Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Even when they were at Jubbulpore, Thug informants had to be housed separately from other prisoners, not least to save them from the vengeance of the men whom they betrayed. No fixed punishment for betraying a gang, it should be said, was ever exacted on traitorous Thugs by their old comrades. But the earliest approvers plainly did fear the vengeance of those whom they betrayed. ‘Thugs will strangle a King’s Evidence,’ one active murderer confirmed, while Syeed Ameer Ali begged earnestly for protection after he was captured:

  All I require, should my life be spared, is permission to live in irons or in any situation where I may be protected from the numerous stranglers who inhabit [these] districts, as they will exert every endeavour to destroy me. I have already undermined all their houses, and have gone too far in my information against them to recede. No person engaged with these people has ever hitherto said so much; as everyone knows how revengeful these stranglers are … I have nothing more to ask, but will do all I can in putting a stop to the work of my late friends, the stranglers, as my safety now depends upon their destruction.

  Once the system was fully established, new approvers could be questioned almost immediately concerning the whereabouts of their closest associates. This minimized the chance that wanted Thugs would hear of the latest arrests and flee their homes, and sometimes made it possible for captured Thugs to lure their former friends into the Company’s hands using much the same cunning they had previously employed in inveigling travellers. When the strangler Ramzan, nominally a revenue collector in Oudh, indicated a willingness to turn approver, he was (he later testified)

  asked if I could point out Buhram Jemadar, a notorious leader of Thugs for whose seizure a reward of 100 rupees had been offered by the British Government. I said, ‘Yes,’ and that very night led forth an English guard of eight sepoys to the village of Sohanee. I went to the house where Buhram Jemadar slept. Often has he led our gangs! I awoke him – he knew me well, and came outside to me. It was a cold night, so, under the pretence of warming myself, but in reality to have light for his seizure by the guard, I lighted some straw and made a blaze. As Buhram and I were warming ourselves, the guard drew around us. I said to them, ‘This is Buhram,’ and he was seized just as a cat seizes a mouse. Buhram immediately confessed that he was a Thug, saying, ‘I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have Thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.’

  Some hint of the motivations that led the Thug approvers to serve Sleeman so readily can be found in this statement by Buhram. We have already seen that some Thugs regarded their involvement with the gangs as a form of military service, depending on their jemadars and, ultimately, the zamindars and petty rajahs who protected them for food and money. Thuggee was no more than a form of employment for them, a means of providing for their families. And as Sleeman evidently recognized, at least some of his approvers saw the transfer of their loyalties from the Thug gangs to the Company as no more disgraceful than the actions of a mercenary selling his services to a new master. ‘We … are become servants of Government,’ one explained. Some of Sleeman’s prisoners may even have seen their work as a form of salaried employment, for as well as being clothed, housed and fed, their families received a Company stipend and they were even able to send money to their relatives by earning the rewards offered for the capture of leading Thugs. The men of the remaining gangs, announced the approver Rambux, ‘are all my enemies now!’

  Not every approver was arrested in the course of a Thug expedition. Other tactics, some of them of dubious legitimacy, were tried with some success, as Futty Khan, one of the most notorious stranglers in Oudh, found to his distress. Futty had been an unusually active jemadar for two decades, and had ‘just completed, with his gang, the murder of three entire families’ when news reached him that his wife and three children had been seized by a party of the Company’s nujeebs, the mounted irregulars most often used to pursue the Thugs. Told his own family would not be released until he gave himself up,

  I returned home and in about a month after this, my last murder, I delivered myself up, confessing my crime. I at once turned King’s Evidence, and within three days pointed out to the guard the following Thugs, who were seized, namely Maigal and Ameer, now in gaol here.

  When I went to catch Maigal, he was at his own house and readily came at my call; but when he saw irons on my legs, great was his consternation! He knew that I had come as an approver to seize him! The lamentation which he and his wife made soon filled the whole village with news of his capture. He is a well-known Thug! He confessed on reaching Lucknow.

