Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Somewhere along the way, and almost unnoticed, there was justice of a sort for the murdered moonshee, Bunda Ali, and his family. The remaining members of the Lucknadown gang, their numbers depleted by the passage of years, were judged at last, in Saugor and Jubbulpore during the sessions of 1830–1. About 90 of the 115 then remained alive, and no fewer than 33 of these were sentenced to be hanged – this being the largest number of death sentences, in proportion to the total of committals, ever handed down by Smith. Another 13 were transported for life, and most of the remainder received long terms of imprisonment. Gubbil Khan, who had tried to claim Bunda Ali’s infant child for himself before burying her alive, and had since spent the best part of a decade in jail, was sent back to prison for a further seven years.

  Among those who went to the gallows were Bhawanee Jemadar, who had strangled the moonshee, Babur Khan and Sheikh Bazeed, who had between them killed his wife, and Essuree the inveigler – one of the police officers who had lured Bunda Ali to his death by showing him his badge of office and persuading him to travel with the gang. These men were hanged at Jubbulpore in May 1831, and Fanny Parks copied a contemporary account of their execution into her diary. Like their comrades in other gangs, she wrote, the Lucknadown Thugs refused to be executed by a low-caste hangman. Each instead made a show of examining ‘with a detached air’ the ropes that dangled from the long beams of the gallows. ‘There was,’ Parks concluded, ‘something dreadful in the thought that men, who had so often imbrued their hands in blood, should meet their deaths with such carelessness.’ Then, one by one, each man reached out, and took a noose, and placed it around his own neck. And each, when he was satisfied, slid the knot tight under his ear, and launched into eternity.

  * ‘Played in this manner: a strap being doubled into many folds, the bystanders were requested to insert a stick where the first double took place, which was impossible to do without the consent of the juggler.’

  * A case recounted by several contemporary authors concerned a Dr Cheek, who – at a time when the country around his home was being scoured for a Thug strangler of the most ferocious sort – employed a servant ‘who had charge of his children. The man was a special favourite, remarkable for his kind and tender ways with his little charges, gentle in manner and unexceptionable in all his conduct. Every year he obtained leave from his master and mistress as, he said, for the filial purpose of visiting his aged mother for one month; and returning after the expiry of that time, with the utmost punctuality, resumed with accustomed affection and tenderness the charge of his little darlings. This mild and exemplary being was the missing Thug; kind, gentle, conscientious and regular at his post for eleven months in the year, he devoted the twelfth to strangulation.’ The Victorians derived a grim enjoyment from this sort of revelation, since it confirmed deeply held beliefs concerning the fiendish deceptions of the Thugs and the unreliability of Indians in general.

  * ‘The case of Kehree,’ Smith went on, ‘is in point. As a boy he had a hand cut off on conviction of belonging to a Thug association; he witnessed the appalling exhibition of his confederates being blown away from Guns, but so far from abandoning this dangerous profession he is now in his old age condemned to death for the same description of crime he was punished for so severely in his youth.’

  * And common, too, in Europe, where French galley slaves were tattooed GAL, English thieves marked with a ‘T’, and Russian prisoners sent to Siberia branded KAT.

  * ‘Glory to Bindachul! Bhowanee’s glory!’

  * The Thugs were not unique in this; most of the sepoys convicted of mutiny in 1857–8 went to their deaths with similar stoicism. And the Duke of Wellington, as one historian points out, ‘had observed long before that in comparison with their European counterparts, Indians were strangely impervious to the prospect of execution’. ‘There is a contempt of death in the natives, high and low,’ he wrote, ‘occasioned by some of the tenets of the religion of both sects, which makes the punishment a joke and, I may say, an honour, instead of what it is in our country.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Across the Black Water

  ‘phur jharna – the process of cleaning a bele to remove

  all signs of murder’

  On the edge of a lake near the centre of Saugor stood a large stone building. It was squat and square, made from the rough local bricks, and surrounded by a high mud wall. This building, with its barred windows and thick wood doors, was the town jail – the largest in the central provinces, and the main prison for convicted Thugs.

  By the end of 1840, Saugor Jail, and others like it dotted throughout India, were crowded with more than a thousand convicted members of the Thug gangs. Hundreds more were still arriving every year. At a time when there were no more than 30,000 convicts in the whole of British India, this huge influx of prisoners placed a great strain on the prison system, and posed real challenges to the resourcefulness of the officers who ran the jails.

  Matters were hardly helped by the decrepit state of many of the penitentiaries. Indian prisons were rarely completely secure when Sleeman and Smith began their anti-Thug campaign. In Saugor & Nerbudda, most – whether run by the Company or the Native States – were nothing more than thatched and mud-walled huts, ringed by walls; a few were merely rented bungalows. A handful of convicts, it is true, were confined within the dark recesses of old forts, but even here there were few outward signs that they were actually in prison. The jails of the early Victorian age did not depend on walkways and watchtowers, or even guards patrolling to and fro inside the building. Instead, prisoners were confined together in a handful of large, unfurnished living spaces – male convicts in one room, those awaiting trial in another, perhaps women in a third – each man claiming his own small area of floor and squabbling with his neighbours over space and the handful of comforts they were allowed.

