Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (23 page)

These village bankers, he went on, did more than exchange the coins issued by the Company and the many Native States – a profitable business until the British imposed the Madras rupee as the single Indian currency in 1835. They were mainstays of their local economies, advancing money to villagers who wished to buy tools and seed, and the Frenchman was deeply impressed by their parsimony and intelligence. A village money-changer would, for
example
, discount the value of a rupee according to its age, since a silver coin lost an infinitesimal amount of precious metal each time it was handled. In the same way, Tavenier observed,

The village money-changer’s methods were not, in fact, too far removed from those employed by the greatest of the city bankers. They, too, diversified and took care to account for every pice, though the greatest of them – such as the famous Jaggat Seths of Calcutta, whose money underpinned the
business
of the East India Company itself – were fast becoming huge concerns. The seths faced little competition from the British, whose own Indian
banking
operations were geared to the overseas trade, and by the 1820s many had become prominent dealers in both cotton and grain. Opium, which was far more profitable than either, naturally attracted them.

Most of the seths of central India had their headquarters in Poona, Bombay or Indore. The majority were members of the Marwari caste – famously clever businessmen who learned mathematics and accounting from the age of 12. Young seths soon achieved a mastery of mental arithmetic that astounded Europeans. ‘To give an instance of their efficiency,’ one Indian writing early in the last century observed, ‘while an English-educated
graduate
may take five minutes to work out on a piece of paper the compound interest on a given sum, the Marwari boy will get an answer correct to the nearest pice mentally, without the aid of pen and paper, in less than half a minute.’

This expertise struck visitors as all the more remarkable when they saw the cramped establishments from which many of the seths did business. Even the grandest Indian banks bore little resemblance to the monolithic temples of commerce found in European capitals, and a British traveller calling at the office of a Poona seth early in the nineteenth century discovered that

In this establishment, too, the seth’s young child was a centre of attention. The banks of central India were invariably family concerns, whose histories could be traced in the names they gave their houses – the firm of Mahanand Ram Puran Mal, for example, had been established by a Mahanand Ram and passed to his son, Puran Mal. The Poona seth, too, must have had hopes of his child, for

It meant something, of course, to be heir to such a business. Like modern banking conglomerates, Indian seths often operated branches in a number of towns. The largest firms might have as many as seven – the house of Bhyaram Gopal Das, headquartered in Benares, also operated in Calcutta, Nagpore, Poona, Bombay and at least three other cities. Some even maintained agencies overseas, in Japan, Aden or Abyssinia. The banking houses of central India tended to be more modest concerns; the majority had no more than one or at best two local branches in addition to their headquarters, run by agents known as
gomashtas
who took care of business in the provinces. But even these firms thought nothing of sending remittances totalling tens of thousands of rupees to and fro, and it was small wonder that the bankers’ agents were closely supervised and expected to report to their seth master on a regular basis.

By the mid-1820s, a good part of many a gomashta’s task was to facilitate the flow of cash into the central provinces. A large part of this money was advanced to the landowners who grew the poppies from which Malwa opium was made. The manufacture of the drug was a difficult and time-consuming
business, and it required substantial capital. Every mature poppy in a field of several thousand had to be scored, by hand, with a special three-pronged implement resembling a fork. At night a sticky residue oozed from each
incision
, and when morning came a host of men, women and children flocked into the fields to scrape this raw opium from each flower. This process was repeated daily for about a month, until the poppies no longer yielded the residue; then the drug was mixed with linseed oil, to prevent evaporation, patted into cakes three or four inches in diameter, and left to dry in the shade. Next, the cakes were taken to a local opium factory – most likely financed by the same bankers – where the oil was drained away and they were crushed together into 3lb balls. Each ball was coated with leaves gummed together with an inferior grade of poppy juice to form an inch-thick protective shell, and this processed opium was then packed into cases, 40 balls to a chest, ready for sale and shipment to China.

The growth of the opium trade was so swift and so considerable that it changed the pattern of banking in central India. It was this, in turn, that
presented
new opportunities to the Thugs and drew men who normally based themselves along the Jumna and in Bundelcund into districts such as Nursingpore. In normal circumstances, only a small portion of the funds sent by one seth to another was remitted in cash. Large payments were
normally
made in the form of
hoondees
, ‘bankers’ cheques written on a thick country-made paper, rolled up and fastened with gum-water’. Each hoondee carried ‘a secret mark or sign that renders forgery difficult’, and could only be cashed at the designated branch of a certain bank; like modern cheques they were useless to thieves, and when the Thugs found one on the body of a
murdered
traveller, they would generally burn it. But since dealing in opium without the sanction of the Company remained illegal, traders preferred to deal in cash, and native bankers also began to send treasure to Malwa and Indore to take advantage of the favourable exchange rates prevailing there. Before long, huge quantities of gold and jewels were passing through central India in the care of special parties of treasure-bearers.

