlement imposed on the Maratha lands in the year 1818.

  * Ernst was removed from his post shortly after registering this protest — not for his views on Thuggee (though they were emphatically dismissed by the Governor General, Lord Minto, himself), but because he had dared to suggest that British rule in India was ‘selfish, exploits natives, and will not last for ever’.

  * ‘Syfoo and Gheena Khan had married two sisters, and Syfoo gave himself airs, and demanded a coral necklace that was taken from one of the travellers. Gheena refused to give it; a quarrel ensued, and Syfoo … went to the Thanadar [police sergeant] at Durbhunga, brought him and his guard down upon them at night, and seized the whole gang
. But Syfoo had not seen the grave, and he made the Thanadar tie up his cousin, Peerbuksh, a boy, throw him down, draw his sword, and pretend to be about to cut his throat. The boy got alarmed, confessed, and pointed out the grave. The bodies were taken up … the four men who had strangled them were hung.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Scarf and Sword

  ‘sosalladhna – strangling a victim in favourable circumstances’

  The flight of the Sindouse and Murnae Thugs from their homes in the Chambel ravines was not unprecedented. For many, perhaps most, of the stranglers who infested the lands south of Etawah, precipitate departures were a fact of life, for the Thugs’ earliest datable tradition – the hasty abandonment of Delhi by the seven Muslim clans during Akbar’s reign – was merely one example among many of gangs falling foul of the rulers who had protected them and being forced to seek sanctuary elsewhere. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Thugs’ oral histories suggest, their gangs left Delhi for Agra, abandoned Agra for Akoopore, and then quit Akoopore for Himmutpore. Their appearance in Sindouse was a consequence of a falling out with the Rajah of Himmutpore, who ‘became in time too exorbitant in his demands for a share of the booty’, and though they seem to have lived largely unmolested for the next hundred years, several of their villages (including Murnae itself) were razed to the ground by Maratha troops seeking payment of rents and taxes in the first years of the nineteenth century. Others were seized, in 1800, by the Rajah of Rampoora, whose exactions forced the Thugs of the district to flee west into Sindhia’s domains.