  The Company’s determination to round up every suspected Thug who could be found soon resulted in serious overcrowding, particularly among prisoners on remand. As early as 1831, Saugor Jail was holding 610 alleged Thugs in buildings meant to house only 200. Sheer lack of space meant that ‘a large proportion’ were confined not in the main prison, but ‘in a kind of building lately erected near the jail without a surrounding wall’, an evidently inadequate measure that merely increased the ever present danger of escape.

  The sheer press of men in Saugor Jail was unusual, even for the time, but overcrowding had long been a problem in Company prisons and the consequences could be serious. Poor ventilation and the absence of even basic sanitation left jails stinking and unhealthy. The convicts had no access to running water; the bare minimum required for drinking and cooking was brought in by hand from nearby tanks or wells. Little was ever available for washing or flushing drains, and the unsanitary conditions that resulted were at their worst in the disgusting prison privies, which were typically no more than uncovered earthen jars. ‘So little care is taken to clean these vessels,’ a report on one Bengal jail observed, ‘that the whole floor, which is paved with brick, has become perfectly saturated with filth.’

  The consequences of this neglect were all too predictable. Repeated epidemics of cholera, malaria and dysentery swept through the prison system, and the mortality rate in Company jails was frequently appalling. More than 40,000 deaths were recorded in Bengal alone during the quarter century from 1843 to 1867, and in the first half of the century it was not uncommon for a quarter of all the men kept in a given prison to die of disease in a single year. Conditions in the central provinces seem to have been rather better – perhaps because most of the jails in the old Saugor & Nerbudda Territory were so small and makeshift that the regimes there were rather relaxed. Even so, one in every 20 of the suspected Thugs imprisoned there died while awaiting trial, and a good many more succumbed to disease while serving their sentences.

  The lack of space in Company prisons was exacerbated by the proscriptions of caste, which required most Hindu prisoners to prepare and cook their own meals in order to
ensure their ritual purity. This made it impracticable to build a single cookhouse. Instead, the convicts were furnished with an allowance to buy food, and vessels in which to prepare it. The sight of hundreds of prisoners packed into a small, walled courtyard, each man hunched over his own pots and pans, was one of the most common in the prison system.

  The staple food consisted of wheat cakes made from buffalo butter and coarse-ground flour, but since little attempt was made, before the 1840s, to regulate the men’s diet, prisoners were free to buy whatever they could afford – which was not much. Supplementary purchases included ‘bad meat, stinking Fish, musty grain, unripe vegetables and fruit’, but also ‘the most deleterious spirits and Drugs’. On Sundays, the one day of rest, those who had had sufficient discipline to set aside a little of their ration during the week would prepare modest feasts. Even so, complaints about the food were more common than protests concerning any other aspect of prison life.

  Security was, nonetheless, rarely a significant problem in Company jails despite the primitive conditions. The main deterrents to escape were not bolted doors and barred windows but the iron shackles that were worn night and day; and the main purpose of the prisons was neither confinement nor reform, but the infliction of forced labour.

  At this time, imprisonment with hard labour was the most common sentence handed down in almost every British court. It was thought to hold particular terror for all the criminal classes, in India as well as at home. ‘Nothing,’ the Company’s Committee on Prison Discipline observed in 1838, ‘is so distasteful to a native as hard continuous labour.’ It was ‘the most powerful engine in the hands of penal legislators in India for making jails as terrible as possible’.

  For the first four decades of the century, therefore, virtually all convicts who were fit to work were marched through the prison gates every day to dig and surface roads, which in the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory meant sweating to quarry, shift and shape the bone-hard basalt of the region. Not every observer believed this a harsh enough punishment; it was ‘only the semblance of hard labour’, thought Henry Spry, and in any case the prisoners worked at it for no more than four or five hours a day. But from the Company’s perspective, the policy had several benefits. It kept the prisoners occupied. It forced down the costs of public works. And the common sight of men labouring in fetters had (it was hoped) a deterrent effect on passers-by.

  Many convicted Thugs had been in prison before. Some had already served time in native prisons, where they had been forced to work on the local roads until they could lodge the security required to secure release; others had been confined for short terms in British jails, only to be released when the local magistrates found it impossible to make their charges stick. Now, however, things were different. The sheer enormity of the confessions heard in Smith’s courtroom, combined with Sleeman’s certainty that any escaped Thugs would inevitably return to their old profession, was sufficient to convince the Company that its new prisoners should never be released, even to labour under heavy guard on public works. From the first days of the anti-Thug campaign, therefore, elaborate precautions were taken to secure them from the moment of their arrest. The members of large gangs captured on the roads were chained together in groups of 30, and secured each evening, during the march back to Saugor or Jubbulpore, by stakes driven into the ground through the links in their shackles. Once they had reached their destination – and unlike ordinary prisoners who were released from their irons for at least part of each day – individual Thugs were kept heavily fettered night and day.

