Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (32 page)

The significance of Feringeea’s evidence can plainly be seen in the growing numbers of stranglers confined in the Company’s jails. Before the jemadar’s arrest, no more than a few hundred Thugs had fallen into British hands in the course of an entire decade. Afterwards, the number increased swiftly. More than 700 suspected stranglers were arrested in 1831 and 1832 alone,
three-quarters
of them in the central provinces. A substantial proportion of these men were either betrayed by Feringeea himself, or convicted as a
consequence
of the depositions he made at their trials.

Before the jemadar’s capture, Sleeman’s knowledge of the Thugs, their numbers, their leaders, their plans and their methods had been only partial. With Feringeea in custody, the Company’s understanding of the strangling gangs was far more complete. And the destruction of those haunting the
central
provinces of India was now only a matter of time.

‘Have you ever heard of Captain Sleeman?’ one eminent Thug was asked when he was captured by a party of the Company’s nujeebs in Oudh. ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘We heard that he was hanging and banishing Thugs, and that he had made a machine for torturing Thugs and for breaking our bones.’ ‘Some said,’ added one of his companions, ‘that Thugs were ground to death in this machine!’

The captured stranglers were wrong, of course. The Company possessed no infernal contraption for maiming and dismembering guilty Thugs. Yet in one sense there was a shred of truth in this strange rumour. William Sleeman had indeed constructed a machine capable of detecting and destroying the Thug gangs. It was constructed not of grindstones and gears but of books and papers, and armed not with racks and whirling knives, but with maps and piles of manuscripts and a collection of spidery genealogies that the captain had sketched out himself, laboriously, by hand. It was a deadly machine, though, nonetheless, for more Thugs were identified and marked for punishment in the record office that Sleeman established in the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory than were ever picked up by mere chance on the roads.

The meticulous collection of documents and indexes assembled in the course of long months of listening to and noting testimony was what made the swift progress of the Company’s campaign against the Thugs possible. Had the effort not been made, dozens of stranglers would have slipped
through the British net, and some, no doubt, would have continued to haunt the roads of India, throttling unwary travellers until they were eventually caught. Sleeman’s machine may be dry and dusty now, and lying in pieces in the libraries of London, Delhi and Bhopal. But it was a marvel in its day, saving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

The men of the East India Company had long been enthusiastic
record-keepers
. Even today, the vast sprawl of their musty archives, assembled in the course of three and a half centuries in India, fill mile after mile of shelves. So tremendous was the amount of business transacted by the Governor General and his council at Calcutta that the documents relating to a single day’s
business
could run to well over 150 closely written pages, and the central records of the Company’s three Presidencies alone filled more than 34,000 substantial volumes.
*
They covered almost every subject: revenue, administration,
relations
with Indian rulers, court cases, the police. But, until Sleeman began to work towards the suppression of the Thugs, there was no sizeable archive relating to crime or criminals. He was to be a pioneer in this field, and not merely in India. Some of the techniques that he developed in the early 1830s presaged methods that would not come into common use in police
departments
at home in Europe for another 50 or 60 years.

The creation by Sleeman of several vast databases packed with information concerning wanted Thugs was a necessary response to the back-breakingly difficult work of bringing captured stranglers to trial. The officers charged with prosecuting the anti-Thug campaign faced almost insuperable
difficulties
. Police investigating a case of murder will generally possess at least a body, from which they can deduce the time, the manner and perhaps the place of death. In the great majority of cases they will also know the identity of the corpse. The killer they are seeking will often prove to be someone who knew the victim well; husbands or wives, friends and business partners are all likely to be suspects. Sleeman and his associates, on the other hand, did not always have a body, and when they did, they rarely had any idea of its identity. Nor did they have the slightest clue – unless some approver told them – which gang had been responsible for the crime, let alone which Thug, among
many, had actually committed it. Yet convictions could only be secured in cases in which the fact of murder could be proved and the identity of the
murderer
himself demonstrated to the satisfaction of a judge.