  The initial progress of the anti-Thug campaign was swift. By the end of 1829, Sleeman had around a hundred newly detained stranglers in custody at Saugor and Jubbulpore. That total was almost quadrupled within 12 months, and as the evidence supplied by the approvers was sifted and checked, hundreds of warrants were issued for the arrest of suspected Thugs. Sleeman and Smith occasionally went further, too, from the very start of their campaign, sending their approvers out in the company of nujeeb patrols armed with what were known as ‘general warrants’ – papers that gave the troops authority to detain any man pointed out by a Thug informer. The use of such warrants soon proved controversial, even in the comparatively lawless central provinces, not least because unscrupulous approvers were suspected of using them to have their enemies arrested. Dozens of other suspects were detained on ‘mere hearsay’ obtained from spies and prostitutes, and police officers, too, were far from immune to the temptation that the warrants posed. Some used them as instruments of extortion, threatening to arrest men who refused to pay them bribes, and even FC Smith – whose signature appeared on many of the papers – had to admit that general warrants did ‘occasionally create great evils’. There were similar problems with the identity papers Sleeman drew up for his approvers, confirming that they were exempt from execution or transportation to a penal colony overseas. On at least one occasion it was discovered that convicted Thugs were loaning such papers to old associates who used them for ‘bad purposes’.

  The approvers sent out on the roads in search of other Thugs were given one other important task. It became a grim routine for them to prove the truth of their testimonies by supervising the exhumation of their victims’ bodies, and for the identity of the cadavers to be proved, if possible, by articles found on their bodies and identified by relatives or friends. ‘Often,’ noted Sleeman, ‘I have seen incredulous visitors at my court house, come to seek information about missing relatives, burst into uncontrolled tears at the sight of some small possession, which had been taken from the corpse and which they instantly recognised.’

  Sleeman’s comment sheds a rare shaft of light on the human cost exacted by the depredations of the Thugs. In the midst of so much murder, the voices of the stranglers’ living victims are heard only occasionally in the Company’s records. Bereaved relatives can be glimpsed here and there, ‘setting up a most dismal yell’ when the bodies of their husbands or children are discovered, or recognizing an article of equipment or clothing recovered from bodies found in a nullah or along the road. But their testimonies were seldom put down in writing, and the grief that they experienced was all too often forgotten then, and still is now, by those investigating Thuggee.

  No account of the Thug gangs is, nonetheless, complete without some reference to the human cost exacted in the course of decades of brutal murder. Consider, for example, the experiences of Ruckbur Singh, a Rajput and brother to a man strangled by Thugs near Ellichpore in 1823. Five weeks after the murder had taken place, Singh became seriously alarmed at his brother’s non-appearance and set off to search the road on which he had been travelling. After making fruitless enquiries for several days, the Rajput was close to giving up the hunt when he fell in with a party of the Company’s sepoys conveying a group of captured Thugs towards Jhalna. These men ‘gave me a full account of my brother’s murder, and his servant Khooba’s murder’, and pointed out the well into which they
had pitched the bodies of a large group of their victims. Investigating the spot more closely, Ruckbur Singh soon uncovered an horrific sight:

  I found five skulls close to the well, and eight skulls in the bottom of the well, into which I dived repeatedly and took up all the bones I could find. As it was impossible to distinguish my brother’s skull and bones, I collected all the bones and placed them with the thirteen skulls on a pile of wood, which I prepared agreeably to the rites of my caste and burnt them all together.

  Then there was the case of the Cotwal of Sopur, a Maratha from Gwalior whose 17-year-old son fell into the hands of a Thug gang while on his way to fetch his bride around the year 1828. The boy was expertly inveigled, and disclosed that he was carrying a purse full of gold mohurs to defray his party’s expenses. That was enough to seal his fate, and the whole group was strangled, but jackals disinterred the bodies soon after they were buried and the murder was discovered. ‘Going back,’ one Thug involved in the case recalled, ‘we found the uncle of the youth sitting in front of the door, weeping and lamenting the loss of his nephew … The father died of grief soon after. He could never be persuaded to eat anything after he learnt of the fate of his only son, and soon died.’

