Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (36 page)

More serious, perhaps, was the frequent failure of the British authorities to check Thug defendants’ alibis with any thoroughness. In some cases the men assigned to obtaining references to the good character of the accused failed even to locate the men’s home villages, and when testimony confirming the Thugs’ statements was obtained, it was sometimes belittled or ignored. Wilson – Sleeman’s representative at Etawah – noted of the testimonies he collected on behalf of a certain Bhugga:

On other occasions, though, the evidence that was received scarcely helped the prisoners’ case. The sole character witness mentioned by one Thug failed ‘to come in to depose by reason of his entire ignorance of the character of these persons’. In another case, the Rajah of Gopulpoor ‘states that he has ascertained from the zamindars of [the suspect’s] village that he has cultivated land for the last five years but they know nothing of him previous to that period’. In a third, a witness testifying to the good character of another of Sleeman’s prisoners admitted that the man had absented himself from the
village
twice in the previous three years; another had quit his home ‘when obliged by want of employment’. Plainly testimony of this sort was of limited value to a defendant confronted with statements from a number of approvers that he had been an active strangler.

 

The sheer volume of the testimony against them nonetheless came as an unpleasant surprise to the Thug prisoners. Most had remained confident that their old tactic of simply denying every charge would serve them well again. Gazing down on the prisoners from the bench, Smith was grimly pleased to note that

There were, even then, few ‘Guilty’ pleas. A handful of men confessed, caught more or less red-handed or unnerved by the vast mass of evidence assembled against them and hoping no doubt to secure reductions in their sentences. The rest – the vast majority – pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ instead, though their defences were generally terse in the extreme, consisting of little more than a simple denial or a declaration of good character. ‘I am innocent and falsely accused,’ a Brahmin named Cheinsah protested, while his companion Bhudalee complained: ‘I have always been a cultivator and have never Thugged. Enquire in my neighbourhood.’ In a few cases a suspected Thug was able to prove that he had been the victim of a case of mistaken identity, but on the whole Sleeman and Smith were both dismissive of the defendants’ pleas. The Thugs, Sleeman pointed out, found it easy enough to produce
witnesses
from their home villages prepared to testify to their good character and popularity. But that was hardly surprising when they had ‘plenty of money, which they spent freely’ in their own communities.

The evidence marshalled by Sleeman filled file after thick file. Most
defendants
were identified by a number of approvers and confronted with a variety of circumstantial evidence. In Trial No. 7 of 1832 (‘Government versus Mukka and 17 other prisoners accused of the murder of three men by Thuggee and robbery of 1,000 rupees’ worth of property’), four approvers called as ‘witnesses to fact’ testified as to the course of events and named the Thugs who had actually strangled the unfortunate victims. Another three appeared as ‘witnesses to character’, and between them these men identified the remainder of the defendants as notorious and hereditary Thugs. The trial did not revolve wholly around such testimony, however. One of the prisoners confessed, and the bodies of the three victims were discovered and exhumed.

The evidence in other cases followed much the same pattern. In Trial No. 10, held during the same sessions to try Thugs accused of the murder of a pair of treasure-carriers, Sleeman mustered three witnesses to fact and three to character, and the court also heard evidence from the merchant who had lost
his money, the servant sent to locate the missing men, and the villagers who found their bodies. Trial No. 13, concerning the murder and burial of two
soldiers
and a boy in Bundelcund, involved four witnesses to fact, three to character, and two confessions made by guilty Thugs. Three bodies had been exhumed, and though they were not positively identified, Sleeman was able to produce a letter from the local British magistrate that stated that the village was a Hindu one in which the dead were never buried. Finally, and perhaps most conclusively of all, seven of the 22 members of this Thug gang had been arrested in the process of dividing up the loot. ‘One of the best-proved cases’, though, in Sleeman’s view, was the murder – at Akola in Malwa – of a sepoy officer together with his wife, her maid, and seven servants. The trial of the alleged killers involved ‘no less than four confessions besides the evidence of approvers and ample circumstantial evidence to prove the guilt of the
prisoners
’. A sari and a saddle-cloth belonging to the murdered couple were found in the possession of the guilty Thugs and identified by relatives, and the sepoy’s infant son, who had been spared on account of his youth and forcibly adopted by a Thug family, was found living in the house of a subadar named Dirgpal, ‘one of their most influential leaders’.

