Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Huge quantities of evidence had been amassed in order to ensure the conviction of the Thugs.

  To begin with, there were the bodies of their victims. Sleeman’s approvers had supervised the exhumation of hundreds of corpses, in every stage of decay, from all over the central provinces. As many as 18 were recovered from a single spot, to the great excitement of the local peasantry, who flocked around the investigating officers whenever they stopped to dig.* In several cases the exhumation parties were accompanied by relatives of the unfortunate victims and the bodies recovered from the makeshift graves were positively identified as those of missing travellers. In others, corpses were recovered soon after the murder had taken place, ‘very little decayed, and their features were still clear and distinct’ – which at least allowed the evidence of the bodies to be tallied against the confessions already made by the approvers. The most impressive confirmation of an approver’s testimony was recorded in the Nerbudda valley in 1833, when a spot identified as the burial place of a party of goldsmiths murdered there in 1819–20 was dug up. ‘On opening their graves,’ recorded FC Smith, ‘several sets of goldsmiths’ tools were found, which corroborates in the strongest manner the truth of the evidence detailed in this case.’

  True, not every set of remains could be positively identified in this way; some were merely skeletons, others so horribly rotten that it was impossible to tell their age or sex. But the officers assigned to supervise the disinterrals were greatly impressed by the accuracy of their approvers’ recollections. Several were so successful that the Company men found themselves all but overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of evidence that they revealed. ‘I was myself present at the opening of several of these unblessed graves, each containing several bodies,’ remembered Meadows Taylor, ‘which were pointed by the approvers one by one, in the coolest manner, to those who were assembled, till we were sickened and gave up further search in disgust.’

  By the time the approvers’ work was completed, a good proportion of the victims of the most lethal Thug gangs had been accounted for. Nearly 140 bodies were exhumed in 1831, the first year in which systematic attempts were made to recover the remains of missing travellers, and so efficient did the Company’s efforts become that 390 of the 440 victims – well over three-quarters – whose murders were investigated at the sessions of 1834–5 had been disinterred by the time the proceedings began. Whatever the accuracy of the remainder of the approvers’ testimony, their accounts of Thuggee were clearly by no means pure invention.

  The remains of the Thugs’ victims themselves formed only part of the evidence presented to FC Smith. Several of the gangs of Thugs apprehended while travelling the roads of the central provinces were found to be carrying substantial quantities of loot plundered from parties of travellers, and it was often possible, with the help of approvers’ testimony concerning the identity of the murdered men, to track down relatives and colleagues who could identify the stolen items. One wife recognized the blue turban worn by her husband; a son identified the patterned slippers of his father. The gang seized by Captain Borthwick as they were making their way out of Malwa in 1829 were carrying swords, turbans and various other items of clothing that had belonged to a party of four Muslim travellers they had murdered; the identifications were made by several of the dead men’s acquaintances, but here again attempts were made to check the depositions, Borthwick observing in his report: ‘It may be necessary to note here that the persons who came to recognize and claim the property of their deceased friends were in the first instance required to make out lists of the different articles of property which their friends had about them, before they were allowed to see a single article of the things found in the possession of the Thugs.’ No fewer than 22 items, belonging to a dozen different victims, were identified in this way.

  In the end, however, it was the approvers’ evidence that really mattered. The disinterral of a body proved only that murder had been committed; the discovery of stolen property in the possession of a gang was harder to explain away, but it was still possible to argue that the goods might have been purchased from the real murderers or otherwise acquired. Only the detailed testimonies of the Company’s informants promised to unravel the facts of the crimes themselves.

  Both Sleeman and Smith were acutely aware that each trial would hinge upon their approvers’ testimony, and they recognized the dangers of relying on such evidence in what were by any standards sensational cases. ‘The confession of some prisoners,’ Sleeman agreed, ‘and many other evidences of a similar kind, have left no doubt as to the fact that the murders had been committed; but to prove the guilt of individuals, the evidence of their accomplices in guilt alone could be procured. The secrecy with which Thugs act, and their precaution of never robbing an individual till they first kill and bury him, render the attainment of any other evidence impossible.’

