Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (29 page)

While Inaent was being secured, the other members of his gang fled into the surrounding jungle and made off. Even while they were evading probable arrest, however, these men continued to murder the travellers they met. The strangler Rambuksh, heading north-east towards the town of Rewah with 25 men, encountered a party of six on their way to the holy city of Benares. Four were Gosains, wandering mendicants ‘remarkable for their wealth’ who often engaged in moneylending and were, thus, likely victims; suspecting that the men had jewels concealed somewhere about their persons, Rambuksh and his
companions strangled them, a little before dawn, in a mango grove for
possessions
worth a total of 900 rupees. The dead men’s corpses were stripped and left exposed and, when the bodies were found by the people of a nearby village, it was observed ‘that their long matted hair seemed to have been opened out and examined; and the only mark of violence that appeared on the bodies was that of a string around the neck, with which they seemed to have been strangled’. Another portion of the dispersed group killed two carriers of Ganges water, a tailor and a woman who were on their way to Banda, and then six more men two days later, the latter murder yielding a further 200 rupees. But Feringeea and Zolfukar were much more cautious. They retreated all the way to Bhopal ‘without killing any person’ before
beginning
to murder again, contriving, nonetheless, to strangle another 14 travellers, in five separate affairs, by the time they finally found their way back to the Nerbudda close to the town of Hoshangabad.

The two jemadars had shaken off Sleeman’s pursuit. And for all its difficulties, the cold season of 1829–30 had at last begun to produce better returns than they had endured 12 months earlier. The Thugs must have hoped that they could
continue
unmolested, and be spared the alarms and arrests that had certainly begun to fray the nerves of all their men. But it was now, in the last weeks of 1829, that things began to go still more badly wrong for Feringeea and his followers.

Suddenly and without warning their world was filled with portents of
disaster
. First, ‘to our great surprise and consternation’, Zolfukar’s mare dropped a foal – a serious matter, since the blood and mucus associated with the birth contaminated the ritual purity of the Hindu Thugs and placed them all ‘under the
eetuk
’, a religious proscription that made it impossible for the men to
continue
the expedition.
*
Then, when the gangs had parted company and begun their long journeys home, something altogether worse occurred. Feringeea’s men were resting by a river eight miles from the town of Bhilsa, and their jemadar was bathing in the stream, when all distinctly heard the sound Thugs dreaded more than any other. Clearly – though it was the middle of the day – the hooting call of a baby owl echoed overhead.

 

Belief in omens and portents was very common at this time. The lives of ordinary villagers could be disrupted or cut short in so many ways – famine, disease, drought, the failure of the crop or the exactions of landlords – that peasants, travellers and merchants alike were only too anxious to place their faith in systems of prophecy and divination that offered guidance to an
uncertain
future. Farmers watched for signs while they tilled their fields. Townsmen consulted the auguries before embarking on a business venture, and hunters interpreted the cries of wild animals as omens for the success or failure of their efforts.

Superstitious thugs and dacoits – who depended heavily on luck to bring them worthwhile hauls of plunder and who risked capture at every turn – were as susceptible to these omens as any peasant. Some dacoit gangs firmly believed that certain days of the week were luckier than others for committing robberies, and others held that the sound of a bull bellowing, or a man sneezing, was so unlucky that they should abandon whatever dacoity they was planning. The Thugs, similarly, swore by an elaborate array of omens,
*
which guided them from first to last on their expeditions.

The movements and the sound of wild animals were the most important signs. When the members of a gang first left their village, Sleeman was told by one approver, they would go a little way along the road they planned to take, and wait until they heard a partridge call. If the cry came from the right, the expedition could begin. If it were heard coming from the left, the men would return home and begin again the next day on a different road. The Thugs would also halt at the first river or stream they came to, awaiting guidance as to whether to proceed, and in some gangs further auguries were taken at the start of each new day. A few men threw dice to determine the best time to commence an expedition; others gargled sour milk each morning and spat it out in the belief that this would guarantee them luck; while

Many portents, naturally, were interpreted as warnings. Some travellers who had fallen into the clutches of a gang of stranglers were saved from imminent death when the scream of a kite was heard in the camp and interpreted as a signal for their would-be murderers to hasten away from the bele immediately. A wolf crossing the road was a signal for the whole gang to go back and take another road, and the call of a jackal during the day, or a partridge at night, was a more general instruction to flee the whole
district
. One old Thug who fell into British hands around this time impressed the officers who interrogated him with his fervent belief in the dire
significance
of the latter omen, having once been a member of a party that heard a partridge call at two in the morning; he and his companions had made off at once in great alarm, but before they could get very far they were surrounded and arrested by a party of troops in the service of the local rajah, and 45 members of the gang were subsequently blown from the mouths of cannon.
*

Each gang seems to have had its own soothsayer – normally a Brahmin – who bore responsibility for the interpretation of portents. ‘The Ass, the Deer, and the Jackal, are considered the auspicious four-legged beasts,’ FC Smith was told, ‘and omens from any of these are more valued than the call of one hundred of the most auspicious of the feathered tribe.’ Even then, however, the interpretation of the animals’ calls and movement depended greatly upon whether they were seen or heard to the left or to the right. Sounds heard from the left while the gangs were on the march were generally interpreted as an instruction to go on, and those coming from the right as warnings to stop or retreat. When a group of Thugs reached a possible campsite, the omens were reversed, and a sound coming from the right was regarded as a good sign, and one from the left as an instruction to go on. To complicate matters
further, many gangs believed that it was dangerous to begin an expedition until one sign had been received from the right and a second from the left; this ‘signified that the deity took them first by the right hand and then by the left to lead them on’.

