by Mike Dash
Sleeman was astonished at the audacity of this escape. ‘The iron was cut through as it were with a knife,’ he wrote, ‘and in a manner so perfectly smooth as to be almost incredible … The bar was so finely cut it would escape detection by the naked eye even at a distance of a few feet, and could only have been detected by sounding the bar with a hammer.’ Over the years a handful of stranglers escaped from other jails. Most were, in the end, recaptured; the Company set its approvers on them, and since the majority had returned to their old haunts they were swiftly hunted down. ‘The narratives of these pursuits,’ Sleeman recalled
were, many of them, exceedingly interesting. [The approvers] knew the homes of the most remote relations or friends of the fugitives, and, in one disguise or another, led the pursuing party to every one of them, until they had gratified their revenge by recapture.
Nevertheless, in the course of the nineteenth century at least 14 convicted Thugs escaped from prison and eluded all pursuit – presumably by fleeing to parts of the country where they had not been previously known. The only consolation for the British was that these few seem to have been convinced they would be foolish to resume their former careers. There is no evidence that any of them ever killed again.
The fifteen hundred or so convicted Thugs imprisoned in central India may have been housed in poor conditions, and kept hard at work, but their fate was far less terrible than that of the men sent to penal colonies overseas. Well over 1,200 of Sleeman’s captives had been sentenced to transportation for life, and these prisoners were shipped, in chains, to a desperate existence in the Malayan swamps. Theirs was a two-fold punishment, for the transportees endured not only unremitting hard labour, but also separation from everything and everyone they knew.
The idea of transportation was an old one. The British had been banishing ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ from their shores since 1597 – at first to the tobacco plantations of Virginia and then, when the American War of Independence put a stop to that, to Australia, where the convicts of the First Fleet made landfall at Botany Bay early in 1788. These men were transported because it was then generally believed that the criminal classes were irredeemable, and Britain would be better off without them; because English prisons were increasingly overcrowded; and also because the free colonists of both the New World and New South Wales required a cheap supply of labour. The practice of shipping convicts out from Britain did not cease until 1868, and by then a total of 40,000 British and Irish felons had been sent to America and the Caribbean, and about 165,000 to Australia.
Large numbers of Indian prisoners suffered similar fates after transportation to the East Indies was introduced in 1787. In all, perhaps 100,000 were sent overseas from Bombay, Bengal and Madras, and for much the same reasons as their British counterparts. They went at first to Bencoolen, a ragged collection of half-built huts sweltering on a mud flat on the south coast of Sumatra, then to Penang, an island off the Malayan coast, and later to Burma, Aden, Malacca, the Straits Settlement (today Singapore) and the sugar plantations of Mauritius. These were places where the British had established footholds of sorts, and where labour was desperately needed to help build the new colonies. Some were not much more than clearings in the midst of fever-ridden jungle – desperately unhealthy places, even by the standards of the time – and the work that the convicts were put to, which included clearing mangrove swamps and cutting back great swathes of rainforest, ensured that mortality among the prisoners was always high.
From the Company’s perspective, the penal colonies of the east were a useful resource. They made it possible to remove convicts from British territory far more certainly than the old practice of deportation to the Native States. They made it difficult for the men to return, since even those transported for a term of years, rather than life, were generally forced to remain in their new homes as free settlers once their sentences were served. And they made escape all but impossible, which meant that even Thugs could usually be put to work outside the prison walls. In both Sumatra and Singapore, the penal settlements were surrounded by hundreds of miles of impenetrable jungle filled with tigers and home to hostile natives, whom the prisoners were encouraged to believe would kill and eat men on the run.