  One further example will stand for the myriad of mute testimonies that never found their way into the Company’s official records. An Indore merchant by the name of Humeerchund became concerned for the safety of his brother and brother-in-law, who vanished, in 1829, while transporting a large load of English chintz to Sehore. After a long and anxious wait for news, he learned

  that the bodies of some persons had been found about three months previously near the Gola pass … A boy observed a number of jackals and vultures near the pass, and had gone there in expectation of finding some dead animal and getting its skin. On reaching the spot, however, he found the bodies of two men which had been buried under a heap of stones so imperfectly that the wild beasts had afterwards dragged them out and almost entirely devoured them. The boy gave notice to the villagers, who went to the pass and buried the remains of the bodies. On hearing this account, I went to the Gola pass in company with the [witness], who pointed out the spot where the bodies had been found. A large stone which lay near the place had some marks of blood upon it, and on removing it I found a shoe, which I at once recognised as having belonged to my brother, and I wept bitterly.

  In this case, rather unusually, Humeerchund was able to confront his brother’s murderers in court, for some time later a Thug gang was apprehended nearby, and one of its jemadars was found to be wearing a distinctive ungurka (jacket), cut from chintz and lined with blue cotton, which had belonged to the strangled man. It had been a present from his uncle, a fellow Thug, ‘and rather than alter so pretty a garment, he ran the risk of wearing it till he was taken’.

  Even though he knew his brother was dead, the shock of seeing his jacket produced in evidence was too much for the merchant. When the ungurka was brought out, Humeerchund ‘immediately recognised it, and was so much affected as scarcely to be able to speak’. And ‘as we had no doubts that our relations had been murdered’, his deposition concluded, ‘we performed their funeral rites according to the customs of our sect’.

  The arrests of two large gangs of Thugs by Borthwick and Sleeman, coming so close together and at a time when the Company was at last receptive to the idea that such bands of murderers existed, caused a considerable sensation.

  ‘Few who were in India at that period,’ wrote Meadows Taylor from his cantonment, ‘will ever forget the excitement which the discovery occasioned in every part of that country, [though] it was utterly discredited by the magistrates of many districts, who could not believe that this silently destructive system could have worked without their knowledge.’ The newspapers were suddenly full of accounts of Thugs. Tales of silent murder became fashionable for a time. The Company’s prisons were scoured for captured stranglers and concerted efforts were, for the first time, made to detain more.

  ‘I became very busy,’ Taylor recalled a few years later. ‘Those famous discoveries in regard to the practice of Thuggee had recently been made at Jubbulpore and Saugor by Captain Sleeman, which made a sensation in India never to be forgotten. By the confessions of one gang, who were apprehended, many Thugs in Central India were brought to justice; and at last the Thugs of the Deccan were denounced by these approvers, and as many lived near Hingolee, they were at once arrested. Day after day I recorded tales of murder, which, though horribly monotonous, possessed an intense interest; and as fast as new approvers came in, new mysteries were unravelled and new crimes confessed.’

  Much remained to be done. Progress, even with the help of the first approvers, was slow at first. But Sleeman, whose headquarters at Jubbulpore were ideally positioned to place him at the centre of the great Thug hunt, could see a way forward. What was needed was an informant capable of betraying not just one gang but many, a man so well informed of the plans of his fellow jemadars that he could secure dozens, even hundreds of stranglers in a single season. Feringeea could play this role. But Sleeman would find himself tested to the utmost in his attempts to capture him.

  * Syeed Ameer Ali, for example, one of the most prolific of all Thug murderers, lived in Rampoora, near the Jumna. But in the course of just one of his expeditions, the jemadar covered a vast swathe of territory: he committed his first murders around Gwalior, then moved south to Nagpore and criss-crossed the central provinces, finally heading north through Jubbulpore, crossing into Oudh, and concluding his expedition in the vicinity of Lucknow.

