Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (39 page)

‘What do you think, Sahib Khan?’ demanded Sleeman of one Deccan Thug brought before him in the cold season of 1835. ‘Am I right in thinking that we shall suppress Thuggee?’

Sahib Khan, a cautious and successful strangler who had served with his gang for more than two decades, paused to consider his response. ‘There have been several
gurdies
*
upon Thuggee,’ he replied, ‘but they have ended in nothing but the punishment of a few … We have heard our fathers and sages predicting these things as punishments for our transgressions of prescribed rules; but none of them ever said that Thuggee would be done away with. [Yet] this seems a greater and more general gurdie than any, and I do not know what to think.’

This hesitant admission, made nearly six years after the arrest of the approver Amanoolah, was a symbolic moment in the Company’s campaign. It was the first time that any jemadar had conceded that the Thug gangs might eventually be crushed.

Captured stranglers had hitherto insisted that Thuggee would always
survive
, an attitude that owed something to the approvers’ understanding of how easy it was to recruit men in times of economic hardship, and a good deal to confidence in their own ability to escape detection. ‘Suppose all
our operations against the Thugs were now to be over,’ another group of approvers was once asked. ‘Do you think it would gain ground again?’ ‘Yes,’ one strangler asserted, ‘in five years it would be as extensive as ever.’ In this he was probably right, since the Thugs’ system was a proven one and many of its practitioners knew no other way to make a living. Their British persecutors naturally agreed. ‘Once a Thug always a Thug is their motto and their creed,’ wrote FC Smith of his approvers. ‘Nothing can or will reform or deter [a Thug] from the practice of his profession. He may for a temporary space retire from business owing to the possession of riches, or other causes, but as sure as a dog returns to his vomit, so will a Thug return to his business sooner or later.’

Sleeman, too, continued to believe that Thuggee had, like some cancer, the ability to regenerate itself while even a handful of stranglers remained free. Hereditary Thugs and Kali’s devotees, he was convinced, would inevitably resume their familiar trade if freed from jail or left to their own devices by the government. By the early 1830s he had become so convinced of the need to account for every member of every gang that his registers and records bulged with information drawn from the interrogations of captured men. Suspected stranglers brought to Jubbulpore for questioning were disconcerted by the detailed knowledge Sleeman possessed of their gangs, and this information, carefully deployed, produced confessions that would never have been made earlier, when the Company’s knowledge of the Thugs was slight and stolid denials were frequently enough to win a suspect his freedom. From this
perspective
, Sleeman’s files – which were by now among the most detailed and comprehensive ever assembled by any police force – had become an
invaluable
resource, one that kept the Company’s Thug-hunting parties supplied with vital intelligence and made the task of tracking down their targets immeasurably easier.

The Thugs responded to Sleeman’s accumulation of intelligence by
shifting
their bases with increasing frequency. Most of the stranglers of the Madras Presidency fled to new homes in the Native States, and men who had once based themselves in Bundelcund began to turn up in the wilds of Candeish. But even this tactic was of limited effect while Thugs meeting on the roads continued to talk freely among themselves. Only gangs that recruited selectively and actively shunned the company of others eluded the Company’s approvers for long. A group of stranglers in Rajpootana, for
example, were ‘rarely seized or punished’ thanks to their reclusiveness. ‘How can their deeds be known?’ demanded Sahib Khan. ‘They do all their work themselves. They live in the desert and work in the desert. We live in villages and cannot do our work without the convenience and support of …
influential
men; but these men are relieved from all this cost and trouble by forgoing the pleasure of other men’s society, and the comforts of a fixed habitation. They are wiser men than we are!’

Even among the gangs known to Sleeman, however, many men evaded capture for a time, and it soon became clear that Francis Curwen Smith had been too sanguine in hoping that the anti-Thug campaign could be concluded in as little as two or three years. The sheer number of suspects, and the ever greater care their leaders took as the Company’s men closed in on them, made this an impossibility. ‘Two seasons are still required for the work,’ Smith admitted late in 1832 after concluding his twenty-sixth major trial of
suspected
stranglers, though by then well over 600 ‘notorious Thugs’ had been hauled before the courts.

