Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Only the direst auguries seem to have been obeyed more or less without exception. The call of the hare, which had prompted Sheikh Inaent and his fellow jemadars to abandon their designs on the four travellers they had planned to murder, was one such omen, possibly because the hare was a sacred animal for many Hindus – in central India women would not eat its meat, and the animal’s long ears and exceptional hearing may account for the widespread belief that it could foresee the future. Perhaps the worst portent of all, however, was the ‘low and melancholy sound’ of the chiraiya, or baby owl, no doubt because it was practically never heard in daytime. This, it was generally agreed, was a sure indication of impending disaster. The gang that heard the chiraiya call was doomed beyond hope of salvation.

  As soon as he had emerged from the river, Feringeea consulted his gang’s soothsayer, Kuhora, regarding the portent they had heard. Kuhora was ‘an excellent augur’, whose interpretation of omens the Thugs had found invaluable in the past. But on this occasion his advice was unwelcome. The owlet’s call, Kuhora said, was a sign of such dire significance that the whole gang ought to abandon any intention of going on towards Saugor and retreat immediately along the road they had just come by.

  This Feringeea was reluctant to do. It was still December 1829, relatively early in the season, and though he and his men had murdered 30 travellers in the few weeks since they had left their homes, none had provided them with a really worthwhile haul. To break off the expedition at such an early stage would mean considerable economic hardship for the members of the gang and, probably, require them to launch another foray into the central provinces almost as soon as they had returned to their homes. Scrupulous though Feringeea had been to the dictates of omens in the past, this was altogether too much to contemplate. He decided to ignore Kuhora’s augury, and ordered his men to press on towards Saugor.

  Whether or not the owlet’s call was truly an omen or not, the jemadar’s decision proved to be a critical mistake. Later that same day, and only four miles further along the road, the Thugs halted to rest. Feringeea tethered his pony to a tree and walked alone into the nearest village to obtain supplies. While he was there, the Thug leader ‘heard a great uproar and saw my horse running towards the village’. Behind the panicked animal, in the distance, he could see a large party of Company sepoys ‘seizing and binding my gang’. Sleeman’s men had caught the Thugs unawares, and the approvers who were with them had identified several wanted stranglers among their ranks. There was nothing Feringeea could do to save his men. Only 12 of his 40 followers escaped, and their jemadar himself – who was no more than ‘half-dressed’ at the time, having left his possessions and the bulk of his clothes in the camp – had no choice but to flee, alone and on foot, back towards his home in Bundelcund.

  The capture of the majority of his gang placed Feringeea in considerable danger. No fewer than seven of the Thugs now brought before Sleeman at Jubbulpore turned approver; worse, several members of the jemadar’s own family – including two of his adopted sons and five foster brothers – had been among the men arrested by the Company’s patrols. Many of the prisoners had known Feringeea for years, and Sleeman had little difficulty in assembling an impressive quantity of information concerning the fleeing Thug. His most reliable informant was a boy who had entered Feringeea’s service two years earlier ‘in consequence of some domestic disputes’, and been taken on his first Thug expedition shortly afterwards. By the end of January 1830, the magistrate knew of the jemadar’s identity, his aliases, his appearance and habits, and a good deal about his Thug career. Most crucially of all, the approvers he recruited from among the captured men had supplied him with one piece of indispensable intelligence: the location of Feringeea’s home.

  * This money, remarkable as it may seem, was also said to be the property of the ubiquitous Dhunraj Seth, and had been stolen by the ambitious but unfortunate thief as it passed through the nearby town of Parowtee.

  * No doubt Zolfukar’s mare was part of the loot seized from one of the travellers murdered by his gang, and this was one of the unanticipated hazards of life as a Thug. Had the horse really been Zolfukar’s own, he would presumably have realized she was pregnant.

  * ‘Indeed,’ the ethnographers RV Russell and Hira Lal observe, ‘the number of these was so extensive that they could never be at a loss for an indication of the divine will, and difficulties could only arise when the omens were conflicting.’

