Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (17 page)

The laws that guided the choice of the first victim of every expedition were, if anything, more complex still. Many Thugs invoked what was known as ‘The Rule of the Bones’, which forbade them to kill any victims accompanied by a horse, an ox or any other quadruped until some other traveller had first been
strangled. Men wearing gold ornaments were likewise to be spared until another victim had been murdered, as were Brahmins and Sayyids, the most holy members of the Hindu and Muslim faiths.
*
It was also considered unlucky to select a poor man as the first victim of an expedition, no doubt for fear that every other traveller met along the way would be similarly impoverished.

Yet more rules existed to govern special situations.
Kawrutties
(the carriers of sacred Ganges water) could only be killed if their pots were empty, while blacksmiths and carpenters – who could be strangled if they were
encountered
separately – were to be spared if they were travelling together.

Most of these proscriptions were firmly rooted in the folk religion and the superstitions practised in the main Thug villages. Oil vendors and sweepers were generally thought to be unlucky, while seriously ill or physically disabled travellers were (as one strangler explained) spared on account of their
misfortune
: ‘These, God has afflicted; we may not touch them.’ Criminals who harmed women had been singled out for particular punishment in even the most ancient Hindu texts. The Thugs’ superstition concerning the killing of travellers accompanied by beasts of burden, meanwhile, probably reflected the sanctity accorded to those conveying the remains of their deceased
parents
to be consigned to the Ganges.

This mass of laws was, in any case, not scrupulously observed. Most jemadars were simply too pragmatic to be entirely bound by customs that so limited their prospects of inveigling worthwhile victims, and though the most successful Thugs did indeed pass over members of the forbidden groups and castes, poorer stranglers were sorely tempted to kill any travellers whom they were certain had money on them. Others struggled with the practical difficulties involved in sparing some members of a party, while contriving to strangle others. Even if it were possible – and the Thugs certainly did employ considerable ingenuity on occasion to separate those they could not kill from those they fully intended to
**
– it was horribly dangerous to leave witnesses
capable of identifying the members of a gang alive, and there were, thus, numerous cases in which victims who should have been safe from attack were killed. In particular, women accompanying large parties of travellers were frequently murdered because the alternative would have been to allow the entire group to escape.

Captured Thugs invariably lamented this development and a good number believed that their gangs had lost the divine protection that shielded them from capture when they first defied the old proscriptions. Reverses or
misfortunes
of all kinds were commonly attributed to failures to observe the sacred laws, and when the jemadars Punchum and Himmut strangled no fewer than 6 women in the course of disposing of a group of 40 travellers near Nagpore in 1809, the awful deaths suffered by many of their men were widely attributed to divine retribution. ‘How was Punchum punished?’ Feringeea asked. ‘Did he not die before he could reach home? And was not his son, Bughola, hung the November following …? And was not Bhugwan hung with him? And what a horrid death did Himmut die! He was eaten alive by worms.’
*

Probably it had once been easier to obey the various proscriptions that bound Feringeea and his men than it eventually became. Most of the customs followed by the Thugs seem to have come into existence before the British appeared in central India, at a time when comparatively few stranglers were active and the countryside was peaceful and prosperous enough for highway robbers to make a decent living on the roads. Certainly most Thugs dated the earliest lapses from their informal code to around the year 1800, when there was great disorder, fewer travellers and a good many more men trying to eke out a living from Thuggee. The first woman murdered by the gangs of the Chambel valley was said to have been the Kale Bebee, the wife of a prominent Maratha officer, who was killed, together with the 12 men of her bodyguard, by Feringeea’s father Purusram around the year 1801. Purusram and another Thug jemadar attempted to atone for the crime, and restore their ritual purity, by hosting a feast for all the Brahmins of their district, and this, the other members of their gang believed, would have been enough to conciliate their gods, had they not given way to temptation once again and strangled other
women in 1805, 1809 and 1813. This repeated flouting of the old proscriptions was sometimes said to have led not only to the jemadars’ own deaths but to have doomed their relations as well. It was, Feringeea said, ‘from that time that we may trace our decline’:

The gangs led by Purusram and Feringeea may have been among the first to stoop to killing women. In the years that followed their flight from Murnae in 1812–13, the men of the Chambel valley were often harshly denounced by Thugs from other districts for killing indiscriminately and even for corrupting their fellow Thugs. The Lodhees of Bengal and Bihar were proverbially strict, for ‘no prospect of booty could ever induce them to kill a woman’. But three Doab jemadars, accused of strangling some girls in the central provinces, protested that they had been led astray by ‘the Bundelcund and Saugor men’, and insisted that such things never happened north of the Jumna, where ‘we do not even murder a person that has a cow with him’. The Phansigars, or stranglers, of the Deccan were also loud in their denunciation of the ‘Hindustani heresies’ that they believed had brought bad luck down upon the heads of their compatriots.

