Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (24 page)

This new system did tackle some of the problems endemic in Mughal times. But it had drawbacks of its own. Each darogah’s territory was so large that it was almost impossible to police properly with the handful of men
available
. The responsibilities – and thus the income – of the chaukidars, meanwhile, were so severely curtailed that most watchmen became
implacably
opposed to the darogah and his men, actively hindering their investigations. All in all, the Company scheme placed so much power and responsibility in the hands of the new police that it could only work if the darogahs themselves were outstandingly honest and efficient. Most, unfortunately, were neither.

The principal difficulty was a simple one: the pay of a darogah was so low that respectable men could rarely be enticed into the ranks of the police. To make matters worse, many magistrates delegated the task of finding a
suitable
officer to their court clerks, themselves poorly paid and frequently corrupt officials willing to appoint any coarse, ill-educated man who would part with a substantial bribe in order to secure the post. Since these clerks
generally
possessed the ear of their British masters, and could have an officer dismissed as quickly as he had been recruited, many darogahs found
themselves
forced to hand over some or even all of their monthly salaries to the clerks simply in order to keep their jobs. The inevitable consequence was that most were not merely badly paid but also fully aware that they could be
dismissed
at any moment. It is hardly surprising, in such circumstances, that many took up their posts determined to make as much money as they could as quickly as was practicable.

By the mid-1820s, the excesses of the Company’s police were already
legendary
. It was common for darogahs arriving at a village to charge the local people for both their services and their travelling expenses, to insist that food and lodging be provided for their entourage, and to solicit payments from both parties in each case. In many districts, each local watchman was forced to pay his darogah three rupees a year – a good sum in itself, but one that amounted to a substantial income when multiplied by the number of villages in a typical jurisdiction. All in all, the total realized by a successful policeman in the course of a single year could amount to as much as 2,400 rupees – a very handsome sum, particularly when it is compared to the policeman’s nominal annual salary of a mere 300 rupees.

Nor were innocent villagers the only source of a darogah’s wealth. Many officers accepted bribes from criminals who lived within their districts in return for concealing their existence from the magistrate, and as early as 1807, one British district officer discovered that every darogah in his
jurisdiction
‘entertained on a small salary an agent whose duty it was to attend the Magistrate’s Court and communicate to his employer all the happenings there’. The information was then sold to criminals who lived within the
darogah
’s territory so that ‘the principal dacoits and others have pretty good information of any orders that may be passed respecting them’. The upshot was that malefactors were able to live relatively unmolested in British
territory
, while Company magistrates themselves had ‘no local knowledge of their districts, nor can they have much information of what passes in the mofussil beyond what the darogahs think fit to report’.

Abuses of this sort had severe consequences for the efficiency of the Company’s police. In many districts, villagers who discovered that some
serious
crime had been committed would do almost anything to prevent the authorities getting wind of it, believing that a visit from the police would be a far worse catastrophe than the crime itself. Murders were particularly likely to be covered up, for in the absence of any obvious suspects many darogahs would not only take the opportunity to ransack a village in search of ‘evidence’, taking bribes from those able to pay to escape the attentions of their constables, but would seek to pin the blame for a murder or a robbery on some unfortunate local rather than admit to their superiors that they could not solve the crime. Innumerable Thug crimes were concealed in this way. Terrified villagers preferred to dispose of bodies that they stumbled across in wells or shallow graves, and only rarely reported them. ‘The police,’ one Indian concluded as late as 1833, ‘is as dangerous as any fierce and grotesque creature in this universe, and resembles the frightful description of the hell in legends … It is death to come into contact with.’

Even the Company’s darogahs, though, took notice when
treasure-bearers
disappeared. Most of the Thugs’ victims might be travellers without influence or powerful friends, had no particular itinerary, and were often not missed for weeks or even months after their deaths. But the seths’
treasure
parties followed predetermined routes, and were expected at their destinations by a certain date. Their disappearances were quickly noticed, and the bankers lost little time in alerting the local authorities. They insisted
on thorough investigations, and because they were wealthy and powerful men the police were anxious to oblige. The sums of money involved were so substantial that most seths did not hesitate to commit their own resources to the hunt as well, despatching search parties to track the
missing
bearers down.

By an extraordinary chance (or, one is inclined to suspect, thanks to the presence of a Thug spy somewhere in the bank concerned) all three of the great consignments of treasure lost between the years 1826 and 1829 were on their way either to or from the house of Dhunraj Seth. Dhunraj, who came from the town of Oomroutee, on the road from Jhalna to Nagpore, was a man of substantial means. His bank had agents in Bombay and Indore,
correspondents
in Poona and Nagpore, and ambitions to expand into Saugor and beyond, and he was wealthy enough to finance his own search for his missing bearers. He was also – at a time when even Maharajah Sindhia of Gwalior had no treasury of his own, since ‘all the cash is in the hands of the bankers of the bazaars, on whom the Government obtains credit for certain sums by
negotiating
loans’ – so important to the native princes of the central provinces who depended on his funds that the Thugs could not rely, as they had always done, on the protection of the petty rajahs and landlords who usually shielded them. In this sense, at least, Dhunraj had greater power than the civil
authorities
, whether British or Indian, whose interest in Thugs and dacoits ceased at the borders of their own territories.