  * A particularly gruesome punishment favoured in some Native States (and by the British in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny). The prisoner was strapped across the barrel of a loaded cannon on a parade ground. When the gun was discharged, ‘the air seemed to split. A head would come dancing across the ground, and an obscene shower of blood and entrails would cover both gunners and observers.’

  * Many Thugs became far more scrupulous in their belief in portents after their arrest, having ascribed their downfall to a failure to interpret and obey such omens properly. ‘Even the most sensible approvers,’ Sleeman remarked a few years later, ‘who have been with me for many years, Hindoos as well as Mussulmans, believe that their good or ill success depended upon the skill with which the omens were discovered and interpreted, and the strictness with which they were observed and obeyed. One of the old Sindouse stock told me, in the presence of twelve others, from Hydrabad, Behar, the Dooab, Oude, Rajpootana, and Bundelcund, that, had they not attended to these omens, they never could have thrived as they did. In ordinary cases of murder, other men seldom escaped punishment, while they and their families had, for ten generations, thrived, although they had murdered hundreds of people. “This,” said the Thug, “could never have been the case had we not attended to omens, and had not omens been intended for us. There were always signs around us to guide us to rich booty, and warn us of danger, had we been always wise enough to discern them and religious enough to attend to them.” Every Thug present concurred with him from his soul.’

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘A Double Weight of Irons’

  ‘bisendee – handcuffs’

  Sleeman’s information was precise, and he wasted no time in acting on it. Within a matter of days a party of eight nujeebs, led by a dafadar (sergeant) named Rustum Khan and supplied with letters of commission addressed to the Company’s agent in Bundelcund, left Jubbulpore and headed north in search of the Thug leader. The distance that they had to cover was not great – a little over 120 miles – and before the cold season had reached its end, the Company troops were picking their way across the drab landscape around Jhansee, making for Feringeea’s home village of Gorha.

  The village was one of at least seven in the vicinity of Jhansee to harbour Thugs, and even though they had taken care to inform the local rajah of their presence, and were accompanied by one of his officers, the nujeebs must have been conscious that they were far from help and heavily outnumbered. They knew that they could hardly hope to catch Feringeea by marching into Gorha openly; but approaching their quarry without being spotted by one of the villagers – most if not all of whom could be assumed to be loyal to the Thug leader and his gang – was impossible during daylight hours. In the end the patrol waited until long after dark, hoping no doubt to catch the jemadar asleep, and crept into the village shortly before midnight, hours after most of the village had gone to bed.

  The nujeebs were quiet, but not quite quiet enough. Alerted to their presence just in time by the sound of urgent whispering outside his door, Feringeea burst out of the rear of his cottage moments before the patrol broke in through the front. The Thug had wasted no time gathering possessions; even so, Sleeman’s men missed their quarry ‘by only a few seconds’, finding his bed still warm, and ‘an English blunderbuss and pistol lying loaded upon it’. Feringeea himself, though, had vanished into the night, and since he knew the district so much better than his enemies, his pursuers judged that it would be futile to go after him. Instead, the patrol took the remaining occupants of the house into custody. Among those thus arr
ested were Feringeea’s mother, wife and child. All three, together with one of the jemadar’s brothers, were hauled off to the jail at Jubbulpore.

  By now the Company’s campaign against the Thugs was gaining a significant momentum.

  Almost from the instant of his first encounter with the stranglers, in 1829, William Sleeman had thrown himself into the business of destroying them with an implacable energy. The whole idea of the Thug campaign appealed to him. He was thoroughly familiar with the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory, in which much of the work was to be done. His long acquaintance with India, and his unusual affection for the Indian peasantry, meant that he genuinely loathed the stranglers and their ruthless disregard for life. He brought an air of almost religious fervour to his new responsibilities, and it was not long before he was speaking of his campaign as ‘the cause’.

