Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (37 page)

We have already seen that Thug gangs took auspices and participated in religious ceremonies before departing on each expedition. Every member of every gang, whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, seems to have taken part in these acts of devotion. There was nothing at all unusual in this. Religious
ceremonies
designed to seek the blessing of the gods were an important part of Indian folk religion and a common feature of village life. Farmers attempted to invoke good harvests; merchants and travellers sought protection on the roads. Thugs – whose livelihood depended so heavily on chance, and whose expeditions were so inherently dangerous – naturally did likewise.
*

But there had been no hint, in any of the thousands of pages of
depositions
and trial documents taken down by Smith and Sleeman and their moonshees, that religion was of any special importance to the Thugs, nor that the beliefs they held influenced the manner in which they practised their grim trade. On the contrary, numerous captured stranglers had implied that their motive for committing murder was financial. The few references to religion that do appear in the statements of ordinary Thugs imply that it was simply a part of everyday life. ‘Having performed the usual worship,’ one strangler’s account of a typical expedition begins, ‘we set out towards Sholapoor.’

Sleeman’s approvers told a different story. For them, religion was a central feature of their lives and the goddess Kali (who also appears under the names Bhowanee or Davey
**
in many of Sleeman’s documents) was a special
protector
of the Thugs. Several respected jemadars recounted legends that
emphasized the regularity with which the goddess had acted to shield them and their families. Not even the mightiest rulers, they said, could stand against her. The approvers firmly believed that Mahadji Sindhia, one of the greatest of Maratha warlords, had met his death at the Kali’s hands after unwisely executing 70 Thugs in February 1794. And ‘was not Nanha the Raja of Jhalone made leprous by Davey for putting to death Boodhoo and his brother Khumoli, two of the most noted Thugs of their day? He had them trampled under the feet of elephants, but the leprosy broke out on his body the very next day.’

The Thugs’ legends reassured them that they had enjoyed the goddess’s protection for many years. As long ago as 1775, the Rajah of Kundul, east of Hyderabad, received repeated warnings that he should release a group of Thugs he had had thrown into prison. But ‘he was obstinate, and on the third night the bed on which he and his Ranee were sleeping was taken up by Davey and dashed violently against the ground … they were not killed, but they were dreadfully bruised; and had they not released the Thugs, they
certainly
would have been killed the next night’. Kali was, moreover, capable of wreaking vengeance on lesser enemies as well. The Gwalior zamindars who seized Thugs fleeing from the destruction of Murnae in 1812 ‘were severely punished for giving us such annoyance’, and – at least in the recollection of one of Sleeman’s most trusted approvers – their loved ones all died, and ‘not a soul of their families are now left to pour the libation at their funeral obsequies!’
*

Indeed all of the Thugs’ legends concerning the goddess featured exactly the sort of cautionary notes typical of folklore. In some Kali saved worthy stranglers from their enemies, but in others she deserted men who had not been faithful to her commands. A fable told by many Thugs related that they had for many years neglected to bury the bodies of their victims, leaving them lying on the ground so that the goddess could devour them – ‘that Bhowanee may have her blood; she delights in blood!’ This their protector did with such efficiency that the Thugs were never in any danger of discovery or arrest, and the members of each gang were strictly enjoined never to look back on the scene of the murder for fear of disturbing the deity’s feast. But

Sleeman’s approvers thus used religion not merely to justify their actions but also to explain their failures and their capture. They held that the real reason for the decline and fall of their gangs was to be found not in the Company’s tactics, nor in their own faithlessness or poor organization, but in their failure to pay proper attention to the proscriptions they had been ordered to obey. ‘That Davey instituted Thuggee, and supported it as long as we attended to her omens, and observed the rules framed by the wisdom of our ancestors, nothing in the world can ever make us doubt,’ observed an approver named Nasir. But the gangs of the early nineteenth century had failed to heed the goddess’s orders to refrain from killing women and
members
of the various proscribed classes. ‘Our ancestors were never guilty of this folly!’ one strangler concluded in disgust. ‘We murdered men and women of all classes. How then can Thuggee stand?’

 

Captured Thugs claimed on many occasions that their crimes were simply a matter of fate; they were destined to commit them. They were ‘merely
irresponsible
agents’, no more liable to be held to account for their killings than were the tigers to whom they often compared themselves. This explained how Thugs could – in an admission that plainly baffled Sleeman – ‘look
forward
indifferently to their children, whom they love as tenderly as any man in the world, following the same trade of murder or being united in marriage to men who follow the trade’. Some elaborated further: ‘How many men have you strangled?’ one notorious jemadar was asked. ‘I have killed none,’ came the incensed response. ‘Is any man killed from man’s killing? Is it not the hand of God that kills him? And are we not mere instruments in the hand of God?’ But this dispensation applied only to men proceeding on a Thug expedition, properly consecrated. Those unwise enough to kill when they were not under the protection of Kali could expect to be punished in the same way as any other Indian. ‘If a man committed a real murder, they held that his family must become extinct, and adduced the fact that this fate had not befallen them as proof that their acts of killing were justifiable.’

