Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (20 page)

A griffin’s ordeal generally began the moment he stepped ashore, to be met by a collection of the rascals, touts and criminals common to ports throughout the world. Unwary novices were easily persuaded of the need to hire throngs of porters to carry their baggage, and a dragoman to command them, and the better-off might be tricked into paying over the odds for a fine horse or an unwieldy carriage. Such purchases were, of course, well beyond the means of all but the most affluent, but it did not take the new arrivals long to make the acquaintance of a moneylender who would be pleased to advance the
necessary
funds. So considerable were the loans, and so great the rate of interest, that it was common for Company men to remain in debt until they reached the rank of major, some 20 or 25 years after first stepping ashore in India.

Nor were the griffins’ problems over once they were ensconced with their regiments. New men would be offered, as a ‘particular favour’, the opportunity to hire whatever useless servants their brother officers were anxious to be rid of, and the really unfortunate were taken in by some roguish major-domo, bearing apparently impeccable references, who would at once arrange for numerous friends and relatives to join the young man’s household at inflated rates of pay.

In fairness to the unfortunate griffins, most officers arriving in India found
it difficult to make sense of the sheer quantity of servants they were expected to employ. Indian households were anywhere between four and 10 times the size of those at home in Britain. In part, this was because servants were cheap in the Subcontinent, and there was a tendency to ostentation among the wealthier British residents – in the richest households, according to one lady who lived up-country from Madras, every horse had not only its own groom, but a grass-cutter as well, and every dog a boy. (‘I inquired,’ the woman added, ‘whether the cat had any servants, but found that she was allowed to wait upon herself, and, as she seemed the only person in the establishment capable of doing so, I respected her accordingly.’) But the real problem, as those anxious to economize quickly discovered, was caste, the Hindu social system that
prevented
servants from performing tasks that were properly the business of another group. Maids could not be told to sweep, sweepers would not make beds, and many officers employed men whose sole duty was to manage their master’s hookah. A British family living in Malaya in the first half of the
nineteenth
century, and employing Muslim servants, found that two or three staff could do the work of a dozen or more of their equivalents in India.

The most senior officers were, of course, expected to employ the largest retinue of servants. Somewhere between 30 and 40 was considered a mere minimum,
*
enough for the officers concerned to be washed and shaved and clothed and horsed and, when the time came for dinner, to be surrounded by a ‘living enclosure’ of bearers flicking constantly at flies. But even Sleeman, as a newly arrived ensign, was expected to allocate approximately half his monthly salary of 100 rupees to pay for the most essential half a dozen
servants
. By the time he had reached the exalted rank of lieutenant and drew three times that pay, he would have a retinue of a dozen.

The great majority of British officers soon grew used to the plethora of servants and relied on them implicitly. This was, in part, because cadets remained almost invariably single. Few Indian officers married before the age of 40, the age when most could expect promotion to the rank of major and with it the increase in pay that would at last enable them to support a wife
and children. The ‘spins’ (spinsters) of ‘the fishing fleet’ – as the single women, mostly plain, despatched each year to Bengal by their families in search of husbands, were cruelly known – understood this, and rarely displayed much interest in even the most dashing youths. ‘India,’ the lady of Madras explained, ‘is the paradise of middle-aged gentlemen. When they are young they are thought nothing of; but at about 40 when they are “high in the
service
”, rather yellow and somewhat grey, they begin to be taken notice of and called “young men”. These respectable persons do all the flirtation too in a solemn sort of way, while the young ones sit by, looking on.’ The perhaps inevitable consequence was that marriages between teenaged girls and men aged somewhere between 40 and 65 were commonplace.
*

Freed from the responsibility of family life, the daily routine followed by most Company cadets varied only according to the season. Outside the cold weather, officers slept in string cots, with thin cotton rugs thrown over them, ‘since a mattress would not only be unpleasantly hot but might breed fleas’, and under a thick mosquito net. They rose at dawn in order to make the most of the few hours they had before the heat of the day. A plethora of servants helped their masters to wash, shave and dress. One soldier described how he was roused each morning by the sound of his valet making

Morning exercise complete, Sleeman and his fellow officers took breakfast, and then went on parade or tackled administrative duties from 9 till 12; in the cold season office hours were from 10 until 1.30. Afternoons were spent sprawled in their cots, attempting to escape the awful temperatures; then, in
the early evenings, Company men and their wives emerged to take the air and promenade in their carriages along the wide boulevards of Calcutta’s
government
district. Evenings were given over to balls and other entertainments, or to elaborately staged visits to each other’s homes.

