Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (28 page)

The approvers sent out on the roads in search of other Thugs were given one other important task. It became a grim routine for them to prove the truth of their testimonies by supervising the exhumation of their victims’
bodies, and for the identity of the cadavers to be proved, if possible, by
articles
found on their bodies and identified by relatives or friends. ‘Often,’ noted Sleeman, ‘I have seen incredulous visitors at my court house, come to seek information about missing relatives, burst into uncontrolled tears at the sight of some small possession, which had been taken from the corpse and which they instantly recognised.’

Sleeman’s comment sheds a rare shaft of light on the human cost exacted by the depredations of the Thugs. In the midst of so much murder, the voices of the stranglers’ living victims are heard only occasionally in the Company’s records. Bereaved relatives can be glimpsed here and there, ‘setting up a most dismal yell’ when the bodies of their husbands or children are discovered, or recognizing an article of equipment or clothing recovered from bodies found in a nullah or along the road. But their testimonies were seldom put down in writing, and the grief that they experienced was all too often forgotten then, and still is now, by those investigating Thuggee.

No account of the Thug gangs is, nonetheless, complete without some reference to the human cost exacted in the course of decades of brutal murder. Consider, for example, the experiences of Ruckbur Singh, a Rajput and brother to a man strangled by Thugs near Ellichpore in 1823. Five weeks after the murder had taken place, Singh became seriously alarmed at his brother’s non-appearance and set off to search the road on which he had been travelling. After making fruitless enquiries for several days, the Rajput was close to giving up the hunt when he fell in with a party of the Company’s sepoys conveying a group of captured Thugs towards Jhalna. These men ‘gave me a full account of my brother’s murder, and his servant Khooba’s murder’, and pointed out the well into which they had pitched the bodies of a large group of their victims. Investigating the spot more closely, Ruckbur Singh soon uncovered an horrific sight:

Then there was the case of the Cotwal of Sopur, a Maratha from Gwalior whose 17-year-old son fell into the hands of a Thug gang while on his way to fetch his bride around the year 1828. The boy was expertly inveigled, and disclosed that he was carrying a purse full of gold mohurs to defray his party’s expenses. That was enough to seal his fate, and the whole group was strangled, but jackals disinterred the bodies soon after they were buried and the murder was discovered. ‘Going back,’ one Thug involved in the case recalled, ‘we found the uncle of the youth sitting in front of the door,
weeping
and lamenting the loss of his nephew … The father died of grief soon after. He could never be persuaded to eat anything after he learnt of the fate of his only son, and soon died.’

One further example will stand for the myriad of mute testimonies that never found their way into the Company’s official records. An Indore
merchant
by the name of Humeerchund became concerned for the safety of his brother and brother-in-law, who vanished, in 1829, while transporting a large load of English chintz to Sehore. After a long and anxious wait for news, he learned

In this case, rather unusually, Humeerchund was able to confront his brother’s murderers in court, for some time later a Thug gang was
apprehended
nearby, and one of its jemadars was found to be wearing a distinctive
ungurka
(jacket), cut from chintz and lined with blue cotton, which had belonged to the strangled man. It had been a present from his uncle, a fellow
Thug, ‘and rather than alter so pretty a garment, he ran the risk of wearing it till he was taken’.

Even though he knew his brother was dead, the shock of seeing his jacket produced in evidence was too much for the merchant. When the ungurka was brought out, Humeerchund ‘immediately recognised it, and was so much affected as scarcely to be able to speak’. And ‘as we had no doubts that our relations had been murdered’, his deposition concluded, ‘we performed their funeral rites according to the customs of our sect’.

 

The arrests of two large gangs of Thugs by Borthwick and Sleeman, coming so close together and at a time when the Company was at last receptive to the idea that such bands of murderers existed, caused a considerable sensation.

