Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Sleeman’s investigations into the Megpunna gangs nevertheless yielded some intriguing information. Megpunnaism turned out to be a very recent innovation. It had originated, Sleeman was told, in 1826, at the time of the Company’s siege of the supposedly impregnable fortress of Bhurtpore. Its practitioners were indigents who probably stumbled across their earliest victims by chance and killed them more or less on a whim. It took some time for them to develop a considered modus operandi, and even in the mid-1830s they were not as well organized or as careful as the Thugs. Their clumsiness, indeed, defined them, for although the first murders definitely known to have been committed by a Megpunna gang – those of three men and two women whose bodies were discovered outside Delhi during the cold season of 1833–4 – were initially ascribed to Thugs, the approver summoned to examine the bodies ‘at once disclaimed any responsibility for the dead on behalf of his fraternity. “It was,” he said, “altogether too clumsy, and must have been done by men new to the trade and very awkward. For instance, the bodies would never have been left exposed [by Thugs] and in such a position; the strangling cords would not have been left about the victims’ necks, nor would such clumsy knots have been tied.”’

  The Megpunnas were destroyed before they had the chance to refine their techniques or pass them on to others. As such, they offer a revealing glimpse into the likely protohistory of the Thug associations themselves. Probably the forebears of the sophisticated Murnae gangs were much like the first Megpunnas: opportunists who killed sporadically and clumsily with whatever weapons came to hand. Unlike the Megpunnas, however, the first Thugs escaped detection and were able to evolve more deadly and efficient tactics. In time, as they became more expert, these early stranglers no doubt came to rely more and more on murder for their living, and to feel the pangs of conscience less. Had the Megpunnas not been stopped when they were, they too might have evolved into confident mass murderers with their own favourite territories and a well-developed network of fences, informants and protectors.

  The remainder of the ‘hereditary criminals’ exposed by the Thuggy Department in the years 1836–60 proved to have even less claim to kinship with the strangling gangs than the Megpunnas. The so-called ‘Tusma-Baz Thugs’, for example, found living on the outskirts of Cawnpore in 1848, were little more than Hindu thimble-riggers. Their association had been founded by three sepoys who had been instructed in the tricks of this ancient trade by a Company private named Creagh around the year 1802, and their particular speciality was a deception known as ‘pricking the garter’,* which they practised at fairs and bazaars throughout the Native States, having first ‘conciliated’ the local police with the promise of the usual quarter-share of their profits. They were really professional gamblers, who were bracketed with the Thugs solely because they had, as a sort of speculation, murdered and robbed a few travellers whom they met upon the roads. This was noticed even at the time. ‘To call them Thugs was evidently a misnomer,’ one contemporary writer observed. ‘They were simply organised bands of vagrants of the most worthless character, who preferred fraud to labour and murder to industry.’

  The fact that peripheral associations such as the Megpunnas and the Tusma-Baz Thugs could be drawn into the Thuggy Department’s orbit (and be widely perceived as threats equal in potential, if not in practice, to the original Thug gangs) is very revealing. The British authorities had been badly shaken by the revelations of the anti-Thug campaign, which had uncovered depredations on a scale that had barely been suspected. The unveiling of apparently respectable stranglers in the most unexpected places had added to the growing feeling of unease.* Evidently, some Company officials now admitted, India remained far from understood. They were more than willing to concede that other criminal bands – some perhaps as deadly as the Thugs – still lurked undiscovered elsewhere in the vastness of the Subcontinent.

  All this made it imperative to retain the expertise built up within the Thuggy Department. By the late 1830s, its remit had already been widened to include the suppression of dacoity – a still more difficult task, perhaps, but one that Sleeman himself took on, with his usual vigour, between 1835 and 1847. After that, the department evolved again – first into a sort of pan-Indian police force with overall responsibility for the suppression of a wide range of violent crimes, and then, in the last years of the nineteenth century, into a central intelligence office, gathering information on Indian nationalist groups and other potential rebels. This was a job its officers – with their intimate knowledge of criminal behaviour in the mofussil – were assumed to be particularly well suited to, and the department thus survived for a further half a century, being abolished, with the empire itself, only in 1947. As late as the latter years of the Second World War, the Government of India’s intelligence agency – then based at Simla – was popularly known as the thagi daftar: the ‘Thug office’.