  There seems, even so, to have been a general perception, in the early 1830s, that confinement to a Company prison was less than such criminals deserved. Dr Spry, who in 1837 reported on the disgusting state of the drains at Saugor Jail, suggested that ‘the respiration of prison-air in Hindustan is, in point of fact, the only punishment, after personal restraint, which those in confinement can be said to endure’. It was partly for this reason that, in 1838, the old punishment of work on the roads was superseded by what the government of India described as ‘monotonous, uninteresting labour within doors’. This, in Company lands, generally meant either mounting the treadwheel – a sort of convict-powered corn mill – or, more usually, turning handmills for grinding flour. These mills, which were a specifically local innovation, were first issued to prisoners serving life sentences in the inland provinces in 1841, and remained in service for so long that they became one of the defining images of imprisonment in Indian jails.

  The increasing numbers of the Thug prisoners raised other issues for the Company. There was no one Thuggee jail; instead captured stranglers were imprisoned where they had been convicted, and there were Thug wards in the prisons at Aurangabad, Cawnpore and Agra, as well as several more within the borders of the central provinces themselves. Since it was feared that Thugs might corrupt the lesser prisoners, the Company was careful to keep them well apart from the other men. At the same time, the Thugs themselves became deliciously grisly attractions for European visitors to the mofussil, and Sleeman and his men often put their captives on display for distinguished guests. These early tourists had to be escorted and protected when they called at Thug jails, though the surviving records suggest that local officers had so much confidence in their prisoners’ behaviour that this responsibility was generally not taken very seriously. The diarists Emily and Fanny Eden – sisters of the then Governor General, Lord Auckland – who visited Cawnpore in 1837, wrote acidly of Captain Paton, ‘who is a great Thug fancier – he has a prison full of them’. Paton had, thought Emily, ‘by dint of living with Thugs … evidently become rather fond of them, and has acquired a latent taste for strangling’, which he indulged by encouraging some of his charges to re-enact their old crimes. This demonstration seems to have impressed the gentlemen in the party – though, as Fanny pointed out, ‘it is a foolish exhibition and once, they warmed into the play so much, they nearly strangled a sepoy in good earnest’.

  Similar re-enactments were a feature of colonial life for years. The Venetian photographer Felice Beato, who went to India in the wake of the Mutiny of 1857, visited one of the Thug prisons of Oudh and was able to secure a portrait of three inmates showing how they disposed of their victims. Altogether more sinister, at least in the eyes of the participants, was the trick played on the Reverend William Butler, an evangelical clergyman, during a visit to Agra at much the same time. Butler and his party had just enjoyed a sightseeing tour of the Taj Mahal when their guide, a Colonel Williams,

  casually remarked, as we crossed the road from the Taj, ‘Come, I will show you something else.’ So he turned down an ominous-looking portal, and we followed him through a guarded gate into a square with high walls, and thence by a gloomy passage into another inclosed court, where were a group of the most awful-looking men that I had ever seen. The Colonel coolly remarked, ‘These are some of my pets.’ In a moment we realised where we were standing, three gentlemen and a party of ladies unguarded in the presence of nearly two hundred Thugs! It made one’s flesh creep. The feeling was dreadful, and the situation was not at all relieved when, in retiring again through the long, dark passage, a number of these wretches came clanking close after us, to plead in the outer court for some concession from the Colonel. The ladies of the party could hardly forgive our gallant escort for the trick he played upon them in leading them into such a presence, and that, too, after coming out of the Taj. It seemed like leaving paradise and descending into hell.

  Nevertheless, the practice of visiting the Thugs continued a while longer. It probably persisted into the early 1880s. Only the increasing decrepitude of the diminishing bands of survivors, and the British decision to move their jails away from town centres, where they had been easily accessible to visitors, put an end to the practice.

  This is not to say that the Company ever viewed its prisoners as harmless. From the late 1830s, when suspects brought into its jails were classified according to the seriousness of the charges that they faced, sus
pected Thugs were ranked as the most dangerous of all native criminals, one category above men accused of ‘heinous crimes’ against property or the person, and two above those charged with theft, forgery, fraud or receiving stolen goods. Sleeman and his successors were always concerned that some might escape, and teach their methods to a new generation of Thugs; this was a constant worry, particularly given the large concentrations of stranglers in the jails of the old Saugor & Nerbudda Territory. Saugor itself was, of course, not particularly secure. The position was a little better at the central jail in Jubbulpore, where the men convicted in the sessions there had been locked away, but even this prison was not proof against every attempted jailbreak. In 1834, a group of more than a dozen Thugs sliced through their cast-iron shackles using twists of thread coated with oil and a little powdered corundum stone – an abrasive sold in local bazaars and used to cut gems and polish steel. Having freed their legs, the men used the same technique to saw through the bars across their window, a job that took them only half an hour. After that, they scaled the walls and made off into the night.