Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (26 page)

It is difficult to be sure how much Sleeman knew about the stranglers prior to 1829. He had been in India when St Leger’s order of the day, warning the Company’s sepoys to be on guard against the Thugs, was given out in every station in the Bengal Presidency. And since he was well read and loved the Subcontinent, he may perhaps have browsed through the papers that Sherwood and Shakespear had published in
Asiatick Researches
, too. But there is nothing to suggest that such minor brushes with Thuggee stirred any great interest in his heart. Sleeman took no notice of the considerable investigation that took place at Jhalna, 280 miles from his own station, in 1823. And although he most likely did hear, from his superior Charles Molony, of the arrest of a gang of more than a hundred stranglers, caught crossing the Nerbudda valley in that same year, he himself had – in common with almost every other officer in India – never seen a Thug nor stumbled across a Thug band.

Occasionally, during the mid 1820s, the gangs’ activities in the mofussil must have come to his attention. Jubbulpore’s jail, the largest in the Nerbudda valley, often held a handful of stranglers and suspected stranglers, confined alongside dacoits and highway robbers of all sorts. But usually the evidence against them was not great, and the men rarely came to trial. Only a single case of Thuggee was heard in the town in the course of the whole decade: a gang 32 men strong, arrested as they passed through the district in 1826, was committed for trial later that same year. Two of the men were executed and the remainder imprisoned, mostly for life.

Sleeman’s superintendence of Jubbulpore suggests he must have known of this case. His friend Fraser had tried it, and it is quite possible that the two men discussed the hearing then or later. But though there had been a large body of circumstantial evidence to show the prisoners’ guilt, each of the imprisoned men denied all knowledge of Thuggee, and there was no
opportunity
to learn anything of the other gangs at large in Saugor & Nerbudda. Sleeman can have known little more of Thugs when he first read Bentinck’s circular than he had a few years previously, when he was wholly unaware of their activities in Nursingpore.

What he had realized, by 1829, was that a full decade of service in the
interior
of India had earned him little notice. A solitary promotion, from lieutenant to captain, and a modest increase in pay had been his only rewards for ten years’ labour, while brother officers lucky or influential enough to
command in battle, or fill posts in the Presidency towns, had earned
preferment
far more quickly. Company men despatched to the mofussil were all too easily forgotten; only those who made it their business to draw their
superiors
’ attention to every incident and each achievement in their districts had much hope of keeping pace with colleagues in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Throughout the 1820s, Sleeman had upbraided his friend Fraser for failing to keep the government informed of his progress. Now, with a new wife to support, he was forced to take his own advice. Bentinck’s circular suggested one way forward. So when, in February 1830, rumours reached Jubbulpore that another band of stranglers was making its way through British territory, Sleeman wasted little time. He set out immediately in pursuit.

 

This new gang had been engaged in a series of murders in Gwalior and Bhopal under the command of a jemadar named Sheikh Madaree, plundering more than 2,000 rupees from a total of more than 30 victims. It had evaded the attentions of the local police and disposed of its victims so securely that no sign of its presence had been discovered. In the first week of April,
however
, a party of six sepoys travelling home on leave was inveigled only a few miles to the north of Saugor. As was their custom, the Thugs waited until their potential victims were settled in camp for the night before the signal for their murder was given. In normal circumstances, the destruction of a small party of this sort would have presented few difficulties. But on this occasion, one member of the gang later explained, ‘the affair was mismanaged’. One of the bhurtotes failed to slip his rumal completely over the selected victim’s head. The scarf caught on the soldier’s nose and, after a brief struggle, the man got free from his assailants and ran off towards the village. The Thug lookouts and guards were quickly after him, but before they could catch up with the fleeing sepoy the Thugs caught sight of another party of soldiers approaching in the distance. Madaree’s entire gang turned and ran, leaving their fortunate victim alive to blurt out the story of his comrades’ murder.

This one error doomed the group. It was unusual enough for the men of a Thug gang to leave one of their intended victims alive. It was unheard of for them to make such a mistake in such close proximity to a sepoy patrol. The soldiers – who were on foot like their quarry – were not quite quick enough to round up the fleeing stranglers. But they were close enough to Saugor to
reach the town in only hours, and so for once the Company received
intelligence
of a Thug gang in good time to scour the local roads.

With the sepoys’ reports to hand, Sleeman was able to send out strong patrols of troops along the main roads leading into the town, and it was not long before one returned leading the 30 members of the gang. Four approvers soon emerged from the ranks of the Thugs, and their evidence was laboriously compiled into a comprehensive indictment that Sleeman presented to Smith. The depositions, as Smith summarized them, offered numerous proofs of the Thugs’ guilt:

It did not take long to bring the case to court. In only a few months, fifteen members of the gang were sentenced to be hanged, and eight more to transportation. The remainder were imprisoned for seven or 14 years. ‘I beg leave to state,’ concluded Smith in his report to Calcutta, ‘that the gang of Thugs, or Land Pirates, against whose hand no ordinary traveller can stand, stands condemned on evidence not in the least apocryphal. I am satisfied that, thanks to the exertions of Captain Sleeman, this Territory has seen the last of them.’ In this last sentiment, however, Smith was wrong. Sleeman had by no means finished with the Thugs. He had, indeed, only just begun.

 

The confessions made by captured Thugs had hitherto been used solely to convict the other members of their own gangs. Sleeman was the first Company officer to perceive that depositions taken from men with long experience of Thuggee were packed with clues that, followed up, would inevitably lead British officials to other gangs and other jemadars. He was also the first to interrogate and deploy his approvers with penetrating intelligence. The system that he evolved at Jubbulpore in the years 1829–30 would later be applied throughout the Subcontinent with great success.

The real difficulty, in almost every case, lay in obtaining sufficient
evidence
to secure convictions in courts governed by Islamic law. The Muslim code inherited from the Mughal Empire, and only partially modified since then, frowned on the testimony of approvers when it was unsupported by other evidence. Indeed it was unlawful to arrest, much less convict, a man solely on the basis of the testimony ‘of any number of confessing prisoners’. The great majority of captured Thugs knew this and realized that their best chance of acquittal was to flatly deny all the charges brought against them.

Sleeman was anxious, first, to establish some sort of rapport with the
captured
men. ‘In order to make them assent to us to the extent of their ability, we require to raise them a little bit in their own esteem, and make them feel a little exalted as the servants of a state which … will always be found to
provide
for their decent subsistence,’ he decided.

That done, each Thug who had indicated a willingness to turn approver would be brought before a British officer for questioning. The prisoner would receive assurances that his life would be spared in exchange for his
testimony
, but it would be made clear to him that this promise would apply only if he fulfilled a number of conditions, which (since they generally
applied to all Thug informants, and help to explain how the Company was able to extract such a flood of information from its approvers) are worth repeating here:

Approvers who fulfilled all three conditions received the promised
conditional
pardons for their crimes, but – Sleeman and his fellow officers were constantly reminded by their superiors in Calcutta – ‘it is of the greatest importance that none are led to believe that they will ever be released from prison’. The loyalty of each man was buttressed with the information that ‘a small maintenance shall be allowed to his wife and child, who must however for some time to come be kept under surveillance’.

A long period of questioning would follow. ‘The mode of proceeding,’ a contemporary article in the
Foreign Quarterly Review
informed its readers,