Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The directors were surely correct. Too many dead bodies had been exhumed for anyone to doubt that murderous gangs really did infest the highways and byways of the mofussil. Too many suspected Thugs had been identified by too many informers, and been caught in possession of too much stolen loot, for there to be any question that Thuggee itself was real. But for all Sleeman’s labours, some of the most fundamental of all questions concerning the strangling gangs had yet to be answered. Smith’s trials no doubt proved the guilt of hundreds of Thug suspects. But they did little or nothing to explain the men’s motives and beliefs. From the days of Thomas Perry, most British officials had supposed the Thugs to be little more than common robbers: better organized than most, and uniquely ruthless, to be sure. They killed, it was assumed, for money, and concealed the corpses of their victims to evade arrest. By the last days of 1830, however – only a few months after his first encounter with the Thugs – Sleeman found himself questioning this view. Methodical investigation, supported by his own interrogations of the approvers themselves, pointed to a quite different conclusion. Something far more frightening, he became convinced – and far stranger, too – was going on in the black heart of India.

  * The sums involved could be substantial – in Gwalior, in 1818, a Maratha officer known as the Hurda Wallah arrested every jemadar he could find in Murnae and the surrounding district and relieved them of a total of 11,250 rupees.

  * For a while, indeed, Smith was actually permitted to put his sentences into effect without waiting for confirmation from Calcutta. The dispensation was revoked when the court of directors, at home in London, expressed unease that a mere political officer could inflict capital punishment without his sentences being subject to any sort of revision or appeal.

  * ‘I proceeded,’ one typical account began, ‘to the town of Laikairee. On the 14th November 1832 at a distance of 160 paces from the town gate, at a spot … pointed out by the Approvers, the earth was dug up in the presence of the authorities of the mentioned town. Three skulls with the body bones, and the bones of another body without a skull were found under the building at the very place pointed out by the Approver Feereengheea.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Demon Devotees

  ‘tuponee – rites’

  Few British officers – brought up in Europe, raised as Christians, and sent out to the Company’s lands in their teens with no practical experience of the Subcontinent – ever felt truly at home in India. The majority found themselves flustered by the bustle of the cities, disgusted by the poverty in which most of the local people lived, and repelled by the strangeness of the language and indigenous religion. Even William Sleeman, for all his knowledge of the mofussil, rarely met on equal terms with the peasants, merchants and zamindars he ruled. Like his colleagues, he spent much of his time in the company of fellow Britons, adhering resolutely to British dress and manners, and eating what passed locally for European food. Like them, he would never entirely understand the nuances of Indian society.

  The increasing isolation of the British community in India was, indeed, one of the principal features of Company history in the late eighteenth century. After 1800, it was perfectly possible – which it had scarcely been before – to serve for years in Bombay, Bengal or Madras while remaining blissfully ignorant of local languages and customs, and of the Indians themselves. A good many officers based in Calcutta were prone to boast that they knew ‘just 16 miles of Asia, and no more’, that being the distance between the town itself and the headquarters of the Bengal Army at Barrackpore. By 1810 it was no longer admissible in fashionable circles to admit a taste for curry or profess any interest in ‘Persian poetry and Hindustani metaphysics’, and a Mrs Graham regretted that every British officer she knew ‘appears to pride himself on being outrageously a John Bull’. Another lady, asked what she had seen of India and its people since arriving in Bengal, replied: ‘Oh, nothing, thank goodness. I known nothing at all about them … I think the less one knows about them the better.’

  Real friendships between Indians and Europeans – which had been common in the eighteenth century, particularly between Company officers and the Muslim notables of larger towns – were rare in the nineteenth. One reason for this was the increasing size of the British community, which was large enough to be socially self-sufficient after about 1810. The appearance of European women in large numbers in the major Company towns had a decided impact. It became possible to enjoy a full, if very British, social life. But the women themselves were seldom content to leave local institutions as they found them. Those who had arrived in search of husbands naturally resented the arrangements enjoyed by the many Company officers they found contentedly ensconced with local mistresses,* and relationships between European men and Indian women – once so universal that they were considered scarcely worthy of comment – soon came to be regarded as shameful and wrong. This further limited the likelihood of newly arrived officers acquiring a proper understanding of local customs and religion.

  The Company’s ignorance was especially pronounced when it came to Indian religion. The British were familiar enough with Islam, the faith of the majority of India’s ruling class. Hinduism was, however, a quite different matter. Its ancient and magnificent Sanskrit texts had attracted the favourable attention of a small group of scholarly Company administrators, who found much to admire in their literary quality and in the piety and morality of the high-caste Hindus whom they met. But for the great majority of British officers, and almost every Christian minister, Hinduism was a vile and pagan faith. It was generally perceived as a religion of ‘prevalent idolatry and indecent ceremonies’, one that encouraged ‘obscene pilgrimages’ and had created and sustained the horrible iniquities of the caste system. It permitted slavery and repressed women, who in the opinion of many writers on India were treated as little more than ‘mere animals’ by their menfolk. Its gods and goddesses, with their multiple arms and odd deformities, were dismissed as nothing more than hideous idols, the worst of them all being Kali, the blood-drenched, sword-wielding mother-goddess who – as the patron deity of Calcutta – was especially familiar to British visitors to India.