‘Few who were in India at that period,’ wrote Meadows Taylor from his cantonment, ‘will ever forget the excitement which the discovery occasioned in every part of that country, [though] it was utterly discredited by the magistrates of many districts, who could not believe that this silently destructive system could have worked without their knowledge.’ The
newspapers
were suddenly full of accounts of Thugs. Tales of silent murder became fashionable for a time. The Company’s prisons were scoured for captured stranglers and concerted efforts were, for the first time, made to detain more.

‘I became very busy,’ Taylor recalled a few years later. ‘Those famous
discoveries
in regard to the practice of Thuggee had recently been made at Jubbulpore and Saugor by Captain Sleeman, which made a sensation in India never to be forgotten. By the confessions of one gang, who were
apprehended
, many Thugs in Central India were brought to justice; and at last the Thugs of the Deccan were denounced by these approvers, and as many lived near Hingolee, they were at once arrested. Day after day I recorded tales of murder, which, though horribly monotonous, possessed an intense interest; and as fast as new approvers came in, new mysteries were unravelled and new crimes confessed.’

Much remained to be done. Progress, even with the help of the first approvers, was slow at first. But Sleeman, whose headquarters at Jubbulpore were ideally positioned to place him at the centre of the great Thug hunt, could see a way forward. What was needed was an informant capable of
betraying not just one gang but many, a man so well informed of the plans of his fellow jemadars that he could secure dozens, even hundreds of stranglers in a single season. Feringeea could play this role. But Sleeman would find
himself
tested to the utmost in his attempts to capture him.

Feringeea and his companions were not at first particularly concerned by the betrayals of Amanoolah and the other approvers. They could not believe that a single confession, or even the efforts of several turncoats, could
eradicate
a system so widespread and successful as Thuggee. Both the Company and the native rulers of India had, after all, achieved little in the past other than the destruction of a few isolated Thug gangs, and each successive effort had – as one eminent strangler observed – ‘ended in nothing but the
punishment
of a few’. Why should this new campaign be any different?

In some respects, indeed, the Thugs were stronger in the late 1820s than they had ever been. An extended economic depression had swollen their ranks to the point where it became possible to spread a net of scouts and spies across an appreciable area of country, ensnaring more potential victims than had previously seemed possible and, just as importantly, the return of peace to the central provinces meant an increase in traffic on the roads. Not all of these new travellers were wealthy – many were fleeing precisely the same financial distress that had driven many of the Thugs themselves to crime – but, all in all, more people, and probably more money, had begun to criss-cross India than ever before. The gangs reaped the benefits. ‘Before the establishment of tranquillity over the country,’ one aged strangler recalled,

Feringeea profited from these improved conditions as much as any other Thug. During the cold season of 1827–8, he and his gang of 25 men had
travelled
south from their homes in Bundelcund, crossing the Malwa plateau into Gujerat and proceeding south into Candeish and the lands that had proved so lucrative for them the previous year. In the course of this one
expedition
, they had strangled some 105 men and women in 32 different affairs. It is unlikely they would have met so many worthwhile victims even a few years earlier, when the country was still blighted in the aftermath of the Maratha and Pindari wars.

None of the murders committed in the course of this expedition had been particularly noteworthy in itself, and the largest number of victims despatched on a single occasion had been no more than nine, but the gang seized plenty of gold and silver nonetheless. The largest single haul had been a consignment of silver valued at 4,000 rupees, taken from two
treasure-bearers
killed outside Aurangabad. But an additional 1,100 rupees was discovered among the possessions of a solitary thief whom Feringeea himself cornered in an old graveyard close to Oomroutee and personally strangled.
*
His gang had also murdered four unlucky drovers and appropriated the two bullock-loads of copper coins they had been conveying north, and added
several
hundred ‘strings of small pearls’, 15 of large pearls, a gilded necklace and a quantity of coral from the body of another victim. This loot had to be split with eight other Thug gangs, amounting in all to about 190 men, with whom Feringeea had cooperated at various times during the four months he and his followers spent on the road. Even so, allowing for the numerous small sums and pieces of loot taken from the remainder of the dead, the Thugs’ haul must have been worth a total of nearly 6,000 rupees, leaving a most respectable total of nearly 30 rupees for each member of the expedition.

