Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (34 page)

‘In all my experience in the Judicial line for upwards of 20 years,’ wrote FC Smith,

Smith and Sleeman and their men had no doubt as to the appropriate response. ‘Mercy to such wretches,’ the agent wrote, ‘would be the extreme of cruelty to mankind.’ There was only one way to proceed. ‘They must be met in their own ways,’ Smith concluded. The guiding principle of the great Thug trials that now began in both Saugor and Jubbulpore would be ‘rigid adherence to the law of
Lex Talonis
– Blood for blood.’ For too many years the gangs had – in effect – taunted the British administration, exposing its
inability
to protect its subjects. Now the Company would have its revenge.

In they came, from Etawah and Gwalior, the Doab and Bundelcund: Thugs and suspected Thugs, the innocent and guilty, swept up together in the Company’s nets.

There were nearly 4,500 of them in all, so many that they filled the prisons and threatened to overwhelm the courts available to try them. Most, Sleeman observed, were Hindus, although about a third were Muslims. They hailed from almost every part of India and from more than 40 different castes and tribes; some were high-born Brahmins, others the lowest of Untouchables. Many, certainly at first, were experienced stranglers, members of the gangs that had their origins in the Chambel valley or their associates from the Deccan and Oudh. But there were also hundreds of occasional or novice stranglers, men who scraped a living in whatever way they could and had few if any ties with the old Thug families.

The difficulties confronting Sleeman – the man responsible for preparing cases for trial – and Smith – the judge scheduled to hear them – were
enormous
. Thugs had seldom been convicted of their crimes before the Company’s campaign began. Many had been arrested, and a good number had spent long periods in prison – the terrible Syeed Ameer Ali was confined for 12 years in the King of Oudh’s jail at Lucknow, the Sindouse men rounded up in Gwalior after the murder of Maunsell were held there for more than a year, and the 115 members of another gang, arrested on their way across the
Nerbudda valley in 1823, spent more than seven years in custody at Jubbulpore. Actual trials, however, had been comparatively infrequent. As late as 1830 it was notoriously difficult to convict suspected Thugs in either British territory or the Native States.

About two dozen cases of Thuggee had, in fact, been heard in the Company’s courts between the years 1799 and 1828, but of these no more than four resulted in significant convictions. Forty-nine Thugs were executed in the Upper Provinces in 1813 as a result of hearings held in Roy Barelly and Benares, and of the 16 sentenced at Mozuffurpore a few years later, four were hanged and the rest transported to penal colonies in the Far East. A few years later, 38 more stranglers were convicted in Jubbulpore and Candeish. But these were the exceptions, and it was much more usual for trials to end inconclusively – as they did in 1808 and 1820, when large gangs of Thugs were simply expelled from British territory, a negligible punishment – or even to collapse in disarray. There had been plenty of cases of the latter sort, from the acquittal, in 1812, of the Thugs sent to Bengal for trial by Thomas Perry to the disastrous attempt to bring to trial the murderers of Mr Pringle’s servant at Patna in 1827, which had resulted in the imprisonment of several approvers and the jailing of the Indian officer who first brought the matter before the courts.

In the handful of cases in which a gang had been captured, it had proved all but impossible to determine which of its members had committed murder and which had played no direct part in the gang’s crimes. To make matters worse, it had long been the Company’s policy to return captured criminals to their home states for trial and punishment. Since most Thugs lived among the Native States, this meant that even Thugs who had
committed
murder in Company territories were rarely tried in Company courts. ‘The inconsistent bandying about of prisoners from one distant jurisdiction to another,’ thought FC Smith, ‘cannot but have proved highly injurious, and the mischief which has been sanctioned or connived at, is most serious and lamentable.’

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Company magistrates
experienced
almost equal difficulty in finding relations of the murdered men willing to press charges in the first place. Only a handful of the Thugs’ victims were ever positively identified; many families remained unaware that their fathers, uncles and brothers had fallen victims to the stranglers, and few of the dead
had relatives, employers or friends wealthy enough to fund a search for them. Fewer still would risk the inconvenience and cost that summoning a darogah almost inevitably entailed. Even when a case did come to trial there was a
general
reluctance to give evidence, not least because cases were often heard a hundred miles or more from the spot where a crime had been committed. Giving testimony required witnesses to leave their homes and work and make expensive, time-consuming journeys that ended, all too frequently, in a
further
lengthy wait for the case itself to come before the court. Although nominally entitled to compensation for lost earnings and the cost of travel, these men often received nothing for all this time and trouble, with the inevitable consequence that many families preferred to ‘remain quiet and forgo prosecution than catch a thief or complain about a robbery’.

Justice in the Native States was no better than that on offer in the Company’s courts. The assumption, shared by many European officers, that Indian courts were irredeemably corrupt was not correct; some states and some rulers administered the law fairly and well. But the punishments meted out by local rajahs and their officers were very light by British standards. The death penalty was rarely and inconsistently imposed, even on highway
robbers
such as Thugs, and the lax treatment of Brahmins was a particular concern; members of the caste were exempt from capital punishment until 1817, though in some notorious cases guilty Brahmins were done away with surreptitiously: ‘destroyed by poison or by unwholesome food – bread, half salt and half flour, being often used’. Company officials found the methods of execution practised in the mofussil – which included treading to death by
elephants
, blowing men away from the mouths of cannon, and crushing the condemned’s head with a mallet – objectionable, and it was generally (though incorrectly) believed that no Hindu juror could be trusted to convict
defendants
who were his superior in caste.

The entire Indian justice system was, indeed, based on principles that British jurists found difficult to understand. Most prison sentences involved ‘
confinement
till repentance’ and were, therefore, not so much a punishment in themselves as a means of enforcing restitution – the payment of blood money, the return of stolen goods, or the provision of a ransom in the form of cash put up as security for future good behaviour. Few able and experienced
stranglers
had much difficulty in making such payments, and those who did were often able to borrow the necessary sum from a helpful zamindar or even a
local banker – both of whom must have known full well that the Thug in
question
would most likely discharge his debt with the proceeds of future murders.
*
Those who were confined to jails often escaped, or were simply expelled from the territory where they had been arrested. Some were
permitted
to wash away their guilt by bathing in the Ganges and were then released. None of these practices – as the Company had already discovered to its cost – ‘carried even the appearance of a punishment’ to a hardened strangler.

Francis Curwen Smith and William Sleeman were determined to do things differently in Saugor & Nerbudda. From the moment that the anti-Thug campaign commenced in earnest, preparations were put in train for the trial of captured stranglers. The whole system was centralized. Thugs captured by Sleeman’s nujeebs or Company troops now remained in British custody, rather than being sent back to their homes to be tried by their own rajahs. Those detained in the British districts of central India were sent to Saugor for trial. Those captured in sweeps through the Native States could be tried by the nearest British Resident, and as cases accumulated the representatives at the courts of Lucknow, Hyderabad and Indore all began to hold trials of their own.

The great majority of captured Thugs were consigned to Smith’s courts in Saugor and Jubbulpore. This decision was nicely calculated to speed up the administration of justice, for the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory had occupied a unique position within the Company’s dominions ever since it was ceded to the British in 1818. It was frontier territory and, after its annexation, the
government
in Calcutta had been anxious not to unsettle its new subjects or add to the chaos left by the Pindaris and the Maratha Wars. For this reason, it had been decided not to impose the comparatively sophisticated but alien law of the Bengal Presidency – informed as it was by many British concepts of
justice
– on the new districts too swiftly. Instead, the province had been designated a ‘non-regulation territory’ and was subject to a simplified code of laws. In practice, this meant that the agents and magistrates sent to govern it were permitted a great deal of latitude in imposing the law. So long as they adhered at least loosely to the spirit of the Bengal regulations, their verdicts were unlikely to arouse any great controversy in Calcutta.

FC Smith, as the Governor General’s Agent in central India, was thus to all intents and purposes a law unto himself. Nominally responsible solely to ‘Supreme Government’, he did much as he pleased. If the Thug trials had been conducted in an ordinary sessions court somewhere in the Bengal Presidency, the proceedings would have come under the scrutiny of the Company’s supreme court, the Nizamat Adalat at Murshidabad. But there was no such appeal process in Saugor & Nerbudda. Smith’s verdicts were simply submitted to the secretary of the political department in far-off Bengal to be rubber-stamped, and communication between Saugor and Calcutta took so long that it was impossible for the Company’s highest authorities to exercise any real control over his proceedings.
*
The Thug suspects hauled before the courts of Saugor & Nerbudda thus had only a single chance of obtaining justice. Their fates depended entirely on the care with which Sleeman marshalled his evidence for submission to Smith’s court.

 

The Thug trials, FC Smith once wrote, proved to be a task so arduous that it took no less than six months of ‘unremitted labour’ to bring each year’s
sessions
to a satisfactory conclusion.

The problem was not the mass of evidence, vast though that was. The approvers’ depositions and the statements made by other witnesses, the
activities
of exhumation parties, catalogues of plunder – all that information was laboriously sifted and compiled by Sleeman before the trials began, which is why, although the anti-Thug campaign commenced in 1829–30, the majority of cases were only heard in 1832. Smith’s chief difficulty was, rather, the sheer number of defendants who appeared before his court. The sessions of 1831–2 alone consisted of 26 separate trials; 345 suspected Thugs were arraigned, and because many of them were accused of more than one crime, a total of 847 sentences (‘all of more than one page’) had to be written out and handed down. Even then, Thugs who might have been involved in
hundreds
of murders were rarely brought to account for more than one or two, since it would have been utterly impractical to make the indictments entirely
comprehensive. ‘These men,’ Sleeman explained, ‘are commonly tried for one particular case of murder, perpetrated on one occasion, in which case all the gang may have participated, and of which the evidence is most complete. On the average, more than 10 of these cases have been found to occur on every expedition; and every man has, on the average, been on 10 of these
expeditions
. The murders for which they are tried are not, therefore, commonly more than a hundredth part of the murders they have perpetrated in the course of their career of crime.’

The first stage in the process was to commit the prisoners for trial. These proceedings began at hearings held ‘in cutcherry’ – that is, in one of Smith’s courts of justice in Saugor or Jubbulpore. Fanny Parks, an intrepid British traveller who passed through the central provinces in 1830, sketched the scene in one such court as the evidence against a Thug captive was heard. ‘The judge,’ she wrote,