It is evident, reading through the vast array of trial transcripts still
preserved
among the Thug archives of Britain and India, that the evidence assembled against many leading jemadars and stranglers was strong –
sufficient
, in many cases, to secure convictions even today. Khoman, leader of one of the largest gangs ever tried in Saugor & Nerbudda, was picked out at eight separate identity parades by eight different approvers. There were numerous cases of Thugs being caught in possession of items that had belonged to their victims and failing to explain how they had come by them. Nearly a thousand bodies were disinterred, and the depositions given by the Thug informants were so detailed and consistent that they point to a long
association
between members of the main Thug gangs. Even the directors of the Company, who displayed a constant anxiety to ensure that the prisoners were fairly tried, and ‘never convicted upon the mere evidence of accomplices unless confirmed by circumstantial evidence’, pronounced themselves
satisfied
that it was ‘beyond the verge of credibility’ that six or seven approvers, questioned separately and in some cases bitterly hostile to one another, ‘should concur in framing such a story to fix the guilt on an innocent person, as would carry with it the slightest degree of probability’.

The directors were surely correct. Too many dead bodies had been exhumed for anyone to doubt that murderous gangs really did infest the highways and byways of the mofussil. Too many suspected Thugs had been identified by too many informers, and been caught in possession of too much stolen loot, for there to be any question that Thuggee itself was real. But for all Sleeman’s labours, some of the most fundamental of all questions
concerning
the strangling gangs had yet to be answered. Smith’s trials no doubt proved the guilt of hundreds of Thug suspects. But they did little or nothing to explain the men’s motives and beliefs. From the days of Thomas Perry, most British officials had supposed the Thugs to be little more than common robbers: better organized than most, and uniquely ruthless, to be sure. They killed, it was assumed, for money, and concealed the corpses of their victims to evade arrest. By the last days of 1830, however – only a few months after his first encounter with the Thugs – Sleeman found himself questioning this view. Methodical investigation, supported by his own interrogations of the approvers themselves, pointed to a quite different conclusion. Something far more frightening, he became convinced – and far stranger, too – was going on in the black heart of India.

Few British officers – brought up in Europe, raised as Christians, and sent out to the Company’s lands in their teens with no practical experience of the Subcontinent – ever felt truly at home in India. The majority found
themselves
flustered by the bustle of the cities, disgusted by the poverty in which most of the local people lived, and repelled by the strangeness of the language and indigenous religion. Even William Sleeman, for all his knowledge of the mofussil, rarely met on equal terms with the peasants, merchants and
zamindars
he ruled. Like his colleagues, he spent much of his time in the company of fellow Britons, adhering resolutely to British dress and manners, and eating what passed locally for European food. Like them, he would never entirely understand the nuances of Indian society.

The increasing isolation of the British community in India was, indeed, one of the principal features of Company history in the late eighteenth
century
. After 1800, it was perfectly possible – which it had scarcely been before – to serve for years in Bombay, Bengal or Madras while remaining blissfully ignorant of local languages and customs, and of the Indians themselves. A good many officers based in Calcutta were prone to boast that they knew ‘just 16 miles of Asia, and no more’, that being the distance between the town itself and the headquarters of the Bengal Army at Barrackpore. By 1810 it was no longer admissible in fashionable circles to admit a taste for curry or profess any interest in ‘Persian poetry and Hindustani metaphysics’, and a Mrs Graham
regretted that every British officer she knew ‘appears to pride himself on being outrageously a John Bull’. Another lady, asked what she had seen of India and its people since arriving in Bengal, replied: ‘Oh, nothing, thank goodness. I known nothing at all about them … I think the less one knows about them the better.’

Real friendships between Indians and Europeans – which had been common in the eighteenth century, particularly between Company officers and the Muslim notables of larger towns – were rare in the nineteenth. One reason for this was the increasing size of the British community, which was large enough to be socially self-sufficient after about 1810. The appearance of European women in large numbers in the major Company towns had a decided impact. It became possible to enjoy a full, if very British, social life. But the women themselves were seldom content to leave local institutions as they found them. Those who had arrived in search of husbands naturally resented the arrangements enjoyed by the many Company officers they found contentedly ensconced with local mistresses,
*
and relationships between European men and Indian women – once so universal that they were considered scarcely worthy of comment – soon came to be regarded as shameful and wrong. This further limited the likelihood of newly arrived
officers
acquiring a proper understanding of local customs and religion.

