Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (30 page)

Sleeman’s information was precise, and he wasted no time in acting on it. Within a matter of days a party of eight nujeebs, led by a
dafadar
(sergeant) named Rustum Khan and supplied with letters of commission addressed to the Company’s agent in Bundelcund, left Jubbulpore and headed north in search of the Thug leader. The distance that they had to cover was not great – a little over 120 miles – and before the cold season had reached its end, the Company troops were picking their way across the drab landscape around Jhansee, making for Feringeea’s home village of Gorha.

The village was one of at least seven in the vicinity of Jhansee to harbour Thugs, and even though they had taken care to inform the local rajah of their presence, and were accompanied by one of his officers, the nujeebs must have been conscious that they were far from help and heavily
outnumbered
. They knew that they could hardly hope to catch Feringeea by marching into Gorha openly; but approaching their quarry without being spotted by one of the villagers – most if not all of whom could be assumed to be loyal to the Thug leader and his gang – was impossible during daylight hours. In the end the patrol waited until long after dark, hoping no doubt to catch the jemadar asleep, and crept into the village shortly before midnight, hours after most of the village had gone to bed.

The nujeebs were quiet, but not quite quiet enough. Alerted to their
presence
just in time by the sound of urgent whispering outside his door,
Feringeea burst out of the rear of his cottage moments before the patrol broke in through the front. The Thug had wasted no time gathering
possessions
; even so, Sleeman’s men missed their quarry ‘by only a few seconds’, finding his bed still warm, and ‘an English blunderbuss and pistol lying loaded upon it’. Feringeea himself, though, had vanished into the night, and since he knew the district so much better than his enemies, his pursuers judged that it would be futile to go after him. Instead, the patrol took the remaining
occupants
of the house into custody. Among those thus arrested were Feringeea’s mother, wife and child. All three, together with one of the jemadar’s brothers, were hauled off to the jail at Jubbulpore.

 

By now the Company’s campaign against the Thugs was gaining a significant momentum.

Almost from the instant of his first encounter with the stranglers, in 1829, William Sleeman had thrown himself into the business of destroying them with an implacable energy. The whole idea of the Thug campaign appealed to him. He was thoroughly familiar with the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory, in which much of the work was to be done. His long
acquaintance
with India, and his unusual affection for the Indian peasantry, meant that he genuinely loathed the stranglers and their ruthless disregard for life. He brought an air of almost religious fervour to his new
responsibilities
, and it was not long before he was speaking of his campaign as ‘the cause’.

There was, nonetheless, another side to Sleeman’s devotion to his work. He was an ambitious man, and – for any district officer – promotion, increased salary and honours came most quickly to those who attracted their superiors’ attention. It was practically impossible, in normal circumstances, for men stationed far out in the wilds of India to get themselves noticed by the government. Sleeman had spent an entire decade in the central provinces, with little obvious reward, when the advent of the Thug campaign offered him the unexpected chance to make his mark. He seized his opportunity with both hands.

Sleeman’s vigour – and his buccaneering determination to harry the Thug gangs wherever they were found – won him the blessing of his seniors. Several high government officials were soon paying close attention to the
progress of the Thug campaign. ‘The extirpation of this tribe,’ confirmed George Swinton,
*
principal aide to the recently appointed Governor General Lord William Bentinck, ‘would, I conceive, be a blessing conferred on the people of India, than which none would be more prized.’ A few months later the same official confirmed, in a note to Smith:

Not everyone shared Swinton’s views, of course. Opinion among Sleeman’s fellow officers in central India remained sharply divided for years over the merits of the new anti-Thug campaign. Several of the British Residents stationed at Indian courts were appalled by the freedom with which Thug-hunting parties began to sweep across borders in pursuit of their
quarries
, arguing that their forays into the Native States would seriously antagonize rulers who were at best grudging allies. Certainly many rajahs were unwilling to hand over men who had paid them lavish tribute over the years. Petty zamindars who had for decades sheltered bandit gangs took their own steps to frustrate the Company’s pursuit. On several occasions Sleeman’s men found the gates of a village barred against them, and one party found itself waylaid within the borders of Gwalior and actually attacked by a
detachment
of Maharajah Sindhia’s troops.

Even rulers who had never knowingly harboured bandits were angered by the nujeebs’ intrusions and their treatment of Thug suspects. The arrest of several prominent Indian citizens on the word of mere informers resulted in despatch of a string of strongly worded protests to Calcutta. ‘The Government,’ the angry Resident at Bhurtpore complained to Swinton after one such incident, ‘may be of the opinion that a humiliation of this sort is not felt by a native Prince, but I can take it upon me to assert that it was felt, and deeply too.’

