Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (21 page)

The love Sleeman professed for India and the Indians had its limits. He never doubted the superiority of European civilization, that the British soldier was innately superior to the sepoy, or that the Company’s rule, for all its many exactions, was a considerable improvement on that of most native princes. He believed that the British system of justice, founded though it was on ideas (such as the private ownership of land) that had no direct parallel in India, could and should be imposed throughout the Company’s territories. And he despised the peculation and corruption that were an established and
inevitable part of government in India. But he never referred to his servants or his sepoys as ‘blacks’ or ‘niggers’, as did many of his contemporaries; he opposed the annexation of any state that had showed itself capable of ruling its people moderately and justly; and he was genuinely determined to improve the lot of the ordinary people of the Subcontinent.

This unusual agglomeration of skills and interests made Sleeman peculiarly well suited to the life of a political officer. The scattered members of this group, whether revenue collectors or magistrates,
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were the men who actually ruled Britain’s Indian empire. Each was placed – often in his late twenties or early
thirties
, and without any special training – in charge of a district that was home to several hundred thousand people. ‘Politicals’ were required to be conversant with rural India and well versed in its customs and languages; self-confidence and self-sufficiency were necessary and highly prized. Help, in the shape of the
nearest
military force, could be several days’ ride away, and the work was physically arduous. Officers toured throughout their districts, calling on Indian notables, inspecting the land, hearing legal cases, and – in the absence of British clerks – writing out their own reports in longhand and in duplicate. One, serving a few years later in the Maratha country, described a routine of almost constant work:

What made the job worthwhile, of course, was the enticing prospect of freedom of action. Unlike an army lieutenant, whose every duty was ordered from above, political officers possessed ‘broad and broadly undefined’ powers that made them little princes in their own districts. The best used their
influence to improve the administration and the infrastructure of their
territories
– and, by extension, the lives of the Indians who lived within them. The worst rode roughshod over local feelings, cowed the notables of their districts, and extracted the maximum in rents and taxes. Either way, the very nature of the job ensured that a political officer’s actions ‘were almost invariably
high-handed
and independent, lacking precedent, and – given the unavoidable delays in communication – without the endorsement of “higher authority”’.

The work suited Sleeman perfectly. It was also a real step up. The Company’s civil servants saw themselves as far superior to their military brethren. They certainly took more responsibility and were significantly better paid, being known to the avaricious women of the fishing fleet as ‘three-hundred-
dead-or
-alive men’ because most earned a salary of about £300 per annum and the same sum was payable, once they had accumulated a few years’ service, to their widows should they die. The soldiers, whose jobs were – if not as taxing – certainly more dangerous, resented the politicals and found them arrogant. Before long they were calling them ‘The Heaven Born’, a derisive reference to the Brahmins who comprised the highest Hindu caste and
considered
themselves ‘twice-born’. The lady of Madras recalled that one evening, at dinner, an army officer turned to her and said: ‘Now I know very well, Mrs ____, you despise us all from the bottom of your heart; you think no one worth speaking to in reality but the Civil Service. Whatever people may really be, you just class them all as civil and military – civil and military; and you know no other distinction. Is it not so?’
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Sleeman’s first posting, as a freshly minted political officer, was to the town of Jubbulpore in central India. The job was scarcely one of the administration’s plums. The beauty of the surrounding countryside did make it perhaps

But Jubbulpore itself was of little intrinsic importance, being merely a collection of neat, low houses and listless markets, built amidst ponds and lakes, clustering in the lee of a second-rate Maratha fort and sustained by
traffic
passing through on the main road leading from Poona to the Ganges. Even 50 years after Sleeman’s time, when another British officer posted to the central provinces enquired about the town, he found it was a station ‘of which few who had not been there knew anything, except that it was situated somewhere in the wilds … I remember when we first got our orders to march there from Upper India, no one could give us a route to it.’

