Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

Next, the seth’s man turned his thoughts to ways of securing the 25,000 rupees that remained outstanding from the Burwaha Ghat affair. Much of this money had either been spent or was in the hands of men who were not in his custody. But the gomashta now realized that there were other ways of obtaining reparation – and also making money for himself. Chance had placed him at the head of a gang of able Thugs, who all depended on him for their freedom. Those who would not cooperate with him, or who could not find the money he demanded, risked being returned to jail. Even those who had handed back their share of the banker’s property remained vulnerable to blackmail, for Beharee’s word – and of course his money – would probably be taken over theirs in any local court of law. The Jhansee Thugs thus became, in effect, the gomashta’s subjects, and he now put them back to work.

  Beharee’s plan was as straightforward as it was brutal. The men who had been released into his custody were, notionally, employed merely to recover the money stolen at Burwaha Ghat. In practice, however, they were sent out to ply their trade of murder once again. A huge share – 60 per cent – of the proceeds of each new expedition was made over to the banker’s man, and he kept some of this commission for himself and returned the rest to Dhunraj Seth. The Jhansee men had, thus, in effect, secured their freedom by selling the gomashta an option on the proceeds of their future murders, and they had little choice but to Thug in order to pay him.

  It was not long before Beharee Lal began applying the same methods to men who had played no part in the Candeish or Burwaha Ghat affairs. He discovered it was possible to secure the release of other criminals into his custody simply by alleging they had been members of the gangs he sought, and that these men were so anxious to escape jail that they were willing to pay him for their freedom. After a while, he even established a tribunal of his own at Alumpore and began to ‘bind and loose at [his] discretion all the Thugs [he] can get hold of without check or control from the Ruler of the country’. Disquieting rumours began to be heard that Beharee had surrounded himself with a number of notorious jemadars, turning himself into the ‘King of Thugs’. The gomashta was now busily directing the fortunes of their united gangs.

  Much of what was whispered about Beharee Lal was true. ‘He got,’ one of the men involved later recalled,

  a good deal of money by procuring the release of all the noted Thugs then in confinement at different places. He got nine thousand rupees for the release of Dhurum Khan Jemadar from Gwalior, on the pretence that he was engaged in the affair, when he had been in prison long before … Such was Dhunraj Seth’s influence that he could get a gang released from prison in any part of India; and for some time his agent Beharee Lal had always half a dozen of the principal Thug leaders about his person, and used to attend all our marriages and festivals. What his master got, we know not, but he got a great deal of our money.

  The Thugs’ raids on seth treasure-bearers had another consequence. They finally compelled the British to take notice of their activities in the Native States.

  For the better part of two decades, the Company’s policy regarding Thugs had been alarmingly pragmatic. Magistrates and district officers from Madras to Hindustan had striven to eradicate Thuggee from their territories. But they had made no attempt to destroy the practice utterly. Experience implied that was impossible. Elusive stranglers who slipped easily from one jurisdiction to the next were simply too hard to catch, and imprisonment was costly. On the whole it had seemed enough to drive suspected Thugs into the Native States and out of British jurisdiction, to make them someone else’s problem.

  The furore that followed the plundering of Dhunraj Seth’s treasure parties changed all this. The officers of Saugor & Nerbudda could scarcely fail to notice the frantic activity that followed the disappearance of Dhunraj’s men, the search parties and the exhumations. Beharee Lal had made it his business to stay in close communication with the Resident at Indore, and Dhunraj himself appealed directly to the Company authorities at Jubbulpore for help. Before long Francis Curwen Smith, the Governor General’s new agent in the central provinces, had found himself involved in efforts to recover the Thug loot, British troops and Company police were alerted to look out for the murderous gangs, and spies were sent into Beharee Lal’s encampment at Alumpore to discover what was going on at the gomashta’s Thug tribunal.

  Still the British kept a certain distance. Burwaha Ghat did not lie within the Company’s borders, so the dead treasure-bearers were not really their responsibility. Dhunraj was the injured party in the case, and the citizens of Jhansee were subjects of the local rajah. Stranglers picked up in Saugor & Nerbudda on suspicion of the theft of seth remittances were, thus, not committed to the Company’s courts, but sent on to Beharee’s tribunal in the Native States for trial.

  Now that British interest had been piqued, however, awareness of the Thugs’ activities increased and officers in both the Bombay and the Bengal presidencies found themselves drawn into the seths’ obsessive quest for vengeance. Recognition that numerous gangs of stranglers were at large on roads that led through Company territory was accompanied by acknowledgement that British subjects, too, were falling victim to their stratagems.

  This was seen as something of an affront. But it was not until the early months of 1829 that the capture of a large Thug band – detained by great good fortune on the Malwa plateau – at last offered real hope that steps could be taken to end the menace of Thuggee.

  * Ambush was, indeed, a technique the Thugs used frequently enough to have a slang expression for it. The term khomusna, meaning ‘to rush upon travellers when there is no time for the ordinary ceremonies of murder’, was employed to describe such incidents.

  * Details of the men suspected of the Candeish thefts having been circulated to the Company’s officers throughout central India, a further 4,000 rupees (part of the loot from the Malagow affair) was subsequently located by the Company’s Resident at Gwalior, and another 1,400 rupees’ worth of gold seized from four men arrested at Jubbulpore. This money was returned to Oomroutee.

  CHAPTER 11

  Approvers

  ‘karhoo – one who betrays or molests Thugs’

  Captain William Borthwick, the Company’s Political Agent in Holkar’s lands, had been in India for nearly 15 years. He had served most of that time in the Madras Presidency, transferring to the central provinces at the end of 1828. And he had never, in all that time, encountered a confessed Thug.

  He had come close to them, without knowing it, on numerous occasions. The gangs travelled far and wide in the course of their expeditions.* Borthwick’s position in one of the largest of the Native States significantly improved the likelihood that he would stumble across them. Several bands had boltholes in the vicinity to which they retreated whenever they became aware of unusual activity in the Company’s lands, knowing full well that British sepoys were forbidden from pursuing their quarry into the Native States that lay scattered like patchwork across India’s central belt.** But Borthwick, who wielded considerable influence around Indore, was less constrained than the majority of his colleagues. Defeat in the Maratha wars had not only reduced the once mighty Holkar to the status of an unwilling ally of the Company, but also forced him to accept the presence of small parties of British–officered sepoys within his borders.

  Even so, Borthwick had had no prior intimation that a substantial gang of Thugs was crossing his district when, late in the cold weather of 1829, the headman of a nearby village hurried into his headquarters bearing urgent information. A ‘band of villains’, Borthwick was told, had entered the area two days earlier and encamped in a mango grove some 15 miles away. Men from the village who passed their campsite that same evening had seen a small party of merchants being entertained within the grove. When the same villagers returned the next morning, the merchants had disappeared. But how, the headman wondered, could that be possible, when their horses and two large packs of goods had been spotted in the possession of their hosts?

  Borthwick guessed
immediately that the mysterious men in the grove were Thugs. But actually securing so large a gang of stranglers was still no easy matter. Their band was, the headman guessed, at least 70 men strong. They had more than a day’s head start. And the only force immediately available to Borthwick was a detachment of sepoys numbering fewer than a dozen men.

  Borthwick responded to this conundrum with a piece of improvisation that would eventually earn him praise for coolness from the Government of India. Plainly such a small group of soldiers could have no hope of detaining so large a group. His men might well be in great danger if they attempted it. But what if he could make the Thugs come to his camp willingly? Was there perhaps some way in which a gang of practised deceivers might be themselves deceived?

  So it was that two days later, outside the village of Dekola, four stages from Indore, a large body of Thugs was overhauled by a small mounted patrol. ‘They came upon us,’ one strangler remembered,

  and said that Captain Borthwick had heard that we were carrying opium out of Malwa, and they had been sent to stop us. On hearing this, our minds were relieved from suspicion or fear that the object of the horsemen was any other than what they professed it to be, or had any reference to our habits or pursuits. We readily consented to return with the horsemen who we thought would of course allow us to depart after searching us and finding we had no opium.

  Another member of the band added: ‘We were without fear of any mischance befalling us. We gladly accompanied them.’ It was only ‘after our arrival there’, he said in indignation, ‘that we learned the true cause of our being arrested – not, however, before the authorities and the inhabitants of the town had joined in aid of the horsemen to secure us and prevent our escape.’

  No fewer than 71 Thugs – the greater part of a substantial gang that had strangled and robbed its way from Bundelcund to Baroda over the preceding weeks, killing no fewer than 31 travellers along the way – were taken by ‘this subterfuge’. They were carrying only a little of their loot, having sent an advance party back to their villages only a few days earlier with the bulk of their plunder. But enough evidence of their murderous activities – stolen horses, swords, brass pots, cloths and turbans – remained for the most serious suspicions to be affixed to them.

  ‘We of course loudly protested our innocence,’ a Thug calling himself Amanoolah continued. And had all the members of the party continued to do so, Borthwick may well have found it difficult to prove that the loot he had discovered in their baggage was indeed the product of murder. Certainly the stranglers themselves knew that persistent denial was their best defence. ‘It is not usual,’ a second member of the party by the name of Khaimraj explained, ‘with persons of our character when apprehended to make disclosures from intimidation or the application of severities; indeed I was firmly resolved to keep silent.’ But Amanoolah – a man 50 years of age, but one who had been a Thug for a mere two years – found his resolve wavering. ‘Seeing that the horsemen were deaf to all our entreaties and threats,’ he confessed, ‘I became alarmed and, as the only chance that appeared to me of saving my own life, determined to admit the truth and make a full disclosure of our habits and acts. I accordingly went immediately to the horsemen and offered on assurance of my life being spared to make a faithful avowal of all our doings.’

  Seeing what had happened, two other Thugs swiftly followed suit. Even the staunch Khaimraj saw little point in maintaining his silence in such circumstances. ‘Finding that two or three of my companions had already told all,’ he conceded, ‘and had pointed out the spots, and bodies of the different individuals whom we had murdered during the last few days … I considered it would be very foolish to abide by my resolution, particularly when I found I might probably save my life by a full and true confession, while remaining silent would not avail me or my companions anything.’

  The confessions given to Captain Borthwick by his informants Amanoolah and Khaimraj were lengthy and detailed. They resulted in the exhumation of 12 bodies and the arraignment of the entire gang on charges of murder and robbery – the greatest success the Company had enjoyed over the Thugs in many years. Despite this, the depositions that Borthwick sent to Calcutta would probably have resulted in the conviction of this single gang of stranglers only. But chance, and a certain opportunism, now involved William Sleeman in the budding anti-Thug campaign.

  News of the capture of the Malwa Thugs reached Bengal midway through 1829, causing an appreciable stir. Even at this late date, however, the Company’s most senior officers still viewed the apprehension of the stranglers as no more than a welcome opportunity to make an example of some guilty men. The correspondence that passed back and forth between Calcutta and Holkar’s court over the next few weeks concerned itself more with the details of where and how to try and execute the Thugs than it did with discussion of the opportunities that Borthwick’s exploits might have opened up. No one in authority considered that the depositions recorded by Borthwick might provide the tools required to launch an anti-Thug campaign.

  It took the intervention of India’s new Governor General to take matters further. William Cavendish Bentinck, who had arrived in Calcutta in the latter half of 1828, was quite possibly the most reserved and unpretentious man ever to be appointed to the post. Shyness ran through his distinguished family like a sinew, rendering him almost incapable of showing ordinary human warmth. His long oval face – tending to jowliness now that he was in his fifties – seldom betrayed a flicker of emotion, and his uncommonly lanky legs (‘so long that everyone would like to have him as a second in a duel, to pace out the ground’) bore him rapidly away from any prospect of confrontation. Yet reserved as he was, Bentinck was nonetheless a driven man, possessed by the need to erase a stain left on his reputation by an earlier sojourn in India.* Unlike his predecessor, Lord Amherst (‘a most amiable but imbecile governor’, under whose uninspiring rule British India had more or less stagnated since the early 1820s), the new Governor General had thus disembarked in Calcutta implacably determined to leave his mark on the administration.

  Bentinck wasted little time in turning on the Thugs. First, he and his advisors recognized that it had become simply too easy for the stranglers to slip from one state into its neighbour to evade pursuit. The best way to dispose of this problem, they decided, was for the British to assume responsibility for pursuing Thugs wherever they operated. If that meant passing out of Saugor & Nerbudda, well … the rajahs’ ruffled feelings could be soothed or, if need be, ignored. Next, Bentinck authorized Company officers to try captured Thugs, no matter where their crimes had been committed. This was a more serious breach of existing law and customs, for the British had hitherto claimed no right to so much as detain a suspect whom they could not prove had robbed or killed within their borders. But there was, nonetheless, some justification for a change in policy. ‘The hand of these inhuman monsters being against every one,’ the Governor reasoned, ‘and there being no country … in which they have not committed murder … they may be considered like Pirates, to be placed without the pale of social law, and be subjected to condign punishment by whatever authority they may be seized and convicted.’

  The implication of these policies was clear. Thuggee itself was again under attack. But Bentinck was far too busy in Bengal to lead the new campaign himself. Since Borthwick’s captives had been picked up deep in the heart of the mofussil, responsibility for their prosecution thus passed down to the most senior British officer in the central provinces: FC Smith, the Company’s Agent in Saugor & Nerbudda.

  At first, the anti-Thug campaign made little progress. Smith – a stiff, pedantic stickler of a man burdened, like Bentinck himself, with a vast amount of work – accepted his commission grudgingly, and showed little immediate interest in implementing the new policies. But he did at least ensure that an official print, prepared on the Governor General’s orders and filled with excerpts from the statements made by Amanoolah and his friends, was distributed to every British officer within the cen
tral provinces. The circular was designed to alert Company officials to the activities and methods of the stranglers and so make it more likely that further arrests would be made; most of the officials who received it, it seems safe to say, scanned it briefly and forgot it, as they did other missives from the government. But one, at least, did not. At his headquarters in the heart of Saugor & Nerbudda, William Sleeman read of Borthwick’s exploits and the capture of the Thugs and saw in them unlooked-for opportunity. Here was a chance to take on interesting work. Here, too, was the prospect of doing some good for ordinary Indians. But there was something else as well. Borthwick’s achievement in Malwa had won him praise from Bentinck himself. A similar success, Sleeman was quick to realize, could benefit his own career enormously.

  Sleeman was working as district officer in Jubbulpore when the Thug circular appeared. The district was larger, more densely populated, and in some ways more demanding to administer than Nursingpore. Sleeman had been burdened by the difficulties of collecting rents and taxes from the district, by a long series of disputes with the neighbouring Rajah of Nagpore, and by a catastrophic drought that struck his town in 1827. He had also been forced to spend a lengthy period of sick leave on the island of Mauritius, a sojourn that resulted, in turn, in marriage, for the island – taken from the French after the Napoleonic Wars – contained (as Sleeman confided to his friend Charles Fraser, who was magistrate at Jubbulpore) ‘a vast number of pretty girls [who] all dress better than English girls of the same class in society’. One of them, a certain Amélie de Fontenne, the dark-haired and strikingly intelligent daughter of an exiled French nobleman, appeared a few years later in central India, searching for new strains of sugar cane that might be introduced to her father’s plantations. Her enquiries led her to Sleeman; they renewed their acquaintance, fell in love, and married at Jubbulpore in 1828.