  Sleeman’s unique creation – the one arm of the East India Company whose jurisdiction extended across the entire Subcontinent – had been extraordinarily successful. In little more than a decade it had destroyed a menace that the whole vast Indian police system had left unchecked for years. Its officers had developed new methods for suppressing crime; its men had learned the art of tracking down endlessly elusive criminals. Sleeman himself had transformed Indian policing from an almost entirely local affair, dependent on officers with few resources and working, in effect, alone, into a recognizably modern operation, one in which the diligent accumulation of intelligence held sway, and careful record-keeping was as important as drill. He had also abandoned the purely reactive policing characteristic of the time. India’s untrained and often inexperienced darogahs, whose jurisdiction and interests were limited to a few square miles, almost always restricted their efforts to solving crimes that had already occurred. Sleeman’s men, rather than waiting for their enemies to strike, actively pursued them. In doing so, they created a new template for police work.

  These were remarkable achievements, and – for all the excesses of the occasional nujeeb, the exaggerated importance attached to the Thugs’ religious beliefs, and the harrying of minor criminals in the later 1830s – they were appreciated by the Company’s subjects themselves. A village to the north-east of Jubbulpore was renamed Sleemanabad, and the brass lamp Sleeman himself presented to the temple there was kept burning for more than a century in his honour; it is still there today. Writing in 1840 to the head of the local Thuggee office, a Hyderabadi noble named Hussain Dost Khan, often a vocal opponent of the British, conceded that ‘seeing that the best arrangements have been made in this matter, the whole of the inhabitants of this country, and travellers, have been emancipated from the fear of Thugs … Where are the murdered men? How can there be any, when you do not hear even the slightest allusion to Thugs? The whole world is giving thanks for this.’

  Sleeman, too, felt pride in his campaign. Writing to his friend Charles Fraser, who had succeeded Francis Curwen Smith as magistrate of Jubbulpore, he ended his letter by urging:

  Do not I pray you get tired of the duties – neither you nor any other man can ever be employed in any more interesting or important to humanity. I shall look back with pride to the share I have had in them as long as I live …

  Believe me, Fraser, I would not exchange the share I have had in this work for the most splendid military service that man ever performed in India. I glory in it and ever shall do.

  The Thug trials continued with grim regularity throughout the 1830s. It was not long before the prosecutions became a mechanical process, in their way as devoid of humanity as the Thugs’ own murders. One hundred men had been committed in 1830, and tried by FC Smith: the first of the great Thuggee trials. A further 389 were dealt with in the sessions of 1831–2, at Saugor and Indore, and another 316 the following year, this time at Poona and Hyderabad as well as at Saugor. By 1835, the number of suspected Thugs brought before the Company’s courts had passed 1,500, Smith alone trying three-quarters of that total. By 1840, by which time Sleeman ha
d extended his campaign into Bombay and Madras, the number of committals had reached 3,689.

  Of the 4,500 men who eventually stood trial for Thug crimes between the years 1826 and 1848, a total of 504 – or nearly one in every nine – was hanged. Three thousand more were sentenced to life in prison, more than half of whom were transported to penal colonies in the Far East. Most of the rest served either seven or 14 years’ hard labour, or died in prison while awaiting trial. Virtually none escaped the Company’s wrath altogether. Fewer than 250 were acquitted.

  Sentences were passed with reference to guidelines issued by the government in Calcutta. Between 1830 and 1836, at least, these were relatively straightforward:

  The death penalty when there was proof that the culprit had strangled or helped or assisted a strangler, or if he had been a jemadar, that is Thug chief.