  There can be little doubt that the sheer difficulty of confirming an approver’s testimony, and so overcoming the scepticism that was still sometimes vocally expressed by district magistrates, British Residents, and even the directors of the Company itself, became a considerable irritation to the men of the Thuggy Department. Sleeman and Smith were forced to go to considerable lengths to persuade their superiors that their informants’ evidence was reliable. Smith was quick to reassure the Chief Secretary to Government in Calcutta that the evidence he had heard was ‘ample and satisfactory’ and the guilt of the convicted Thugs ‘unquestionable’. There were, he added, at least eight corroborations of the approvers’ evidence, from ‘the free, unembarrassed and consistent way’ in which the original depositions had been made to the inability of Thugs apprehended on the road to explain why they were travelling together in such numbers. This evidence could not be considered ‘in the least apocryphal’.

  ‘The following precautions,’ Smith added in another letter, ‘have always been adopted:

  First, the Approvers are examined separately respecting their whole life: in the course of the narrative of which they pointed out the murders at which they were present. They are then made to descend to particulars in each case and to state the names of the Thugs who were present at each murder. The names of the Thugs are then inserted in [the] Register with the evidence of each approver annexed. The Approvers are then sent out under guard to point out the Thugs at their homes and on the roads … and the guards are ordered most strictly to seize no man who is not named on the list furnished by them; to release no man seized by them till they have brought them before the authorities of the district; to leave it to the local authorities to retain, release or make over to them; and never to allow the Approvers to go out of their sight.

  Most, if not all, of the Thug informants’ testimony was checked with some care. The general reliability of Sleeman’s prisoners was well illustrated by an incident that occurred in Hyderabad in the early 1830s, when about 80 Thugs, arrested on the evidence of approvers at various spots throughout the province, were collected into a single party and sent off to Jubbulpore under guard. On their way north, a further party of 11 men was handed over to the nujeebs by a local governor who had ‘apprehended them on suspicion’ of crimes other than Thuggee. The entire party reached Jubbulpore safely, but upon their arrival the captain of the guard neglected to mention that some of his prisoners were not suspected Thugs, and it was discovered that the documents relating to the supposed Thugs’ arrest had been delayed. All 91 prisoners were thus brought before various approvers in the usual way. ‘All,’ Sleeman concluded, ‘were recognised to be Thugs excepting the 11 men, of whom the approvers said they knew nothing. On the receipt of the documents a few days afterwards, these 11 proved to be the party given in charge of the guard by the local governor, with whose arrest our approvers had no concern.’

  Plainly, then, the statements of the approvers carried a good deal of weight. Sleeman and Smith pronounced themselves entirely satisfied with their accuracy, pointing out that every informant was constantly reminded that any failure to make a f
ull and true disclosure of everything he knew of Thuggee would result in his return to prison, the withdrawal of all of an approver’s privileges, the revoking of the Company’s conditional pardon, and hence his own inevitable execution. But the evidence obtained from informants was not always wholly reliable nonetheless – as the captured Thugs protested at the time, and the Company would eventually confess.

  The Thug trials held at Saugor and Jubbulpore in the early 1830s were held up as models of efficiency and rigour. By the standards of justice that had long prevailed in the Mughal Empire – indeed, by those usually encountered in courts in Britain at this time – the hearings were scrupulously conducted. But there were, nonetheless, flaws in the proceedings that made it more difficult for suspected Thugs to receive a fair trial than might otherwise have been the case.