The sheer variety of the men and women who met their deaths at the hand of Feringeea and his companions in the course of this one journey says something about the vibrancy of the roads of India after a full decade of peace. In addition to the usual mass of undifferentiated ‘travellers’, ‘Marathas’, ‘Rajpoots’ and ‘Brahmins’ despatched in the course of the expedition, the Thugs had murdered two dozen sepoys, eight bearers, six merchants, three
pundits
(learned teachers of Sanskrit, law and religion), a messenger, a fakir, two shopkeepers, an elephant driver and a bird-catcher. Their victims also included four women who – travelling with men whom the Thugs wished to murder – had been despatched without any apparent compunction.

Feringeea was by now at the height of his powers. He was still young –
perhaps
in his mid-twenties – and had yet to accumulate a sizeable number of followers; the gang of 25 men he led in 1827–8 was less than half the size of the largest group of Thugs at large in India that year. Nor is there any
evidence
that he exercised influence over the movements of gangs other than his own, other than in agreeing with his fellow jemadars, in the loosest terms, the districts most likely to yield returns in the prevailing circumstances. Yet there can be little doubt that Feringeea was one of the most deadly and effective stranglers ever to operate in the mofussil.

His high caste, practised charm and good looks made him a particularly successful inveigler, but he was a consummate leader, too. Year after year, he and his men killed as many, if not more, travellers than any other group of stranglers. Perhaps even more significantly, Feringeea was unusually well connected. He seems to have known, either by name or reputation, virtually all of the most important Thugs of Hindustan, and – in a career that by now dated back the better part of 15 years – had travelled, at one time or another, with most of them. His knowledge of other gangs, their successes, their members and those members’ families and homes, was unsurpassed.

The frequency with which Feringeea and his men cooperated with other jemadars on the roads of central India comfirms that loose alliances did exist between gangs quartered close together in the wilds of Bundelcund, or
sharing
common origins in a village such as Murnae. Feringeea himself often joined forces with a number of other Thug leaders, among them two much older men by the names of Zolfukar and Sheikh Inaent, both of whom were old associates of his family. Zolfukar had taken part, with Feringeea’s father, in a Thug expedition that had occurred as long ago as 1801, while Sheikh Inaent,
who was nearly 20 years older than his young colleague, came originally from Sindouse and had fled, with his fathers and brothers, when Halhed invaded the pargana, settling with other Chambel valley Thugs in Bundelcund. Ties of this sort must have proved invaluable when it came to turning several smaller gangs of stranglers into one large group capable of tackling a sizeable party of travellers. But the loose associations that existed between Thug leaders left them ever more vulnerable to the denunciations of approvers. In the course of the cold season of 1829–30, this fatal weakness would at last be fully exploited.

 

Feringeea left his home in November 1829 determined to atone for the
disastrous
outcome of his most recent expedition. He and his gang had strangled a further 77 men and three women in the course of the cold season of 1828–9. But a jemadar named Phoolsa, who came from the same village as Feringeea himself, had been seized by the local militia almost as soon as they had killed their first victim, and had to be abandoned. The travellers who had fallen prey to the Thugs were carrying so little cash that the loot hardly covered the costs of the expedition, and the stranglers’ frustration had only been increased by a chance encounter with another group of Thugs returning from an
expedition
to Dhoree, in Candeish, with somewhere in excess of 70,000 rupees of gold and jewels taken from yet another party of treasure-bearers. In this same year, Feringeea himself had spent an uncertain four months in Holkar’s prison at Alumpore, placed there no doubt on the orders of Beharee Lal, before
contriving
to escape. And by then it was so late in the season that most of the jemadar’s followers dispersed not long after he rejoined their gang, leaving him with only two companions. Feringeea had been forced to join Zolfukar’s band simply in order to remain active on the long road home.

