Read Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult Online
Authors: Mike Dash
Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (27 page)
It was a complicated business. Approvers were questioned in Hindustani and their testimony taken down by Sleeman’s moonshees in Persian, before being translated into English when required by the courts. Sleeman made a practice of leading each captured Thug slowly through his entire career,
concluding
only at the moment of his capture. Great pains were taken to note the details of every murder that could be recalled, including the names or the occupations of the victims and the quantity and nature of the loot taken from their bodies.
Sleeman did everything he could to ensure that suspect Thugs were
properly
identified. Depositions taken from approvers and witnesses all over India were collated and indexed, and whenever a gang of suspected Thugs was
captured
, its members were placed, one at a time, in an identity parade, and all the approvers at the station were ‘sent for singly, and required to point out any individual of the party whom they may know’. For many months Sleeman was never quite satisfied that all the information he took down in this way was accurate, and his superiors, both in Britain and Bengal, feared that
captured
Thugs would do their utmost to protect their friends and relatives from arrest. In some cases approvers undoubtedly did conceal information in this way. But there is no evidence that any approvers who were confronted with an unknown suspect guessed at or simply invented an identity for the man.
Testimony recorded in this way possessed an eerie fascination that the officers involved in its collation frequently commented on. The Thugs’
statements
were generally exact and almost always curiously emotionless. One typical deposition, among hundreds collected by Sleeman over the ensuing months, began when the approver who had been brought before him was asked how often he had travelled with his gang before he witnessed his first murder. ‘It was on my return from the first expedition which I made with my father to the Deccan, when I was 15 years of age,’ remembered the Thug,
and about 35 years ago [1801–2]. We were a gang of about 80 or 90 Thugs, under my father, Hinga, and some of the Deccan chiefs lodged in the mausoleum outside the town of Ellichpore. Two of our leaders,
Gumboo and Laljoo, on getting into the bazaar, fell in with the grooms of the Nawab Subzee Khan, the uncle of the Nawab of Bhopal, who told them that their master … was now on his way home. They came back and reported, and Dulele Khan and Khuleel Khan, and other leaders of fame, went and introduced themselves to the Nawab, pretending that they had been to the Deccan with horses for sale, and were now on their way back to Hindustan. He was pleased with their address and
appearance
, and invited them to return the next day, which they did; and the following day he set out with as many of our gang as it was thought safe to exhibit. He had two grooms, two troopers, and a slave girl, two horses, a mare with a wound in the neck, and a pony. The slave girl’s duty was to prepare him his daily portion of
subzee
;
*
and he told us that he had got the name of Subzee Khan from the quantity of that drug which he was accustomed to drink.We came on together three stages; and during the fourth stage we came to an extensive jungle on this side of Dhoba, in the Baitool district; and on reaching a nullah, about nine o’clock, Khuleel said, ‘Khan Sahib, we have had a fatiguing journey, and we had better rest here and take some
refreshment
.’ – ‘By all means,’ said the Nawab, ‘I feel a little fatigued, and will take my subzee here.’ He dismounted, laid his sword and shield upon the ground, spread his carpet, and sat down. Dulele and Khuleel sat down by his side, while the girl was preparing his potion, of which he invited these two men, as our supposed chiefs, to partake, while the grooms were engaged with the horses and the troopers were smoking their pipes at a distance.It had been determined that the Nawab should be first secured, for he was a powerful man, and, if he had a moment’s warning, would
certainly
have cut down some of the gang before they could secure him. [So] Laljoo also went and sat near him, while Gomanee stood behind, and seemed to be much interested in the conversation. All being now ready, the signal was given; and the Nawab was strangled by Gomanee, while Laljoo and Dulele held his legs. As soon as the others saw the Nawab secured, they fell upon his attendants and all were strangled, and their bodies buried in the bed of a watercourse. On going back to Ellichpore, Gomanee sold the Nawab’s shield for eight rupees, but it was worth so much more that the people suspected him, and came to our camp to search for him. Our spies brought us timely notice, and we concealed him under the housings of our horses.
‘This, the approver added in conclusion, ‘was the first murder I ever
witnessed
, and it made a great impression on my mind. You may rely upon the correctness of what I state regarding it.’
The truth of depositions of this sort was never taken at face value. Approvers’ statements would be checked against the testimony of other
members
of the gang concerned, where that was possible, and Sleeman also devoted considerable energy to obtaining such corroboration as was possible from
surviving
witnesses. In the case of Subzee Khan – one of the most difficult he had to investigate, given the 35 years or more that had passed since the murder had been committed – he wrote to the Company’s political agent at Bhopal for
further
information; the agent referred the matter to the chief minister of the city’s ruler, and he in turn located ‘an old resident of Bhopal’ by the name of Sultan Khan Afghan who recalled the commotion caused by the Nawab’s unexplained disappearance. ‘When his son came home,’ Sultan Khan’s deposition explained, ‘he got 200 rupees and, with four attendants, set out in search of him. He went to Nagpore and Ellichpore, and found traces of his father to the last place, but could find no trace of him beyond it.’ The evidence of a second elderly resident substantiated Sultan Khan’s in every particular.
Approvers employed under Sleeman’s system were confined and kept in chains, but many of the more useful men were often released temporarily from prison into the custody of patrols of
nujeebs
– mounted militiamen. Equipped with lighter irons, concealed by a pair of long and flowing trousers, they accompanied Company troops sent in search of Thug gangs in order to identify wanted men. In most cases at least two approvers would be used in the hope that they might confirm each other’s testimonies.