Perhaps most significantly of all, the punishment of transportation was believed to be a terror to Hindu convicts, whose religion forbade them to cross open water on penalty of losing caste. ‘The belief was that transportation would be polluting,’ writes one historian. ‘It was thus commended as “a weapon of tremendous power” … and the effect of transportation on the whole community was believed to be greater than the death sentence.’ Sleeman, like most British administrators, was certainly convinced that he set a severe example of the Thugs whom he sentenced to be shipped to settlements ‘across the black water’. Whether there was any truth in this belief is debatable; it was certainly no deterrent to Muslims, and since Hindu prisoners risked sacrificing their ritual purity in jail in India, where they could not always be sure of choosing their companions or the food they ate, some prisoners actually found the prospect of transportation preferable, and pleaded to be sent overseas. Nevertheless, British magistrates continued to make liberal use of their right to banish prisoners to Malaya well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
The majority of these men – certainly the majority of Thugs – went to the largest of the new settlements, Penang. Prisoners were sent, in irons, from Saugor and Jubbulpore to the coast, and there held in jail, along with other convicts, until a ship became available. A British army officer named Gould Hunter-Weston, who encountered a group of 97 Thug transportees on the Bombay waterfront in 1840, noted that the entire party had been tattooed on their foreheads with both their names and their offence, and that all were heavily shackled to prevent escape. Hunter-Weston asked one what he had done to deserve such punishment. ‘The reply was that he did not know, for he had only strangled six men.’
The tattoos were generally effective in marking out Thugs from other prisoners once they arrived at their destinations. The stranglers detested them and took no pride in this visible identification of their status as members of a notorious fraternity; when they could, they hid them by wearing their turbans ‘inconveniently low down on their brows’. Such deceptions were, however, difficult to maintain in the confined conditions in which the men were held. In the early years of the Penang settlement, for example, convicts were crowded together inside a small stockade, and went out to work in gangs each day – at first on the roads, and later, in the 1850s, making ‘lounging chairs’ for sale to British officers. The area was malarial, and since the medical wisdom of the time suggested that fevers were borne by a ‘noxious effluvia’ that rose from the surrounding jungle, the transportees slept in cramped dormitories raised on wooden stilts. Charcoal braziers burned day and night in every room to drive off diseased air, and the men contributed to their own well-being by coating the floors each morning with a fresh layer of cow dung mixed with water, a common Indian prophylactic.
In some respects, in fact, conditions in the penal settlements were better than they were in India. The leg irons worn by most felons were much lighter than those used on the Subcontinent, and so confident were the authorities that their prisons were secure that even these were generally discarded once the men had served a probation of three months. Such liberal regulations did not, of course, apply to convicted Thugs, who were made to work in heavy fetters and forbidden to cook their own food. The most notorious among them, in common with other ‘irredeemable’ criminals, were not allowed out of the stockade, where they ‘were confined in the refractory ward on severe task work, such as making coir* from the rough husks of cocoa-nuts’.
The knowledge that the penal colonies dotted about the Indian Ocean were full of Thugs only added to the frisson that many Britishers felt when confronted by groups of transportees, whom they were already inclined to see as implacable villains. The shiver that ran down the spine of a Mrs Bartrum, who enc
ountered one gang of prisoners in Mauritius in the 1830s, seems to have been entirely typical. ‘I remember being struck with the appearance of the Hindoo convicts, at work on the roads,’ she recalled. ‘They had a most ferociously scowling aspect. The dark, malignant glance, the bent brow, the turban of dirty white or dusky red; the loose drapery, only half clothing the body, gave them a wild, picturesque appearance, to which mountain scenery added still greater effect.’
Yet the warders responsible for the penal settlements had – or at least professed to have – no fear of the Thugs. Prison officers thought of their charges as cowards, who had relied on the force of numbers to commit their crimes and were harmless when kept isolated from the other members of their gangs. In this they were apparently correct, for despite the casual violence that was commonplace in many jails, there are no records of convicted Thugs strangling either fellow prisoners or civilians. According to JFA McNair, the officer who commanded the penal colony at Singapore until its abolition,
It is worthy of remark … how signally these men often fail when they attempt to act alone. Amongst our Thugs we had one (a strangler) who, coveting a pair of gold bangles on the wrist of a fellow-convict employed at the General Hospital, one night tried the handkerchief upon him, but missed his mark, and got away without being detected. Later on, the convict authorities examined the warrants of all the men in the hospital, and this gave them a clue, which they followed up successfully and caught the ‘Thug’. He was punished, and then confessed, saying, ‘Bhawani was unkind, and I could not do it by myself; I missed my companions.’