Only by the most meticulous accumulation of every scrap of information let slip by the approvers could Sleeman hope to glimpse the true nature of Thuggee; only by painstaking cross-referencing and the assembly of detailed files could he know the full extent of a Thug’s crimes; and only by patient tracking, careful mapping and the intelligent deployment of his scarce resources could he bring his suspects to trial. All this work, moreover, had to be undertaken at a time when the Indian police force was fragmented, poorly paid and appallingly corrupt; when pen, paper and foolscap indexes were the best available technology; and when the techniques of photography,
fingerprinting
and forensic analysis were more or less undreamed of. At the time that the Company’s campaign against the Thugs first got under way, even the Metropolitan Police, at home in London, was a brand new institution, and one still regarded with the very greatest suspicion by a good number of Britons.

Sleeman’s work began, in 1829, with the careful cataloguing of every known Thug crime. ‘With regard to the mode of collecting the evidence to convict the Thugs of specific murders,’ he wrote to a colleague in the Deccan,

Reports on each case, drawn up by the officer concerned, were sent to Sleeman and combed for as much information as they could be made to yield. The raw data was then entered into a vast register that contained the names of every Thug who could be identified – not merely the handful who had already been arrested, but every man named in every deposition made by
every approver. Each Thug was assigned his own unique number, and against this number Sleeman recorded his name, the location of his home, and the details of his associates and of all the crimes of which they stood accused. This was never a simple matter, for many Thugs had the same or almost identical names and none had surnames, most being identified by their tribe, their caste or their role within their gang. A good number, moreover, employed one or more aliases. Sheikh Inaent, for example – the jemadar whose apprehension in 1830 had put Feringeea to flight – appears in the earliest documents relating to his case as ‘Khuda Buksh’, while Feringeea himself used the aliases ‘Deahuct Undun’ and ‘Daviga Persaud’. To
complicate
matters further, it was common for Hindu Thugs to adopt Muslim names, and for Muslim stranglers to pose as Hindus, in order to inveigle their way into groups of travellers on the roads.

Undaunted, Sleeman also kept careful records of all the information he could find or deduce about each Thug’s family. The names of a man’s father, his brothers, his sons, and even his adopted children all appeared against his name. So did any distinguishing marks: ‘Persaud, alias Omraw Sing Jemadar, son of Hemmut Sing alias Runna, dark mark on his nose’; ‘Khuluk, son of Runna Lodhee, with small finger broken’; ‘Holkar, brother of Persaud Jemadar, blind of one eye’. With the great Thug register conveniently to hand, the men of Sleeman’s department had ready access to the information that they needed to plot the arrest of the ‘most notorious’ men when the gangs returned to their homes at the end of each cold season. And ‘as soon as an accused was arrested and identified’ – as the Thug-hunter himself pointed out – ‘a mass of evidence was usually at once forthcoming to secure his conviction’.

Sleeman’s register proved to be an immediate success. Some 350 captured Thugs were committed for trial in Saugor in 1832. Two hundred more came before the courts in 1833, and another 170 were arraigned in Indore, Hyderabad, Poona and Cawnpore. The rapid progress of the anti-Thug
campaign
soon persuaded the Government of India to supplement the staff serving under FC Smith. At the beginning of the cold season of 1832, Lieutenant PA Reynolds, one of the assistant Residents at Hyderabad, was appointed to hunt down the stranglers of the Deccan and JC Wilson was placed in charge of operations in the Doab; each received command of a detachment of 40 sepoys and 20 militiamen, relieving the pressure on
Sleeman’s own hard-pressed nujeebs. A year later, a Lieutenant McLeod was given responsibility for Rajpootana, Malwa and the lands around Delhi. By 1835, Smith – ‘exercising, as heretofore, a general control over the officers employed in the suppression of Thuggee’ – and Sleeman, who was at last formally appointed Superintendent of what was already widely known as the Thuggy Department in Jubbulpore, had a staff of seven assistants spread across the territories from Rohilkhand, to the north of Delhi, all the way to Hyderabad, and command over nearly 300 nujeebs. Seventeen other officers, most of them the Residents or Agents in various Native States, assisted in the pursuit and capture of wanted Thugs in their home villages. For the first time the resources available to Sleeman became adequate to the task in hand.

