Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  For you, sahib, have but the instincts of the wild beasts to overcome, whereas the Thug has to subdue the suspicions and fears of intelligent men and women, often heavily armed and guarded, knowing that the roads are dangerous. In other words, game for our hunting is defended from all points save those of flattery and cunning.

  Can you not imagine the pleasure of overcoming such protection during days of travel in their company, the joy of seeing suspicion change to friendship, until that wonderful moment arrives when the rumal completes the hunt – this soft rumal, which has ended the lives of hundreds? Remorse, sahib? Never! Joy and elation, often!

  It would be wrong to overstate the sneaking regard that British officers began to feel for their approvers, nonetheless. Sleeman and his men continued to abhor their crimes. Nor did their admiration extend to the great mass of Thugs who served the jemadars they kept in custody; these, the British invariably found, were coarser, crueller and less sympathetic than their more polished leaders.

  In fact, the danger posed by the strangling gangs seemed greater now than it had done before. Mere murderers were bad enough. But they could be rounded up and captured and imprisoned, and so the dangers that they posed could be removed. The evidence uncovered in the course of his lengthy conversations with the Thug approvers hinted at something far more insidious and much more difficult to eradicate. If Thuggee was a hereditary calling, the arrest of a single member of a family would do nothing to remove the danger posed to travellers; the man’s brothers would continue his work. Similarly, the arrest of a Thug who had fathered children neither would nor could deter his sons from becoming stranglers themselves. Even infants who had never ventured out onto the roads of India themselves would inevitably grow up, join gangs, and learn the secrets of their father’s trade.

  Nor, Sleeman became increasingly certain, was it possible that Thuggee would simply wither and die when the conditions then prevalent in central India – economic hardship, widespread unemployment and repeated drought and famine – eased. Men who ‘consider the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the Goddess’ would never cease to kill in any circumstances, and it was this (the Thug-hunter convinced himself) that explained how a strangler could cold-bloodedly ‘mediate his murders without any misgivings, perpetrate them without any emotions of pity, and remember them without feelings of remorse’.

  Sleeman’s conversations with his Thug approvers had other sinister implications, too. Killing from habit, not from need, seemed particularly perverted. And the suggestion that a gang’s victims were selected more or less at random, at the whim of some portent or omen, was especially terrifying; stranglers who were as likely to kill an impoverished pilgrim as the wealthiest merchant seemed somehow stranger – and yet more Satanic – than mere robbers out for plunder.

  There is no reason to doubt that the East India Company would have set out to destroy the Thugs whatever their motives, whatever their beliefs; sporadic efforts had, after all, been made to do just that for years before Sleeman began his own enquiries. But there is, equally, no question that his work – disseminated throughout India in a stream of letters, articles and memoranda – gave the officials responsible for policing India every incentive to pursue their task with grim determination.

  If Sleeman’s theories were correct, disposing of the last vestiges of Thuggee would be an immense task. And accomplishing it would not only require, but warrant, measures almost as extreme as those employed by the stranglers themselves.

  * Even in the eighteenth century, few British men would consider actually marrying an Indian girl. But the fact that most expected to keep mistresses is illustrated by the fact that a demi-official guide to the Company’s service – intended for the instruction of young officer cadets freshly arrived on the Subcontinent – contained, as late as the 1790s, a detailed explanation of the costs involved in running a zenana (women’s quarters).

  * ‘They dress her up in silver and jewels and sandals,’ one Company report explained, ‘and having buried her to the waist, her hands are supported by bamboo to which they are tied – she represents the goddess, and after a human sacrifice performed before her in the night she is left in that situation in the jungle (if not dead with fright before) to starve or be devoured by tigers and jackals.’

  * The victims described in contemporary British accounts, the historian Amal Chatterjee wryly observes, ‘fell into two broadly corresponding groups – officials saw and recorded suttees that involved “mature” women, while non-officials invariably encountered young women, in the bloom of their youth, being tragically destroyed by blind and tyrannical custom.’ The latter image was given form by innumerable poems and romances. Mariana Starke’s celebrated play The Widow of Malabar (1791) featured a beautiful girl driven towards her death by evil Brahmins, only to be rescued by a gallant Englishman at the very moment all seemed lost.

  * In truth deaths of this sort were rather rare, and were generally accidents caused by the sheer press of people along the route; according to the British army officer Thomas Bacon, who wrote about Juggernaut in the early 1830s, there had then been no genuine suicides there since 1821. It was true, he added, that the road leading to the temples was indeed lined with thousands of bleached human bones; but these, he was told, had been deposited not by suicides crushed beneath the wheels of the carts but by hundreds of terminally ill pilgrims who died in their desperate attempts to reach the temples.

  * Ramasee has often been described as a ‘language’. It was not. It was a form of low-class Hindu cant, full of sly jokes and coarse double entendres. The majority of travellers do not seem to have understood its meaning at all. But there were several instances of some potential victim grasping the true significance of a phrase and hurriedly leaving the Thugs’ company in the nick of time.