The contempt that British officers felt for individual Thugs left them determined to prevent any resurgence in Thuggee. Though the authorities occasionally showed mercy to other long-term prisoners with exemplary jail records, no Thug lifer was ever paroled. Even when the convict settlements at Penang and Singapore were closed down between 1867 and 1873, and many of the prisoners freed, the 250 Thugs found there were simply transferred to a brand new penal colony being established in the Andaman Islands. There they passed the remainder of their lives in the uniquely harsh environment of what became the most feared of all Indian prison settlements: a jail built in a jungle on islands that lay two hundred miles out in the Bay of Bengal and were scarcely ever visited; a place whose ‘utter unfamiliarity – a deliberately maintained vacuum of knowledge and experience – was expected to make the Andamans a kind of black hole in the imagination of the Indian criminal’.
Those Thugs who survived to be sent to the Andamans found themselves confined, as they had always been, to separate quarters, arranged so that they could not corrupt the lesser prisoners who made up the remainder of the prison population – habitual thieves, occasional murderers and rebellious sepoys rounded up after the Mutiny of 1857. Nevertheless, by the 1870s the tides of penal reform were at last shifting in the Thugs’ favour. By now the centuries-old certainty that such criminals could never be redeemed was at last giving way to belief in the potential for reform. Isolated as they were from the mainland, the remaining Thugs posed little danger to society, and – safe in the Andaman Islands – it was at last agreed that they might be rehabilitated within the confines of the settlement. To mark the great Imperial durbar of January 1877, at which Queen Victoria was created Empress of India, a number of the Thugs, dacoits and poisoners on the islands were granted conditional and local releases, and allowed thereafter to live and work with the free men in the island capital, Port Blair. The chance of a return to India was still denied them; but for the time that remained to them, these minor Thugs – men who were, in British eyes, less evil than those who had been hanged, and less useful than those made approvers – were returned to society of a sort.
The approvers themselves, who had proved their usefulness to the Company and atoned – in some small measure – for their crimes, were treated rather differently.
Feringeea’s fellow informants remained out on the roads long after he himself was returned to jail in 1832, travelling about with their escorts of nujeebs and chasing the diminishing bands of Thugs of whom they had personal knowledge. This information was the key to their temporary freedom, for they could only avoid confinement for as long as they remained of service to their new masters, and it was certainly suspected – then and now – that a few, at least, levelled false allegations against innocent men in the hope of appearing useful. Even so, 56 approvers had been returned to prison by the late 1830s, where they were, naturally, widely hated by the men they had betrayed. The only way to guarantee their safety was to keep them in isolation from the other convicts, and so they were confined together in a lock-up just outside the gates of Jubbulpore’s Central Jail.
This state of affairs endured until 1837, when a new model prison, called the School of Industry, was opened in the town. It was specially designed to house the approvers in relatively comfortable conditions, and unlike the other prisons and penal colonies to which convicted Thugs were sent, it served two purposes, being not merely a prison but a reformatory as well. The approvers themselves were, of course, regarded as beyond salvation; the commutation of their death sentences to life imprisonment, in exchange for their services to government, was the most they could expect. But their sons – those who had never been on a Thuggee expedition, and were (it was thought) too young to have been fully exposed to the full horror of their fathers’ lives – were also imprisoned, to be educated and, if possible, brought up as useful citizens. They, too, were forcibly confined, over a good number of protests, for the Company remained convinced that they would take up strangling if they were released. Because they were as yet innocent of any crime, however, they were permitted much more freedom than their fathers could enjoy.
The Jubbulpore School of Industry did not look much like a prison. It was located in the centre of the town, and was close to, but not a part of, the central jail. It was long and low and built of brick, with tiled and sloping roofs to drain the monsoon rains, and it enclosed a large dirt quadrangle, where the inmates ate and exercised. The approvers themselves were housed nearby, alongside the soldiers assigned to guard them, in what were called the ‘Thuggee Lines’. The Lines were, in effect, a model native village, built by the prisoners themselves with Company help, in which the informers lived with their wives and children. This was a particular indulgence. The British always took great pains to prevent their other Thug prisoners from breeding, for fear that any children would turn to Thuggee. But here, in what amounted to controlled conditions, the practice was tolerated. By 1870, the village had grown to a substantial size; in that year it housed 158 Thugs (the great majority of them men arrested in the 1840s and 1850s) and 202 of the approvers’ dacoit counterparts, together with their wives and more than 1,500 children.
Sleeman’s approvers were not, of course, permitted to be idle. The School of Industry was, as its name implied, a place of work – not of numbing toil, like other jails, but of useful labour. This, it was believed, would help to develop the inmates’ self-respect, and thus contribute to the process of reform. It was an advanced notion for the time, and also helped the School to become self-supporting, for successive governors sold the products made there on the open market, thus covering the costs of upkeep.
The central provinces, indeed, turned out to be a first-rate market for the goods turned out by the School of Industry. The cost of importing anything from Bombay or Bengal – much less Britain – was prohibitive, and there was little in the way of local manufacturing. The School’s first products, bricks, were soon in great demand, and from then on the reformatory paid its way, and even made a net contribution to government funds.
The greatest difficulty that the warders faced was to make the inmates work. The Thugs themselves regarded the whole idea as degrading, and though many of their sons were less reluctant, their fathers prevented them from labouring. It was only when the School’s first governor, a Captain Brown, explained that the prisoners would be paid for their work that these objections were overcome. �
�The approvers,’ wrote Brown, ‘are all very fond of money, and when they see they are to share in the profits of the manufacture, they will cheerfully join in the work.’
By the early 1840s even Thugs who had previously lived almost entirely on the profits of robbery and murder were doing manual work to set examples for their sons. The approvers next petitioned for their children to be taught to read and write – a request that was at first refused, on the grounds that superior education would leave the children dissatisfied with their drab existence in the jail – and when Sleeman’s successors decided to turn the School into a tent-and carpet-making factory they proved eager to learn how to use the new machines that were brought in. Tent-making was taught by artisans from the Doab town of Futtehpore, and the art of carpet-weaving by men from Mirzapore, the great centre of that trade; by 1847 the men and women of the Thug village were turning out more than 130 tents and 3,300 yards of Kidderminster carpet a year. Revenues for that year exceeded 35,000 rupees, and the School of Industry had placed itself firmly in profit.
The School was not unique in specializing in a certain sort of manufacturing. Other Indian prisons did the same; the maximum security jail at Alipore had a noted print shop that sold more than 200,000 rupees’ worth of books and pamphlets in the year 1861 alone. But the superior quality of the Thugs’ work was widely recognized, and by the 1850s, the carpets woven at the School of Industry were noted as the best made anywhere in India. An example of the Thugs’ work was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and a few years later the men of the School wove a huge, seamless carpet, 80 feet by 40 feet in size, for Queen Victoria herself. It weighed more than two tons and found its way to the Waterloo Chamber in Windsor Castle, where it remains today – still, by repute, the largest that has ever been hand-woven. By then the Thugs had also become one of the main suppliers of tents to the Indian Army, their products – notably latrine, or ‘necessary’, tents – finding their way to every cantonment from the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin. In time, successive superintendents turned the School into a fully commercial concern, improving capacity by bringing in prisoners from the Thuggee jail in Jubbulpore and even free labourers from the surrounding districts to work alongside the approvers from the village. The most important portions of the annual reports compiled by these officers became the figures for turnover and profit, and the records of the School contain far more about the problems of accounting for the cost of tent-cloth woven, cheaply, in other prisons, than they do about the process of reform or the lives of the prisoners themselves.
