Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (38 page)

 

The most unexpected consequence of this perversion of the Thug’s religion was the romanticization of Thuggee itself. ‘The histories of these men,’ the Company magistrate Edward Thornton exclaimed, ‘are as romantic as the most ardent lover of Oriental adventures could desire.’ Men driven to kill by their beliefs were far more compelling than mere highway robbers, however lethal, and the stranglers were, it seemed clear to Sleeman and his men, no ordinary criminals. Their devotion to Kali could even be perceived as noble. Sharp distinctions could be drawn between the dacoits, who tortured their victims and killed indiscriminately, and the Thugs, who were forbidden – however nominally – from murdering the members of certain classes and castes, and who killed comparatively quickly and cleanly. ‘However
unscrupulous
and treacherous the Thugs were,’ Sleeman’s grandson concluded, looking back, ‘one thing at least stands to their credit, that while they
sometimes
killed women – though contrary to their faith – they never maltreated them beforehand.’

Seen in this way, the Thugs could appear ‘sporting’, even chivalrous opponents: men who possessed a code – however obscene – and who lived by it, men to whom faith and honour were important. These were not, of course, the men encountered by the unfortunate victims actually inveigled on the roads, killers devoid of compassion and – at least in the early nineteenth century – more than willing to flout the proscriptions that supposedly governed their behaviour. But it was undoubtedly an attractive image, not least because it elevated and flattered those involved in the pursuit of the Thug ‘cult’ as well as those engaged in it. The stranglers, one officer of Sleeman’s
department
later wrote, possessed ‘noble and chivalrous instincts … [there were]
specimens who in habitual courtliness and fair faith, were clothed with both
dignity
and manliness’.

Admiration for the captured Thugs emerged gradually, and was often qualified, at least in print, for reasons of Christian propriety. ‘I know not whether most to admire the duplicity with which they continue to conceal their murderous intentions, or to detest the infernal apathy with which they can eat out of the same dish, and drink out of the very cup that is partaken of by the victims they have fixed on to destroy,’ wrote Sleeman’s assistant in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Reynolds. But prolonged exposure to the approvers – and the destruction of the gangs themselves, which at last rendered the
surviving
Thugs more of a curiosity than a menace – led some members of the Thuggy Department to become more open. Even James Paton, a stern Presbyterian, whose transcriptions of his Thug interrogations are peppered with disapproving footnotes and Biblical allusions,
*
succumbed eventually to the romantic lure of his prisoners and ‘made positive pets of some’.

Sleeman himself was not immune to the stranglers’ allure. He appears to have been not merely puzzled but actually captivated by Feringeea, whose pursuit had presented him with such difficulties. The prisoner was far from being the insensate brute, coarsened by his long career of murder and
incapable
of any finer feeling that Sleeman seems to have expected, and Feringeea’s youth, considerable good looks, firm bearing and unexpected sensitivity took him by surprise. The jemadar, Sleeman discovered, was a paradox, a man who, by his own account, could have escaped the Company’s net scot-free were it not for the love he bore for his own family. ‘I could not forsake them,’ the captured Thug explained, ‘and was always inquiring after them, and affording my
pursuers
the means of tracing me. I knew not what indignities my wife and mother might suffer. Could I have felt secure that they would suffer none, I should not have been taken.’ The Thugs’ love of their families, remarked upon by several British authorities, became regarded as one of their principal
characteristics
. ‘These common enemies of mankind,’ Sleeman wrote after one interview with Feringeea, ‘who … strangle other people of whatever age or sex without the slightest feeling of compunction, feel towards their relations as
strongly as other men. At different times during his deposition, this man had occasion to mention his foster brother, Radha Kishun, and his nephew, Sinha, two of the 11 hung, and every time the tears filled his eyes and ran over his cheeks.’

Other officers found the same contrast between the senior jemadars’
murderous
behaviour on the roads and the principled lives they led (or claimed to lead) in their own homes a source of endless fascination. ‘Mr Wilson,’ Sleeman noted, ‘describes approver Makeen Lodhee as “one of the best men I have ever known!”, and I believe that Makeen may be trusted in any relation of life save that between a Thug who has taken the auspices and a traveller with something worth taking on him.’