  * Thieves and housebreakers – the Thugs themselves pointed out – performed similar ceremonies. But the stranglers did not think them so punctilious: ‘[The housebreaker] performs religious rites to the iron instruments with which he breaks through the wall much as the Thugs do to our instruments of murder … but they do not worship on every expedition – perhaps only once or twice in the year.’

  ** A corruption of ‘Devi’, the female energy force. Neither Bhowanee nor Davey are entirely synonymous with Kali, though Sleeman certainly thought they were.

  * It is evident that these stories had their basis in myth and misapprehension. It is now generally believed that Mahadji Sindhia, for example, died after either throwing himself, or being thrown, from a balcony in his palace.

  * ‘What a sad but faithful picture of our ruined nature does this present!’ Paton scribbled at one point, after setting down an account of murder perpetrated by a vast Thug gang. ‘Three hundred sons of fallen Adam leaguing themselves together for the purpose of murder!’

  * The same small bazaar proved to be hiding three other wanted stranglers: ‘Ismail Thug, who turned approver, Mohna alias Ruhman, and Bahleen’.

  * Big game hunter.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Last Days of Thuggee

  ‘kondul kurna – breaking clumps of earth and spreading

  them on a grave’

  ‘What do you think, Sahib Khan?’ demanded Sleeman of one Deccan Thug brought before him in the cold season of 1835. ‘Am I right in thinking that we shall suppress Thuggee?’

  Sahib Khan, a cautious and successful strangler who had served with his gang for more than two decades, paused to consider his response. ‘There have been several gurdies* upon Thuggee,’ he replied, ‘but they have ended in nothing but the punishment of a few … We have heard our fathers and sages predicting these things as punishments for our transgressions of prescribed rules; but none of them ever said that Thuggee would be done away with. [Yet] this seems a greater and more general gurdie than any, and I do not know what to think.’

  This hesitant admission, made nearly six years after the arrest of the approver Amanoolah, was a symbolic moment in the C
ompany’s campaign. It was the first time that any jemadar had conceded that the Thug gangs might eventually be crushed.

  Captured stranglers had hitherto insisted that Thuggee would always survive, an attitude that owed something to the approvers’ understanding of how easy it was to recruit men in times of economic hardship, and a good deal to confidence in their own ability to escape detection. ‘Suppose all our operations against the Thugs were now to be over,’ another group of approvers was once asked. ‘Do you think it would gain ground again?’ ‘Yes,’ one strangler asserted, ‘in five years it would be as extensive as ever.’ In this he was probably right, since the Thugs’ system was a proven one and many of its practitioners knew no other way to make a living. Their British persecutors naturally agreed. ‘Once a Thug always a Thug is their motto and their creed,’ wrote FC Smith of his approvers. ‘Nothing can or will reform or deter [a Thug] from the practice of his profession. He may for a temporary space retire from business owing to the possession of riches, or other causes, but as sure as a dog returns to his vomit, so will a Thug return to his business sooner or later.’

  Sleeman, too, continued to believe that Thuggee had, like some cancer, the ability to regenerate itself while even a handful of stranglers remained free. Hereditary Thugs and Kali’s devotees, he was convinced, would inevitably resume their familiar trade if freed from jail or left to their own devices by the government. By the early 1830s he had become so convinced of the need to account for every member of every gang that his registers and records bulged with information drawn from the interrogations of captured men. Suspected stranglers brought to Jubbulpore for questioning were disconcerted by the detailed knowledge Sleeman possessed of their gangs, and this information, carefully deployed, produced confessions that would never have been made earlier, when the Company’s knowledge of the Thugs was slight and stolid denials were frequently enough to win a suspect his freedom. From this perspective, Sleeman’s files – which were by now among the most detailed and comprehensive ever assembled by any police force – had become an invaluable resource, one that kept the Company’s Thug-hunting parties supplied with vital intelligence and made the task of tracking down their targets immeasurably easier.

  The Thugs responded to Sleeman’s accumulation of intelligence by shifting their bases with increasing frequency. Most of the stranglers of the Madras Presidency fled to new homes in the Native States, and men who had once based themselves in Bundelcund began to turn up in the wilds of Candeish. But even this tactic was of limited effect while Thugs meeting on the roads continued to talk freely among themselves. Only gangs that recruited selectively and actively shunned the company of others eluded the Company’s approvers for long. A group of stranglers in Rajpootana, for example, were ‘rarely seized or punished’ thanks to their reclusiveness. ‘How can their deeds be known?’ demanded Sahib Khan. ‘They do all their work themselves. They live in the desert and work in the desert. We live in villages and cannot do our work without the convenience and support of … influential men; but these men are relieved from all this cost and trouble by forgoing the pleasure of other men’s society, and the comforts of a fixed habitation. They are wiser men than we are!’

  Even among the gangs known to Sleeman, however, many men evaded capture for a time, and it soon became clear that Francis Curwen Smith had been too sanguine in hoping that the anti-Thug campaign could be concluded in as little as two or three years. The sheer number of suspects, and the ever greater care their leaders took as the Company’s men closed in on them, made this an impossibility. ‘Two seasons are still required for the work,’ Smith admitted late in 1832 after concluding his twenty-sixth major trial of suspected stranglers, though by then well over 600 ‘notorious Thugs’ had been hauled before the courts.