These bearers played an important part in the economy of central India. They were generally implicitly reliable men of superior caste, proficient at
concealing
treasure, hiding gold in their baggage and jewels in their hair. Most preferred to travel in disguise, and in small groups, because trusting to an escort – even an armed guard – merely attracted the attention of dacoits and thieves. This
reliance on subterfuge, however, made them all the more desirable to the Thugs, who generally refrained from tangling with large parties of armed men.

Certainly it was not long before the Thug jemadars such as Feringeea realized that their best hope of seizing a substantial sum was to take it from a party of treasure-bearers. Identifying the seths’ men was, of course, a tricky business. Every few years, however, a courier would prove careless, or the Thugs’ spies too adept, and one gang or another would chance upon a huge quantity of booty. In 1807 a party of 17 bearers were murdered on the road between Jubbulpore and Saugor, the Thugs rifling their corpses so thoroughly that they left ‘nothing but naked bodies lying in the grove, with their eyes apparently starting out of their sockets’. Another group was strangled on the Nerbudda, at Jhansee Ghat, in 1820; and three years later a group of Deccan Thugs seized 14,000 rupees from another party of five bearers. Luck, too, played its part, as it did when, on one notorious occasion, a filthy, raggedly dressed and fly-infested fakir attached himself to Feringeea’s gang on the road to Hyderabad. The man was evidently absolutely destitute, and the Thugs were reluctant to kill him and tried three times to shake him off. On each occasion, however, the obdurate mendicant returned to beg for their protection. When the gang at last lost patience and strangled him, they were startled to discover he was a treasure-bearer in disguise, carrying no fewer than 365 strings of pearls.

It was the gomashtas’ job to arrange such shipments of cash, to hire
bearers
, agree a route, settle on appropriate disguises, and pursue and recover any remittances that might be lost. Assignments of this sort, difficult though they were, were nothing new to them. Most were ‘invested with very wide powers; they are not highly paid, but their industry, integrity, and efficiency are remarkable and proverbial’. Their resourcefulness was sometimes severely tested – when the bankers of the central provinces had first begun to invest in opium, their gomashtas were sometimes charged with smuggling the drug to the coast, bribing the local authorities and protecting the shipments from theft and seizure along the way – but they were seldom found wanting. And when the Thugs tangled with the firm of Dhunraj Seth Pokur Mal, a
substantial
bank with its headquarters in the far north of Hyderabad, they found the bank’s agent in Malwa fully their equal – not merely in resourcefulness, but in savagery as well.

Thug gangs had begun to stumble upon Indian bankers’ treasure parties with increasing regularity in the mid-1820s. One of the earliest groups of bearers to fall into their hands was a body of 13 men and a single woman from Poona, murdered near the Tapti river in 1826. A Thug jemadar named Budloo and his men had fallen in with the bearers nearly a week earlier, and walked with their intended victims across much of the province of Candeish, waiting for the chance to strangle them. Their victims were leading a number of horses piled with baggage which, when searched, proved to contain not only a good quantity of merchandise but also the enormous sum of 25,000 rupees in cash and gold bars. But even this great loss was little more than a foretaste of the disasters of 1828 and 1829, when a further 135,000 rupees’ worth of cash and jewels were seized in the course of another three affairs and 19 more bearers were killed.

The first of these robberies was carried out five miles outside the town of Malagow in the division of Nasik. The district, together with its northern neighbour, Candeish, was still a ‘disturbed and deserted’ area and had only recently been ceded to the Company and incorporated into the Bombay Presidency; ‘in order to prevent sudden and extensive changes’, it had been administered directly by the Governor General in Calcutta until 1827. Northern Candeish, and the far western portions of both divisions, were
relatively
wealthy areas. But the remainder of the district, which included
Malagow and the land around it, was bordered in the north by the wild Satpuda hills and in the south by long stretches of desolate ridges. Within these bounds, Candeish and Nasik consisted mostly of ‘rolling broken ground … much of it, from fear of wild beasts, waste or covered with
brushwood
’. Towards the west lay expanses of ‘wide, stony, thorny plains, rising in broad ridges, or sinking in rich valleys studded with mango groves and large prosperous villages’. To the south, around Malagow itself, the land was flat and treeless – a substantial plain surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe of low, steep, flat-topped hills.