  Deportation for life of the culprit if it was proven that he had been known to be a Thug, but when only one witness accused him of having been a strangler in the course of a single incident.

  Deportation for life for Thugs who performed important tasks such as digging graves, convincing victims, helping to make the bodies disappear.

  Fourteen years in prison for those who performed lesser tasks such as standing guard.

  Seven years in prison for those accused of having been present as the gang perpetrated its crimes, but who did not actively participate in them.

  Release on security for young boys taken prisoner.

  In the event, almost all Thugs were found guilty of active complicity in their gang’s crimes. Shorter terms of imprisonment were imposed only rarely, particularly at first, and almost always involved cases in which the defendant was no more than a boy. And there was never any case in which the initial verdict was overturned on appeal. The willingness of the Governor General to confirm even the harshest sentences seems to have been influenced by the pleas of FC Smith who, having heard all the evidence marshalled for the numerous cases brought before him, became utterly convinced that no Thug deserved mercy.

  ‘They never should recover their unrestricted liberty,’ Smith argued,

  for numerous proofs exist of the utter impossibility of reclaiming even boys the sons of Thugs from this horrid but apparently irresistible profession. Like tigers their taste of Blood is indelible and not to be eradicated while life exists.*

  Men sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment or more suffered an additional punishment. Each convicted Thug was forcibly branded or tattooed with the details of his crime, a form of punishment often employed in India at this time, though it had previously been reserved for those who had been handed life sentences.* The most common formulation specified ‘branding on the forehead or on the back, with the word “Thug” marked by the process of the godna [tattooing needle] in the Hindee and Persian characters’. Other men received the tattoo ‘Convicted Thug’, and some contemporary drawings show stranglers with tattoos on their lower eyelids, though there is no written evidence that such markings were actually applied. The principal aim of this punishment was to enable escaping prisoners to be easily recaptured. But it was also seen as a shameful imposition; Muslims were forbidden by their religion to wear tattoos, while Hindus believed that the markings endured after death and would be legible to those who met them in the afterlife.

  The Company had planned to execute convicted Thugs in their home villages, where it was thought their deaths might best act as a deterrent to their fellow stranglers. In the end, however, the scheme was rejected on the grounds that it made escape too likely. Those who were condemned to death met their ends in the towns where they had been tried. Most were hanged in either Jubbulpore or Saugor.

  Among the first prisoners to be executed were the Thugs of Feringeea’s gang, who went to their deaths in Jubbulpore late in September 1830. Betrayed by their leader, they faced their ends with a show of equanimity that impressed the crowd gathered to watch their execution and struck Sleeman as worthy of comment. ‘I was,’ he wrote to the editor of the Calcutta Gazette,

  yesterday present at the execution of eleven Thugs … convicted of the murder of about 35 travellers whose bodies were disinterred as evidence against them along the lines of the road between Bhopal and Saugor. A new drop had been constructed of cut-free stone for the purpose of receiving the whole at once, and consisted of three pillars about sixteen feet from each other and twelve feet high, with two beams across them at the top, and two planks as platforms … about five feet from the ground. The eleven nooses, suspended at equal distances from the beam, reached down about three feet, so as to give a fall of about two feet; and in order to shorten the duration of

  suffering they were made small and formed partly of thongs to ensure strength.

  As the sun rose, the eleven men were brought out from the Jail decorated with chaplets of flowers, and marched up to the front of the drop, where they arranged themselves in a line each seeming to select the noose or situation that pleased him best, with infinitely more self-possession than men generally select their positions in a dance or at a dinner-table. When arranged, they lifted up their hands and shouted ‘Bindachul Ke Jae, Bhowanee Ke Jae’,* every one making use of precisely the same invocation, though four were Mohammedans … They all took their positions on the platform … and taking the noose in both hands, made the same invocation to Bhowanee, after which they placed them over their heads and adjusted them to their necks with the same ease and self-possession that they had first selected them; and some of the younger ones were actually laughing during the operation … Being directed to have their hands tied to their sides that they might not in their agonies seize the rope, and thereby prolong their sufferings, one of the youngest, a Mohammedan, impatient of the delay, stooped down so as to tighten the rope, either to prevent it breaking with a jerk, or with a view to prevent pain from it, and stepped deliberately one leg after the other over the platform and hung himself, precisely as one would step over a rock to take a swim in the sea.

