Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The sheer variety of the men and women who met their deaths at the hand of Feringeea and his companions in the course of this one journey says something about the vibrancy of the roads of India after a full decade of peace. In addition to the usual mass of undifferentiated ‘travellers’, ‘Marathas’, ‘Rajpoots’ and ‘Brahmins’ despatched in the course of the expedition, the Thugs had murdered two dozen sepoys, eight bearers, six merchants, three pundits (learned teachers of Sanskrit, law and religion), a messenger, a fakir, two shopkeepers, an elephant driver and a bird-catcher. Their victims also included four women who – travelling with men whom the Thugs wished to murder – had been despatched without any apparent compunction.

  Feringeea was by now at the height of his powers. He was still young – perhaps in his mid-twenties – and had yet to accumulate a sizeable number of followers; the gang of 25 men he led in 1827–8 was less than half the size of the largest group of Thugs at large in India that year. Nor is there any evidence that he exercised influence over the movements of gangs other than his own, other than in agreeing with his fellow jemadars, in the loosest terms, the districts most likely to yield returns in the prevailing circumstances. Yet there can be little doubt that Feringeea was one of the most deadly and effective stranglers ever to operate in the mofussil.

  His high caste, practised charm and good looks made him a particularly successful inveigler, but he was a consummate leader, too. Year after year, he and his men killed as many, if not more, travellers than any other group of stranglers. Perhaps even more significantly, Feringeea was unusually well connected. He seems to have known, either by name or reputation, virtually all of the most important Thugs of Hindustan, and – in a career that by now dated back the better part of 15 years – had travelled, at one time or another, with most of them. His knowledge of other gangs, their successes, their members and those members’ families and homes, was unsurpassed.

  The frequency with which Feringeea and his men cooperated with other jemadars on the roads of central India comfirms that loose alliances did exist between gangs quartered close together in the wilds of Bundelcund, or sharing common origins in a village such as Murnae. Feringeea himself often joined forces with a number of other Thug leaders, among them two much older men by the names of Zolfukar and Sheikh Inaent, both of whom were old associates of his family. Zolfukar had taken part, with Feringeea’s father, in a Thug expedition that had occurred as long ago as 1801, while Sheikh Inaent, who was nearly 20 years older than his young colleague, came originally from Sindouse and had fled, with his fathers and brothers, when Halhed invaded the pargana, settling with other Chambel valley Thugs in Bundelcund. Ties of this sort must have proved invaluable when it came to turning several smaller gangs of stranglers into one large group capable of tackling a sizeable party of travellers. But the loose associations that existed between Thug leaders left them ever more vulnerable to the denunciations of approvers. In the course of the cold season of 1829–30, this fatal weakness would at last be fully exploited.

  Feringeea left his home in November 1829 determined to atone for the disastrous outcome of his most recent expedition. He and his gang had strangled a further 77 men and three women in the course of the cold season of 1828–9. But a jemadar named Phoolsa, who came from the same village as Feringeea himself, had been seized by the local militia almost as soon as they had killed their first victim, and had to be abandoned. The travellers who had fallen prey to the Thugs were carrying so little cash that the loot hardly covered the costs of the expedition, and the stranglers’ frustration had only been increased by a chance encounter with another group of Thugs returning from an expedition to Dhoree, in Candeish, with somewhere in excess of 70,000 rupees of gold and jewels taken from yet another party of treasure-bearers. In this same year, Feringeea himself had spent an uncertain four months in Holkar’s prison at Alumpore, placed there no doubt on the orders of Beharee Lal, before contriving to escape. And by then it was so late in the season that most of the jemadar’s followers dispersed not long after he rejoined their gang, leaving him with only two companions. Feringeea had been forced to join Zolfukar’s band simply in order to remain active on the long road home.

  The expedition of 1829–30 opened rather more auspiciously. Feringeea and the 25 men who made up his gang strangled a moonshee, five servants and four Brahmins before they had even crossed the Nerbudda river, and a shopkeeper and three other travellers shortly thereafter, before falling in with Zolfukar and his followers not far from Saugor. The two gangs joined forces, and – now nearly 40 strong – inveigled and murdered another 15 travellers on the roads leading to Bhopal. Sheikh Inaent, meanwhile, was in the adjoining district with his men, working their way along the road towards the town of Sewagunge.

  The Company’s net was, however, now closing fast around the gangs still at large in the half million square miles of the central provinces. The approvers captured by Borthwick and Sleeman a few months earlier had produced a list of 23 leaders quartered in villages around the town of Jhansee; five of the men named had already been arrested, and the remainder were now being sought in the very districts through which the gangs were passing. The captured stranglers had also betrayed the routes most favoured by their comrades and the dates when they were active in the cold season. With this information to hand, it became possible for Sleeman and his colleagues to station parties of sepoys along the roads frequented by the gangs, and to supply some of them, at least, with informants capable of identifying Thugs whom they encountered along the way.