The working day being so short, there was plenty of time to devote to dining. Native dishes, widely consumed and appreciated a few decades earlier, were rarely eaten now. Instead, Indian cooks attempted traditional English favourites – Brown Windsor soup, cutlets and roasts, plum
pudding
– with varying results. Appetites, in Sleeman’s day, were not quite so gross as they had been 10 or 20 years earlier, when one griffin was ‘shocked to see one of the prettiest girls in Calcutta eating some two pounds of mutton chops in one sitting’, and a peculiar craze for food fights was at its height. (‘Formerly,’ one veteran officer recalled, ‘instead of drinking a Glass of Wine with a Gentleman, it was usual to throw a chicken at his Head – while the ladies pelted with Sweetmeats and Pastry. This was thought Refinement in Wit and Breeding.’) Even so, breakfast generally consisted of a considerable profusion of ‘rice, fried fish, eggs, omelettes, preserves, tea, coffee, etc.’. Tiffin – lunch – was taken ‘at two o’clock in the very heat of the day … A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, excellent Madeira …’, and a similar but even larger array of dishes appeared at dinner. It was then that the most serious drinking took place, and again the quantities consumed were staggering. Even ladies typically finished off at least a bottle of wine every night. Gentlemen would drink more than that and then – after the women had withdrawn – dispose of as many as three bottles of claret apiece with their pipes and cigars. Such conspicuous
consumption
(which proved fatal to many an Indian career) was more or less compulsory. Any officer attempting to leave the table before his companions had finished their drinking ‘would be pursued with cries of “Shabby fellow”, “Milk sop” or “Cock tail”.’

It is difficult to know how the peculiarities of Calcutta society affected Sleeman himself. Probably they repelled him. He was an austere man at heart, more serious and much more academically inclined than most of his colleagues. Social life, particularly the ostentatious conviviality of Calcutta, held little interest for him; letters to his family at home never mentioned women and satirized the conventions of the time, remarking on how
ridiculous it was for men posted to distant stations to pay elaborately choreographed social calls upon each other during the heat of the day. Colleagues seem to have regarded him as sober, able, perhaps a little dry, but there was no suggestion, at this early date, that he was in any way exceptional. A routine Company assessment, dating to 1817, was neither effusive nor overtly critical, describing him as ‘able, impartial and satisfactory’.

Sleeman’s first decade in India was comparatively uneventful. His three years in Calcutta were broken by a short period of service in Bihar, followed by a posting to Mirzapore, a city on the Ganges. From there, his regiment marched north to Nepal, where it fought in the Gurkha Wars of 1814 and 1816. Sleeman was fortunate to survive these conflicts; half of the officers serving with him died, mostly of disease, and he himself contracted a severe case of ‘Nathpore Fever’ – malaria – that was to trouble him for the
remainder
of his life. But by 1817 he was in Allahabad, at the junction of the Jumna and the Ganges, stationed in a substantial cantonment with all the social obligations that entailed. There was little prospect, apparently, of further active service, and less of rapid promotion. It was there that the young
lieutenant
decided to apply to the Company’s political service.

It had become obvious, even in the first years of Sleeman’s service, that he was best suited to life up-country, in some little station where his talents would stand him in good stead, where officers worked longer hours than was the case in Calcutta, and where fewer social demands would be made upon him. Obtaining such a position was, however, far from easy. With few exceptions, the Company’s military officers could expect postings to major cities dotted along the most important routes through the interior, or to large cantonments where substantial bodies of troops were concentrated. Positions up-country, offering greater responsibility and more scope for initiative, were largely the preserve of the political officers employed by the civil administration. And it was to this branch of the East India Company that Sleeman now transferred.

 

Sleeman was, by Indian standards, now in the prime of life. He was 29 years old, tall, stocky, with a round, open face and red-gold hair that was beginning to recede. His languages were by now so much better than those of the vast
majority
of his peers that he would be described, later in his career, as ‘probably the only British official ever to have addressed the King of Oudh in correct Urdu
and Persian’. His service in Nepal had helped him to add at least the elements of Pushtu and Gurkhali to his fluent Hindustani. Like many intelligent men born late in the eighteenth century, Sleeman was interested in almost everything: agronomy, ethnography, political economy, palaeontology – even the contentious subject of ‘wolves nurturing children in their dens’. Politically a liberal free trader who once refused to commandeer private stores of grain to relieve distress during a famine, he was otherwise an eminently practical man. Later in his career he supervised the introduction of new varieties of Mauritian sugar cane to India, taught himself the art of printing, and even installed a small press in the parlour of his home so that he could print his own copies of the numerous reports and books he wrote.

Most significantly of all, Sleeman possessed a passionate interest, most unusual in any British officer of the time, in the lives of the ‘respectable
peasants
’ of India, among whom he found ‘some of the best men that I have ever known’. This fascination with the local people dated to around 1816, when his service in Nepal had taken him into the foothills of the Himalayas to question landholders and farmers. From then on, Sleeman made a habit of talking to the people of all the districts through which he passed. He was insatiably
curious
about their customs and habits, their lands and rights, and their opinion of the East India Company itself. In time he developed a pronounced sympathy with the lot of peasant farmers prey to the exacting financial demands made by rapacious rajahs and zamindars, and indeed by the Company itself. Nor were these enthusiasms limited to mere conversation. They formed the bedrock of numerous official reports remarkable for their detail if not for their conciseness. The 800-page journal that Sleeman produced, during the 1840s, on the state of the Kingdom of Oudh was so much more detailed than any equivalent work that it remains, even today, the most complete source of information on the condition of that province in the early nineteenth century.