Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (10 page)

Worse followed. On the evening of 22 October, Halhed took an evening ride through the ravines along the Maratha border, accompanied by Maunsell and a bodyguard of a dozen sepoys and three mounted guides. The evening had been a quiet one, but as Halhed rode along a dried-up riverbed outside the village of Bindawa, ‘a party of about 500 armed men, headed by Loll Jee and his son, Suntak Arn, who had it seems laid in wait for us, rushed out’. The attack was quite unexpected. ‘I had no reason to apprehend any such
disturbance
in our own Territories at that time,’ Halhed protested. ‘Nor had anyone
the least idea that it was possible to happen. We offered no provocation
whatever
and were proceeding quietly on our road, and I certainly deemed the protection of 12 horsemen sufficient.’ In a matter of moments, however, the British party found itself entirely surrounded and cut off from their base.

Their situation was desperate. ‘To move forward,’ the magistrate would recall, ‘was death, to stand still to prolong our existence for a very short time, to return was equally dangerous, for it is the custom of these villagers to rush on when the opposing or defending party retreat.’ Only the Sindouse men’s reluctance – common among Indian irregulars at this time – to assault armed Europeans prevented an immediate attack. But, even so, there was no obvious escape and Halhed swiftly realized that his men’s one hope was to retreat to the top of the ravines, under cover provided by a desperate rearguard action.

All was confusion as the ascent began. Halhed placed himself with the rearguard and was overseeing the retreat of the last of the sepoys when

Turning, Halhed found that Maunsell was nowhere to be seen. Four wounded sepoys, coming up the ravine after him, confirmed that the
lieutenant
‘had been shot and cut down, that Manoolah, horseman, was killed, and also one of the mounted guides, and that the villagers were coming up’. There was very little the magistrate could do, but he ‘went to the braw of the cliff and fired my pistols at them, which they returned with matchlock balls’.

Halhed’s flight brought him and the remaining members of the party to the village of Bindawa, a few hundred yards from the Maratha border. The
village
zamindars – whom the magistrate ‘had every reason to suppose would try to destroy us’ – refused to offer any help, and though Halhed was anxious to counter-attack, the most he could do was return to the foot of the ravines to recover Maunsell’s corpse. It had been ‘cut into pieces … stripped and covered with numberless wounds, most of them apparently inflicted after life had left them’.

Such an outrage could not be left unrevenged. It was more than simply a matter of prestige; the Company was so badly outmanned in India that its entire position could be swiftly undermined if its subjects thought they could kill Europeans with impunity. Within a few days another party of sepoys, this one under a Captain Popham, was sent to Sindouse to reinforce Halhed’s men. A battery of artillery capable of reducing the rebels’
strongholds
was floated down the Chambel. And a reward of 5,000 rupees was offered for the capture of Laljee himself. When news reached Halhed that the zamindar had taken refuge, with most of his retainers, in the village of Murnae, just over the Maratha border to the west, he wasted no time in crossing into Gwalior after them.

Once again, Laljee did not stand and fight. At the first news of Halhed’s approach, he fled, accompanied by almost all his men, including a party of well over a hundred Thugs. Murnae, which had been one of the stranglers’ principal headquarters for more than a century, was left exposed. And in the second week of November, the Company’s troops descended upon it. Their orders were to raze the village to the ground.

 

Murnae burned, a vivid flare of colour amid the grey of the ravines. Two months after the end of the rains, the grass roofs of the village houses were dry and combustible. It took only seconds to set them alight, and as Captain Popham’s sepoys ran from hut to hut, thrusting flaming torches into the thatch, thin columns of smoke began to rise into the air and went spiralling up over the surrounding gorges to scar the cold November sky. Long before nightfall, the settlement had been reduced to little but ash and a scattering of sagging walls, black with soot and still hot to the touch.

Popham did not rest even then. Before he marched away, the captain had asses harnessed to the local farmers’ ploughs and sent his sepoys back into Murnae. The smouldering remnants of its mud-brick buildings were ploughed back into the earth from which they had been made, until there was nothing but rutted heaps of black, charred soil where the village had once stood. Maunsell’s death had been avenged. The destruction of the Thug headquarters was complete.

By then, of course, the stranglers themselves had fled. At the first signs of Popham’s approach, every able-bodied person in Murnae had hastened south
or west into the Maratha lands to escape the vengeance of the Company. Some did not go very far. Most of the village’s farmers and artisans probably halted no more than a few miles away, fearful for their crops, and some of these men had already returned home by the end of the year to begin
rebuilding
their village. Laljee himself, accompanied by a band 400 strong, did not venture much further. The zamindar sought refuge in Rampoora, a small town 15 miles to the north of his former home, and hovered for several weeks along the south bank of the River Sindh, hoping for an opportunity to cross back into British territory and seize back the cattle that were the main source of his wealth. This proved to be a serious mistake, for – surrounded by a detachment of Maratha troops despatched at the Company’s request, handed over to the British authorities for trial, and swiftly found guilty of complicity in Maunsell’s murder – Laljee found himself imprisoned for life in the British jail at Roy Barelly, east of Delhi. Some 140 Sindouse and Murnae Thugs, picked up by the Marathas in nearby villages and towns, fared only a little better. These men were thrown into a grim prison in Gwalior where almost a third of them died, apparently of rheumatic fever.
*
The survivors had to endure 13 months of incarceration before securing their release by paying the enormous total of 16,000 rupees as security for their future good behaviour. Every one was, in the meantime, ‘horribly maltreated’, even those with money – which usually purchased good treatment in the prisons of the Native States – for ‘those who could not pay’ (one of their number recalled) ‘were beaten in the hopes that their friends would in time pay; and those who paid, were beaten in the hopes that their friends would be made, in time, to pay more’.

The wisest of Laljee’s followers were those who left the district altogether. A number of Thugs fled south into their traditional hunting grounds in the lands south of the Nerbudda river known as the Deccan, and 200 more found sanctuary amidst the mosaic of tiny semi-independent states that made up
eastern Gwalior and the province of Bundelcund. Many settled with their families along the south bank of the Jumna in districts ruled by petty chiefs who – like Laljee and the zamindars of Murnae – were happy to extend their protection to men able to pay for the privilege; the remainder headed south towards the towns of Jhansee, Saugor and Bhopal. These men, too, found secure boltholes. Two decades later, one Jhansee official was still lamenting the fate that had brought Thugs into his master’s lands in 1812 and prompted them to settle in a score of villages scattered across the district of Khyrooah, where the local chiefs shielded them from all manner of threats:

The Company’s officers in Etawah remained quite ignorant of the fate of these fleeing Thugs. They had little knowledge of events in the Native States of central India, and their concern, in any case, was not so much to catch and try the stranglers themselves as to ensure that Sindouse was pacified and the pargana’s rents and taxes paid on time. The dispersal of the Thugs and
bandits
living in the district had been necessary to achieve this aim. But while Halhed’s actions did secure the disputed revenues, and deter the Chambel valley Thugs themselves from operating in British territory, it must be doubted whether they saved many lives. The destruction of Murnae did not even prevent the district from becoming a Thug headquarters again, for by the end of 1813 the village had already been rebuilt. Several prominent families of stranglers soon settled back into the ravine country, and in no more than a year or two the parganas south of Sindouse were once again notorious for harbouring all manner of Thugs, dacoits and rebels. The Marathas tolerated their presence while they paid for protection, and the British took little interest in their activities while they confined themselves to
the districts south of the Jumna. No attempt was made to capture them or drive them out again.

The Thugs themselves did curtail their operations in the Company’s
territories
as a result of Perry’s efforts. But this did not mean that there were fewer stranglers on the roads, nor that the number of Thug murders actually decreased, even in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Murnae itself. Most gangs were content to direct their attentions southwards, into the
central
provinces of India and away from Company lands. These provinces were then made up entirely of small, poorly resourced native states, where policing was often inadequate and the Thugs went largely unmolested. During the cold season of 1813, several new or enlarged Thug bands had taken to the roads of southern Hindustan with considerable success. In the course of the cold season several parties of Thugs united to seize 27,000 rupees from one group of travellers outside the town of Rewah, and another 13,500 rupees from a gang of 27 dacoits who were tracked and slaughtered close to Lucknadown. This made the year 1813–14 one of the most successful ever known by the Thugs.

In later years, the Company would come to see the destruction of Murnae as a mistake. ‘It is, to me, extremely doubtful whether by this dispersion of the Thug headquarters we performed any real benefit to India,’ one senior judge observed two decades later. Yet this was scarcely Halhed’s fault. There were, in 1812, already many precedents for expelling undesirables from British territory into the Native States; it was a cheap and simple – if scarcely
effective
– solution to the problem of tackling crime, and it was still almost unheard of for large gangs to be smashed by the mass arrest and trial of their members. Had the Etawah magistrates wanted to tackle the Sindouse Thugs in this way, there was no prospect of them mustering the resources required to arrest, try and imprison the hundreds of bandits and rebels living in the ravines.

For Company officials such as Halhed and Perry, cast more or less adrift in Etawah, the activities of the Thugs – and indeed criminal justice in general – were little more than unwelcome distractions from more pressing tasks. The idea of pursuing highly mobile gangs of stranglers through central India was certainly impractical. Even the cost of imprisoning the Thugs who were in custody was such that the Company was glad to let others bear it. When news reached Etawah that Maharajah Sindhia had arrested 130 men from Laljee’s
band, no effort was made to have more than a handful of the Thugs most responsible for Maunsell’s death transferred to British jails, though Halhed and Perry must have known that the rest were unlikely to spend long in a Maratha prison. There was a simple reason for this failing: no one, in 1812, was greatly concerned to discover the fate of the unknown number of travellers who vanished on the roads of the Subcontinent each year. Even after Murnae had been razed to the ground, most of the Thugs who had lived there felt quite safe in their new homes in Bundelcund.