  The platforms were now drawn out from under [the others], and six beside the young Mussulman who had hung himself remained swinging; but, owing to some rains that had fallen during the night and wet the thongs, four of the ropes gave way with the jerk, and the men came to the ground. Spare ropes thicker and stronger were at hand and they were soon again swinging at the side of their companions; and among the people of all religions and all colours that were present, not one, I believe, felt the smallest emotion of pity for their prolonged agonies, in such utter abhorrence are they held by all classes of Society.

  Not all convicted Thugs behaved so calmly. Some ascended the gallows still protesting their innocence, and condemning the approvers who had testified against them. One group of men from Borthwick’s gang, hanged earlier in the same year, 1830, ‘met their fate with hardened and sullen indifference’, and were heard to ‘give vent to bitter and unmeasured recrimination of the evidence’ as they passed along towards the gallows. But displays of bravado – whether real or feigned – plainly were a feature of a good number of Thug hangings. The British traveller Fanny Parks quoted an observer from Jubbulpore who believed that ‘it would be impossible to find in any country a set of men who meet death with more indifference than these wretches; and, had it been in a better cause, they would have excited universal sympathy’. Sleeman’s cousin, a Company surgeon named Henry Spry, noted that the night before another mass execution in Saugor ‘was passed by these men in displays of coarse and disgusting levity’, and that they sang loud songs in the cells. Next morning, under the gallows, ‘the air was pierced with the hoarse and hollow shoutings of these wretched men’.*

  All in all, about one man in every eight found guilty of Thuggee was handed a death sentence, these being, in the Company’s view, the most hardened of all the prisoners brought before its courts. Among them were Feringeea’s cousin and his foster brother, hanged at Jubbulpore with the other members of their gang, but on the whole the approver’s family did not suffer unduly at the hands of Smith and
Sleeman. Of Feringeea’s other three brothers, one died in Huttah jail in 1823 and the other two were accepted as approvers. Among his cousins, one died in prison, three turned approver, one fled and remained at large, and three others died natural deaths.

  The fate of the executed Thugs varied according to the year and the place in which they were hanged. Some Hindu prisoners asked to be cut down and cremated, in accordance with their faith, but this was not generally granted to them. On rare occasions, the Company authorities permitted the dead men’s relatives to erect a rough cairn over their graves. A good number of Thugs, however, were left to dangle from their gallows for weeks or months, as a warning to others – an ancient practice that was not ended until 1836. Even then, several British magistrates made applications to have the rotting bodies of dead Thugs permanently displayed, in gibbets, along the highways they had haunted. This was officially forbidden, but there is some evidence that the practice of ‘hanging in chains’ continued in the mofussil, at least in a few instances, as late as the 1860s.

  Even the corpses that were cut down from the gallows were often subjected to further rituals. It was generally believed in India that men who suffered violent deaths remained on earth as evil spirits called bhutas, and the people of Saugor were sufficiently concerned at the prospect of being haunted by dead Thugs to request that Sleeman order incisions to be made in their corpses. A deep cut made above the right ankle, it was thought, would ensure that the dead men’s spirits escaped their bodies. Such mutilations had recently been forbidden in an official circular sent out from Calcutta, but Sleeman allowed them to be made anyway, and the bodies of all the Thugs hung at Saugor were given the necessary incisions. Sleeman was never disciplined for this breach of regulations. Smith defended the decision, and the Company accepted it. Circumstances, in the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory in the 1830s, were very far from usual.