  To begin with, the trials themselves took place before a judge – Smith – who had been intimately concerned in the progress of the anti-Thug campaign, without the mediation of a jury. Smith no doubt strove to be fair, and a small handful of men – consisting of those who had not been positively identified by any approver – were indeed acquitted in his court. There can, however, be no doubt that the agent firmly believed that the Thugs as a group had committed horrific crimes, nor that he – like almost every other British judge – was of the opinion that ‘native defendants lie freely and are undeterred by oaths of truth’. From this perspective it may fairly be said that there was a strong presumption that the accused men hauled before the courts were guilty, and that any statements that the prisoners made in their own defence were unlikely to be believed. The captured Thugs were, furthermore, denied the chance to argue their own cases, a problem typical of Indian courts at this time. They had no lawyers, and their depositions carried little weight with British magistrates and judges.

  Nor was the evidence of Sleeman’s approvers invariably as reliable as he liked to believe. We know that at least some informants did attempt to conceal their involvement in murders the British authorities appeared to know nothing about. The approver Motee, for example, hid the fact that he had participated in the murder of a party of 10 travellers in central India in 1822. When he discovered that other witnesses had implicated him, ‘he was willing enough to give evidence, but it was too late’, and he was hanged. Whether or not this unreliability extended to the evidence he offered against specific Thugs in other cases is less clear. The opportunities for approvers to collude were limited at first, and absent later. But even Sleeman freely admitted that he had uncovered cases of Thug approvers settling scores by levelling false accusations against old enemies. If any cases of this sort chanced to escape his scrutiny and came before the courts, the defendant’s pleas of innocence were unlikely to be believed.

  More serious, perhaps, was the frequent failure of the British authorities to check Thug defendants’ alibis with any thoroughness. In some cases the men assigned to obtaining references to the good character of the accused failed even to locate the men’s home villages, and when testimony confirming the Thugs’ statements was obtained, it was sometimes belittled or ignored. Wilson – Sleeman’s representative at Etawah – noted of the testimonies he collected on behalf of a certain Bhugga:

  There are seven witnesses to his good character, and did I not know the loose manner in which all depositions are taken in almost every court … I should be inclined to think him an innocent man. There is also a letter from the Rajah of Rushdan in his favour. On this I place no reliance whatsoever, as I have a letter of his now in my possession in which he [the Rajah] was guilty of knowingly writing a wilful falsehood.

  On other occasions, though, the evidence that was received scarcely helped the prisoners’ case. The sole character witness mentioned by one Thug failed ‘to come in to depose by reason of his entire ignorance of the character of these persons’. In another case, the Rajah of Gopulpoor ‘states that he has ascertained from the zamindars of [the suspect’s] village that he has cultivated land for the last five years but they know nothing of him previous to that period’. In a third, a witness testifying to the good character of another of Sleeman’s prisoners admitted that the man had absented himself from the village twice in the previous three years; another had quit his home ‘when obliged by want of employment’. Plainly testimony of this sort was of limited value to a defendant confronted with statements from a number of approvers that he had been an active strangler.

  The sheer volume of the testimony against them nonetheless came as an unpleasant surprise to the Thug prisoners. Most had remained confident that their old tactic of simply denying every charge would serve them well again. Gazing down on the prisoners from the bench, Smith was grimly pleased to note that

  the change in the demeanour of many of the Prisoners during the consecutive Trials they underwent during the Sessions was remarkable. At the first two or three arraignments they affected much nonchalance and indifference, some actually laying down to sleep, while others kept spinning balls of cotton in their hands; but latterly their attention was evidently directed with intense interest towards the Proceedings; and especially, whenever a question effected any of them in a more than usual criminatory way, till at last, several pleaded Guilty and begged only to have their lives spared, consenting to Transportation as an inevitable result of the Trials … I am therefore, on the whole, inclined to believe that their indifference to the prospect of punishment originates in the known difficulty of their being convicted, and that a great change in their opinion will take place after the result of these Trials becomes known all over India.