The Company’s ignorance was especially pronounced when it came to Indian religion. The British were familiar enough with Islam, the faith of the majority of India’s ruling class. Hinduism was, however, a quite different matter. Its ancient and magnificent Sanskrit texts had attracted the favourable attention of a small group of scholarly Company administrators, who found much to admire in their literary quality and in the piety and morality of the high-caste Hindus whom they met. But for the great majority of British
officers
, and almost every Christian minister, Hinduism was a vile and pagan faith. It was generally perceived as a religion of ‘prevalent idolatry and
indecent
ceremonies’, one that encouraged ‘obscene pilgrimages’ and had created and sustained the horrible iniquities of the caste system. It permitted slavery
and repressed women, who in the opinion of many writers on India were treated as little more than ‘mere animals’ by their menfolk. Its gods and
goddesses
, with their multiple arms and odd deformities, were dismissed as nothing more than hideous idols, the worst of them all being Kali, the
blood-drenched
, sword-wielding mother-goddess who – as the patron deity of Calcutta – was especially familiar to British visitors to India.

With very few exceptions, Europeans showed little interest in the
complexities
of Indian society. They thought of Hinduism as simply a religion, rather than the social system that it was; they saw it as a monolithic and
uniform
faith, when really it encompassed the religious practices of numerous distinct districts; even the Hindu’s fabled tolerance was interpreted as mere passivity, rather than an example of intrinsic good. Most of those who wrote or read about the subject preferred to devote much of their attention to lurid descriptions of the ‘excesses’ of Indian custom. By the early nineteenth
century
, these excesses had come to be regarded as somehow representative of both the ‘lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty’ of Hinduism itself, and the inhumanity of the Indian people as a whole. Sleeman, who understood the local languages better than the majority of his colleagues, and whose interest in Indian society ran deeper, was better informed than most. But he was not entirely immune to the prejudices of his day, particularly when they offended his very Christian morality.

Many British officials of the period, indeed, took ghoulish pleasure in tales of Hindu barbarism. They were disgusted by the custom of ‘swinging’ – the ritual practice of inserting hooks into the skin of a man’s back, hauling him up on a rope, and setting him circling, at a height of nearly 30 feet, while the suspended devotee ‘played a thousand antic tricks’ – and utterly appalled by ‘the horrid rite of
chundee pooja
’, said to involve the deliberate sacrifice of girls of 11 or 12 years of age.
*
Fakirs, the wandering Hindu ascetics who were a highly visible feature of rural life, were distrusted for their habit of ‘endeavouring to stimulate the charity of the multitude by a great variety of ingenious, whimsical, and preposterous devices’, and were widely suspected of fostering anti-British sentiment. They were blamed for at least one rebellion against the Company’s
rule, and defined, in a dictionary published in 1805, as ‘a worthless set of villains, who, to obtain money from the credulous Hindoo, put on the appearance of religion, under the cloak of which they commit the greatest excesses’.

In many British minds, therefore, Hinduism became perceived as a barbaric religion. It was a faith that permitted infanticide – specifically, the killing of unwanted female children – and
suttee
, the burning of widows who chose to join their beloved husbands in death, even though both
practices
were forbidden in its most ancient texts. Suttee was not, in fact, particularly common, and most widows who did choose self-immolation went willingly and calmly to their deaths. But that was not the impression Britons received from their newspapers and books. Prurient reports from India spoke of women being forced shrieking onto their funeral pyres by baying relatives, and dwelled on the agonies of a slow death by fire; a good many readers with no personal knowledge of India certainly believed that this was the common fate of all Hindu widows from Bombay to Bengal. The notion that innocent, healthy and perhaps beautiful young girls
*
should be made sacrifices to an alien religion profoundly shocked public opinion at home, and when it was learned that the Company – bound by its solemn promise never to interfere in matters of religion – actually endorsed the practice if the woman concerned freely requested it, the howls of outrage that arose from liberal reformers and Christian moralists alike were heard distinctly in Calcutta. Even old India hands commonly believed that, in permitting the two practices, Hinduism made itself complicit in thousands of murders.