Life in Jubbulpore was harsh. Although the climate was by no means so severe as that of northern India, temperatures still rose precipitately during the hot season, and many of the whitewashed bungalows dotted across the district were provided with not one but two thatched roofs, one over the other, to help keep out the sun. During the hot weather the windows and doors could be covered with screens of dampened
khas-khas
grass, which cooled and perfumed such gasps of wind as could be made to enter, but relays of servants were still required to labour inside the buildings, tugging lazily at
punkahs
, the thick cotton mats that swung to and fro from all the
ceilings
to circulate currents of air.
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The most unpleasant single aspect of existence around Jubbulpore was undoubtedly the plague of insects, and it was remarked upon by many visitors. ‘Moths, flying ants, beetles – besides creatures which leap or crawl’ were all attracted to lights left burning after sunset; and they appeared in such profusion that, one disgruntled officer complained, ‘Sometimes dinner is a difficult task, as they may even make the tablecloth more black than white, so numerous are they … They settle on the food as it is being passed from one’s plate to the mouth, and the fork and spoon has to be
shaken to drive them off before the mouthful can be taken.’ Worse still were the swarms of ants; the red and black varieties found their way into stores of food, or dropped from the ceilings into bowls of marmalade or sugar, while the even more voracious white ants attacked clothes and paper, ‘sometimes eating important documents and small articles of clothing so quickly as to destroy them in a single night’. Dining tables stood in bowls of water, and
uniforms
were stored in sealed tin boxes, to deter attack.

For all these reasons, Jubbulpore was little visited by British officers. The town’s only real significance lay in the fact that it had been chosen as the administrative capital of a district bounded to the north by the town of Saugor and to the south by the valley of the Nerbudda river, and known accordingly as the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory. This province, which had been British for only two years when Sleeman arrived there in 1820, was in a ruinous state. It had been acquired as a result of a campaign waged by the Company against vicious bands of freebooters known as Pindaris, whose ranks were filled with former soldiers and armed retainers thrown out of work by the British-imposed peace that had descended upon India since Wellesley’s day. For more than a decade, Pindari bands with a combined strength of as many as 50,000 men had looted and raided their way across the district, often at the behest of one or other of the rival Maratha princes. Most of the villages of Saugor & Nerbudda were sacked and plundered at least once during these years; many of the inhabitants were killed or compelled to abandon their homes. It was only in 1818, with the final destruction of the marauders and the defeat of their Maratha overlords, that any sort of order was restored.
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Even then, it took years for the territory to recover. Sleeman thus reached Jubbulpore to find the surrounding districts still in turmoil and his task by and large a thankless one.

To begin with, Saugor & Nerbudda was unusually isolated. It was the only British possession in the central provinces, being completely surrounded by at least nominally independent territories. The district itself was tableland,
largely flat and fertile, but much of the highest ground was nothing but bare rock, and to the north ‘it appears to a traveller as if hills, small and great, have been sown broadcast over the face of the country’. Much of the countryside had been depopulated and in many places jungle was encroaching on
once-flourishing
settlements. Then there was the matter of the Company’s rents and revenues, which were falling well below Calcutta’s expectations.

It took Sleeman two years to learn to meet this challenge. He had been sent to Jubbulpore as assistant to Charles Welland, the Company’s political agent in the new province, and served what was effectively an apprenticeship. Only in 1822, after two years in the town, did he at last receive orders to
proceed
to the village of Nursingpore, 50 miles to the south, to take charge of a district of his own.

Nursingpore was Sleeman’s first independent command, and his
responsibilities
were considerable. His predecessor’s attempts to increase the district’s revenues had ended in ‘disastrous failure’, there were few records to show what rents and taxes had been paid, and it was in the landholders’
interests
to deceive the new district officer as to the true figures if they could. It took months of touring, and many long hours of compiling and copying reports, to even begin to set matters straight. The three years that Sleeman spent in Nursingpore were, he would later recall, ‘by far the most laborious of my life’.

In these difficult circumstances, as the newly qualified political officer would freely admit, the presence of a Thug gang in a nearby village entirely eluded Sleeman. He expected ordinary crime – the spate of assaults and petty burglaries and the occasional acts of dacoity that so inevitably occurred in the aftermath of the Pindari wars – and he tackled this as vigorously as he could: ‘No ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my becoming acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or a thief of the ordinary kind in the district, with whose character I had not become acquainted.’ But Thuggee remained very much a mystery.

‘If any man had then told me,’ Sleeman confessed more than a decade later,

Sleeman’s failure to appreciate the threat posed by Thuggee was, of course, far from unusual, even in the early 1820s. More than a decade after Perry and Wright had first made their discoveries, few British officers knew much about the stranglers. Their depredations were still seldom reported, and most British soldiers and administrators were simply too busy in their towns and cantonments to spare much thought for the dangers confronting
anonymous
travellers passing through their districts. But that did not mean the Thug gangs were not active; most, indeed, became bolder and more deadly once the Pindaris were suppressed and travel through India became safer once again. Out there, out in the mofussil, the subjects of the Company still lived and died in ways that men such as Sleeman barely understood.