Sleeman and his associates saw matters differently. ‘A Thug,’ Sleeman concluded, ‘considers the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the Goddess’, and his habits and his actions were all determined by his devotion to Kali. This faith, moreover, had been fully rounded and worked out over the course of centuries, and was unique to the Thugs.

Such views were controversial then. Today, it is generally agreed that the conclusions Sleeman drew from his ‘Conversations with Thugs’ were
distorted
by the prejudices and misinterpretations so common at the time. In truth, the Thugs’ worship of Kali and their veneration of the sacred pickaxe hardly constituted a religion. The gangs possessed no religious texts, had no agreed forms of worship, and while they certainly shared in the belief that their goddess protected them, they held this in common with thousands of ordinary Indians. Kali was commonly invoked as a protector by all sorts of Hindus; and at this time she was – later anthropologists have noted – especially popular among criminals of all sorts and men of lower caste.
Pickaxe
worship arose merely ‘from the common animistic belief that tools and implements generally achieve the results obtained from them by their inherent virtue and of their own volition, and not from the human hand which guides them … Members of practically all castes worship the implements of their profession.’

The Thugs’ beliefs, indeed, may be better understood as folklore than as a distinct faith. This may be seen most clearly in the manner in which members of various gangs differed sharply in the interpretation of even the most
fundamental
customs – as Sleeman discovered when he questioned his approvers regarding their obedience to omens:

Most strikingly of all, the evidence so carefully recorded by Sleeman and his men makes it clear that Indian villagers did not engage in Thuggee because they worshipped Kali. Rather, Kali worship was a facet of life as a Thug – one that could safely be neglected or abandoned by a man no longer practising the trade. The first hints that this was the case emerge from questions posed to Muslim Thugs: ‘Do Mussellman Thugs continue to follow the rites of their religion?’ Paton asked. ‘Or does Bhowanee supercede Mohammed?’ ‘What?’ exclaimed the approver Allyar. ‘Is Bhowanee the equal of Mohammed? He is the lord of our faith and of our religion.’ ‘Bhowanee,’ added his colleague Bakh Mohammed, ‘is only for Thuggee.’ But it was when Paton turned to the question of the religion practised by the Thugs now they were in Company custody that the most instructive exchange took place:

The emphasis placed by Sleeman and – through him – by the Company authorities on the role of religion in Thug life was thus enormously
exaggerated
. But in a country such as India, in which most Europeans felt barely at home, such exaggerations were accepted without question. To take only one example, references made by the Thugs to the pilgrimages some made to a temple to Kali maintained in the village of Bindachul, just outside Mirzapore, were built up into suggestions that the temple was itself an
important
headquarters of Thugs, maintained by Thug priests and funded by the proceeds of Thuggee. Sleeman formed this opinion at an early stage, writing in October 1830: ‘Kali’s temple at Bindachul … is constantly filled with
murderers
from every quarter of India, who go there to offer up in person a share of the booty they have acquired from their victims strangled in their annual excursion … The priests of this temple know perfectly well the source from which they derive their offerings [and] they suggest expeditions and promise the murderers in the name of their mistress immunity.’

Probably this impression of a harsh and murderous cult owed something to Sleeman’s own religious beliefs, for he added: ‘To pull down [Kali’s] temple at Bindachul and hang her priests would no doubt be the wish of every honest Christian.’ But the impact of such pronouncements – made, as they were, in the almost total absence of information to the contrary – on British
consciousness
in India was significant. By 1835 the impression that Thuggee was an alien religion of the most horrible sort was firmly established among the European communities in India. A few years later, with the publication of
the sensational novel
Confessions of a Thug
, written by Meadows Taylor, Sleeman’s contemporary in Hyderabad, a similar view was introduced to Britain. The consequence was a distinct loss of perspective. The determined criminal, anxious to provide for his family, seeking rich prizes and schooled in the ways of the Thug trade by other members of his gang became ‘that fiend in human form, luring his victims to their doom with soft speech and cunning artifice, committing the cold-blooded murder of every man he met’. The murder of potential witnesses became ‘the taking of human life for the sheer lust of killing’, and ‘the plunder, however pleasant … a secondary consideration’.