Worse yet, in some respects, was the Company’s fear of the wild excesses displayed by Hindu devotees. This, too, was largely a product of ignorance, and of the growing distance throughout the Subcontinent between rulers and the ruled. But the concern itself was real enough. From the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin, it was increasingly believed, religious frenzy lurked just beneath the placid surface of Indian society – a frenzy so spontaneous and  
unrestrained that it seemed all too likely it would one day be channelled into actual rebellion. The signs were there for those who wished to see them, not least at the famous temple complex at Juggernaut, on the Bay of Bengal, where every March tens of thousands of chanting pilgrims lined the roads to watch the procession of four gigantic wooden carts, each bearing a ‘
monstrous
idol’ in the form of an ancient statue of a major Hindu god. The carts were dragged along by the brute muscle power of the faithful. Each one was 43 feet high, garishly painted, and mounted on 16 enormous wooden wheels, and it was widely rumoured – and generally believed – that pilgrims sacrificed themselves to their gods each year by hurling themselves to destruction beneath the carriages.
*

By Sleeman’s day, then, India itself – an object of admiration and even envy only a few decades earlier – was increasingly perceived as a ‘hideous moral wilderness’, and matters were not helped when, in 1813, the British
government
compelled the Company to allow Christian missionaries into its dominions. Within a remarkably short space of time, even educated Britons, whether in London or Bengal, were condemning the Hindu peasantry as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.

The Company’s discovery, early in the nineteenth century, that Thug gangs were strangling hundreds of travellers in Hindustan, thus fitted neatly into the pattern of British expectation. The belief (which became common later) that India was home to hundreds of secret criminal communities was already beginning to gain ground; the Company had run up against roving groups of dacoits, fakirs and Sannyasis in Bengal, Naga robber-bands in the Rohilla country, north of Oudh, and Kallar cattle-thieves – ‘wild Colleries’ to the men of the Madras Presidency – in the newly conquered districts of the Deccan. The Thugs were bracketed with such robbers and disturbers of the peace at first. But in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Sleeman began to think of them as something considerably more dangerous.

 

Sleeman’s interest in his prisoners extended well beyond the determination to catalogue and record their crimes. He was equally fascinated by their
methods
, customs and beliefs. As early as the cold season of 1830–1 he had composed a letter – published anonymously in the
Calcutta Gazette
– that outlined the stranglers’ techniques in such startling detail that its publication aroused ‘universal interest’ in the Company’s capital and prompted no less a figure than Lord Bentinck to enquire as to the identity of the unknown writer who ‘appears to possess extensive knowledge of the character and habits of the Thugs’. Gradually, over the next few years, the Thug-hunter teased out further confessions from his approvers. These he set out in a series of detailed ‘Conversations with Thugs’.

Sleeman’s ‘Conversations’ recall many of the most notorious and
remarkable
Thug crimes and describe the gangs’ customs and traditions in considerable depth. These interrogations – together with a shorter set of ‘Dialogues’ set down by James Paton, one of Sleeman’s assistants, at his station in Lucknow – supply almost everything that we now know about the Thugs’ history and their own beliefs. Their value is enhanced by the care that Sleeman took to question approvers from a variety of
backgrounds
. Men from the Deccan and Bengal took part alongside those of Murnae and Bundelcund. Hindu stranglers argued with their Muslim
colleagues
. Approvers who gave one version of events were corrected and upbraided by fellow informers who remembered events differently. Every exchange was taken down, presumably in Hindustani, by the Company’s moonshees and then translated into English. The voices of the Thug
informers
emerge clearly from Sleeman’s pages in a way that they never do in the transcripts of their trials.

By his own account, Sleeman’s initial purpose was to take down, codify and make available a glossary of Thug slang – an argot known as Ramasee that the stranglers used when in company with a party of intended victims in order to conceal their murderous intentions.
*
But the ‘Conversations’ soon strayed
onto other subjects, and several excerpts, dealing with omens, religious belief and the organization and recruitment of the Thugs themselves, clearly stood out – not merely in Sleeman’s mind, but also in the memories of those who read through the captain’s transcripts. In these passages, the approvers stressed that the principal Thug gangs were composed of hereditary
stranglers
, men who could trace their ancestry back through many generations of murderers. And they placed far greater emphasis on the Thugs’ religion – in particular their fierce devotion to the goddess Kali – than any earlier source.