Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (22 page)

North of Bombay and west of Indore, a group of two dozen men came hurrying along a narrow track. They were Bundelcund Thugs, ‘the stoutest and most active’ members of five gangs that had joined forces to scour the countryside around Baroda, and they were in an ugly mood.

Their expedition had opened well. They had strangled 30 people in ten
separate
affairs, and taken a fair quantity of loot, including the best part of 2,000 rupees’ worth of gold from a group of sepoys whom they had killed a month or so earlier. Since then, however, the gangs had been casting about for other travellers with very limited success. Scouts had been despatched to all points of the compass while the main body loitered, waiting for news, but in the last fortnight their only victims had been three unlucky passers-by who had
blundered
into their camp. Their bodies had not yielded much, and – even more frustratingly – when at last a group of spies did hasten in with news of a potential haul, it was already almost out of their grasp.

The prize was a party of treasure-bearers, heading west. There were four of them, carrying their goods in bulky packs slung over their shoulders. But it had taken the scouts several days to return to camp, and by now the
bearers
were, they guessed, at least six days’ travel away. The only hope of catching them was for a group of the fastest men to set off in pursuit at once, travelling by forced marches until they overtook their quarry.

Thus it was that 25 exhausted Thugs found themselves a stage or two east
of Baroda, having covered nearly 80 miles in no more than two days. There they at last sighted the bearers and, falling in with them, walked on a little way until they came to a deserted spot where all four were set upon and murdered. As soon as the bodies were safely concealed, the Thugs turned to rifle through the packs, fully expecting to find a horde of jewels and silver. But, one recalled later on, ‘to the great disappointment and chagrin of us all, no property was found upon them, for they turned out to be common stone-cutters, and their tools tied up in bundles … [had] deceived the spies into the supposition that they were carrying treasure’.

The arduous pursuit of the Baroda stonecutters demonstrates just how precarious life could be for a Thug. Even the members of a successful gang – killing regularly, escaping unmolested, and stumbling occasionally across a substantial prize – seldom made so much money that they could afford to remain idle for long; and the Thugs’ habit of banding together into groups 50 to 100 strong, which made it possible for them to tackle large parties of
travellers
, also meant that the loot they did seize tended to be divided among so many men that only the gangs’ leaders saw an appreciable return. Successful subadars and jemadars could certainly become wealthy men – there are accounts of such men spending thousands of rupees on weddings and family celebrations – but the lesser members of their gangs had to be content with a great deal less.

Estimating the value of a typical Thug haul is difficult, for it was generally partly or wholly made up of the victims’ goods or possessions, rather than cash. But the gangs involved in the Baroda affair split 2,150 rupees between nearly 80 men that year, and in another case a Thug who scrupulously listed every murder he had been involved with over a 24-month period came up with a total of 1,300 rupees, taken from 61 victims and split between about 20 men – an average of less than 33 rupees per man per year. Even this meagre income had to be set against the protection money demanded by the Thugs’ landlords or the police, not to mention the expenses of a typical expedition, largely borne by the jemadars, which one witness put at around 500 rupees for a single gang. Supplemented though it was by the sale of loot – sundry items of cloth and cooking utensils were the most common booty – it is
evident
that many Thugs barely scraped a living from their trade.

For this reason, most gangs were careful in their choice of victims when circumstances allowed. Thug scouts became expert in calculating the value of
each potential prize; a favourite tactic was to loiter at rural customs posts while the officers there searched travellers’ baggage for contraband. Potential victims with no money would occasionally be spared, though there were also cases of gangs savagely mutilating the corpses of men who had failed to yield the expected plunder. Individual Thugs described hauls of 10 or 12 rupees as ‘trifling’, and one of a single rupee – the equivalent of a week’s wages for the meanest Indian labourer – as ‘paltry’, though when they were desperately short of cash gangs would gladly kill for even the tiniest amounts. Eight annas – not much more than half a rupee – ‘is a very good
remuneration
for murdering a man’, a Thug named Shumsherah thought. ‘We often strangle a victim who is suspected of having two pice.’ But Shumsherah was a weaver who Thugged only occasionally, and he seems to have been more easily satisfied than many of his comrades. Experienced men, and particularly those who came from a long line of stranglers, had more
ambition
, and they were far from indiscriminate.

The greatest of all Thug hauls seems to have been the enormous sum of 200,000 rupees, seized in Candeish early in the nineteenth century by ‘Bowanee the Soosea and his gang of Rajpootana’, and consisting of
remittances
on their way from Bombay to Indore. Another strangler, named Jhora Naek, was greatly venerated by generations of Thugs for the honesty he
displayed
after killing a man found to have 160,000 rupees’ worth of jewels on him. Although he had committed the murder accompanied only by a servant, Jhora took the booty back to his village and divided it among the members of his gang as though all of them had been present. The saintly reputation he acquired suggests such steadfastness was unusual, and though many Thugs prided themselves on their honesty (at least when it came to dealing with
colleagues
) it was certainly not unheard of for men who chanced upon really substantial quantities of loot to keep it for themselves. The largest sum ever taken by the Murnae Thugs – a haul of about 130,000 rupees, seized south of the Nerbudda in about 1790 – caused huge dissension among the members of the gang, for Rae Singh, Feringeea’s uncle, purloined a gigantic diamond worth 65,000 rupees from the loot and, in the ensuing fracas, was stabbed in the belly by a rival, ‘causing his bowels to burst out’. A sheet of beaten silver was quickly pressed over the wound, and Rae Singh survived to sell his
diamond
and become a great man in the district, but he was ‘for a long time obliged to wear the silver plate’.