At least half the land here was either abandoned during the Maratha wars or had never been cultivated, and much of the remainder had been devastated in the course of the Pindari campaign. The weather, though not hot by Indian standards, was humid and notoriously unhealthy, for visiting Europeans required time to acclimatize; and the roads were terrible. In 1828, after a decade of Company rule, almost all were – a government official later recalled – still mere tracks, ‘ill-appointed and deficient in everything but
discomfort
and danger. Few and far between were the miserable hamlets, and the mountain passes were as rugged and impracticable as their fierce possessors.’ Even the main route through the district, the Bombay to Agra trunk road that ran through Malagow to Doolea and beyond, was scarcely maintained before 1850. It was ideal territory for the Thugs. The Company’s authority was weak, there were plenty of travellers on the great trunk road, and so many
ill-frequented
tracks that it was easy to escape the scene of a murder.

It was at Malagow itself that Feringeea and his men first encountered the seths’ treasure-bearers. There were four of them, going from Poona to Indore with 22,000 rupees in gold and jewels, and they were accompanied by three other travellers and no fewer than six other Thug gangs, 225 men in all. The first of these gangs had fallen in with the bearers on the road four stages from Poona, and the others – alerted to the discovery of the treasure – had joined up with the party further along the way. They had hoped to kill the bearers at the river crossing outside the town, and been frustrated by the appearance of some of the Company’s cavalry. Now they were planning to murder the men as they made their way north into Candeish.

The arrival of Feringeea’s group brought the number of Thugs trailing the seths’ party to 250. Most were experienced men, but one gang, led by a man named Omrow, was less reliable, being ‘composed chiefly of fellows of all
castes whom he had scraped together, to make up a gang for this expedition’. Worried by the sheer number of Thugs who had been drawn to the bearers like flies to freshly butchered meat, and sure that these novices would be more trouble than they were worth, Feringeea and the other jemadars sent 30 of the rawest men on ahead, ‘that they might not, by their blunders, frustrate our designs upon the treasure-bearers’, and ordered a second group to remain in Malagow. The remaining gangs, now 125 strong, watched the bearers from a distance until the men packed up their belongings and left town an hour before dawn next morning. The Thugs followed, trailing their doomed
victims
at a distance, and – being unable to shake off the Company messenger and two cotton-cleaners who still accompanied the bearers – killed all seven only half a mile along the road shortly before daybreak. The treasure they had been carrying was found to consist of golden coins and jewellery, and once they were well clear of the vicinity, the Thugs set to haggling over the division of their haul.

This proved to be a tricky business, for Omrow claimed – as was the custom – a full share for his novice followers even though they had played no part in the killings. After considerable wrangling it was decided to split the money equally among the gangs involved, and leave the members of each to decide how best to share their loot with those of their men who had been elsewhere. Each of the Thugs actually involved in the murders thus received between 80 and 125 rupees, as much as 35 rupees more than they would have expected in normal circumstances; and two of the gangs did indeed adhere to their own code of honour by dividing the money they had received with those who had been sent elsewhere.

Early the next year, 1829, four Thug gangs were making their way south through Candeish once again when they chanced upon an even larger
consignment
of treasure. On this occasion, perhaps as a consequence of the grievous losses of the previous years, the number of bearers had been increased to eight, armed with matchlocks and provided with camels to carry their baggage. This group gave the Thugs a good deal of trouble: ‘They went fast,’ one strangler explained, ‘and, afraid to appear near to them in a body, we several times lost all trace of them.’ The seths’ men were cautious, too; they laid false trails, telling the people of the bazaars where they rested that they were heading for a certain town, then taking a different road. At least twice the Thugs were themselves deceived, and had to send out scouts in all
directions, promising rewards of 100 rupees, over and above their share of the booty, to the men who relocated the treasure party. On the second occasion they were extremely fortunate to stumble across the bearers on the Indore road, more than 60 hours after losing them.

The triumphant scouts hurried back to their gangs. There was no time to rest. The Thugs – all 112 of them – set off at once after the treasure, ‘although we were much tired’, finally catching up with their intended victims at
midnight
on the third day of the chase and making camp close by. Both parties rose early the next morning, and the Thugs followed the bearers over the Nerbudda river at Burwaha Ghat, where customs men detained the members of the treasure party. As they passed by, the Thugs had the grim satisfaction of hearing the matchlock-men protest bitterly at ‘the hardship of being obliged to expose the value of their charge in an unsettled country’; and they went on only a short way before stopping for the night in ‘a small deserted
village
in the midst of a jungly waste’. They would wait for the bearers there.

