Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (12 page)

A few other officers had taken an interest in the subject. John Shakespear, the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces, published a short description of Thugs and dacoits, based on one of his official reports, in the same issue of
Asiatick Researches
. A paper describing ‘The habits and character of the Thugs’, and based on the statements made by three stranglers arrested on their way across Gwalior, was sent to the then Governor General by the Resident at Sindhia’s court in the same year. And John Malcolm, one of the most able British officers stationed in the central provinces of India in the mid 1810s,
*
encountered a group of Thugs in the course of his service in Malwa and wrote an instructive account of them in memoirs that he published in 1823.

None of these new sources of information added greatly to what was already known. The Resident at Gwalior confirmed that ‘the race of Thugs’ travelled in large gangs – the three men captured had been members of a group of 300 murderers – and ‘employed both the sword and the noose’ in the course of excursions that took them from the Ganges into the Deccan. They were thorough; it was by now ‘well known’ that Thug gangs ‘act in
parties
and scour all the parallel and cross roads on the route which they take. These parties bring in and give account of their respective acquisitions, after which a fair distribution of the whole is made.’

The Thugs’ ‘principal residences’, added Malcolm, were still in the Chambel ravine country, where they ‘usually maintain a connexion, or at least an
understanding
, with the manager of the district’. His estimate of Thug numbers was quite low; there were, he thought, no more than 300 stranglers at large in the central provinces, selecting wealthy victims when they could, and killing by strangulation or by using datura. ‘Some of them have horses, camels and tents, and are equipped like merchants; others are dressed like soldiers going under a leader to take service; some affect to be Mahommedan beggars … or holy mendicants: they assume, in short, every disguise.’

Perhaps the most interesting fragments of new intelligence, however, emerged from the depositions of the Thugs captured in Gwalior. These revealed a picture of men driven by extremes of poverty to join Thug gangs. The first prisoner, a man named Heera, was nominally a cowherd but, ‘forced by hunger’, he had left his village in search of a better living and been lured into the company of a group of stranglers by a jemadar who ‘said he would feed me if I accompanied the Thugs’. Heera’s statement also painted a
revealing
picture of the gang’s dependence on the zamindar of their home village, a man whose protection cost these Thugs no less than half of all the plunder they took on every expedition.

 

The slow accumulation of information on the Thugs had one important effect. It was not until about 1820 – as Shakespear pointed out in his report on the subject – that the existence of Thug gangs became generally accepted by Company officers whose duties had never brought them into contact with such men. As late as 1815, Shakespear said, ‘much scepticism [had] still prevailed regarding the existence of any distinct class of people who are designated “
T’hegs
”’. He himself, he would admit, had long supposed that they were no more than highway robbers who occasionally employed brutal tactics.

Even after 1820 a number of Company magistrates shared Shakespear’s early doubts. As the men most directly concerned with the quality of the
evidence
that could be mustered against supposed Thugs, they found it particularly hard to accept prosecutions based upon circumstantial evidence and the confessions of informants whose motives were seldom entirely praiseworthy. The sceptical magistrates’ position was perhaps most clearly
put by Thomas Ernst, of the Hooghly court, who protested vigorously at plans to recruit ‘spies and common prostitutes’ to inform against suspected stranglers. Such evidence, Ernst asserted, could never be reliable, and his own investigations led him to believe that magistrates such as Wright were exaggerating the threat posed by the Thugs and overstating the uniqueness of their methods.
*
A similar scepticism remained prevalent in other towns. In Gorruckpore, on the far eastern border of Oudh, a persistent informer named Khodabux Khan attempted to bring charges against the members of a local gang of stranglers on no fewer than three occasions over the course of nearly a decade, only to have the depositions he had sworn rejected out of hand. In 1814 Khan was imprisoned for three months for giving false
evidence
, and a year or two later he was murdered by the men he had informed against. It was another dozen years before the unlucky Khan was vindicated by the conviction of the very Thugs he had offered evidence against as early as 1809.

The use of Thug informers – ‘approvers’, they were called at the time, because they confirmed the tentative identification of captured stranglers – provoked controversy for years. Magistrates convinced of the existence of the Thugs, endlessly frustrated by the lack of living witnesses, favoured the employment of approvers. An officer named William Wright – not the same man as the Madras magistrate – appears to have been the first to make
systematic
use of such prisoners; with their help he rounded up nearly 200 Oudh and Doab Thugs and sent them to Bengal for trial in 1814. But the results were the same as they had been two years earlier, when Perry had sent his prisoners before the Nizamat Adalat; much of the approvers’ testimony was struck out, and the remaining case collapsed for lack of evidence. After that, interest in the use of informants lapsed for several years.

Few magistrates had better luck than Wright. For years, all sorts of
problems
bedevilled attempts to bring suspected Thugs to trial. A magistrate named Gregory was dismissed from his post in Madras in 1819 after arresting nearly 200 suspected Phansigars, together with their families, when it emerged that his conduct towards the prisoners had been ‘marked by great injustice and violence’. A few years later, in the northern town of Patna, an
approver recruited by a British civil servant, JA Pringle, came up before the local commissioner, John Elliot. Elliott was another disbeliever in the Thugs, and more difficulties ensued as the trial began. As one of the prisoners involved in the case recalled:

Even Pringle, the magistrate, did not escape from the case unscathed. His ‘own conduct was visited with the severest censure, and both the Government and the Nizamat Adalat were led into a belief that there was no such gang of Thugs, and that the crime, if it existed at all, was very limited in its extent’.

It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that British officers rarely found it worthwhile to pursue Thug gangs, and that most of the encounters between British magistrates and Thugs in the first quarter of the century occurred by chance. Either a gang of stranglers would be arrested on general suspicion by authorities alarmed at the discovery of murdered bodies in their districts, or one or more of a gang’s own members would betray the group as the result of some quarrel. There were several such incidents. Thug bands were detained at Jhalna in 1821, at Seonee in 1822, and at Mozuffurpore in 1826. At Jhalna, British officers in a nearby cantonment mounted a search after hearing reports from local villagers of murders committed in the area. At Seonee, nearly 60 Thugs were detained after a chance discovery. In the Mozuffurpore case, a gang of 15 robbers who had strangled a party of
travellers
fell out over the ownership of a coral necklace and one, ‘in a passion’,
turned the others in to the local police.
*
Success in cases of this sort owed nothing to any concerted effort on the part of the Company authorities. There was no particular pattern to the encounters, nor any attempt by senior officers to draw lessons from what had been learned or to coordinate further action against the gangs.

Little or nothing, then, was done in the years that followed Halhed’s assault on Murnae to build on Wright’s and Perry’s pioneering work. British
knowledge
of the Thugs, their methods and their plans remained partial at best, and clues that might have led to the gangs’ destruction were undoubtedly missed. Had the magistrates and district officers scattered through the mofussil understood the stranglers better, they might have enjoyed greater success in tackling them. As it was, however, some of the darkest secrets of the
infamous
system of Thuggee remained known only to the Thugs themselves.

The flight of the Sindouse and Murnae Thugs from their homes in the Chambel ravines was not unprecedented. For many, perhaps most, of the stranglers who infested the lands south of Etawah, precipitate departures were a fact of life, for the Thugs’ earliest datable tradition – the hasty
abandonment
of Delhi by the seven Muslim clans during Akbar’s reign – was merely one example among many of gangs falling foul of the rulers who had protected them and being forced to seek sanctuary elsewhere. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Thugs’ oral histories suggest, their gangs left Delhi for Agra, abandoned Agra for Akoopore, and then quit Akoopore for Himmutpore. Their appearance in Sindouse was a consequence of a falling out with the Rajah of Himmutpore, who ‘became in time too exorbitant in his demands for a share of the booty’, and though they seem to have lived largely unmolested for the next hundred years, several of their villages (including Murnae itself) were razed to the ground by Maratha troops
seeking
payment of rents and taxes in the first years of the nineteenth century. Others were seized, in 1800, by the Rajah of Rampoora, whose exactions forced the Thugs of the district to flee west into Sindhia’s domains.

Forced migrations of this sort continued for as long as there were Thugs, and were probably more common after 1812 than they had been before, as men fleeing into Bundelcund were forced to establish new and no doubt sometimes uneasy relationships with the zamindars and rajahs of their
adopted districts. Certainly Thugs frequently quarrelled with their protectors over the division of their spoils, or attracted so much unwelcome attention that their protectors were forced to expel them from their lands. Yet another flight, from the town of Jhalone into the Deccan, took place in 1823, and others again occurred wherever Company officials took up arms against the gangs.

The Thug gangs were, thus, of necessity, far more mobile – geographically, and also socially – than most Indians of their day. At a time when the great majority of peasants lived their entire lives in a single village, clinging
stubbornly
to whatever plots of land they could obtain the rights to farm, it was not at all uncommon for a Thug to dwell in six or seven different places in the course of a long life of crime. This was, on the whole, an advantage to the gangs. Individual stranglers became familiar with a variety of districts within the territories in which they operated. It was more difficult for the authorities to track them down, not least because many Thugs also employed a variety of aliases. And the members of each gang undoubtedly recruited novice stranglers to their ranks as they moved from place to place.

The establishment of good relations with the zamindar or rajah of their chosen homes was nonetheless of critical importance to the Thugs. In
addition
to offering protection, a cooperative zamindar could be approached for loans of the cash or goods required to fund an expedition. Laljee had certainly financed the Sindouse Thugs, advancing capital that the gangs used to pay their way through India in return for interest at the exorbitant rate of 25 or even 50 per cent, and making what amounted to personal loans to members of the gangs in exchange for loot. ‘If we have nothing to eat,’ explained Budloo Thug, an Afghan who had lived in the pargana for well over a decade, ‘he feeds us, in lieu of which he takes a horse, or money, or anything else – whatever he finds, he takes.’

The relationship between the members of a Thug gang and their
protectors
was, of course, an unequal one.
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Fear of incurring a landholder’s displeasure led some stranglers to pay as much as fifty times the going rate to rent land in their villages, and all were regularly forced to part with their choicest plunder in return for protection. It was highly risky to upset
a zamindar in this respect. ‘Our chiefs give a part to our village chiefs before giving us our part,’ explained one Thug, and generally it was ‘the handsomest horse, sword or ornament’ that was ‘reserved for the most powerful patron of the order’. Any attempt to make do without the support of a local notable of this sort, or to cheat him, led swiftly to the Thugs’ arrest or imprisonment at the hands of men more anxious to extort their dues from the captured
bandits
than they were to render justice. Even the fiercest Thugs, so formidable on the roads, cowered in the presence of their zamindars.

 

The men responsible for dealing with the petty notables whose patronage was so vital to the Thugs were the leaders of the various Thug bands. Each of the 200 or more gangs scattered across India was organized along broadly similar lines, being recruited and commanded by leaders known as
subadars
and
jemadars
– titles that aped those awarded to native officers in the Company’s armies. But it would be a mistake to imagine, because of this, that Thug gangs were rigidly obedient to their leaders or subject to military discipline. They were much more loosely organized than that.

The members of a Thug gang were never simply ordered out onto the roads; each man made up his own mind whether or not to join an expedition, and the depositions of captured stranglers are full of accounts of Thugs who decided to remain at home, working the land, for months or even years at a time, or who had to be talked into joining some planned foray into the Deccan. It was equally common for Thugs to break off an expedition and return home when they thought they had garnered enough loot, and for gangs to join together for a few days before breaking apart again. Similarly, rank-and-file Thugs were not beholden to any particular commander for more than a few weeks at a time; men only ever agreed to serve a leader for the duration of a single expedition. There were, certainly, cases of Thugs working together in the same band for decades on end – but jemadars who failed to accumulate
sufficient
plunder to pay adequately for the services of their men soon found their followers abandoning them to join more successful gangs.

The size of the band commanded by a given Thug thus offered an accurate reflection of his status and ability. The smallest that we have records of
numbered
as few as 5 or 10 men, but most were between 15 and 25 strong. This was a practical number; any more and the cost of maintaining the gang for a
period of several months would be excessive; fewer, and there would be
insufficient
men to tackle more than a moderately sized party of travellers. Thus while a handful of the richest and most successful Thugs were capable of mustering as many as 50 or even 60 followers, gangs containing more than 25 men were considered to be noticeably large, and the Thugs had a special vocabulary to describe them.

The title of subadar was the grandest to which a Thug could aspire. It seems to have been awarded by general acclamation, and was only bestowed upon the most respected and experienced Thugs – men capable of leading and coordinating the actions of several gangs. A jemadar, on the other hand, was simply the self-appointed leader of a single band, or even the head of a small group of Thugs absorbed into a larger gang commanded by several leaders. The rank was not perceived as an especially distinguished one. Experienced Thugs sought many different qualities in their jemadars, but it was not necessary for a would-be leader to possess more than one or two in order to gather a small gang around him. The most important qualification, certainly, was to be ‘a man who has always at command the means of
advancing
a month or two’s subsistence’ to his men, either from his own resources or in the form of a loan from the local zamindar. But

The members of the Thug band itself were divided according to their duties and paid according to their skills and seniority. Some worked as scouts. The best dressed, most plausible and eloquent were employed as inveiglers, the men responsible for befriending parties of travellers and luring them into the clutches of the gang. The victims were actually murdered by designated stranglers, who were invariably Thugs of long experience and considerable strength, assisted by ‘hand-holders’ who restrained a victim and prevented their escape.
Some gangs also contained specialist grave-diggers, responsible for the disposal of the bodies. Camp followers, in the shape of older Thugs past their prime, children and, in many cases, ordinary labourers and other villagers who were certainly not hardened murderers, but had been recruited on a more or less casual basis in order to swell the ranks of the gang as a whole, generally took no part in the killing of victims, serving instead as lookouts or guards.

Scouts seem to have been employed by only a few Thug bands, and then only occasionally; in most cases a gang’s victims consisted of parties of
travellers
unlucky enough to fall in with a jemadar and his men on the road. There were, nonetheless, obvious advantages to employing men to scour the countryside for potential targets. For one thing, a single gang could cover a far wider stretch of countryside with the help of scouts; for another, an experienced spy might be expected to distinguish between wealthy groups of merchants or treasure bearers and poorer travellers, thus greatly increasing the chance that his gang would seize a substantial quantity of loot.

A jemadar who had decided to use scouts would usually halt the main body of his gang in some convenient grove near a large town or an important crossroads, sending out ‘men chosen from among the most smooth-spoken and intelligent’ members of his band. On rare occasions, when hunting for some known consignment of great value, Thug pickets might travel up to three or four days’ journey from their temporary headquarters. It was more usual, though, for scouts to ‘parade the bazaars of the town near which their
associates
are encamped, and endeavour to pick up intelligence of the intended despatch or expected arrival of goods’. Frontier
chokies
and customs posts were also favourite places to intercept parties of potential victims, since travellers were forced to unpack and display their wares and possessions at such places.

Sometimes scouts would double as inveiglers and begin the process of luring a chosen group into the clutches of their gang:

In general, however, the tricky job of seducing a victim was left to men with the experience and subtlety to attempt it successfully. Soothing the
suspicions
of wary travellers – many of them fully alert to the dangers of the road, if not to the existence of the Thugs themselves – required a
considerable
degree of charm and cunning, and only the most intelligent members of a gang were permitted to attempt it.
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In many cases a gang’s jemadar would himself act as inveigler; being better dressed and wealthier than his men, and often mounted on a tattoo, or pony, he would find it easier to effect an introduction to the leader of another party. On other occasions, the task would be allocated to a specialist known as a
sotha
.

Most gangs of any experience possessed a variety of tried and tested
stratagems
for deceiving a traveller, and which was used depended largely on the destination, the job or the caste of the unfortunate men selected as
victims
. Probably the most common method was to overtake a party of travellers on the road and enquire as to the purpose of their journey. Once the strangers had disclosed that they were heading for Meerut, say, or for Benares, it was a simple matter for the Thugs to declare that they were travelling by the same road, and to suggest the two groups should join forces as a protection from dacoits and thieves. Other Thugs adopted appropriate disguises. ‘When going south towards the Native States,’ one explained, ‘where many native soldiers found service, I used to assume the disguise of a native sepoy, and wear a sword, shield and carry a matchlock, pretending I was going to
service
. I had a large horse with me, and used to ride with English spurs; this disguise enabled me to deceive sepoys … On returning from the south, I used to assume the apparel of a table attendant of a rich man, or I gave myself out as the
darogah
[police officer] of some Raja. In short I suited my disguise to the traveller I had to inveigle, so as to blind him and disarm his suspicion.’ On the whole, however, Thug gangs cultivated an unremarkable demeanour that the Company officials responsible for hunting them down plainly regarded as
more terrifying than the more bloodthirsty appearance of the dacoits. ‘There was nothing to excite alarm or suspicion in the appearance of these
murderers
; but on the contrary they are described as being mild and benevolent of aspect, and peculiarly courteous, gentle and obliging.’