Another of Sleeman’s assistants, Lieutenant Reynolds, who had charge of the anti-Thug campaign in Hyderabad, was ‘quite astounded’ to discover that a certain Hurree Singh, whom he had known for several years as a highly respectable cloth dealer in the Sudder Bazaar, ‘was the Hurree Singh of the list sent to him of noted Thugs at large in the Duckun’. Singh, a strangler of such notoriety that the reward placed on his head was twice that offered for the
capture
of Feringeea, turned out to be the adopted son of a Thug subadar executed at Hyderabad in 1816 ‘for the murder of a party of two women and eight men’. He had, Sleeman concluded, been ‘so correct in his deportment and all his dealings, that he had won himself the esteem of all the gentlemen of the station … and yet he had, as he has since himself shown, been carrying on his trade of murder up to the very day of his arrest … and leading out his gang of assassins while pretending to be on his way to Bombay for a fresh supply of linens and broad cloth’.
*
Even the Holkar of Indore was greatly astonished when, ‘only about two months ago, a party of mine pointed out, as a notorious Thug, a non-commissioned officer who was superintending the drill of soldiers in the very Court Yard of His Highness … He was instantly secured and soon after acknowledged that during the whole twenty years that he has been a Sepahee in the service of the Honourable Company or that of different Native Chiefs, he has been himself a Thug or in league with the Gangs that passed up and down the country, and that there was not a Thug of any note in the Hyderabad territories, in the Scindhia, Holcar and Bundelcund
states, with whom he had not in that time become personally acquainted.’

Sleeman, who hunted game, as did most British officers in India, even seems to have felt some slight stirring of common feeling with a few of his approvers for this reason. ‘They all look upon travellers as a sportsman looks upon hares and pheasants,’ he wrote, ‘and they recollect their favourite beles, or places of murder, as sportsmen recollect their best sporting grounds, and talk of them, when they can, with the same kind of glee!’ It is an
extraordinary
statement, and if the Thugs were being truthful at all (for Sleeman’s captives probably dwelled more fondly on their days on the roads of India after their capture – when it was obvious to all of them that they would never be free to wander them again – than they had at the time, when every expedition was, for many of their number, a struggle to provide for
themselves
and their families), it can only have been true for a handful of the best and most successful jemadars. Yet a few Thug leaders seem to have drawn similar parallels between themselves and the men who had hunted them down. ‘Are you yourself not a
shikari
,’
*
one asked Sleeman,

 

It would be wrong to overstate the sneaking regard that British officers began to feel for their approvers, nonetheless. Sleeman and his men continued to
abhor their crimes. Nor did their admiration extend to the great mass of Thugs who served the jemadars they kept in custody; these, the British
invariably
found, were coarser, crueller and less sympathetic than their more polished leaders.

In fact, the danger posed by the strangling gangs seemed greater now than it had done before. Mere murderers were bad enough. But they could be rounded up and captured and imprisoned, and so the dangers that they posed could be removed. The evidence uncovered in the course of his lengthy
conversations
with the Thug approvers hinted at something far more insidious and much more difficult to eradicate. If Thuggee was a hereditary calling, the arrest of a single member of a family would do nothing to remove the danger posed to travellers; the man’s brothers would continue his work. Similarly, the arrest of a Thug who had fathered children neither would nor could deter his sons from becoming stranglers themselves. Even infants who had never
ventured
out onto the roads of India themselves would inevitably grow up, join gangs, and learn the secrets of their father’s trade.

Nor, Sleeman became increasingly certain, was it possible that Thuggee would simply wither and die when the conditions then prevalent in central India – economic hardship, widespread unemployment and repeated drought and famine – eased. Men who ‘consider the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the Goddess’ would never cease to kill in any
circumstances
, and it was this (the Thug-hunter convinced himself) that explained how a strangler could cold-bloodedly ‘mediate his murders without any misgivings, perpetrate them without any emotions of pity, and
remember
them without feelings of remorse’.

Sleeman’s conversations with his Thug approvers had other sinister
implications
, too. Killing from habit, not from need, seemed particularly perverted. And the suggestion that a gang’s victims were selected more or less at random, at the whim of some portent or omen, was especially terrifying; stranglers who were as likely to kill an impoverished pilgrim as the
wealthiest
merchant seemed somehow stranger – and yet more Satanic – than mere robbers out for plunder.

There is no reason to doubt that the East India Company would have set out to destroy the Thugs whatever their motives, whatever their beliefs; sporadic efforts had, after all, been made to do just that for years before Sleeman began his own enquiries. But there is, equally, no question that his work – disseminated throughout India in a stream of letters, articles and
memoranda
– gave the officials responsible for policing India every incentive to pursue their task with grim determination.

If Sleeman’s theories were correct, disposing of the last vestiges of Thuggee would be an immense task. And accomplishing it would not only require, but warrant, measures almost as extreme as those employed by the stranglers themselves.