Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (11 page)

Even as the Murnae and Sindouse Thugs vanished into the patchwork of
independent
and semi-independent states that made up Gwalior and Bundelcund, the East India Company was forgetting them. Halhed left Etawah for a better position at a larger station within a few weeks of his return from Sindouse at the end of 1812. Perry, who remained in the town until the early 1820s,
concentrated
more and more on other work, and though Etawah’s new magistrate, George Stockwell, took up the task of harrying any Thugs bold enough to settle within the Company’s borders, he was very much alone. Few other British officers in India knew or cared about the stranglers.

A scant and scattered body of knowledge concerning the Thugs did exist, had Perry only known it. British officials had first encountered
organized
bands of stranglers a full quarter of a century before Halhed ventured into Sindouse, and, even before that, there had been indications that such gangs, or something very like them, were roaming India. But the almost total lack of communication between the Company’s three Presidencies – each of which maintained its own administrative system, its own army and its own police – made it difficult for anyone to draw together the few reports that did exist. News of Perry’s activities in Etawah barely penetrated further than the Jumna at first; the proceedings of magistrates in Madras were filed in the archives of that Presidency and forgotten. And so long as Thuggee was perceived as a local problem – with officers expelling criminals from their territories
without worrying too much where they would settle next – the situation was unlikely to change.

The first unequivocal description of an Indian strangling gang had been composed nearly a thousand miles from Etawah, in the vicinity of Madras. Writing home in 1785, more than a century after John Fryer had witnessed the execution of what may have been a gang of Thugs outside Surat, a Company administrator by the name of James Forbes reported that

The arrests that prompted Forbes to compile this brief account can no longer be traced in the records of his Presidency. But his letter is important for several reasons. It is the first British account to mention the word ‘phanseegur’ (Phansigar), which the Emperor Aurangzeb had used to describe the stranglers whom he condemned in his farman of 1672, and which would henceforth be applied to all Thug-like bandits living south of the River Tapti. It is the first, too, to describe one of the Thugs’ most
distinctive
tactics: the practice of inveigling their way into their victims’ confidence and awaiting the perfect moment to murder them. And its
mention
of the Phansigars’ favoured weapon – the noose – is a useful reminder that the gangs’ habits and methods evolved over time, for only a few decades later this weapon was superseded by the strangling scarf or cloth, which, while less effective, was far less conspicuous. The noose (often made of catgut and sometimes mounted on a stick) seems not to have been employed after about 1810, and even experienced Phansigars questioned on the subject in later years had no recollection of ever seeing it in use. This they attributed to the danger of being stopped by police and found with such a
compromising
object in their possession.

No more was heard of the stranglers of the Deccan for two decades after Forbes wrote his report, although some sources suggest that, in 1799, a large
gang of suspected Phansigars was detained outside the southern city of Bangalore during the Company’s war against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The fact that such murderous bands existed was recognized outside the borders of Madras, for a dictionary published in Bombay in 1808 defined the word ‘Phanseeo’ as ‘a term of abuse in Guzerat,
*
applied also, truly, to thieves or robbers who strangle children in secret or travellers on the road’. But the Phansigars and their methods were certainly not widely known, nor
discussed
in newspapers or journals during the first decade of the century. The great majority of British officers, it seems safe to say, heard nothing of their activities. Nor, apparently, did the Indians themselves, for ‘among some 2,000 fragments of oral tradition’ collected from the central provinces, one
historian
searching, many years later, for evidence of the stranglers’ existence found ‘many stories about robbers, but none specifically about Thugs’.

It was not until 1807 that first-hand reports of the Phansigars’ activities began to appear. In that year, purely by chance, several stranglers ‘belonging to a gang that had just returned laden with booty from an expedition to Travancore’ fell into the hands of William Wright, the British magistrate of the district of Chittoor, 75 miles inland from Madras. These men were thrown into jail and, confronted with the prospect of lengthy prison sentences, several of them confessed to playing minor roles in a number of murders. Their crimes included the theft of 2,500 pagodas – the property of a Company
officer
– and the killing of five of the officer’s servants at Coimbatoor in 1805; the throttling, two years later, of seven men carrying 1,000 pagodas for a Lieutenant Blackston of the Engineers; and, most spectacularly, the murder, on the coast south of Madras, of three men who had been escorting treasure valued at 160,000 rupees. There seemed little doubt that the same band had murdered other victims, including many whose disappearances had never been reported to the police. Wright soon became convinced that gangs of Phansigars were active throughout the Deccan, killing hundreds, if not
thousands
, every year.

The Chittoor magistrate’s reports, which were the first to describe the stranglers’ activities in any detail, would have proved invaluable to Perry, for the Phansigars of southern India were practically identical to the Thugs of Hindustan. By careful questioning of a number of informants, Wright
discovered that most Phansigars lived under the protection of local
landholders
in his own district (which had been an independent territory until it was ceded to the Company in 1807), and that their gangs were active chiefly during the cold season. Like the Thugs of Etawah, many Deccan stranglers worked on the land for the remainder of the year, apparently because few derived large incomes from banditry. Phansigars played a full part in village life, and the loot they acquired in the course of their expeditions ensured that they were welcomed, rather than feared, when they returned to their homes. ‘They and their families,’ the magistrate was told, ‘lived peaceably with their neighbours, whom they never attempted to molest.’