  There were, even then, few ‘Guilty’ pleas. A handful of men confessed, caught more or less red-handed or unnerved by the vast mass of evidence assembled against them and hoping no doubt to secure reductions in their sentences. The rest – the vast majority – pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ instead, though their defences were generally terse in the extreme, consisting of little more than a simple denial or a declaration of good character. ‘I am innocent and falsely accused,’ a Brahmin named Cheinsah protested, while his companion Bhudalee complained: ‘I have always been a cultivator and have never Thugged. Enquire in my neighbourhood.’ In a few cases a suspected Thug was able to prove that he had been the victim of a case of mistaken identity, but on the whole Sleeman and Smith were both dismissive of the defendants’ pleas. The Thugs, Sleeman pointed out, found it easy enough to produce witnesses from their home villages prepared to testify to their good character and popularity. But that was hardly surprising when they had ‘plenty of money, which they spent freely’ in their own communities.

  The evidence marshalled by Sleeman filled file after thick file. Most defendants were identified by a number of approvers and confronted with a variety of circumstantial evidence. In Trial No. 7 of 1832 (‘Government versus Mukka and 17 other prisoners accused of the murder of three men by Thuggee and robbery of 1,000 rupees’ worth of property’), four approvers called as ‘witnesses to fact’ testified as to the course of events and named the Thugs who had actually strangled the unfortunate victims. Another three appeared as ‘witnesses to character’, and between them these men identified the remainder of the defendants as notorious and hereditary Thugs. The trial did not revolve wholly around such testimony, however. One of the prisoners confessed, and the bodies of the three victims were discovered and exhumed.

  The evidence in other cases followed much the same pattern. In Trial No. 10, held during the same sessions to try Thugs accused of the murder of a pair of treasure-carriers, Sleeman mustered three witnesses to fact and three to character, and the court also heard evidence from the merchant who had lost his money, the servant sent to locate the missing men, and the villagers who found their bodies. Trial No. 13, concerning the murder and burial of two soldiers and a boy in Bundelcund, involved four witnesses to fact, three to character, and two confessions made by guilty Thugs. Three bodies had been exhumed, and though they were not positively identified, Sleeman was able to produce a letter from the local British mag
istrate that stated that the village was a Hindu one in which the dead were never buried. Finally, and perhaps most conclusively of all, seven of the 22 members of this Thug gang had been arrested in the process of dividing up the loot. ‘One of the best-proved cases’, though, in Sleeman’s view, was the murder – at Akola in Malwa – of a sepoy officer together with his wife, her maid, and seven servants. The trial of the alleged killers involved ‘no less than four confessions besides the evidence of approvers and ample circumstantial evidence to prove the guilt of the prisoners’. A sari and a saddle-cloth belonging to the murdered couple were found in the possession of the guilty Thugs and identified by relatives, and the sepoy’s infant son, who had been spared on account of his youth and forcibly adopted by a Thug family, was found living in the house of a subadar named Dirgpal, ‘one of their most influential leaders’.

  It is evident, reading through the vast array of trial transcripts still preserved among the Thug archives of Britain and India, that the evidence assembled against many leading jemadars and stranglers was strong – sufficient, in many cases, to secure convictions even today. Khoman, leader of one of the largest gangs ever tried in Saugor & Nerbudda, was picked out at eight separate identity parades by eight different approvers. There were numerous cases of Thugs being caught in possession of items that had belonged to their victims and failing to explain how they had come by them. Nearly a thousand bodies were disinterred, and the depositions given by the Thug informants were so detailed and consistent that they point to a long association between members of the main Thug gangs. Even the directors of the Company, who displayed a constant anxiety to ensure that the prisoners were fairly tried, and ‘never convicted upon the mere evidence of accomplices unless confirmed by circumstantial evidence’, pronounced themselves satisfied that it was ‘beyond the verge of credibility’ that six or seven approvers, questioned separately and in some cases bitterly hostile to one another, ‘should concur in framing such a story to fix the guilt on an innocent person, as would carry with it the slightest degree of probability’.