The newly appointed superintendent’s next idea was to map the homes of the known Thugs, the routes they followed in the course of their lengthy expeditions, and the spots where their murders were committed. Sleeman thought that this would help him to position his patrols more effectively, ‘for I shall often be liable to direct them upon a wrong road and to lose time by doubts and mistakes as to the jurisdiction of the officers with whom I have to communicate’. But the creation of such a map was no simple task. Even though the Company had established a cartographical office, the Survey of India, in 1785, large portions of the Native States had still not been mapped, and an official request for ‘a skeleton map of 10 or 12 square feet, comprising the countries north and south from Madras to Delhi and east and west from Calcutta to Bombay’ caused a good deal of head-scratching in the Survey’s offices, for no attempt had yet been made to combine all the elements that Sleeman required in a single map showing ‘all the principal rulers and lands and roads and principal stages at which travellers halt, and all the ferries at which they cross rivers, together with the seats of our own courts and
military
establishments’. After an exchange of letters between Sleeman, Bentinck and the Surveyor General, George Everest, however, a cartographer named Ferris Robb was given the unenviable task of producing ‘a map of peculiar construction’ that suited the Thuggy Department’s needs. His completed chart was finally delivered in 1832, and put to immediate use in planning the routes to be patrolled by parties of nujeebs during the coming cold season.

By the middle of the 1830s, then, Sleeman had equipped himself with almost all the tools he needed to apprehend suspected stranglers. Endless streams of letters, instructions, orders and encouragement poured out of
his headquarters at Jubbulpore, some seeking information and help from the British Residents at Indian courts, others urging his assistants to follow his lead in compiling yet more files, more lists and tables. At least one member of the new department followed the Superintendent’s lead,
creating
an intricately detailed map of Thug activities within his own districts. Captain James Paton, who had been placed in charge of the anti-Thug
campaign
in Oudh, obtained a large-scale chart of his territory from the Surveyor General’s office and carefully plotted on it the location of as many Thug beles as his 20 approvers could identify. The results were startling. ‘As nearly as can be calculated,’ Paton observed, ‘the whole extent of those roads so thoroughly well known by Thugs, infested by them, [is] no less than 1,401 miles, and in those 1,401 miles there are no less than 274
bails
[beles]… or one bail for about every 5¼ miles.’ Paton was soon
persuaded
that the map was proof of his approvers’ worth. ‘If false,’ he argued, ‘the Thugs could not possibly have remembered all their varied positions and localities to repeat, on cross-examination, the same falsehoods.’ He had descriptions of each of these murder spots worked up into a manuscript he called the
Thug Road Book
and made plans to circulate it to other Company officials in northern India.

Sleeman’s register and maps provided him with the key to tracking down and arresting known Thugs. But that in itself was not enough for him. Firmly convinced, by the evidence of his approvers and his own understanding of Indian society, that Thuggee had become a hereditary profession for
numerous
large families of criminals, he also devoted long hours to the preparation of complicated genealogies, showing the lineage of more than 80 extended families of stranglers. Most of the information came from the Thug approvers, some of whom appear to have vied with each other to create the longest and most detailed pedigrees, for although some of Sleeman’s
genealogies
show the descent of no more than two or three generations of Thugs, others trace a family’s ancestry over as many as eight. Between them they list somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 men, and in some families as many as 100 brothers, sons and cousins had worked together in the Thug gangs. Read carefully against the voluminous notes describing each approver’s family, however, the trees show just how misleading it was to suppose that every male member of every ancient family of Thugs inevitably became a strangler himself. Dotted among Sleeman’s grim records of ‘noted Thugs’ and hereditary
jemadars are occasional mentions of men who had eschewed life with the gangs to become farmers, merchants, or even common thieves.