Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The Company had, in short, underestimated the ingenuity of Indian merchants and bankers determined to profit from the trade in drugs. But, ironically, this native success presented the Thugs of the central provinces with opportunities they could scarcely have dreamed of when the monopoly was in force. Throughout the 1820s Thug gangs occasionally chanced upon and seized small consignments of smuggled opium. The rapid growth of the Malwa trade, moreover, required substantial investment, and increasingly large sums of money began to make their way to and fro between the landowners and merchants of the district and the great financiers of the central provinces.

  The transfer of funds on so large a scale was not unusual in India, which had an ancient and sophisticated economy. The existence of bankers – seths – had been recorded as early as the sixth century BC, and by the time the first Europeans reached the Subcontinent the industry had grown deep roots. ‘In India,’ the French traveller Tavenier noted in the 1670s,

  a village must be very small indeed if it has not a money-changer who acts as a banker to make remittances of money and issue letters of exchange … All the Jews who occupy themselves with money and exchange in the empire of the Grand Seigneur* pass for being very sharp; but in India they would scarcely be apprentices to these Changers.

  These village bankers, he went on, did more than exchange the coins issued by the Company and the many Native States – a profitable business until the British imposed the Madras rupee as the single Indian currency in 1835. They were mainstays of their local economies, advancing money to villagers who wished to buy tools and seed, and the Frenchman was deeply impressed by their parsimony and intelligence. A village money-changer would, for example, discount the value of a rupee according to its age, since a silver coin lost an infinitesimal amount of precious metal each time it was handled. In the same way, Tavenier observed,

  of all the gold which remains on the touchstone after an assay has been made, and of which we here make no account, far from allowing such a thing to be lost, they collect it with the aid of a ball, made half of black pitch and half of wax, with which they rub the stone which carries the gold, and at the end of some years they burn the ball and so obtain the gold which has accumulated.

  The village money-changer’s methods were not, in fact, too far removed from those employed by the greatest of the city bankers. They, too, diversified and took care to account for every pice, though the greatest of them – such as the famous Jaggat Seths of Calcutta, whose money underpinned the business of the East India Company itself – were fast becoming huge concerns. The seths faced little competition from the British, whose own Indian banking operations were geared to the overseas trade, and by the 1820s many had become prominent dealers in both cotton and grain. Opium, which was far more profitable than either, naturally attracted them.

  Most of the seths of central India had their headquarters in Poona, Bombay or Indore. The majority were members of the Marwari caste – famously clever businessmen who learned mathematics and accounting from the age of 12. Young seths soon achieved a mastery of mental arithmetic that astounded Europeans. ‘To give an instance of their efficiency,’ one Indian writing early in the last century observed, ‘while an English-educated graduate may take five minutes to work out on a piece of paper the compound interest on a given sum, the Marwari boy will get an answer correct to the nearest pice mentally, without the aid of pen and paper, in less than half a minute.’

  This expertise struck visitors as all the more remarkable when they saw the cramped establishments from which many of the seths did business. Even the grandest Indian banks bore little resemblance to the monolithic temples of commerce found in European capitals, and a British traveller calling at the office of a Poona seth early in the nineteenth century discovered that

  this bank, in which large sums are deposited and extensive business transacted, was nothing but a mud house plastered over within and without. The counter was an inclined platform reaching from the front to nearly the whole length of the building; on it squatted, cross-legged, surrounded with bags of all kinds of money, a Mahratta banker with his handsome countenance and keen piercing black eyes, talking to his customers, discounting bills, and counting money with astonishing rapidity and ease.

  In this establishment, too, the seth’s young child was a centre of attention. The banks of central India were invariably family concerns, whose histories could be traced in the names they gave their houses – the firm of Mahanand Ram Puran Mal, for example, had been established by a Mahanand Ram and passed to his son, Puran Mal. The Poona seth, too, must have had hopes of his child, for

  the bank was managed, in the absence of his father, by a young Hindoo boy who could not have been over 12 years of age. This youthful cashier astonished us with his accuracy and quickness in counting and discounting money. His only account-book, as far as I could see, was a flat board covered with fine white sand. On this primitive slate he made all his calculations, writing them down with his forefinger. When he had finished he blew away the sand and handed over the amount due, with interest for odd days, etc., all calculated with the nicest accuracy down to the smallest fraction.

  It meant something, of course, to be heir to such a business. Like modern banking conglomerates, Indian seths often operated branches in a number of towns. The largest firms might have as many as seven – the house of Bhyaram Gopal Das, headquartered in Benares, also operated in Calcutta, Nagpore, Poona, Bombay and at least three other cities. Some even maintained agencies overseas, in Japan, Aden or Abyssinia. The banking houses of central India tended to be more modest concerns; the majority had no more than one or at best two local branches in addition to their headquarters, run by agents known as gomashtas who took care of business in the provinces. But even these firms thought nothing of sending remittances totalling tens of thousands of rupees to and fro, and it was small wonder that the bankers’ agents were closely supervised and expected to report to their seth master on a regular basis.

  By the mid-1820s, a good part of many a gomashta’s task was to facilitate the flow of cash into the central provinces. A large part of this money was advanced to the landowners who grew the poppies from which Malwa opium was made. The manufacture of the drug was a difficult and time-consuming business, and it required substantial capital. Every mature poppy in a field of several thousand had to be scored, by hand, with a special three-pronged implement resembling a fork. At night a sticky residue oozed from each incision, and when morning came a host of men, women and children flocked into the fields to scrape this raw opium from each flower. This process was repeated daily for about a month, until the poppies no longer yielded the residue; then the drug was mixed with linseed oil, to prevent evaporation, patted into cakes three or four inches in diameter, and left to dry in the shade. Next, the cakes were taken to a local opium factory – most likely financed by the same bankers – where the oil was drained away and they were crushed together into 3lb balls. Each ball was coated with leaves gummed together with an inferior grade of poppy juice to form an inch-thick protective shell, and this processed opium was then packed into cases, 40 balls to a chest, ready for sale and shipment to China.

  The growth of the opium trade was so swift and so considerable that it changed the pattern of banking in central India. It was this, in turn, that presented new opportunities to the Thugs and drew men who normally based themselves along the Jumna and in Bundelcund into districts such as Nursingpore. In normal circumstances, only a small portion of the funds sent by one seth to another was remitted in cash. Large payments were normally made in the form of hoondees, ‘bankers’ cheques written on a thick country-made paper, rolled up and fastened with gum-water’. Each hoondee carried ‘a secret mark or sign that renders forgery difficult’, and could only be cashed at the designated branch of a certain bank; like modern cheques they were useless to thieves, and when the Thugs found one on the body of a murdered traveller, they would generally burn it. But since dealing in opium without the sanction
of the Company remained illegal, traders preferred to deal in cash, and native bankers also began to send treasure to Malwa and Indore to take advantage of the favourable exchange rates prevailing there. Before long, huge quantities of gold and jewels were passing through central India in the care of special parties of treasure-bearers.

  These bearers played an important part in the economy of central India. They were generally implicitly reliable men of superior caste, proficient at concealing treasure, hiding gold in their baggage and jewels in their hair. Most preferred to travel in disguise, and in small groups, because trusting to an escort – even an armed guard – merely attracted the attention of dacoits and thieves. This reliance on subterfuge, however, made them all the more desirable to the Thugs, who generally refrained from tangling with large parties of armed men.

  Certainly it was not long before the Thug jemadars such as Feringeea realized that their best hope of seizing a substantial sum was to take it from a party of treasure-bearers. Identifying the seths’ men was, of course, a tricky business. Every few years, however, a courier would prove careless, or the Thugs’ spies too adept, and one gang or another would chance upon a huge quantity of booty. In 1807 a party of 17 bearers were murdered on the road between Jubbulpore and Saugor, the Thugs rifling their corpses so thoroughly that they left ‘nothing but naked bodies lying in the grove, with their eyes apparently starting out of their sockets’. Another group was strangled on the Nerbudda, at Jhansee Ghat, in 1820; and three years later a group of Deccan Thugs seized 14,000 rupees from another party of five bearers. Luck, too, played its part, as it did when, on one notorious occasion, a filthy, raggedly dressed and fly-infested fakir attached himself to Feringeea’s gang on the road to Hyderabad. The man was evidently absolutely destitute, and the Thugs were reluctant to kill him and tried three times to shake him off. On each occasion, however, the obdurate mendicant returned to beg for their protection. When the gang at last lost patience and strangled him, they were startled to discover he was a treasure-bearer in disguise, carrying no fewer than 365 strings of pearls.

  It was the gomashtas’ job to arrange such shipments of cash, to hire bearers, agree a route, settle on appropriate disguises, and pursue and recover any remittances that might be lost. Assignments of this sort, difficult though they were, were nothing new to them. Most were ‘invested with very wide powers; they are not highly paid, but their industry, integrity, and efficiency are remarkable and proverbial’. Their resourcefulness was sometimes severely tested – when the bankers of the central provinces had first begun to invest in opium, their gomashtas were sometimes charged with smuggling the drug to the coast, bribing the local authorities and protecting the shipments from theft and seizure along the way – but they were seldom found wanting. And when the Thugs tangled with the firm of Dhunraj Seth Pokur Mal, a substantial bank with its headquarters in the far north of Hyderabad, they found the bank’s agent in Malwa fully their equal – not merely in resourcefulness, but in savagery as well.

  * The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire – the greatest of powers in Tavenier’s day.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Devil’s Banker

  ‘bunar – a bad road for Thugs’

  Thug gangs had begun to stumble upon Indian bankers’ treasure parties with increasing regularity in the mid-1820s. One of the earliest groups of bearers to fall into their hands was a body of 13 men and a single woman from Poona, murdered near the Tapti river in 1826. A Thug jemadar named Budloo and his men had fallen in with the bearers nearly a week earlier, and walked with their intended victims across much of the province of Candeish, waiting for the chance to strangle them. Their victims were leading a number of horses piled with baggage which, when searched, proved to contain not only a good quantity of merchandise but also the enormous sum of 25,000 rupees in cash and gold bars. But even this great loss was little more than a foretaste of the disasters of 1828 and 1829, when a further 135,000 rupees’ worth of cash and jewels were seized in the course of another three affairs and 19 more bearers were killed.

  The first of these robberies was carried out five miles outside the town of Malagow in the division of Nasik. The district, together with its northern neighbour, Candeish, was still a ‘disturbed and deserted’ area and had only recently been ceded to the Company and incorporated into the Bombay Presidency; ‘in order to prevent sudden and extensive changes’, it had been administered directly by the Governor General in Calcutta until 1827. Northern Candeish, and the far western portions of both divisions, were relatively wealthy areas. But the remainder of the district, which included Malagow and the land around it, was bordered in the north by the wild Satpuda hills and in the south by long stretches of desolate ridges. Within these bounds, Candeish and Nasik consisted mostly of ‘rolling broken ground … much of it, from fear of wild beasts, waste or covered with brushwood’. Towards the west lay expanses of ‘wide, stony, thorny plains, rising in broad ridges, or sinking in rich valleys studded with mango groves and large prosperous villages’. To the south, around Malagow itself, the land was flat and treeless – a substantial plain surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe of low, steep, flat-topped hills.

  At least half the land here was either abandoned during the Maratha wars or had never been cultivated, and much of the remainder had been devastated in the course of the Pindari campaign. The weather, though not hot by Indian standards, was humid and notoriously unhealthy, for visiting Europeans required time to acclimatize; and the roads were terrible. In 1828, after a decade of Company rule, almost all were – a government official later recalled – still mere tracks, ‘ill-appointed and deficient in everything but discomfort and danger. Few and far between were the miserable hamlets, and the mountain passes were as rugged and impracticable as their fierce possessors.’ Even the main route through the district, the Bombay to Agra trunk road that ran through Malagow to Doolea and beyond, was scarcely maintained before 1850. It was ideal territory for the Thugs. The Company’s authority was weak, there were plenty of travellers on the great trunk road, and so many ill-frequented tracks that it was easy to escape the scene of a murder.

  It was at Malagow itself that Feringeea and his men first encountered the seths’ treasure-bearers. There were four of them, going from Poona to Indore with 22,000 rupees in gold and jewels, and they were accompanied by three other travellers and no fewer than six other Thug gangs, 225 men in all. The first of these gangs had fallen in with the bearers on the road four stages from Poona, and the others – alerted to the discovery of the treasure – had joined up with the party further along the way. They had hoped to kill the bearers at the river crossing outside the town, and been frustrated by the appearance of some of the Company’s cavalry. Now they were planning to murder the men as they made their way north into Candeish.

  The arrival of Feringeea’s group brought the number of Thugs trailing the seths’ party to 250. Most were experienced men, but one gang, led by a man named Omrow, was less reliable, being ‘composed chiefly of fellows of all castes whom he had scraped together, to make up a gang for this expedition’. Worried by the sheer number of Thugs who had been drawn to the bearers like flies to freshly butchered meat, and sure that these novices would be more trouble than they were worth, Feringeea and the other jemadars sent 30 of the rawest men on ahead, ‘that they might not, by their blunders, frustrate our designs upon the treasure-bearers’, and ordered a second group to remain in Malagow. The remaining gangs, now 125 strong, watched the bearers from a distance until the men packed up their belongings and left town an hour before dawn next morning. The Thugs followed, trailing their doomed victims at a distance, and – being unable to shake off the Company messenger and two cotton-cleaners who still accompanied the bearers – killed all seven only half a mile along the road shortly before daybreak. The treasure they had been carrying was found to consist of golden coins and jewellery, and once they were well clear of the vicinity, the Thugs set to haggling over the division of their haul.

 
This proved to be a tricky business, for Omrow claimed – as was the custom – a full share for his novice followers even though they had played no part in the killings. After considerable wrangling it was decided to split the money equally among the gangs involved, and leave the members of each to decide how best to share their loot with those of their men who had been elsewhere. Each of the Thugs actually involved in the murders thus received between 80 and 125 rupees, as much as 35 rupees more than they would have expected in normal circumstances; and two of the gangs did indeed adhere to their own code of honour by dividing the money they had received with those who had been sent elsewhere.

  Early the next year, 1829, four Thug gangs were making their way south through Candeish once again when they chanced upon an even larger consignment of treasure. On this occasion, perhaps as a consequence of the grievous losses of the previous years, the number of bearers had been increased to eight, armed with matchlocks and provided with camels to carry their baggage. This group gave the Thugs a good deal of trouble: ‘They went fast,’ one strangler explained, ‘and, afraid to appear near to them in a body, we several times lost all trace of them.’ The seths’ men were cautious, too; they laid false trails, telling the people of the bazaars where they rested that they were heading for a certain town, then taking a different road. At least twice the Thugs were themselves deceived, and had to send out scouts in all directions, promising rewards of 100 rupees, over and above their share of the booty, to the men who relocated the treasure party. On the second occasion they were extremely fortunate to stumble across the bearers on the Indore road, more than 60 hours after losing them.