  ** ‘My district,’ wrote Meadows Taylor, a junior officer in the Nizam’s lands in Hyderabad, ‘was much cut up by private estates, whose owners or managers defied or evaded the orders of the Nizam’s executive government, and would only obey their own masters, some of whom were powerful nobles in Hyderabad who jealously resented any interference by the executive minister, while their agents were well-known protectors of thieves and robbers, whose booty they shared.’

  * The Governor General had spent the years 1803 to 1806 in the Presidency of Madras, where he had signed into law an edict compelling the sepoys of the Deccan to wear hats instead of turbans and to decorate those hats with leather cockades. This order had been widely regarded as anathema in a country where a hat was the symbol of a Christian convert and leather was not only an abomination to all Hindus but an object of suspicion to Muslim soldiers, who thought that the material in question might be pigskin rather than cow hide. The consequence had been a terrifying mutiny, the most serious to occur in India before the great rebellion of 1857. Bentinck – held personally responsible for the debacle – was recalled to London in disgrace and never entirely recovered from the shame of his early failure.

  * An opium-based drink, also known as bhang.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Omen of the Owl

  ‘jeetae purjana – taking omens’

  Feringeea and his companions were not at first particularly concerned by the betrayals of Amanoolah and the other approvers. They could not believe that a single confession, or even the efforts of several turncoats, could eradicate a system so widespread and successful as Thuggee. Both the Company and the native rulers of India had, after all, achieved little in the past other than the destruction of a few isolated Thug gangs, and each successive effort had – as one eminent strangler observed – ‘ended in nothing but the punishment of a few’. Why should this new campaign be any different?

  In some respects, indeed, the Thugs were stronger in the late 1820s than they had ever been. An extended economic depression had swollen their ranks to the point where it became possible to spread a net of scouts and spies across an appreciable area of country, ensnaring more potential victims than had previously seemed possible and, just as importantly, the return of peace to the central provinces meant an increase in traffic on the roads. Not all of these new travellers were wealthy – many were fleeing precisely the same financial distress that had driven many of the Thugs th
emselves to crime – but, all in all, more people, and probably more money, had begun to criss-cross India than ever before. The gangs reaped the benefits. ‘Before the establishment of tranquillity over the country,’ one aged strangler recalled,

  our excursions were neither carried out to so great a distance as they have since been, nor were so lucrative or certain, for in those days travellers, particularly with much property, seldom ventured to go from one place to another without being well escorted or in large parties, and we feared the Pindaris and other mounted plunderers as much as other classes did.

  Feringeea profited from these improved conditions as much as any other Thug. During the cold season of 1827–8, he and his gang of 25 men had travelled south from their homes in Bundelcund, crossing the Malwa plateau into Gujerat and proceeding south into Candeish and the lands that had proved so lucrative for them the previous year. In the course of this one expedition, they had strangled some 105 men and women in 32 different affairs. It is unlikely they would have met so many worthwhile victims even a few years earlier, when the country was still blighted in the aftermath of the Maratha and Pindari wars.

  None of the murders committed in the course of this expedition had been particularly noteworthy in itself, and the largest number of victims despatched on a single occasion had been no more than nine, but the gang seized plenty of gold and silver nonetheless. The largest single haul had been a consignment of silver valued at 4,000 rupees, taken from two treasure-bearers killed outside Aurangabad. But an additional 1,100 rupees was discovered among the possessions of a solitary thief whom Feringeea himself cornered in an old graveyard close to Oomroutee and personally strangled.* His gang had also murdered four unlucky drovers and appropriated the two bullock-loads of copper coins they had been conveying north, and added several hundred ‘strings of small pearls’, 15 of large pearls, a gilded necklace and a quantity of coral from the body of another victim. This loot had to be split with eight other Thug gangs, amounting in all to about 190 men, with whom Feringeea had cooperated at various times during the four months he and his followers spent on the road. Even so, allowing for the numerous small sums and pieces of loot taken from the remainder of the dead, the Thugs’ haul must have been worth a total of nearly 6,000 rupees, leaving a most respectable total of nearly 30 rupees for each member of the expedition.