The most strident complaints came from Gwalior, a Maratha state long familiar with Thugs. Richard Cavendish, the Company’s long-serving Resident at Sindhia’s court, consistently deplored Sleeman’s willingness to entrust his nujeebs ‘with such unlimited power’ and proposed that all
Thug-hunting
parties from Jubbulpore should be accompanied by a British officer to prevent abuse of process. His complaints were consistently rebuffed, Swinton’s colleague William Macnaghton noting that ‘such a deputation would be impracticable consistent with the secrecy and celerity of
movement
required’, but it took years to overcome such stubborn opposition. In the meantime, Sleeman began angrily insisting, Gwalior remained ‘a
sanctuary
to which, after a glut of murder elsewhere, [the Thugs return] with as much safety as an Englishman to his inn’.

Problems of this sort were seen as mere distractions. Smith, as agent in Saugor & Nerbudda, and even the British government itself, far away in Calcutta, brushed all such disputes aside. ‘To check the dreadful evil of Thuggee,’ Macnaghton wrote, ‘extraordinary measures are necessary’,
particularly
in cases where ‘the pursuit is surrounded by too many difficulties’.

Feringeea’s wife, mother and infant child had all been seized on one of Sleeman’s general warrants, and none had been accused of any crime, although the Company officials felt sure that the women must at least have suspected the source of their relatives’ wealth.
*
Sleeman saw their arrests as a critical breakthrough in his pursuit of Feringeea himself, whose escape was an embarrassment to him. ‘I knew,’ he told his superiors, ‘that Feringeea would not go far while links so dear to him were in my hands.’ And if there was no prospect of flight, it was merely a matter of time before the great strangler fell into British hands.

 

Sleeman was right to suppose that Feringeea would not venture too far from the central provinces while his family languished in the custody of the East India Company. The Thug considered but rejected the notion of fleeing to the inaccessible territories of Rajpootana, where he had spent the early 1820s. But neither could he afford to remain idle after a second financially disastrous cold
season in succession. A few weeks after the Company’s attempt to capture him, he slipped back into Gorha, and before Sleeman had the opportunity to send a second party of nujeebs in search of him, mustered another gang – smaller, this time, than his first – and set off again towards Saugor & Nerbudda in the hope of recouping his losses.

It was by now June or July 1830, the beginning of the monsoon season, and very late in the year for a Thug expedition; there were so many fewer people on the roads that this new sortie did not promise much success. Meeting once again with Zolfukar, Feringeea and his men fell upon a party of six near the town of Beseynee, 80 miles north of Jubbulpore. But things quickly began to go wrong. Almost as soon as the combined gangs reached the banks of the Nerbudda, ‘Feringeea was taken up on suspicion’ by the militia of the local rajah and abandoned by his companions. The jemadar spent only two days in confinement before securing – or more probably purchasing – his release, and was able to join yet another Thug band near Saugor. But there was time to strangle only one more victim, a servant at a police compound, before this gang, too, was detained, this time by the local darogah on
suspicion
of mere robbery.

It was the third time in less than 12 months that Feringeea had found
himself
in jail; plainly the whole of the central provinces was becoming a risky area for Thugs to operate in. Once again he enjoyed a lucky escape: ‘I was taken to the zamindar … in whose presence I chanced to meet a friend who, giving me a good character, caused my release.’ But, even so, the jemadar retired to Bundelcund at the end of July with nothing to show for the entire expedition, his arrest having prevented him from sharing in the booty taken by the rest of the gang, which was ‘taken off by the [other] Thugs and not divided’.

Chastened by his escape from the Company’s nujeebs, Feringeea took elaborate precautions to safeguard himself on his return to his home
district
. Sleeman was forced to work hard to track him down. After several months, however – no doubt with the assistance of approvers who had friends and relatives among the people of the district – it was established that the fugitive Thug was dividing his time between houses in five different villages, never sleeping in the same bed for two nights in succession. This was a highly effective precaution. Recognizing that it was impossible to determine in advance where Feringeea would be on any given night, and lacking the
manpower
to raid five villages simultaneously, Sleeman concluded that he had no choice but to search each possible hiding place in succession, arresting and securing the Thug’s hosts in every one so as to prevent any warning being given, until Feringeea’s hiding place was discovered. Even supposing such a thing was possible, however, there was still an element of risk. The villages stood so far apart that it was impossible to search more than four of them in a single night. If his men had the bad luck to choose the wrong settlements, their quarry would certainly elude them once again.

The Jubbulpore nujeebs were able, dedicated men – spurred on also, no doubt, by the prospect of sharing in the enormous reward of 500 rupees on Feringeea’s head. Setting out from the borders of the district at dusk one day in the first week of November 1830, they hurried through the shadows to the first of the Thug villages, Joomaree, eight miles away. Not finding Feringeea there, Sleeman’s men arrested his usual host, a man named Chutta, and forced him to guide them to the next hamlet on their itinerary, two miles away. Once again there was no sign of the fugitive, and once again the nujeebs ‘seized and bound’ the owner of the house they had been ordered to search. This man, a Brahmin, was compelled to escort the party to a third
village
, Jomun Sagura, another eight miles along the road.