Hauls of such magnitude were, however, very unusual. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, only one other group of Thugs seized a lakh of rupees in a single affair, and most gangs seem to have been fortunate to realize as much as 1,000 rupees in the course of an entire expedition. There were, of course, exceptions; what became known as the ‘Sixty Soul Affair’ – the strangling of a large party of Muslim men and women in 1805 – yielded 26,500 rupees, and the ‘Murder of Forty’ near Nagpore in 1809–10 another 17,000 – but the men who committed these crimes had to work hard for the money. In the Sixty Soul Affair, several gangs of Thugs travelled with their intended victims for about two weeks, ‘winning more and more upon their confidence every day’, and covered upwards of 160 miles while awaiting the right moment to strike. The booty, moreover, was once again divided among a large number of men. As many as 600 Thugs were involved in the Murder of Forty, which must mean most saw less than 30 rupees from even this enormous haul.

 

The difficulty experienced by the many stranglers who struggled to make a living from Thuggee was not in itself surprising. More and more men were being driven to join such gangs by desperation and grinding poverty, for the 1820s were a poor time for much of central India. There was famine every year from 1824 until 1827, and between 1827 and 1832 a new and strange
disease
blighted the wheat crop in central India. These misfortunes, together with the fierce rents imposed by an East India Company anxious to recoup the vast expenses of its Pindari and Maratha wars, reduced thousands of peasants to misery, and badly depressed the economy. Yet, paradoxically, the indigenous bankers of Bombay, Poona and Indore had rarely been so busy, and had never sent so many huge remittances to and fro across the central provinces. Their businesses were booming; profits were up. This success, and their great wealth, was based largely upon the trade in a single product: opium.

Opium was one of India’s biggest exports. Manufacture of the drug was legal at this time – contemporary medical opinion held that it was
considerably
less harmful than alcohol or tobacco – and the poppies from which opium is harvested were grown across great swathes of the Company’s
territories
, particularly in Bengal and Bihar. They were also the most important
crop in Malwa, a fertile plateau to the north-west of the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory. The profits on the Bengal trade alone were enormous – around two million rupees a year at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and as much as eight million fifteen years later. The trade in Malwa opium, which remained in Indian hands, was perhaps less lucrative, but it was nevertheless substantial. Hundreds of private traders from Bombay and the central provinces were involved in manufacturing the drug.

Opium had been known in India since the eighth century, when it was
introduced
by Arab invaders, and its properties as both a narcotic and a painkiller were widely recognized by the time the first English traders arrived in the Subcontinent. Morphine – which is its main ingredient – dispels cares, dulls pain, and induces sensations of weightlessness and, eventually, lassitude. Taken as a pill (this was the ‘opium-eating’ famously described by De Quincey) or smoked in a pipe, the oriental way, it is also highly addictive. John Company’s greatest general, Robert Clive, died of an overdose of opium in 1774; William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner, was prescribed it as a young man and remained an opium-eater until his death. The drug was even more popular in China, where it was known as ‘foreign mud’. By the late 1820s, more than 2,500 tons of processed opium were being shipped from India to Canton each year, and the money the Company made from its sale, together with the duty it levied on private traders, made up one-seventh of its revenues.

The opium trade was, indeed, so lucrative that the government in Calcutta did everything it could to keep it to itself. The Company maintained a strict monopoly on the cultivation of poppies in its own territories; landowners had to obtain permission to grow the crop, and heavy fines were imposed on
unlicensed
production. Similar restrictions also applied in Malwa, for most of the tableland was divided between Holkar and Sindhia, two of the Company’s princely allies, and they were bound by treaty to uphold the monopoly in their lands. Malwa opium should – the government insisted – be shipped only to Bombay, and purchased solely by the Presidency’s agents.

The Indian response to this edict was entirely predictable. Illicit opium
production
increased, and cargoes were diverted to native ports along the western coast to avoid the swingeing duty at Bombay. Shipments were sewn into saddles or hidden inside bales of cotton, and smuggled out of Malwa along unfrequented jungle paths. Efforts to curtail this illegal trade were fruitless, for the princes themselves connived in it, and in 1819 the Company
grudgingly accepted that the monopoly was unenforceable. Attempts to
suppress
smuggling were curtailed, and by 1830 an estimated 10,000 chests of Indian-owned opium were being shipped to China from the west coast ports each year – three times the total despatched by the British from Bombay.

The Company had, in short, underestimated the ingenuity of Indian
merchants
and bankers determined to profit from the trade in drugs. But, ironically, this native success presented the Thugs of the central provinces with opportunities they could scarcely have dreamed of when the monopoly was in force. Throughout the 1820s Thug gangs occasionally chanced upon and seized small consignments of smuggled opium. The rapid growth of the Malwa trade, moreover, required substantial investment, and increasingly large sums of money began to make their way to and fro between the landowners and merchants of the district and the great financiers of the central provinces.

The transfer of funds on so large a scale was not unusual in India, which had an ancient and sophisticated economy. The existence of bankers –
seths
– had been recorded as early as the sixth century
BC
, and by the time the first Europeans reached the Subcontinent the industry had grown deep roots. ‘In India,’ the French traveller Tavenier noted in the 1670s,