  These tactics were immediately successful. While Feringeea’s men were still in the vicinity of Saugor, word reached them that a jemadar named Sheikh Macub had been seized, together with his men, only a few miles away. A few days later, they encountered another Thug who was fleeing back towards his home in Bundelcund. This man bore even more disturbing news. A day or two earlier, the jemadar of another gang had been seized by Company troops between Jubbulpore and Banda. Once again the arrest had been made uncomfortably close to hand. But it was the identity of the gang’s leader that particularly disturbed Feringeea. Sleeman’s sepoys had captured his old associate, Sheikh Inaent.

  Inaent, travelling with five other jemadars and a combined force of 85 Thugs, had been ‘intending to operate that season along the great road from Mirzapore to Jubbulpore, and strike off to that between Saugor and Calpee’. He and his men had already murdered two shopkeepers, a pair of blacksmiths and a Muslim sepoy carrying a churee, or painted stick – his badge of office – and had just formed designs on a second party of four when they reached a convenient tank and agreed to stop there for the night. ‘We were preparing to go on with them after the third watch,’ Inaent would recall, ‘with the intention of killing them on the road, when we heard the duheea (the cry of the hare), a dreadful omen; and we let them go on, unmolested.’ Even this observance of ritual, however, was not enough to save the gang, for late that same night, when the Thugs halted in order to burn the evidence of their earlier killings, they were overtaken by a group of Company sepoys, accompanied by two approvers by the names of Doulut and Dhun Singh. The soldiers did not linger for very long, but to Inaent’s horror, the approvers decided to stop and rest by the Thugs’ fire. The two men sat down to warm themselves, telling their new comrades that they would catch them up.

  It was now a little before dawn, and both groups were in desperate danger. The two approvers were heavily outnumbered; Inaent and his men could easily have killed them. On the other hand, the sepoys were not yet far away, and the murdered soldier’s clothes and his churee could clearly be seen blazing away in the fire. Doulut and Dhun Singh could scarcely fail to notice and understand such an obvious clue.

  They did not fail. ‘We overheard,’ Inaent recalled, ‘Doulut saying to Dhun Singh: “This stick and these clothes must have belonged to murdered men; and these must be some of our old friends, and a large party of them.” And both seemed to be alarmed at their situation, as they were then alone.’ But r
ather than fall upon their former comrades, whose presence they knew would all too soon be missed, the nervous Thugs decided to make good their escape instead. They packed hurriedly and prepared to leave, but were not quite quick enough. Inaent was in the act of mounting his pony when a second party of sepoys appeared on the horizon:

  I had my foot in the stirrup, when [the approvers] saw part of the advanced guard, and immediately made a rush at our bridles. We drew our swords, but it was too late. Both fell upon me, and I was secured. Had Doulut and Dhun Singh called out, ‘Thugs!’, the guard might have secured a great part of the gang, but they appeared to be panic struck, and unable to speak. By this time the regiment came up, and finding some of the remains of the trooper’s clothes on the fire, the European officers found it difficult to prevent the sepoys from bayoneting me on the spot.

  While Inaent was being secured, the other members of his gang fled into the surrounding jungle and made off. Even while they were evading probable arrest, however, these men continued to murder the travellers they met. The strangler Rambuksh, heading north-east towards the town of Rewah with 25 men, encountered a party of six on their way to the holy city of Benares. Four were Gosains, wandering mendicants ‘remarkable for their wealth’ who often engaged in moneylending and were, thus, likely victims; suspecting that the men had jewels concealed somewhere about their persons, Rambuksh and his companions strangled them, a little before dawn, in a mango grove for possessions worth a total of 900 rupees. The dead men’s corpses were stripped and left exposed and, when the bodies were found by the people of a nearby village, it was observed ‘that their long matted hair seemed to have been opened out and examined; and the only mark of violence that appeared on the bodies was that of a string around the neck, with which they seemed to have been strangled’. Another portion of the dispersed group killed two carriers of Ganges water, a tailor and a woman who were on their way to Banda, and then six more men two days later, the latter murder yielding a further 200 rupees. But Feringeea and Zolfukar were much more cautious. They retreated all the way to Bhopal ‘without killing any person’ before beginning to murder again, contriving, nonetheless, to strangle another 14 travellers, in five separate affairs, by the time they finally found their way back to the Nerbudda close to the town of Hoshangabad.

  The two jemadars had shaken off Sleeman’s pursuit. And for all its difficulties, the cold season of 1829–30 had at last begun to produce better returns than they had endured 12 months earlier. The Thugs must have hoped that they could continue unmolested, and be spared the alarms and arrests that had certainly begun to fray the nerves of all their men. But it was now, in the last weeks of 1829, that things began to go still more badly wrong for Feringeea and his followers.