  There was, nonetheless, another side to Sleeman’s devotion to his work. He was an ambitious man, and – for any district officer – promotion, increased salary and honours came most quickly to those who attracted their superiors’ attention. It was practically impossible, in normal circumstances, for men stationed far out in the wilds of India to get themselves noticed by the government. Sleeman had spent an entire decade in the central provinces, with little obvious reward, when the advent of the Thug campaign offered him the unexpected chance to make his mark. He seized his opportunity with both hands.

  Sleeman’s vigour – and his buccaneering determination to harry the Thug gangs wherever they were found – won him the blessing of his seniors. Several high government officials were soon paying close attention to the progress of the Thug campaign. ‘The extirpation of this tribe,’ confirmed George Swinton,* principal aide to the recently appointed Governor General Lord William Bentinck, ‘would, I conceive, be a blessing conferred on the people of India, than which none would be more prized.’ A few months later the same official confirmed, in a note to Smith:

  His Lordship relies on the approved zeal and activity already displayed by yourself and Captain Sleeman, in bringing to condign punishment some of the most notorious of these inhuman wretches, and if through your instrumentality the abominable race of Thugs should be ultimately exterminated, your services in the cause of humanity would entitle you to the highest meed of applause.

  Not everyone shared Swinton’s views, of course. Opinion among Sleeman’s fellow officers in central India remained sharply divided for years over the merits of the new anti-Thug campaign. Several of the British Residents stationed at Indian courts were appalled by the freedom with which Thug-hunting parties began to sweep across borders in pursuit of their quarries, arguing that their forays into the Native States would seriously antagonize rulers who were at best grudging allies. Certainly many rajahs were unwilling to hand over men who had paid them lavish tribute over the years. Petty zamindars who had for decades sheltered bandit gangs took their own steps to frustrate the Company’s pursuit. On several occasions Sleeman’s men found the gates of a village barred against them, and one party found itself waylaid within the borders of Gwalior and actually attacked by a detachment of Maharajah Sindhia’s troops.

  Even rulers who had never knowingly harboured bandits were angered by the nujeebs’ intrusions and their treatment of Thug suspects. The arrest of several prominent Indian citizens on the word of mere informers resulted in despatch of a string of strongly worded protests to Calcutta. ‘The Government,’ the angry Resident at Bhurtpore complained to Swinton after one such incident, ‘may be of the opinion that a humiliation of this sort is not felt by a native Prince, but I can take it upon me to assert that it was felt, and deeply too.’

  The most strident complaints came from Gwalior, a Maratha state long familiar with Thugs. Richard Cavendish, the Company’s long-serving Resident at Sindhia’s court, consistently deplored Sleeman’s willingness to entrust his nujeebs ‘with such unlimited power’ and proposed that all Thug-hunting parties from Jubbulpore should be accompanied by a British officer to prevent abuse of process. His complaints were consistently rebuffed, Swinton’s colleague William Macnaghton noting that ‘such a deputation would be impracticable consistent with the secrecy and celerity of movement required’, but it took years to overcome such stubborn opposition. In the meantime, Sleeman began angrily insisting, Gwalior remained ‘a sanctuary to which, after a glut of murder elsewhere, [the Thugs return] with as much safety as an Englishman to his inn’.

  Problems of this sort were seen as mere distractions. Smith, as agent in Saugor & Nerbudda, and even the British government itself, far away in Calcutta, brushed all such disputes aside. ‘To check the dreadful evil of Thuggee,’ Macnaghton wrote, ‘extraordinary measures are necessary’, particularly in cases where ‘the pursuit is surrounded by too many difficulties’.

  Feringeea’s wife, mother and infant child had all been seized on one of Sleeman’s general warrants, and none had been accused of any crime, although the Company officials felt sure that the women must at least have suspected the source of their relatives’ wealth.* Sleeman saw their arrests as a critical breakthrough in his pursuit of Feringeea himself, whose escape was an embarrassment to him. ‘I knew,’ he told his superiors, ‘that Feringeea would not go far while links so dear to him were in my hands.’ And if there was no prospect of flight, it was merely a matter of time before the great strangler fell into British hands.