  Sleeman, too, occasionally became despondent when he considered the sheer volume of work still left to do. ‘There are many leaders and leading members of the old gangs still at large,’ the Thug-hunter conceded,

  and some of them may perhaps be in situations which enable them to destroy solitary travellers, though they have for the most part I believe found service in the military and police establishments of Native Chiefs. All these persons would return to their old trade, and teach it to their sons, and to the needy and dissolute of their neighbourhood, and thus reorganise their gangs, should our pursuit be soon relaxed. To prevent the system from rising again, it will be indisputably necessary to keep up the pursuit for some years till all these leaders and leading members of the old gangs die, or become too old to return to their old trade. Under the pressure of this pursuit their sons will take to honest industry, seeing no prospect of being able to follow successfully that of their ancestors.

  The growing difficulty of securing the remaining Thugs now urged Sleeman and his superiors in Calcutta into a further frenzy of activity. When the anti-Thug campaign had commenced at the beginning of the decade, high standards of evidence were required to secure guilty verdicts in any Company court – even those run by FC Smith in the non-regulation territory of Saugor & Nerbudda. No man could be convicted of murder without the denunciations of several approvers and the support of circumstantial evidence, and after 1833, moreover, it was ruled that the evidence of approvers alone was insufficient to secure a death sentence in any case. In the course of the next few years, however, the ancient legal principle that the punishment should fit the crime began to blur as a stream of new legislation was passed. Each successive act made it easier to convict suspected Thugs no matter what the evidence against them.

  This development was directly related to the progress of Sleeman’s drive to extirpate Thuggee. The first few years of the campaign had witnessed the apprehension of virtually every major jemadar – men against whom numerous approvers were ready to testify and who could be confronted with a wealth of evidence relating to specific crimes. After 1835, however, the Thug suspects still at large were mostly minor figures. Few had taken a direct part in any murder, and some were guilty of nothing more than being peripheral members of one of the strangling gangs. The conviction of such men was not guaranteed under existing law, and yet the demonization of the stranglers – the suggestion that they were devotees of a perverted cult, and in particular the widespread acceptance of Sleeman’s dictum that captured Thugs would inevitably return to their old trade upon release – made it seem imperative that every man among their ranks be detained for life. It was this necessity that drove the changes to the law that characterized the latter stages of the anti-Thug campaign.

  The earliest law relating specifically to the crime of Thuggee thus appeared on the statute books some half a dozen years after the first approvers were secured. ‘Act XXX of 1836’, as it was known, was a sweeping revision of the existing code. It made the simple act of being a Thug, ‘either within or without the territories of the East India Company’, punishable by life imprisonment with hard labour. A second piece of legislation, Act XIX of 1837, disposed of the criticism (heard from several of the Company’s stricter magistrates over the years) that the evidence of admitted criminals such as the Thug approvers could not be admissible in a British court. ‘No person shall,’ this new law decreed, ‘by reason of any conviction for any offence whatever, be incompetent to be a witness in any stage of any cause, Civil or Criminal, before any Court.’

  Company officers and magistrates could now charge suspected Thugs in a variety of ways. Men identified by approvers as active stranglers were sent for trial under existing regulations. The lesser members of the gangs – together, quite possibly, with a number of entirely innocent men unfortunate enough to be picked up in the company of Thugs – were charged under the new Act XXX. If there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction even under the broad terms of the new Act, moreover, an older Company law – Regulation 8 of 1818 – was still at hand, as Sleeman reminded his men. Under the provisions of Regulation 8, Company magistrates were entitled to detain any suspect whom they were ‘morally satisfied’ was a member of a gan
g of criminals until the man had furnished security for his future good behaviour. Since British officers were free to determine what security was adequate, the practical result was that many suspected stranglers were held in prison for months and sometimes years, unable to raise the sums demanded. Setting the figure required to obtain bail at some impossibly high level became deliberate policy, for ‘to release on security a Thug’, insisted FC Smith, was ‘folly and ignorance’.

  Acts XXX and XIX were not the last pieces of legislation enacted by the Company as it attempted to dispose of the remaining vestiges of Thuggee. Seven years later, Act XXIV of 1843 not only extended the provisions of the existing Thug laws to cover dacoits as well – thus ‘affording a security net to convict the prisoner who might escape a specific charge of murder by Thuggee’ – but also gave the British authorities power to seize any Thug prisoner still held in the jails of the Native States and send them to a Company jail or to penal colonies overseas. This act ensured that not a single convicted strangler of any importance would ever be released in India.

  The general effects of these changes in the law were twofold. Many more Thugs were convicted than would ever have been possible under existing regulations, and this satisfied Sleeman’s increasingly determined quest to jail or execute every last strangler in India. But the standards of proof demanded by the courts fell sharply, and this made miscarriages of justice more likely. The second phase of the anti-Thug campaign, which lasted roughly from 1836 until 1840 or a little later, was thus less creditable to Sleeman and to the Company than was the work done in earlier years.