  Suddenly and without warning their world was filled with portents of disaster. First, ‘to our great surprise and consternation’, Zolfukar’s mare dropped a foal – a serious matter, since the blood and mucus associated with the birth contaminated the ritual purity of the Hindu Thugs and placed them all ‘under the eetuk’, a religious proscription that made it impossible for the men to continue the expedition.* Then, when the gangs had parted company and begun their long journeys home, something altogether worse occurred. Feringeea’s men were resting by a river eight miles from the town of Bhilsa, and their jemadar was bathing in the stream, when all distinctly heard the sound Thugs dreaded more than any other. Clearly – though it was the middle of the day – the hooting call of a baby owl echoed overhead.

  Belief in omens and portents was very common at this time. The lives of ordinary villagers could be disrupted or cut short in so many ways – famine, disease, drought, the failure of the crop or the exactions of landlords – that peasants, travellers and merchants alike were only too anxious to place their faith in systems of prophecy and divination that offered guidance to an uncertain future. Farmers watched for signs while they tilled their fields. Townsmen consulted the auguries before embarking on a business venture, and hunters interpreted the cries of wild animals as omens for the success or failure of their efforts.

  Superstitious thugs and dacoits – who depended heavily on luck to bring them worthwhile hauls of plunder and who risked capture at every turn – were as susceptible to these omens as any peasant. Some dacoit gangs firmly believed that certain days of the week were luckier than others for committing robberies, and others held that the sound of a bull bellowing, or a man sneezing, was so unlucky that they should abandon whatever dacoity they was planning. The Thugs, similarly, swore by an elaborate array of omens,* which guided them from first to last on their expeditions.

  The movements and the sound of wild animals were the most important signs. When the members of a gang first left their village, Sleeman was told by one approver, they would go a little way along the road they planned to take, and wait until they heard a partridge call. If the cry came from the right, the expedition could begin. If it were heard coming from the left, the men would return home and begin again the next day on a different road. The Thugs would also halt at the first river or stream they came to, awaiting guidance as to whether to proceed, and in some gangs further auguries were taken at the start of each new day. A few men threw dice to determine the best time to commence an expedition; others gargled sour milk each morning and spat it out in the belief that this would guarantee them luck; while

  if any Thug is heard to break wind while they are at their resting place, dividing the booty, it is considered a very bad omen. They remove the offender from among them, and kindle a fire upon the place where he sat, and quench it with water, saying: ‘As the signs of the water disappear, so the threatened evil passes away.’ Five blows of a shoe inflicted upon the head of the offending person mitigates the evil to be apprehended, but cannot avert it altogether.

  Many portents, naturally, were interpreted as warnings. Some travellers who had fallen into the clutches of a gang of stranglers were saved from imminent death when the scream of a kite was heard in the camp and interpreted as a signal for their would-be murderers to hasten away from the bele immediately. A wolf crossing the road was a signal for the whole gang to go back and take another road, and the call of a jackal during the day, or a partridge at night, was a more general instruction to flee the whole district. One old Thug who fell into British hands around this time impressed the officers who interrogated him with his fervent belief in the dire significance of the latter omen, having once been a member of a party that heard a partridge call at two in the morning; he and his companions had made off at once in great alarm, but before they could get very far they were surrounded and arrested by a party of troops in the service of the local rajah, and 45 members of the gang were subsequently blown from the mouths of cannon.*

  Each gang seems to have had its own soothsayer – normally a Brahmin – who bore responsibility for the interpretation of portents. ‘The Ass, the Deer, and the Jackal, are considered the auspicious four-legged beasts,’ FC Smith was told, ‘and omens from any of these are more valued than the call of one hundred of the most auspicious of the feathered tribe.’ Even then, however, the interpretation of the animals’ calls and movement depended greatly upon whether they were seen or heard to the left or to the right. Sounds heard from the left while the gangs were on the march were generally interpreted as an instruction to go on, and those coming from the right as warnings to stop or retreat. When a group of Thugs reached a possible campsite, the omens were reversed, and a sound coming from the right was regarded as a good sign, and one from the left as an instruction to go on. To complicate matters further, many gangs believed that it was dangerous to begin an expedition until one sign had been received from the right and a second from the left; this ‘signified that the deity took them first by the right hand and then by the left to lead them on’.

  For all these complexities, however, the Thugs could be surprisingly pragmatic when it came to interpreting portents. A warning to abandon an expedition and return to their villages might be obeyed if it was rece
ived only a day or two after their departure; one heard or seen when a gang was hundreds of miles from home might be dealt with merely by retreating a stage or two or making an offering. Similarly, the firm belief that a turban catching fire was so terrible an omen that disaster could only be averted by waiting seven days before beginning a journey afresh did not apply when far from home: ‘If they had travelled for some distance, an offering of goor was made, and the owner of the turban alone returned.’ Occasionally a whole succession of portents were simply ignored, and although many Thugs could cite examples of the awful fates that had befallen comrades foolish enough to proceed in the face of such warnings, it seems that only a minority of jemadars would willingly sacrifice a prize that was almost within their grasp in such circumstances.*