  Sleeman was right to suppose that Feringeea would not venture too far from the central provinces while his family languished in the custody of the East India Company. The Thug considered but rejected the notion of fleeing to the inaccessible territories of Rajpootana, where he had spent the early 1820s. But neither could he afford to remain idle after a second financially disastrous cold season in succession. A few weeks after the Company’s attempt to capture him, he slipped back into Gorha, and before Sleeman had the opportunity to send a second party of nujeebs in search of him, mustered another gang – smaller, this time, than his first – and set off again towards Saugor & Nerbudda in the hope of recouping his losses.

  It was by now June or July 1830, the beginning of the monsoon season, and very late in the year for a Thug expedition; there were so many fewer people on the roads that this new sortie did not promise much success. Meeting once again with Zolfukar, Feringeea and his men fell upon a party of six near the town of Beseynee, 80 miles north of Jubbulpore. But things quickly began to go wrong. Almost as soon as the combined gangs reached the banks of the Nerbudda, ‘Feringeea was taken up on suspicion’ by the militia of the local rajah and abandoned by his companions. The jemadar spent only two days in confinement before securing – or more probably purchasing – his release, and was able to join yet another Thug band near Saugor. But there was time to strangle only one more victim, a servant at a police compound, before this gang, too, was detained, this time by the local darogah on suspicion of mere robbery.

  It was the third time in less than 12 months that Feringeea had found himself in jail; plainly the whole of the central provinces was becoming a risky area for Thugs to operate in. Once again he enjoyed a lucky escape: ‘I was taken to the zamindar … in whose presence I chanced to meet a friend who, giving me a good character, caused my release.’ But, even so, the jemadar retired to Bundelcund at the end of July with nothing to show for the entire expedition, his arrest having prevented him from sharing in the booty taken by the rest of the gang, which was ‘taken off by the [other] Thugs and not divided’.

  Chastened by his escape from the Company’s nujeebs, Feringeea took elaborate precautions to safeguard himself on his return to his home district. Sleeman was forced to work hard to track him down. After several months, however – no doubt with the assistance of approvers who had friends and relatives among the people of the district – it was established that the fugitive Thug was dividing his time between houses in five different villages, never sleeping in the same bed for two nights in succession. This was a highly effective precaution. Recognizing that it was impossible to determine in advance w
here Feringeea would be on any given night, and lacking the manpower to raid five villages simultaneously, Sleeman concluded that he had no choice but to search each possible hiding place in succession, arresting and securing the Thug’s hosts in every one so as to prevent any warning being given, until Feringeea’s hiding place was discovered. Even supposing such a thing was possible, however, there was still an element of risk. The villages stood so far apart that it was impossible to search more than four of them in a single night. If his men had the bad luck to choose the wrong settlements, their quarry would certainly elude them once again.

  The Jubbulpore nujeebs were able, dedicated men – spurred on also, no doubt, by the prospect of sharing in the enormous reward of 500 rupees on Feringeea’s head. Setting out from the borders of the district at dusk one day in the first week of November 1830, they hurried through the shadows to the first of the Thug villages, Joomaree, eight miles away. Not finding Feringeea there, Sleeman’s men arrested his usual host, a man named Chutta, and forced him to guide them to the next hamlet on their itinerary, two miles away. Once again there was no sign of the fugitive, and once again the nujeebs ‘seized and bound’ the owner of the house they had been ordered to search. This man, a Brahmin, was compelled to escort the party to a third village, Jomun Sagura, another eight miles along the road.

  Jomun Sagura was the home of the Thug jemadar Kuleean Singh, who was then in the jail at Jubbulpore. Sleeman guessed that Feringeea was using members of this family to keep in touch with his imprisoned wife and mother, and the nujeebs were not surprised to find Kuleean’s spouse and his young son, Soghur, inside the house that their Brahmin captive pointed out to them. Once again, however – to their intense frustration – there was no sign of the fugitive himself.