  With very few exceptions, Europeans showed little interest in the complexities of Indian society. They thought of Hinduism as simply a religion, rather than the social system that it was; they saw it as a monolithic and uniform faith, when really it encompassed the religious practices of numerous distinct districts; even the Hindu’s fabled tolerance was interpreted as mere passivity, rather than an example of intrinsic good. Most of those who wrote or read about the subject preferred to devote much of their attention to lurid descriptions of the ‘excesses’ of Indian custom. By the early nineteenth century, these excesses had come to be regarded as somehow representative of both the ‘lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty’ of Hinduism itself, and the inhumanity of the Indian people as a whole. Sleeman, who understood the local languages better than the majority of his colleagues, and whose interest in Indian society ran deeper, was better informed than most. But he was not entirely immune to the prejudices of his day, particularly when they offended his very Christian morality.

  Many British officials of the period, indeed, took ghoulish pleasure in tales of Hindu barbarism. They were disgusted by the custom of ‘swinging’ – the ritual practice of inserting hooks into the skin of a man’s back, hauling him up on a rope, and setting him circling, at a height of nearly 30 feet, while the suspended devotee ‘played a thousand antic tricks’ – and utterly appalled by ‘the horrid rite of chundee pooja’, said to involve the deliberate sacrifice of girls of 11 or 12 years of age.* Fakirs, the wandering Hindu ascetics who were a highly visible feature of rural life, were distrusted for their habit of ‘endeavouring to stimulate the charity of the multitude by a great variety of ingenious, whimsical, and preposterous devices’, and were widely suspected of fostering anti-British sentiment. They were blamed for at least one rebellion against the Company’s rule, and defined, in a dictiona
ry published in 1805, as ‘a worthless set of villains, who, to obtain money from the credulous Hindoo, put on the appearance of religion, under the cloak of which they commit the greatest excesses’.

  In many British minds, therefore, Hinduism became perceived as a barbaric religion. It was a faith that permitted infanticide – specifically, the killing of unwanted female children – and suttee, the burning of widows who chose to join their beloved husbands in death, even though both practices were forbidden in its most ancient texts. Suttee was not, in fact, particularly common, and most widows who did choose self-immolation went willingly and calmly to their deaths. But that was not the impression Britons received from their newspapers and books. Prurient reports from India spoke of women being forced shrieking onto their funeral pyres by baying relatives, and dwelled on the agonies of a slow death by fire; a good many readers with no personal knowledge of India certainly believed that this was the common fate of all Hindu widows from Bombay to Bengal. The notion that innocent, healthy and perhaps beautiful young girls* should be made sacrifices to an alien religion profoundly shocked public opinion at home, and when it was learned that the Company – bound by its solemn promise never to interfere in matters of religion – actually endorsed the practice if the woman concerned freely requested it, the howls of outrage that arose from liberal reformers and Christian moralists alike were heard distinctly in Calcutta. Even old India hands commonly believed that, in permitting the two practices, Hinduism made itself complicit in thousands of murders.

  Worse yet, in some respects, was the Company’s fear of the wild excesses displayed by Hindu devotees. This, too, was largely a product of ignorance, and of the growing distance throughout the Subcontinent between rulers and the ruled. But the concern itself was real enough. From the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin, it was increasingly believed, religious frenzy lurked just beneath the placid surface of Indian society – a frenzy so spontaneous and unrestrained that it seemed all too likely it would one day be channelled into actual rebellion. The signs were there for those who wished to see them, not least at the famous temple complex at Juggernaut, on the Bay of Bengal, where every March tens of thousands of chanting pilgrims lined the roads to watch the procession of four gigantic wooden carts, each bearing a ‘monstrous idol’ in the form of an ancient statue of a major Hindu god. The carts were dragged along by the brute muscle power of the faithful. Each one was 43 feet high, garishly painted, and mounted on 16 enormous wooden wheels, and it was widely rumoured – and generally believed – that pilgrims sacrificed themselves to their gods each year by hurling themselves to destruction beneath the carriages.*

  By Sleeman’s day, then, India itself – an object of admiration and even envy only a few decades earlier – was increasingly perceived as a ‘hideous moral wilderness’, and matters were not helped when, in 1813, the British government compelled the Company to allow Christian missionaries into its dominions. Within a remarkably short space of time, even educated Britons, whether in London or Bengal, were condemning the Hindu peasantry as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.

  The Company’s discovery, early in the nineteenth century, that Thug gangs were strangling hundreds of travellers in Hindustan, thus fitted neatly into the pattern of British expectation. The belief (which became common later) that India was home to hundreds of secret criminal communities was already beginning to gain ground; the Company had run up against roving groups of dacoits, fakirs and Sannyasis in Bengal, Naga robber-bands in the Rohilla country, north of Oudh, and Kallar cattle-thieves – ‘wild Colleries’ to the men of the Madras Presidency – in the newly conquered districts of the Deccan. The Thugs were bracketed with such robbers and disturbers of the peace at first. But in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Sleeman began to think of them as something considerably more dangerous.