Wright’s evidence also revealed something of the gangs’ methods for the first time. The Chittoor magistrate was the first official to draw attention to the defining characteristic linking the Thugs and Phansigars – the fact that ‘they never commit a robbery unaccompanied with murder’. He determined that the Deccan stranglers generally travelled in bands 30 to 50 strong, seldom disposed of any victims within 30 miles of their own homes, and
frequently
used aliases or changed their names, so that ‘it may generally be said there is no discovering Fauseegars while travelling’ – all information that might have aided Perry in his interrogation of Gholam Hossyn. Wright also noted that the members of several Chittoor gangs were well known to one another, and that they often combined forces on the roads to overwhelm large parties of travellers, dividing into groups of about a dozen men in order to cover more ground and arouse less suspicion in the minds of their intended victims. They had their own slang or argot, impenetrable to
ordinary
travellers, and their method of killing was generally the same as that practised in Hindustan:

Like their counterparts in the north of India, the Phansigars were careful never to kill the people of the districts they passed through, preferring to attack travellers whose disappearance was unlikely to be noticed for some time. Other than that, though, Wright found them to be indiscriminate. ‘They murder,’ he wrote, ‘even Coolies, Palanqueen boys, Fakirs and Byragees
*
– no one escapes whom they have an opportunity of murdering – the chance is that every man has a rupee or two about him in money or cloths, and with them the most trifling sum is a sufficient inducement to commit murder.’

Gradually, Wright learned enough about the Phansigars to arrest the
leaders
of some other gangs. Large groups of stranglers were tried at Chittoor in 1809, and as late as 1812 at least 40 alleged Phansigars were still being held in the Company prison there, although they had been acquitted in the district court. Wright refused to release them until they lodged substantial bonds, called ‘securities’, to guarantee their future good behaviour – a ruse
commonly
used in India to detain prisoners whom the authorities suspected might be dangerous. The magistrate remained untroubled that supposedly innocent men were languishing in prison. ‘Of their guilt,’ he insisted, ‘not a shadow of doubt exists.’

Wright’s reports received scant attention when they were first compiled. Probably they were initially restricted to a small group of administrators in Madras, and there is certainly no evidence that Thomas Perry was aware of them as he struggled with the mystery of the Thugs. From these small
beginnings
, however, the Company’s knowledge of the strangling gangs did gradually expand. In the second decade of the century, word of the Thugs’ existence spread slowly east along the Jumna. This was probably a
consequence
of the pursuit of the Murnae gangs. After 1810 the new Superintendent of Police for the western, or inland, provinces of northern India became the first British officer to be formally charged with
responsibility
for combating Thuggee. From then on the forms used to compile crime statistics in the interior included a space for listing ‘murders by Thugs’, and the addition of this category allowed Calcutta to estimate, however
incompletely
, the incidence of Thug crime. The essential details of Wright’s reports became known in the Bengal Presidency by 1811–12, when they were at last circulated to local magistrates. Information gleaned from
Perry’s interrogations of Gholam Hossyn was also copied for the use of other magistrates and the police.

These early bulletins were still very much provisional. Thuggee was not formally defined for several years; nor was there as yet any tendency to see all stranglers as practically identical, or as members of a single, rigidly
controlled
fraternity. George Stockwell, writing from Etawah during the monsoon of 1815, was of the opinion that ‘the Thugs who have been in the habit of infesting this part of the Company’s Provinces may … be divided into three classes, entirely unconnected with each other.’
*

The most important reason for this upsurge of interest in India’s
stranglers
was the Company’s belated recognition that large numbers of its sepoys were falling prey to Thugs. Soldiers were – as we have seen – favourite targets of the various Thug bands. Not only did they travel home on leave each year taking large sums of money to their families, their disappearance was unlikely to be noticed until the expiration of their leave. The first
general
warning that gangs of stranglers were active in the interior was issued in April 1810, just a month after the Company’s first encounter with Gholam Hossyn, by the officer commanding the British armies of Bengal. In an Order of the Day, Major General William St Leger not only drew his men’s attention to this hitherto unknown danger but detailed what was known of the Thugs’ appearance and methods. He described the manner in which their inveiglers contrived to fall in with strangers on the road, and sepoys were urged not to partake in conversation with other parties whom they might meet on the roads. The men were particularly warned not to leave their camping grounds before dawn or allow others to lead them to ‘some solitary spot’, and ordered never to accept food or drink from strangers and to stay together on the road. Attempts were also made to end the soldiers’ habit of setting out for home carrying their arrears of pay. A new system, involving the issuing of what amounted to cheques that could be cashed by applying to the British Residents at Delhi and Lucknow, or to various Collectors of Revenue, was introduced. This, it was hoped, would reduce the sepoys’ reliance on cash and make them less appealing targets.

Thus by the year 1812 knowledge of the Thugs was at last growing within the ranks of the Company and its army. However, civilians in India, as well as newspapers and magazines in Asia or at home, still paid little attention to the stranglers. The honour of introducing Thuggee to this broader audience fell to another Madras magistrate – an acquaintance of Wright’s – by the name of Richard Sherwood, who, adapting his friend’s various reports, produced a highly influential article titled ‘Of the murderers called Phansigars’ in the year 1816. This paper’s first appearance, in the pages of the obscure
Madras Literary
Gazette
, aroused little comment. But in 1820 the same article was reprinted in
Asiatick Researches
, a respected academic journal produced in Calcutta.
Asiatick Researches
had a larger circulation than the
Literary Gazette
and its readers included some of the most senior men in the Company’s service and a
significant
number of subscribers in Britain itself. This time Sherwood’s information was noticed.