Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (18 page)

This attachment served the Thugs well when, stopping for the night in a village called Dhoma, the house in which most of the gang were staying caught fire and the occupants were arrested on suspicion of arson. Newul Singh was vocal in protesting his new friend’s innocence, and was able to call upon a relative serving with the British forces in nearby Seonee to secure their release. By the time the party reached Jubbulpore a few days later, the two groups had become so close that Newul Singh laughingly rejected several warnings from acquaintances in the town that the men he had fallen in with were dangerous characters. He was, he said, more than happy to remain in their company.

Some Thugs, owing so much to a party of intended victims, might have
searched for other prey. Khimolee and his men, however, chose to avail
themselves
again of the attachment of Newul Singh and his daughters only a day or so later, when messengers from Nagpore reached the town with news of the robbery at Kamptee and the Jubbulpore authorities began a search for the missing bags of silk and spices. Singh’s daughters were persuaded to sit down on the bags of loot ‘and to say that their companions were friends of theirs, and honest men’, while the police searched their lodgings. Nothing was found, and a few days later, at the village of Beseynee, Singh and all the members of his party were murdered and robbed, the Thugs having
accompanied
them ‘a distance of more than 200 miles, and were with them about 20 days on the most intimate terms, before they put them all to death’.

 

The growing danger of arrest had other consequences. Many Thugs became, for example, much more cautious regarding the disposal of their victims’ bodies during the third decade of the nineteenth century. Hitherto, as we have seen, the stranglers had only roughly concealed many of the men they killed, abandoning their corpses in dried-up riverbeds or close to roads with only leaves, branches and stones to cover them; the burial of victims occurred more rarely, and then chiefly in densely populated districts – scouts would be sent ahead of the gang to find a suitable murder-spot, or
bele
, within a day’s march. After about 1820, however, the use of beles and well-dug graves became more common and greater efforts were made to conceal the evidence of murder.

Feringeea was among the jemadars who began to take precautions at this time, and it is possible that his lucky escape at Kotah inspired him to take greater care whilst on the road. Certainly he and his men very carefully buried the bodies of 16 men whom they had murdered west of Seoni in 1820; two years later, near Jypore, they concealed the remains of a Company
subadar-major
named Akhbar Khan and eight other travellers ‘under the wall of a building’ to guard against a chance discovery. It helped, in cases such as these, to find a place ‘where the ground is soft for the grave, or the jungle thick to cover them, and where the local authorities [take] no notice of the bodies’, but really anywhere secluded sufficed. The temple of Kamptee outside Nagpore, where Khimolee Jemadar and his men had murdered three travellers, was a good example of a well-appointed bele – it was ruined and deserted, but
offered welcome shelter; it retained gates that could be closed to prevent intended victims from escaping; and its earthen courtyard made it a simple matter to dispose of bodies within the grounds without risk of discovery.

More usually, however, Thugs made use of a ready-made network of potential beles – groves and orchards that flourished a short way outside many villages and towns in the central provinces of India. These groves had long been favoured resting-places for weary travellers. They often contained around 400 trees; hardy mango saplings were favoured, but ‘orange,
pomegranate
and other small trees that will always require watering’ were almost equally commonplace, and so most groves were planted close to a stream or well. Many had never been intended as commercial ventures, though it was usual for the rights to harvest their fruit to be leased out by the owners. Instead they were often planted as acts of charity on the part of wealthy local notables, who hoped to earn religious merit by providing sanctuaries for travellers. As two merchants encountered by a British officer observed:

It was thus particularly unfortunate that the prospect of excellent cover, ready access to a
nullah
or a well, and soil deep enough for graves combined to make the groves and orchards planted with such good intentions irresistible to Thugs.

In certain circumstances it remained unnecessary to dig elaborate graves. One of the Thugs’
matarbur beles
(favourite murder-spots) was a stretch of dense jungle on the road between Chupara and Jubbulpore; another was near Punna, in the hills of Oudh – ‘a secret place where no tidings of our
victims
transpired. Hundreds of travellers were there strangled; we concealed their bodies under stones and the tigers devoured them’.
*
High ground was
favoured, presumably because the Thugs were less likely to be caught there unawares by the police or passing troops; but the most important duty of the scouts charged with locating a bele was to find a spot near the end of a stage, where the Thugs’ inveiglers could easily persuade their companions to stop for the night.