  Sleeman’s interest in his prisoners extended well beyond the determination to catalogue and record their crimes. He was equally fascinated by their methods, customs and beliefs. As early as the cold season of 1830–1 he had composed a letter – published anonymously in the Calcutta Gazette – that outlined the stranglers’ techniques in such startling detail that its publication aroused ‘universal interest’ in the Company’s capital and prompted no less a figure than Lord Bentinck to enquire as to the identity of the unknown writer who ‘appears to possess extensive knowledge of the character and habits of the Thugs’. Gradually, over the next few years, the Thug-hunter teased out further confessions from his approvers. These he set out in a series of detailed ‘Conversations with Thugs’.

  Sleeman’s ‘Conversations’ recall many of the most notorious and remarkable Thug crimes and describe the gangs’ customs and traditions in considerable depth. These interrogations – together with a shorter set of ‘Dialogues’ set down by James Paton, one of Sleeman’s assistants, at his station in Lucknow – supply almost everything that we now know about the Thugs’ history and their own beliefs. Their value is enhanced by the care that Sleeman took to question approvers from a variety of backgrounds. Men from the Deccan and Bengal took part alongside those of Murnae and Bundelcund. Hindu stranglers argued with their Muslim colleagues. Approvers who gave one version of events were corrected and upbraided by fellow informers who remembered events differently. Every exchange was taken down, presumably in Hindustani, by the Company’s moonshees and then translated into English. The voices of the Thug informers emerge clearly from Sleeman’s pages in a way that they never do in the transcripts of their trials.

  By his own account, Sleeman’s initial purpose was to take down, codify and make available a glossary of Thug slang – an argot known as Ramasee that the stranglers used when in company with a party of intended victims in order to conceal their murderous intentions.* But the ‘Conversations’ soon strayed onto other subjects, and several excerpts, dealing with omens, religious belief and the organization and recruitment of the Thugs themselves, clearly stood out – not merely in Sleeman’s mind, but also in the memories of those who read through the captain’s transcripts. In these passages, the approvers stressed that the principal Thug gangs were composed of hereditary stranglers, men who could trace their ancestry back through many generations of murderers. And they placed far greater emphasis on the Thugs’ religion – in particular their fierce devotion to the goddess Kali – than any earlier source.

  We have already seen that Thug gangs took auspices and participated in religious ceremonies before departing on each expedition. Every member of every gang, whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, seems to have taken part in these acts of devotion. There was nothing at all unusual in this. Religious ceremonies designed to seek the blessing of the gods were an important part of Indian folk religion and a common feature of village life. Farmers attempted to invoke good harvests; merchants and travellers sought protection on the roads. Thugs – whose livelihood depended so heavily on chance, and whose expeditions were so inherently dangerous – naturally did likewise.*

  But there had been no hint, in any of the thousands of pages of depositions and trial documents taken down by Smith and Sleeman and their moonshees, that religion was of any special importance to the Thugs, nor that the beliefs they held influenced the manner in which they practised their grim trade. On the contrary, numerous captured stranglers had implied that their motive for committing murder was financial. The few references to religion that do appear in the statements of ordinary Thugs imply that it was simply a part of everyday life. ‘Having performed the usual worship,’ one strangler’s account of a typical expedition begins, ‘we set out towards Sholapoor.’

  Sleeman’s approvers told a different story. For them, religion was a central feature of their lives and the goddess Kali (who also appears under the names Bhowanee or Davey** in many of Sleeman’s documents) was a special protector of the Thugs. Several respected jemadars recounted legends that emphasized the regularity with which the goddess had acted to shield them and their fa
milies. Not even the mightiest rulers, they said, could stand against her. The approvers firmly believed that Mahadji Sindhia, one of the greatest of Maratha warlords, had met his death at the Kali’s hands after unwisely executing 70 Thugs in February 1794. And ‘was not Nanha the Raja of Jhalone made leprous by Davey for putting to death Boodhoo and his brother Khumoli, two of the most noted Thugs of their day? He had them trampled under the feet of elephants, but the leprosy broke out on his body the very next day.’

  The Thugs’ legends reassured them that they had enjoyed the goddess’s protection for many years. As long ago as 1775, the Rajah of Kundul, east of Hyderabad, received repeated warnings that he should release a group of Thugs he had had thrown into prison. But ‘he was obstinate, and on the third night the bed on which he and his Ranee were sleeping was taken up by Davey and dashed violently against the ground … they were not killed, but they were dreadfully bruised; and had they not released the Thugs, they certainly would have been killed the next night’. Kali was, moreover, capable of wreaking vengeance on lesser enemies as well. The Gwalior zamindars who seized Thugs fleeing from the destruction of Murnae in 1812 ‘were severely punished for giving us such annoyance’, and – at least in the recollection of one of Sleeman’s most trusted approvers – their loved ones all died, and ‘not a soul of their families are now left to pour the libation at their funeral obsequies!’*