Other informants were put to work identifying those already in prison. As always, the approvers were carefully segregated so that their testimonies could be checked against each other. Each suspected strangler was then brought forward in turn, and the approver would say whether he knew him and, if so, which village he came from, and which Thug expeditions, if any, the pair had shared in. Other details – such as the names of the prisoner’s
associates and family – were taken down at the same time, if known. ‘Ormea took part in the murder of 60 on the road to Indore, four years ago,’ ran one typical denunciation. ‘During this expedition he himself strangled seven men and a woman.’
Even when they were at Jubbulpore, Thug informants had to be housed separately from other prisoners, not least to save them from the vengeance of the men whom they betrayed. No fixed punishment for betraying a gang, it should be said, was ever exacted on traitorous Thugs by their old comrades. But the earliest approvers plainly did fear the vengeance of those whom they betrayed. ‘Thugs will strangle a King’s Evidence,’ one active murderer
confirmed
, while Syeed Ameer Ali begged earnestly for protection after he was captured:
All I require, should my life be spared, is permission to live in irons or in any situation where I may be protected from the numerous stranglers who inhabit [these] districts, as they will exert every endeavour to destroy me. I have already undermined all their houses, and have gone too far in my information against them to recede. No person engaged with these people has ever hitherto said so much; as everyone knows how revengeful these stranglers are … I have nothing more to ask, but will do all I can in putting a stop to the work of my late friends, the stranglers, as my safety now depends upon their destruction.
Once the system was fully established, new approvers could be questioned almost immediately concerning the whereabouts of their closest associates. This minimized the chance that wanted Thugs would hear of the latest arrests and flee their homes, and sometimes made it possible for captured Thugs to lure their former friends into the Company’s hands using much the same cunning they had previously employed in inveigling travellers. When the strangler Ramzan, nominally a revenue collector in Oudh, indicated a willingness to turn approver, he was (he later testified)
asked if I could point out Buhram Jemadar, a notorious leader of Thugs for whose seizure a reward of 100 rupees had been offered by the British Government. I said, ‘Yes,’ and that very night led forth an English guard of eight sepoys to the village of Sohanee. I went to the house where Buhram
Jemadar slept. Often has he led our gangs! I awoke him – he knew me well, and came outside to me. It was a cold night, so, under the pretence of warming myself, but in reality to have light for his seizure by the guard, I lighted some straw and made a blaze. As Buhram and I were warming ourselves, the guard drew around us. I said to them, ‘This is Buhram,’ and he was seized just as a cat seizes a mouse. Buhram immediately confessed that he was a Thug, saying, ‘I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have Thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.’
Some hint of the motivations that led the Thug approvers to serve Sleeman so readily can be found in this statement by Buhram. We have already seen that some Thugs regarded their involvement with the gangs as a form of military service, depending on their jemadars and, ultimately, the zamindars and petty rajahs who protected them for food and money. Thuggee was no more than a form of employment for them, a means of
providing
for their families. And as Sleeman evidently recognized, at least some of his approvers saw the transfer of their loyalties from the Thug gangs to the Company as no more disgraceful than the actions of a mercenary selling his services to a new master. ‘We … are become servants of Government,’ one explained. Some of Sleeman’s prisoners may even have seen their work as a form of salaried employment, for as well as being clothed, housed and fed, their families received a Company stipend and they were even able to send money to their relatives by earning the rewards offered for the capture of leading Thugs. The men of the remaining gangs, announced the approver Rambux, ‘are all my enemies now!’
Not every approver was arrested in the course of a Thug expedition. Other tactics, some of them of dubious legitimacy, were tried with some success, as Futty Khan, one of the most notorious stranglers in Oudh, found to his distress. Futty had been an unusually active jemadar for two decades, and had ‘just completed, with his gang, the murder of three entire families’ when news reached him that his wife and three children had been seized by a party of the Company’s nujeebs, the mounted irregulars most often used to pursue the Thugs. Told his own family would not be released until he gave himself up,
I returned home and in about a month after this, my last murder, I delivered myself up, confessing my crime. I at once turned King’s Evidence, and within three days pointed out to the guard the following Thugs, who were seized, namely Maigal and Ameer, now in gaol here.
When I went to catch Maigal, he was at his own house and readily came at my call; but when he saw irons on my legs, great was his consternation! He knew that I had come as an approver to seize him! The lamentation which he and his wife made soon filled the whole village with news of his capture. He is a well-known Thug! He confessed on reaching Lucknow.
The initial progress of the anti-Thug campaign was swift. By the end of 1829, Sleeman had around a hundred newly detained stranglers in custody at Saugor and Jubbulpore. That total was almost quadrupled within 12 months, and as the evidence supplied by the approvers was sifted and checked,
hundreds
of warrants were issued for the arrest of suspected Thugs. Sleeman and Smith occasionally went further, too, from the very start of their campaign, sending their approvers out in the company of nujeeb patrols armed with what were known as ‘general warrants’ – papers that gave the troops
authority
to detain any man pointed out by a Thug informer. The use of such warrants soon proved controversial, even in the comparatively lawless central provinces, not least because unscrupulous approvers were suspected of using them to have their enemies arrested. Dozens of other suspects were detained on ‘mere hearsay’ obtained from spies and prostitutes, and police officers, too, were far from immune to the temptation that the warrants posed. Some used them as instruments of extortion, threatening to arrest men who refused to pay them bribes, and even FC Smith – whose signature appeared on many of the papers – had to admit that general warrants did ‘occasionally create great evils’. There were similar problems with the identity papers Sleeman drew up for his approvers, confirming that they were exempt from execution or transportation to a penal colony overseas. On at least one occasion it was discovered that convicted Thugs were loaning such papers to old associates who used them for ‘bad purposes’.