The increasing importance attached by most gangs to the proper disposal of their victims can be glimpsed in accounts of the numerous rituals and
superstitions
associated with the burial of a corpse. The most common of these, and the one most often mentioned by Thugs themselves, was the consecration of the pickaxe with which they dug their victims’ graves. This ritual was regarded as so significant that many gangs performed it prior to every
expedition
as a way of seeking the favour of the deity under whose protection the gang was placing itself. It was most usual for an appeal of this sort to be made to Kali, the black-skinned, six-armed Hindu mother-goddess of
destruction
, venerated by many low-caste Hindus and Indian criminals, and for the consecration to be attended by every member of the gang and presided over by their jemadar, or some other strangler judged ‘most skilled in
ceremonies
’. So important was the ritual that it was performed inside a house or tent ‘so that the shadow of no living thing might fall on or contaminate the sacred implement’.

Accounts of such ceremonies, given by Feringeea and a number of his fellow jemadars, suggest that the Thugs’ pickaxe was simply an ordinary agricultural implement – typically consisting of a curved blade forged from wrought iron about 10 inches long, sharply pointed at one end and mounted on a long wooden shaft – but one usually made in such a way that it could be easily disassembled so as to avoid detection. Once taken to pieces, one man would be entrusted with the haft, and another – the gang’s most experienced gravedigger – would conceal the blade within his clothing so that it could not be seen by casual passers-by. Reassembled, the implement would be brought out as the ceremony began; a pit would be dug in the ground and the pickaxe held over it and washed, successively, with water, a sugar solution, sour milk and alcohol. Finally it would be marked seven times with vermilion,
symbolizing
the blood of future victims.

According to the testimony given by one Thug, a cow-dung fire – made fragrant with incense, sandalwood and coconut – would then be lit, and the blade of the pickaxe passed through it seven times. At the height of the
ceremony the gang’s jemadar would take a coconut, place it on the ground and ask the members of the assembled band, ‘Shall I strike?’ Receiving a
positive
response, he would break open the coconut with the butt of the pickaxe amid ‘a loud cry of devout approval’ and share pieces of the flesh amongst the principal stranglers. Finally, the blade of the pickaxe would be placed on a piece of clean white cloth and the assembled Thugs would bow to it. The expedition, suitably blessed, was ready to begin.

Elaborate rituals of this sort have always been common in rural India, and similar ceremonies – appealing, for example, for protection from danger on the roads – would have been conducted by many of the travellers who would eventually fall prey to the wiles of the Thugs. But the stranglers’
superstitions
regarding their sacred burial tool were so extensive that they went far beyond the consecration of the pickaxe. Thugs recounted numerous tales concerning their veneration of the implement. Once properly blessed, one said, it could only be carried by the member of the gang ‘most noted for his sobriety, shrewdness and calm’, and it was believed to be practically a living thing. When in camp, it was buried in a secure place with its point facing in the direction that the gang intended to go, and it was sometimes believed that Kali would move the point around in the course of the night if another route were likely to be more propitious. Some elderly Thugs added further and more mystical details, alleging that in earlier times the pickaxe had been thrown into a well whenever the gang halted for the night, from which it would rise of its own accord when summoned with due ceremony. A
handful
even claimed to have witnessed the feat, one recalling a time when several gangs had camped together ‘and at the call, the pickaxes of the various gangs came up of themselves and went to their respective bearers’. Similarly, the Thugs insisted that as long as the implement was cleansed after each use, the sound made by it in digging a grave could not be heard by anyone but a member of their gang. The pickaxe was so sacred that it could never be allowed to fall to the ground; if such a calamity occurred, the bearer was instantly deprived of his office, and the gang-members either returned to their homes to begin a fresh expedition, or chose a fresh route, consecrating the implement anew.

The tool’s most important property, however, was neither its supernatural silence nor its ability to prophesy good fortune. It was the security it was believed to offer to the Thugs under its protection. Properly consecrated,
scrupulously maintained and treated with reverence, the pickaxe was believed to protect the members of a gang from detection or capture.

This protection was not absolute. A great priest, or a man so favoured by the gods that his
iqbal
(good fortune) was superior to that of the stranglers themselves, could overcome the powers of even the most sacred symbols of Thuggee. Admittedly the very oldest Thugs, men whose memories stretched back halfway into the eighteenth century, could never recall encountering such a man. But, in fact, one did exist. His name was William Sleeman, and he had only recently arrived in India. Sleeman knew nothing whatever of Thuggee. But he was about to learn.