‘It was about nine o’clock in the morning when they reached the place,’ one of the Thugs recalled.

It was only when the Thugs stopped to rest at last, more than 50 miles from the place where they had slaughtered the bearers, that they realized the true extent of the treasure they had seized. The packs they had taken from the camels’ backs were cut open with knives and swords, and out tumbled 15,000 rupees in coin, a quantity of silver bullion and a small brass box that, forced open, disgorged ‘four diamond rings set with jewels, eight pearls, and one pair of gold bangles’. This plunder was valued at a total of 40,000 rupees. Each man in the party received about 150 rupees and a small quantity of jewels as his share.

The Burwaha Ghat affair showed the Thugs at their most resourceful. Not only had they tracked a suspicious, highly mobile party of bearers across well over 100 miles of difficult terrain; they had also abandoned the practice of inveigling their victims, knowing that the cautious matchlock-men would never willingly travel with a large body of strangers, so that the murders were actually more like a highway robbery than a typical case of Thuggee. They had trusted to swords and spears, as well as their rumals, and shown that they were willing to draw blood when the potential prize warranted it.
*

The gold and jewels seized at Burwaha Ghat took the total plundered from the seths of central India in a mere three years to more than 90,000 rupees, split between as many as 500 Thugs. It was an enormous sum, and the gangs, well satisfied with their efforts, turned at once for home. They made their way north ‘by regular stages’ along the main roads, anticipating – it seems fair to guess – a warm welcome in their villages. But the wiser heads among them were apprehensive. They knew the seths would never let the theft of so much of their property go unrevenged.

 

Few Thugs were deterred by the fear of imprisonment or execution.

For some, this was a matter of necessity. These men either regarded murder as their trade or could find no better way to feed their families. But most Thugs believed, in any case, that they ran scant risk of conviction. Before the mid-1820s, the handful who had found themselves in court had generally been betrayed by disgruntled colleagues or been caught in possession of some item of loot that they could not account for. It was rare for the police, in either the Company’s territories or the Native States, to actively pursue a gang, much less for them to catch one.

The failings of the Indian police dated to Mughal times. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the police had been little more than a militia, employed to keep the country’s zamindars in check, and there were never many of them. A pargana of perhaps 200 villages would be policed by a detachment of 40 or 50 matchlock-men stationed in a special compound, called a
thanah
, from which they issued periodically to overawe recalcitrant
landholders. By acting as a brake upon the powers of a district’s zamindars, the police played a vital role in keeping the peace and ensuring the smooth flow of taxes from the provinces. But they were not equipped to solve
complex
crimes.

Policing, in the modern sense, remained largely the duty of the village
chaukidar
, or watchman. Every Indian community had at least one, hired by the local zamindar to guard fields and deal with the minor thefts and
robberies
that could plague any community. But the chaukidars, too, had their deficiencies. They were so poor that they were vulnerable to bribery. Their responsibilities ended at the edge of their villages, and since there was more often rivalry than cooperation between the watchmen of neighbouring
settlements
, few rural policemen had much success in catching criminals from outside their own communities. The village chaukidar was neither trained nor a part of any hierarchy; he had few if any resources to draw on, and rarely shared such information as he might possess concerning criminals living in his district with any higher authorities. There was no reason for him to pursue suspects beyond the borders of his village. Worse, each man was so beholden to his zamindar that he naturally felt compelled to connive at any breaches of the law committed by his master.

The Company’s solution to these problems had been to transform the men of the old thanah system into a modern force that combined the responsibilities of the militia with many of the duties of the village watch. From 1793, its magistrates were required to divide their districts into ‘police jurisdictions’ some 400 square miles in extent, and to recruit an Indian police officer, known as the darogah, to take charge of each. The notion of police compounds was retained, each thanah being manned by 10 or 12 militiamen, paid for by a special police tax to ensure that they were free from the zamindar’s control, and charged with patrolling a substantial swathe of countryside. The darogahs themselves were also given responsibility for solving major crimes, such as murder and cases of banditry, and were required to tour their districts constantly. They possessed the power to decide all but the most serious cases without reference to their magistrate, handing down the appropriate sentences and fines. In order to end the plainly unsatisfactory lack of cooperation between adjoining districts, Company darogahs were also permitted to pursue wanted criminals into neighbouring territories – though not, of course, into the Native States. British Superintendents of Police were appointed to oversee the efficiency of the entire scheme.