The expedition of 1829–30 opened rather more auspiciously. Feringeea and the 25 men who made up his gang strangled a moonshee, five servants and four Brahmins before they had even crossed the Nerbudda river, and a shopkeeper and three other travellers shortly thereafter, before falling in with Zolfukar and his followers not far from Saugor. The two gangs joined forces, and – now nearly 40 strong – inveigled and murdered another 15 travellers on the roads leading to Bhopal. Sheikh Inaent, meanwhile, was in the adjoining district with his men, working their way along the road towards the town of Sewagunge.

The Company’s net was, however, now closing fast around the gangs still
at large in the half million square miles of the central provinces. The approvers captured by Borthwick and Sleeman a few months earlier had
produced
a list of 23 leaders quartered in villages around the town of Jhansee; five of the men named had already been arrested, and the remainder were now being sought in the very districts through which the gangs were passing. The captured stranglers had also betrayed the routes most favoured by their comrades and the dates when they were active in the cold season. With this information to hand, it became possible for Sleeman and his colleagues to station parties of sepoys along the roads frequented by the gangs, and to supply some of them, at least, with informants capable of identifying Thugs whom they encountered along the way.

These tactics were immediately successful. While Feringeea’s men were still in the vicinity of Saugor, word reached them that a jemadar named Sheikh Macub had been seized, together with his men, only a few miles away. A few days later, they encountered another Thug who was fleeing back towards his home in Bundelcund. This man bore even more disturbing news. A day or two earlier, the jemadar of another gang had been seized by Company troops between Jubbulpore and Banda. Once again the arrest had been made uncomfortably close to hand. But it was the identity of the gang’s leader that particularly disturbed Feringeea. Sleeman’s sepoys had captured his old associate, Sheikh Inaent.

Inaent, travelling with five other jemadars and a combined force of 85 Thugs, had been ‘intending to operate that season along the great road from Mirzapore to Jubbulpore, and strike off to that between Saugor and Calpee’. He and his men had already murdered two shopkeepers, a pair of blacksmiths and a Muslim sepoy carrying a
churee
, or painted stick – his badge of office – and had just formed designs on a second party of four when they reached a convenient tank and agreed to stop there for the night. ‘We were preparing to go on with them after the third watch,’ Inaent would recall, ‘with the intention of killing them on the road, when we heard the
duheea
(the cry of the hare), a dreadful omen; and we let them go on, unmolested.’ Even this observance of ritual, however, was not enough to save the gang, for late that same night, when the Thugs halted in order to burn the evidence of their earlier killings, they were overtaken by a group of Company sepoys, accompanied by two approvers by the names of Doulut and Dhun Singh. The soldiers did not linger for very long, but to
Inaent’s horror, the approvers decided to stop and rest by the Thugs’ fire. The two men sat down to warm themselves, telling their new comrades that they would catch them up.

It was now a little before dawn, and both groups were in desperate danger. The two approvers were heavily outnumbered; Inaent and his men could easily have killed them. On the other hand, the sepoys were not yet far away, and the murdered soldier’s clothes and his churee could clearly be seen
blazing
away in the fire. Doulut and Dhun Singh could scarcely fail to notice and understand such an obvious clue.

They did not fail. ‘We overheard,’ Inaent recalled, ‘Doulut saying to Dhun Singh: “This stick and these clothes must have belonged to murdered men; and these must be some of our old friends, and a large party of them.” And both seemed to be alarmed at their situation, as they were then alone.’ But rather than fall upon their former comrades, whose presence they knew would all too soon be missed, the nervous Thugs decided to make good their escape instead. They packed hurriedly and prepared to leave, but were not quite quick enough. Inaent was in the act of mounting his pony when a second party of sepoys appeared on the horizon: