Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (35 page)

Parks’s accompanying sketch, which captures an elderly and balding judge – probably Smith himself – in the centre of his crowded courtroom, wearing a look of surprise, freezes this one moment in time. Over the years, though, there were thousands of proceedings of this sort, each over in no more than a minute or two. A brief capitulation of the evidence – an approver’s
identification
– a ‘Not Guilty’ plea from the suspected Thug – and the hearing was already over. All that remained was for the judge to pen a summary of his findings, and to refer the case to court.

 

Huge quantities of evidence had been amassed in order to ensure the
conviction
of the Thugs.

To begin with, there were the bodies of their victims. Sleeman’s approvers had supervised the exhumation of hundreds of corpses, in every stage of decay, from all over the central provinces. As many as 18 were recovered from a single spot, to the great excitement of the local peasantry, who flocked around the investigating officers whenever they stopped to dig.
*
In several cases the exhumation parties were accompanied by relatives of the unfortunate victims and the bodies recovered from the makeshift graves were positively identified as those of missing travellers. In others, corpses were recovered soon after the murder had taken place, ‘very little decayed, and their features were still clear and distinct’ – which at least allowed the evidence of the bodies to be tallied against the confessions already made by the approvers. The most impressive confirmation of an approver’s
testimony
was recorded in the Nerbudda valley in 1833, when a spot identified as the burial place of a party of goldsmiths murdered there in 1819–20 was dug up. ‘On opening their graves,’ recorded FC Smith, ‘several sets of
goldsmiths
’ tools were found, which corroborates in the strongest manner the truth of the evidence detailed in this case.’

True, not every set of remains could be positively identified in this way; some were merely skeletons, others so horribly rotten that it was impossible to tell their age or sex. But the officers assigned to supervise the disinterrals were greatly impressed by the accuracy of their approvers’ recollections. Several were so successful that the Company men found themselves all but overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of evidence that they revealed. ‘I was myself present at the opening of several of these unblessed graves, each
containing
several bodies,’ remembered Meadows Taylor, ‘which were pointed by the approvers one by one, in the coolest manner, to those who were
assembled
, till we were sickened and gave up further search in disgust.’

By the time the approvers’ work was completed, a good proportion of the victims of the most lethal Thug gangs had been accounted for. Nearly 140 bodies were exhumed in 1831, the first year in which systematic attempts were made to recover the remains of missing travellers, and so efficient did the Company’s efforts become that 390 of the 440 victims – well over
three-quarters
– whose murders were investigated at the sessions of 1834–5 had been disinterred by the time the proceedings began. Whatever the accuracy of the remainder of the approvers’ testimony, their accounts of Thuggee were clearly by no means pure invention.

The remains of the Thugs’ victims themselves formed only part of the
evidence
presented to FC Smith. Several of the gangs of Thugs apprehended while travelling the roads of the central provinces were found to be carrying substantial quantities of loot plundered from parties of travellers, and it was often possible, with the help of approvers’ testimony concerning the identity of the murdered men, to track down relatives and colleagues who could identify the stolen items. One wife recognized the blue turban worn by her husband; a son identified the patterned slippers of his father. The gang seized by Captain Borthwick as they were making their way out of Malwa in 1829 were carrying swords, turbans and various other items of clothing that had belonged to a party of four Muslim travellers they had murdered; the
identifications
were made by several of the dead men’s acquaintances, but here again attempts were made to check the depositions, Borthwick observing in his report: ‘It may be necessary to note here that the persons who came to recognize and claim the property of their deceased friends were in the first instance required to make out lists of the different articles of property which their friends had about them, before they were allowed to see a single article of the things found in the possession of the Thugs.’ No fewer than 22 items, belonging to a dozen different victims, were identified in this way.

In the end, however, it was the approvers’ evidence that really mattered. The disinterral of a body proved only that murder had been committed; the
discovery
of stolen property in the possession of a gang was harder to explain away, but it was still possible to argue that the goods might have been purchased from the real murderers or otherwise acquired. Only the detailed testimonies of the Company’s informants promised to unravel the facts of the crimes themselves.

Both Sleeman and Smith were acutely aware that each trial would hinge upon their approvers’ testimony, and they recognized the dangers of relying
on such evidence in what were by any standards sensational cases. ‘The
confession
of some prisoners,’ Sleeman agreed, ‘and many other evidences of a similar kind, have left no doubt as to the fact that the murders had been
committed
; but to prove the guilt of individuals, the evidence of their accomplices in guilt alone could be procured. The secrecy with which Thugs act, and their precaution of never robbing an individual till they first kill and bury him, render the attainment of any other evidence impossible.’

There can be little doubt that the sheer difficulty of confirming an approver’s testimony, and so overcoming the scepticism that was still
sometimes
vocally expressed by district magistrates, British Residents, and even the directors of the Company itself, became a considerable irritation to the men of the Thuggy Department. Sleeman and Smith were forced to go to
considerable
lengths to persuade their superiors that their informants’ evidence was reliable. Smith was quick to reassure the Chief Secretary to Government in Calcutta that the evidence he had heard was ‘ample and satisfactory’ and the guilt of the convicted Thugs ‘unquestionable’. There were, he added, at least eight corroborations of the approvers’ evidence, from ‘the free,
unembarrassed
and consistent way’ in which the original depositions had been made to the inability of Thugs apprehended on the road to explain why they were travelling together in such numbers. This evidence could not be considered ‘in the least apocryphal’.

‘The following precautions,’ Smith added in another letter, ‘have always been adopted:

Most, if not all, of the Thug informants’ testimony was checked with some care. The general reliability of Sleeman’s prisoners was well illustrated by an incident that occurred in Hyderabad in the early 1830s, when about 80 Thugs, arrested on the evidence of approvers at various spots throughout the province, were collected into a single party and sent off to Jubbulpore under guard. On their way north, a further party of 11 men was handed over to the nujeebs by a local governor who had ‘apprehended them on suspicion’ of crimes other than Thuggee. The entire party reached Jubbulpore safely, but upon their arrival the captain of the guard neglected to mention that some of his prisoners were not suspected Thugs, and it was discovered that the documents relating to the supposed Thugs’ arrest had been delayed. All 91 prisoners were thus brought before various approvers in the usual way. ‘All,’ Sleeman concluded, ‘were recognised to be Thugs excepting the 11 men, of whom the approvers said they knew nothing. On the receipt of the documents a few days afterwards, these 11 proved to be the party given in charge of the guard by the local governor, with whose arrest our approvers had no concern.’

Plainly, then, the statements of the approvers carried a good deal of weight. Sleeman and Smith pronounced themselves entirely satisfied with their accuracy, pointing out that every informant was constantly reminded that any failure to make a full and true disclosure of everything he knew of Thuggee would result in his return to prison, the withdrawal of all of an approver’s privileges, the revoking of the Company’s conditional pardon, and hence his own inevitable execution. But the evidence obtained from informants was not always wholly reliable nonetheless – as the captured Thugs protested at the time, and the Company would eventually confess.

 

The Thug trials held at Saugor and Jubbulpore in the early 1830s were held up as models of efficiency and rigour. By the standards of justice that had long prevailed in the Mughal Empire – indeed, by those usually encountered in courts in Britain at this time – the hearings were scrupulously conducted. But there were, nonetheless, flaws in the proceedings that made it more difficult for suspected Thugs to receive a fair trial than might otherwise have been the case.

To begin with, the trials themselves took place before a judge – Smith – who had been intimately concerned in the progress of the anti-Thug
campaign
, without the mediation of a jury. Smith no doubt strove to be fair, and a small handful of men – consisting of those who had not been positively identified by any approver – were indeed acquitted in his court. There can, however, be no doubt that the agent firmly believed that the Thugs as a group had committed horrific crimes, nor that he – like almost every other British judge – was of the opinion that ‘native defendants lie freely and are undeterred by oaths of truth’. From this perspective it may fairly be said that there was a strong presumption that the accused men hauled before the courts were guilty, and that any statements that the prisoners made in their own defence were unlikely to be believed. The captured Thugs were,
furthermore
, denied the chance to argue their own cases, a problem typical of Indian courts at this time. They had no lawyers, and their depositions carried little weight with British magistrates and judges.

Nor was the evidence of Sleeman’s approvers invariably as reliable as he liked to believe. We know that at least some informants did attempt to
conceal
their involvement in murders the British authorities appeared to know nothing about. The approver Motee, for example, hid the fact that he had
participated
in the murder of a party of 10 travellers in central India in 1822. When he discovered that other witnesses had implicated him, ‘he was willing enough to give evidence, but it was too late’, and he was hanged. Whether or not this unreliability extended to the evidence he offered against specific Thugs in other cases is less clear. The opportunities for approvers to collude were limited at first, and absent later. But even Sleeman freely admitted that he had uncovered cases of Thug approvers settling scores by levelling false accusations against old enemies. If any cases of this sort chanced to escape his scrutiny and came before the courts, the defendant’s pleas of innocence were unlikely to be believed.