Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The triumphant scouts hurried back to their gangs. There was no time to rest. The Thugs – all 112 of them – set off at once after the treasure, ‘although we were much tired’, finally catching up with their intended victims at midnight on the third day of the chase and making camp close by. Both parties rose early the next morning, and the Thugs followed the bearers over the Nerbudda river at Burwaha Ghat, where customs men detained the members of the treasure party. As they passed by, the Thugs had the grim satisfaction of hearing the matchlock-men protest bitterly at ‘the hardship of being obliged to expose the value of their charge in an unsettled country’; and they went on only a short way before stopping for the night in ‘a small deserted village in the midst of a jungly waste’. They would wait for the bearers there.

  ‘It was about nine o’clock in the morning when they reached the place,’ one of the Thugs recalled.

  The party consisted of eight men, mounted on camels, and a merchant, by name Futteh Alee, who had joined them on the road in the hope of being more secure in their company than alone … The signal was given; we rushed in upon the camels, seized them by their bridles, and made them sit down by beating them with sticks. The men were seized and killed; some were strangled, some stabbed with spears, and some cut down with swords. Futteh Alee was pulled off his pony and strangled. We transferred the treasure to our ponies, threw the bodies into a ravine, and went on for three days without halting anywhere, as we knew we should be immediately pursued.

  It was only when the Thugs stopped to rest at last, more than 50 miles from the place where they had slaughtered the bearers, that they realized the true extent of the treasure they had seized. The packs they had taken from the camels’ backs were cut open with knives and swords, and out tumbled 15,000 rupees in coin, a quantity of silver bullion and a small brass box that, forced open, disgorged ‘four diamond rings set with jewels, eight pearls, and one pair of gold bangles’. This plunder was valued at a total of 40,000 rupees. Each man in the party received about 150 rupees and a small quantity of jewels as his share.

  The Burwaha Ghat affair showed the Thugs at their most resourceful. Not only had they tracked a suspicious, highly mobile party of bearers across well over 100 miles of difficult terrain; they had also abandoned the practice of inveigling their victims, knowing that the cautious matchlock-men would never willingly travel with a large body of strangers, so that the murders were actually more like a highway robbery than a typical case of Thuggee. They had trusted to swords and spears, as well as their rumals, and shown that they were willing to draw blood when the potential prize warranted it.*

  The gold and jewels seized at Burwaha Ghat took the total plundered from the seths of central India in a mere three years to more than 90,000 rupees, split between as many as 500 Thugs. It was an enormous sum, and the gangs, well satisfied with their efforts, turned at once for home. They made their way north ‘by regular stages’ along the main roads, anticipating – it seems fair to guess – a warm welcome in their villages. But the wiser heads among them were apprehensive. They knew the seths would never let the theft of so much of their property go unrevenged.

  Few Thugs were deterred by the fear of imprisonment or execution.

  For some, this was a matter of necessity. These men either regarded murder as their trade or could find no better way to feed their families. But most Thugs believed, in any case, that they ran scant risk of conviction. Before the mid-1820s, the handful who had found themselves in court had generally been betrayed by disgruntled colleagues or been caught in possession of some item of loot that they could not account for. It was rare for the police, in either the Company’s territories or the Native States, to actively pursue a gang, much less for them to catch one.

  The failings of the Indian police dated to Mughal times. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the police had been little more than a militia, employed to keep the country’s zamindars in check, and there were never many of them. A pargana of perhaps 200 villages would be policed by a detachment of 40 or 50 matchlock-men stationed in a special compound, called a thanah, from which they issued periodically to overawe recalcitrant landholders. By acting as a brake upon the powers of a district’s zamindars, the police played a vital role in keeping the peace and ensuring the smooth flow of taxes from the provinces. But they were not equipped to solve complex crimes.

  Policing, in the modern sense, remained largely the duty of the village chaukidar, or watchman. Every Indian community had at least one, hired by the local zamindar to guard fields and deal with the minor thefts and robberies that could plague any community. But the chaukidars, too, had their deficiencies. They were so poor that they were vulnerable to bribery. Their responsibilities ended at the edge of their villages, and since there was more often rivalry than cooperation between the watchmen of neighbouring settlements, few rural policemen had much success in catching criminals from outside their own communities. The village chaukidar was neither trained nor a part of any hierarchy; he had few if any resources to draw on, and rarely shared such information as he might possess concerning criminals living in his district with any higher authorities. There was no reason for him to pursue suspects beyond the borders of his village. Worse, each man was so beholden to his zamindar that he naturally felt compelled to connive at any breaches of the law committed by his master.

  The Company’s solution to these problems had been to transform the men of the old thanah system into a modern force that combined the responsibilities of the militia with many of the duties of the village watch. From 1793, its magistrates were required to divide their districts into ‘police jurisdictions’ some 400 square miles in extent, and to recruit an Indian police officer, known as the darogah, to take charge of each. The notion of police compounds was retained, each thanah being manned by 10 or 12 militiamen, paid for by a special police tax to ensure that they were free from the zamindar’s control, and charged with patrolling a substantial swathe of countryside. The darogahs themselves were also given responsibility for solving major crimes, such as murder and cases of banditry, and were required to tour their districts constantly. They possessed the power to decide all but the most serious cases without reference to their magistrate, handing down the appropriate sentences and fines. In order to end the plainly unsatisfactory lack of cooperation between adjoining districts, Company darogahs were also permitted to pursue wanted criminals into neighbouring territories – though not, of course, into the Native States. British Superintendents of Police were appointed to oversee the efficiency of the entire scheme.

  This new system did tackle some of the problems endemic in Mughal times. But it had drawbacks of its own. Each darogah’s territory was so large that it was almost impossible to police properly with the handful of men available. The responsibilities – and thus the income – of the chaukidars, meanwhile, were so severely curtailed that most watchmen became implacably opposed to the darogah and his men, actively hindering their investigations. All in all, the Company scheme placed so much power and responsibility in the hands of the new police that it could only work if the darogahs themselves were outstandingly honest and efficient. Most, unfortunately, were neither.

  The principal difficulty was a simple one: the pay of a darogah was so low that respectable men could rarely be enticed into the ranks of the police. To make matters worse, many magistrates delegated the task of finding a suitable officer to their court clerks, themselves poorly paid and frequently corrupt officials willing to appoint any coarse, ill-educated man who would part with a substantial bribe in order to secure the post. Since these clerks generally possessed the ear of their British masters, and could have an officer dismissed as quickly as he had been recruited, many darogahs found themselves forced to hand over some or even all of their monthly salaries to the clerks simply in order to keep their jobs. The inevitable consequence was that most were not merely badly paid but also fully aware that they could be dismissed at any moment. It is hardly surprising, in such circum
stances, that many took up their posts determined to make as much money as they could as quickly as was practicable.

  By the mid-1820s, the excesses of the Company’s police were already legendary. It was common for darogahs arriving at a village to charge the local people for both their services and their travelling expenses, to insist that food and lodging be provided for their entourage, and to solicit payments from both parties in each case. In many districts, each local watchman was forced to pay his darogah three rupees a year – a good sum in itself, but one that amounted to a substantial income when multiplied by the number of villages in a typical jurisdiction. All in all, the total realized by a successful policeman in the course of a single year could amount to as much as 2,400 rupees – a very handsome sum, particularly when it is compared to the policeman’s nominal annual salary of a mere 300 rupees.

  Nor were innocent villagers the only source of a darogah’s wealth. Many officers accepted bribes from criminals who lived within their districts in return for concealing their existence from the magistrate, and as early as 1807, one British district officer discovered that every darogah in his jurisdiction ‘entertained on a small salary an agent whose duty it was to attend the Magistrate’s Court and communicate to his employer all the happenings there’. The information was then sold to criminals who lived within the darogah’s territory so that ‘the principal dacoits and others have pretty good information of any orders that may be passed respecting them’. The upshot was that malefactors were able to live relatively unmolested in British territory, while Company magistrates themselves had ‘no local knowledge of their districts, nor can they have much information of what passes in the mofussil beyond what the darogahs think fit to report’.

  Abuses of this sort had severe consequences for the efficiency of the Company’s police. In many districts, villagers who discovered that some serious crime had been committed would do almost anything to prevent the authorities getting wind of it, believing that a visit from the police would be a far worse catastrophe than the crime itself. Murders were particularly likely to be covered up, for in the absence of any obvious suspects many darogahs would not only take the opportunity to ransack a village in search of ‘evidence’, taking bribes from those able to pay to escape the attentions of their constables, but would seek to pin the blame for a murder or a robbery on some unfortunate local rather than admit to their superiors that they could not solve the crime. Innumerable Thug crimes were concealed in this way. Terrified villagers preferred to dispose of bodies that they stumbled across in wells or shallow graves, and only rarely reported them. ‘The police,’ one Indian concluded as late as 1833, ‘is as dangerous as any fierce and grotesque creature in this universe, and resembles the frightful description of the hell in legends … It is death to come into contact with.’

  Even the Company’s darogahs, though, took notice when treasure-bearers disappeared. Most of the Thugs’ victims might be travellers without influence or powerful friends, had no particular itinerary, and were often not missed for weeks or even months after their deaths. But the seths’ treasure parties followed predetermined routes, and were expected at their destinations by a certain date. Their disappearances were quickly noticed, and the bankers lost little time in alerting the local authorities. They insisted on thorough investigations, and because they were wealthy and powerful men the police were anxious to oblige. The sums of money involved were so substantial that most seths did not hesitate to commit their own resources to the hunt as well, despatching search parties to track the missing bearers down.

  By an extraordinary chance (or, one is inclined to suspect, thanks to the presence of a Thug spy somewhere in the bank concerned) all three of the great consignments of treasure lost between the years 1826 and 1829 were on their way either to or from the house of Dhunraj Seth. Dhunraj, who came from the town of Oomroutee, on the road from Jhalna to Nagpore, was a man of substantial means. His bank had agents in Bombay and Indore, correspondents in Poona and Nagpore, and ambitions to expand into Saugor and beyond, and he was wealthy enough to finance his own search for his missing bearers. He was also – at a time when even Maharajah Sindhia of Gwalior had no treasury of his own, since ‘all the cash is in the hands of the bankers of the bazaars, on whom the Government obtains credit for certain sums by negotiating loans’ – so important to the native princes of the central provinces who depended on his funds that the Thugs could not rely, as they had always done, on the protection of the petty rajahs and landlords who usually shielded them. In this sense, at least, Dhunraj had greater power than the civil authorities, whether British or Indian, whose interest in Thugs and dacoits ceased at the borders of their own territories.

  The seth’s search for the gangs who had robbed him and killed his men properly began in 1828. Enquiries had evidently been made into the disappearance of the dozen or more men strangled near the Tapti river in 1826, but the Thugs who murdered this party of bearers seem to have buried their victims with some care; their bodies were never found and the circumstances of their deaths remained a mystery. The seven men killed two years later in the Malagow affair, however, were disposed of hurriedly, as frequently occurred when the stranglers were anxious to leave the scene. ‘Some of the bodies,’ Feringeea recalled, ‘were thrown into [a] tank, and the others were slightly buried in a field close by.’

  The consequences were predictable. Only a few days after the murders had been committed, the stench of decomposing corpses drew a peasant from a nearby village to the spot, and he chanced to return home with news of his discovery just as one of Dhunraj’s search parties reached the village. The villagers and the banker’s men returned to the river together, and soon uncovered the remains of a long-haired man in a white shirt, which had been hidden beneath some stones. He was immediately recognized as one of the missing bearers.

  Next day the seth’s men explored the murder site more thoroughly. They were accompanied by several villagers, who joined in with the search. One of these helpers, a man named Oda Patel, later recalled:

  I saw in a hollow place bodies with stones over them. Animals had devoured part of the flesh. We uncovered [them] and took out bones and two or three skulls. About 10 cubits [roughly 17 feet] from this pit, we found bones of two or three other people, but the skeletons were not entire. The hair on the head was about a cubit [20 inches] long, and part being cut off showed that they were men.

  While the hunt was going on, another of the peasants confided that the bodies of five or six people, also supposed to be the victims of murder, had recently been exhumed nearby, close to the road. Malagow lay within the borders of the Bombay Presidency, so the investigation of the scene fell to the Company’s police. But Candeish had long been such a lawless place that the discoveries were viewed, ‘by the native officers, with a great deal of coolness’. In ordinary circumstances the local darogah might well have calculated that he was unlikely to profit in tackling such a tricky case. But at the insistence of the seth’s men a formal report was made to the authorities in Bombay nonetheless.

  The murder site at Burwaha Ghat was uncovered even more promptly. The Thugs involved in this affair had turned the bearers’ three camels loose in the jungle, and their discovery five days after the slaughter of the treasure party soon led the local watchmen to the crude graves that had been prepared nearby. The dead men had been interred at the bottom of a ravine. The first three bodies recovered were, one chaukidar reported,

  under the branches of a Golur-tree, covered with leaves, dry sand, and stones. We took them out, and found all their throats cut, apparently with swords. On one of the bodies was a black coat; and by that coat he was recognised to be Meer Futteh Alee, a merchant of Borhanpore.

  The remaining members of the treasure party were lying 50 yards away – two in a second shallow grave, the others in the open on the bank of a stream, their bodies torn apart by vultures – and checks made with the customs post at the Ghat soon revealed their identities. More importantly, the customs
officers recalled levying duty on a large group of men who passed through at the same time as the bearers. They had been travelling, the records showed, to Bundelcund, and since they were at once suspected of the robbery, four men set off in pursuit. One was a policeman from the local thanah, another Holkar’s agent in the district. The other two were the seth’s men – Beharee Lal and Gomanee Ram, Dhunraj’s gomashtas in Indore.

  Beharee Lal, the senior gomashta, had received specific instructions from his master. His principal duty, it is clear, was not simply to find the men who had stolen the lost treasure, but to recover the whole sum by whatever means were necessary. So, when the Thugs who had fled Burwaha Ghat were at length tracked down to their home villages in the district around Jhansee – a state then nominally an ally of the Company – Beharee went at once to the Resident at Indore for help in securing them. Supplied with an escort of native troops, he seized as many of the men as he could find, and carried them off, together with their families, to a fortress in the town of Alumpore. There they were in effect held hostage while the gomashta negotiated with them for the return of their loot.

  Beharee Lal’s next step was to ascertain what had happened to his master’s property. The Thugs had divided the loot from Burwaha Ghat into 101 shares, so it had been dispersed, but comparatively little had been spent and much was still recoverable. The gomashta secured its return by promising each of his captives their release in exchange for handing over three-quarters of their booty. Others were set free so they could point out places where portions of the cash were hidden. In this way, Beharee managed to unearth perhaps four-tenths of the treasure – the first large Thug haul ever, even partially, recovered.*