The seth’s search for the gangs who had robbed him and killed his men properly began in 1828. Enquiries had evidently been made into the disappearance of the dozen or more men strangled near the Tapti river in 1826, but the Thugs who murdered this party of bearers seem to have buried their victims with some care; their bodies were never found and the
circumstances
of their deaths remained a mystery. The seven men killed two years later in the Malagow affair, however, were disposed of hurriedly, as frequently occurred when the stranglers were anxious to leave the scene. ‘Some of the bodies,’ Feringeea recalled, ‘were thrown into [a] tank, and the others were slightly buried in a field close by.’

The consequences were predictable. Only a few days after the murders had been committed, the stench of decomposing corpses drew a peasant from a nearby village to the spot, and he chanced to return home with news of his discovery just as one of Dhunraj’s search parties reached the village. The
villagers and the banker’s men returned to the river together, and soon
uncovered
the remains of a long-haired man in a white shirt, which had been hidden beneath some stones. He was immediately recognized as one of the missing bearers.

Next day the seth’s men explored the murder site more thoroughly. They were accompanied by several villagers, who joined in with the search. One of these helpers, a man named Oda Patel, later recalled:

While the hunt was going on, another of the peasants confided that the bodies of five or six people, also supposed to be the victims of murder, had recently been exhumed nearby, close to the road. Malagow lay within the
borders
of the Bombay Presidency, so the investigation of the scene fell to the Company’s police. But Candeish had long been such a lawless place that the discoveries were viewed, ‘by the native officers, with a great deal of coolness’. In ordinary circumstances the local darogah might well have calculated that he was unlikely to profit in tackling such a tricky case. But at the insistence of the seth’s men a formal report was made to the authorities in Bombay nonetheless.

The murder site at Burwaha Ghat was uncovered even more promptly. The Thugs involved in this affair had turned the bearers’ three camels loose in the jungle, and their discovery five days after the slaughter of the treasure party soon led the local watchmen to the crude graves that had been prepared nearby. The dead men had been interred at the bottom of a ravine. The first three bodies recovered were, one chaukidar reported,

The remaining members of the treasure party were lying 50 yards away – two in a second shallow grave, the others in the open on the bank of a stream, their bodies torn apart by vultures – and checks made with the customs post at the Ghat soon revealed their identities. More
importantly
, the customs officers recalled levying duty on a large group of men who passed through at the same time as the bearers. They had been travelling, the records showed, to Bundelcund, and since they were at once suspected of the robbery, four men set off in pursuit. One was a
policeman
from the local thanah, another Holkar’s agent in the district. The other two were the seth’s men – Beharee Lal and Gomanee Ram, Dhunraj’s gomashtas in Indore.

Beharee Lal, the senior gomashta, had received specific instructions from his master. His principal duty, it is clear, was not simply to find the men who had stolen the lost treasure, but to recover the whole sum by whatever means were necessary. So, when the Thugs who had fled Burwaha Ghat were at length tracked down to their home villages in the district around Jhansee – a state then nominally an ally of the Company – Beharee went at once to the Resident at Indore for help in securing them. Supplied with an escort of native troops, he seized as many of the men as he could find, and carried them off, together with their
families
, to a fortress in the town of Alumpore. There they were in effect held hostage while the gomashta negotiated with them for the return of their loot.

Beharee Lal’s next step was to ascertain what had happened to his master’s property. The Thugs had divided the loot from Burwaha Ghat into 101 shares, so it had been dispersed, but comparatively little had been spent and much was still recoverable. The gomashta secured its return by promising each of his captives their release in exchange for handing over three-quarters of their booty. Others were set free so they could point out places where portions of the cash were hidden. In this way, Beharee managed to unearth perhaps four-tenths of the treasure – the first large Thug haul ever, even partially, recovered.
*

Next, the seth’s man turned his thoughts to ways of securing the 25,000 rupees that remained outstanding from the Burwaha Ghat affair. Much of this money had either been spent or was in the hands of men who were not in his custody. But the gomashta now realized that there were other ways of obtaining reparation – and also making money for himself. Chance had placed him at the head of a gang of able Thugs, who all depended on him for their freedom. Those who would not cooperate with him, or who could not find the money he demanded, risked being returned to jail. Even those who had handed back their share of the banker’s property remained vulnerable to blackmail, for Beharee’s word – and of course his money – would probably be taken over theirs in any local court of law. The Jhansee Thugs thus became, in effect, the gomashta’s subjects, and he now put them back to work.

Beharee’s plan was as straightforward as it was brutal. The men who had been released into his custody were, notionally, employed merely to recover the money stolen at Burwaha Ghat. In practice, however, they were sent out to ply their trade of murder once again. A huge share – 60 per cent – of the proceeds of each new expedition was made over to the banker’s man, and he kept some of this commission for himself and returned the rest to Dhunraj Seth. The Jhansee men had, thus, in effect, secured their freedom by selling the gomashta an option on the proceeds of their future murders, and they had little choice but to Thug in order to pay him.

It was not long before Beharee Lal began applying the same methods to men who had played no part in the Candeish or Burwaha Ghat affairs. He discovered it was possible to secure the release of other criminals into his custody simply by alleging they had been members of the gangs he sought, and that these men were so anxious to escape jail that they were willing to pay him for their freedom. After a while, he even established a tribunal of his own at Alumpore and began to ‘bind and loose at [his] discretion all the Thugs [he] can get hold of without check or control from the Ruler of the country’. Disquieting rumours began to be heard that Beharee had
surrounded
himself with a number of notorious jemadars, turning himself into the ‘King of Thugs’. The gomashta was now busily directing the fortunes of their united gangs.