For all these complexities, however, the Thugs could be surprisingly
pragmatic
when it came to interpreting portents. A warning to abandon an expedition and return to their villages might be obeyed if it was received only a day or two after their departure; one heard or seen when a gang was hundreds of miles from home might be dealt with merely by retreating a stage or two or making an offering. Similarly, the firm belief that a turban catching fire was so terrible an omen that disaster could only be averted by waiting seven days before beginning a journey afresh did not apply when far from home: ‘If they had travelled for some distance, an offering of goor was made, and the owner of the turban alone returned.’ Occasionally a whole
succession
of portents were simply ignored, and although many Thugs could cite examples of the awful fates that had befallen comrades foolish enough to
proceed
in the face of such warnings, it seems that only a minority of jemadars would willingly sacrifice a prize that was almost within their grasp in such
circumstances
.
*

Only the direst auguries seem to have been obeyed more or less without exception. The call of the hare, which had prompted Sheikh Inaent and his fellow jemadars to abandon their designs on the four travellers they had planned to murder, was one such omen, possibly because the hare was a sacred animal for many Hindus – in central India women would not eat its meat, and the animal’s long ears and exceptional hearing may account for the widespread belief that it could foresee the future. Perhaps the worst
portent of all, however, was the ‘low and melancholy sound’ of the
chiraiya
, or baby owl, no doubt because it was practically never heard in
daytime
. This, it was generally agreed, was a sure indication of impending disaster. The gang that heard the chiraiya call was doomed beyond hope of salvation.

 

As soon as he had emerged from the river, Feringeea consulted his gang’s soothsayer, Kuhora, regarding the portent they had heard. Kuhora was ‘an excellent augur’, whose interpretation of omens the Thugs had found
invaluable
in the past. But on this occasion his advice was unwelcome. The owlet’s call, Kuhora said, was a sign of such dire significance that the whole gang ought to abandon any intention of going on towards Saugor and retreat immediately along the road they had just come by.

This Feringeea was reluctant to do. It was still December 1829, relatively early in the season, and though he and his men had murdered 30 travellers in the few weeks since they had left their homes, none had provided them with a really worthwhile haul. To break off the expedition at such an early stage would mean considerable economic hardship for the members of the gang and, probably, require them to launch another foray into the central provinces almost as soon as they had returned to their homes. Scrupulous though Feringeea had been to the dictates of omens in the past, this was altogether too much to contemplate. He decided to ignore Kuhora’s augury, and ordered his men to press on towards Saugor.

Whether or not the owlet’s call was truly an omen or not, the jemadar’s decision proved to be a critical mistake. Later that same day, and only four miles further along the road, the Thugs halted to rest. Feringeea tethered his pony to a tree and walked alone into the nearest village to obtain supplies. While he was there, the Thug leader ‘heard a great uproar and saw my horse running towards the village’. Behind the panicked animal, in the distance, he could see a large party of Company sepoys ‘seizing and binding my gang’. Sleeman’s men had caught the Thugs unawares, and the approvers who were with them had identified several wanted stranglers among their ranks. There was nothing Feringeea could do to save his men. Only 12 of his 40 followers escaped, and their jemadar himself – who was no more than ‘half-dressed’ at the time, having left his possessions and the bulk of his clothes in the camp –
had no choice but to flee, alone and on foot, back towards his home in Bundelcund.

The capture of the majority of his gang placed Feringeea in considerable danger. No fewer than seven of the Thugs now brought before Sleeman at Jubbulpore turned approver; worse, several members of the jemadar’s own family – including two of his adopted sons and five foster brothers – had been among the men arrested by the Company’s patrols. Many of the
prisoners
had known Feringeea for years, and Sleeman had little difficulty in assembling an impressive quantity of information concerning the fleeing Thug. His most reliable informant was a boy who had entered Feringeea’s service two years earlier ‘in consequence of some domestic disputes’, and been taken on his first Thug expedition shortly afterwards. By the end of January 1830, the magistrate knew of the jemadar’s identity, his aliases, his appearance and habits, and a good deal about his Thug career. Most
crucially
of all, the approvers he recruited from among the captured men had supplied him with one piece of indispensable intelligence: the location of Feringeea’s home.