The tendency to shift blame for the failure to observe the old Thug customs existed even within the ranks of the Chambel valley gangs themselves. The Hindu members of Purusram’s band insisted that they were sometimes forced, against their will, to agree to the murder of women by the more numerous Muslims in the gang, who did not feel bound by customs based on ancient Brahmin texts. Feringeea’s men were adamant that no Hindu took part in the Mughalanee’s murder, and possibly some were sufficiently religious to be
genuinely
disturbed by the forbidden practice. But there were other Thugs who – while never stooping to kill a member of one of the proscribed groups
themselves
– were happy enough to let unscrupulous or low members of their gangs flout custom in the convenient belief that they themselves were not defiled by such objectionable practices. ‘Among us,’ one strangler explained,
‘it is a rule never to kill a woman; but if a rich old woman is found, the gang sometimes get a man to strangle her by giving him an extra share of the booty, and inducing him to take the responsibility upon himself.’ This practice eventually became common even in Oudh, whose Thugs considered
themselves
more scrupulous than those of Hindustan. One Oudh gang included a bhurtote by the name of Jubber, who could often be persuaded to strangle inconvenient victims ‘for the love of four additional annas’.
*

The Thugs were, in short, strikingly inconsistent in their interpretations of old customs that seem to have been common to all the gangs of northern India. The outcome of an encounter between a Thug band and travellers from one of the proscribed groups and castes could seldom be predicted; it depended upon the circumstances, the character of the jemadars involved, and the proportions of Hindus and Muslims in a gang. This was a consequence of the absence of any sort of central leadership or hierarchy among the gangs. In most cases, the Thugs’ leaders were free to act as they saw fit, and that meant that need, chance and – on rare occasions – even compassion all played their parts in determining the outcome of an expedition.

Compassion was a subject seldom touched on by hardened stranglers. Most Thugs felt little sympathy for the people that they killed, such feelings as they possessed having been, as we have seen, squeezed from them in the course of their first few expeditions. The business was also the only way of making a living that many stranglers knew. ‘The love of money makes us kill them,’ a Thug named Dhoosoo once explained, ‘we care not for their life.’

Yet even the most ruthless stranglers did feel compassion on occasion, sometimes when it was least expected. In about 1830, for example, a gang of 40 men working near Lucknow met

Most such cases occurred when Thugs were confronted with the need to murder women or young children. Feringeea, the year after killing the Mughalanee, was once again working his way through Rajpootana when he and his men fell in with the handmaid of a Maratha ruler, ‘on her way from Poona to Cawnpore’. The fact that she was a woman would not in itself have been enough to save her, ‘for she and her escort had a
lakh
and a half of property and jewels and other things with them’. But ‘after having her and her party three days within our grasp’, the Thugs eventually let her go, ‘for she was very beautiful’, as well as being – presumably – less likely than her Muslim
predecessor
to cause trouble. It was not an unprecedented incident – ‘We all feel compassion sometimes,’ the jemadar concluded. But such sentiments were generally rare.

 

One reason for the Thugs’ flouting of ancient proscriptions and their ruthless despatch of victims who might once have been spared was an increasing fear of arrest and punishment.

Feringeea, whose Thug career had proceeded more or less without
incident
for the best part of a decade, was one of a number of prominent stranglers to fall foul of either the British or the Indian authorities in the early 1820s. No more than a year after he had left Ochterlony’s service, the young jemadar was nearing the town of Kotah with his men when the gang was waylaid by a patrol of sepoys. Feringeea’s band had enjoyed recent
success
, having strangled ‘four men with bundles of clothes’ less than a week earlier and killed a Hindu chief and his retinue of servants four days later, and they were carrying a considerable quantity of incriminating plunder. In
consequence
, no fewer than 28 Thugs were arrested, Feringeea himself escaping only because he chanced to be bathing when the troops appeared and was able to flee, naked, into the countryside and then evade pursuit. His followers
were also fortunate on this occasion; the local rajah baulked at the cost of imprisoning so many men, and released them after only a day, having ‘
blackened
their faces’ with a dye in order to give warning to other travellers of their character. But two other gangs of Thugs were not so fortunate: 40 men whom the Kotahan patrols chanced upon while chasing Feringeea were jailed for the best part of four years, perhaps because the evidence against them was stronger.

In these changing circumstances, fewer and fewer Thugs could afford to be scrupulous about their choice of victims. At roughly the same time that Feringeea’s men were arrested at Kotah, for example, another band of
stranglers
under a certain Khimolee Jemadar was committing what came to be regarded as one of the most atrocious of all Thug murders. This, the
so-called
‘Beseynee affair’, began in a temple at Kamptee, just outside Nagpore, with the killing of three men working for a local merchant and the seizure of a bag of valuable spices and another containing silks. Khimolee’s men then fell in with a party coming north from the Deccan. This group was led by a man named Newul Singh, a disabled soldier who had lost one arm in the Nizam’s service and was travelling with two daughters, aged 11 and 13, the girls’ intended husbands – two youths of about their ages – and a son aged seven. Both Singh and the girls thus belonged to classes of travellers forbidden to the Thugs, and several of Khimolee’s men refused to have anything to do with the murder of a disabled man, splitting from the main party. The jemadar himself, however, successfully inveigled his way into Newul Singh’s confidence and became a great favourite of his daughters ‘from numerous acts of kindness and attention on the roads’.