Sleeman, too, occasionally became despondent when he considered the sheer volume of work still left to do. ‘There are many leaders and leading members of the old gangs still at large,’ the Thug-hunter conceded,

 

The growing difficulty of securing the remaining Thugs now urged Sleeman and his superiors in Calcutta into a further frenzy of activity. When the anti-Thug
campaign had commenced at the beginning of the decade, high standards of evidence were required to secure guilty verdicts in any Company court – even those run by FC Smith in the non-regulation territory of Saugor & Nerbudda. No man could be convicted of murder without the denunciations of several approvers and the support of circumstantial evidence, and after 1833, moreover, it was ruled that the evidence of approvers alone was
insufficient
to secure a death sentence in any case. In the course of the next few years, however, the ancient legal principle that the punishment should fit the crime began to blur as a stream of new legislation was passed. Each successive act made it easier to convict suspected Thugs no matter what the evidence against them.

This development was directly related to the progress of Sleeman’s drive to extirpate Thuggee. The first few years of the campaign had witnessed the apprehension of virtually every major jemadar – men against whom
numerous
approvers were ready to testify and who could be confronted with a wealth of evidence relating to specific crimes. After 1835, however, the Thug suspects still at large were mostly minor figures. Few had taken a direct part in any murder, and some were guilty of nothing more than being peripheral members of one of the strangling gangs. The conviction of such men was not guaranteed under existing law, and yet the demonization of the stranglers – the suggestion that they were devotees of a perverted cult, and in particular the widespread acceptance of Sleeman’s dictum that captured Thugs would inevitably return to their old trade upon release – made it seem imperative that every man among their ranks be detained for life. It was this necessity that drove the changes to the law that characterized the latter stages of the anti-Thug campaign.

The earliest law relating specifically to the crime of Thuggee thus appeared on the statute books some half a dozen years after the first approvers were secured. ‘Act XXX of 1836’, as it was known, was a sweeping revision of the existing code. It made the simple act of being a Thug, ‘either within or
without
the territories of the East India Company’, punishable by life
imprisonment
with hard labour. A second piece of legislation, Act XIX of 1837, disposed of the criticism (heard from several of the Company’s stricter
magistrates
over the years) that the evidence of admitted criminals such as the Thug approvers could not be admissible in a British court. ‘No person shall,’ this new law decreed, ‘by reason of any conviction for any offence whatever,
be incompetent to be a witness in any stage of any cause, Civil or Criminal, before any Court.’

Company officers and magistrates could now charge suspected Thugs in a variety of ways. Men identified by approvers as active stranglers were sent for trial under existing regulations. The lesser members of the gangs – together, quite possibly, with a number of entirely innocent men unfortunate enough to be picked up in the company of Thugs – were charged under the new Act XXX. If there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction even under the broad terms of the new Act, moreover, an older Company law – Regulation 8 of 1818 – was still at hand, as Sleeman reminded his men. Under the
provisions
of Regulation 8, Company magistrates were entitled to detain any suspect whom they were ‘morally satisfied’ was a member of a gang of
criminals
until the man had furnished security for his future good behaviour. Since British officers were free to determine what security was adequate, the
practical
result was that many suspected stranglers were held in prison for months and sometimes years, unable to raise the sums demanded. Setting the figure required to obtain bail at some impossibly high level became deliberate policy, for ‘to release on security a Thug’, insisted FC Smith, was ‘folly and ignorance’.

Acts XXX and XIX were not the last pieces of legislation enacted by the Company as it attempted to dispose of the remaining vestiges of Thuggee. Seven years later, Act XXIV of 1843 not only extended the provisions of the existing Thug laws to cover dacoits as well – thus ‘affording a security net to convict the prisoner who might escape a specific charge of murder by Thuggee’ – but also gave the British authorities power to seize any Thug prisoner still held in the jails of the Native States and send them to a Company jail or to penal colonies overseas. This act ensured that not a single convicted strangler of any importance would ever be released in India.

The general effects of these changes in the law were twofold. Many more Thugs were convicted than would ever have been possible under existing regulations, and this satisfied Sleeman’s increasingly determined quest to jail or execute every last strangler in India. But the standards of proof demanded by the courts fell sharply, and this made miscarriages of justice more likely. The second phase of the anti-Thug campaign, which lasted roughly from 1836 until 1840 or a little later, was thus less creditable to Sleeman and to the Company than was the work done in earlier years.

 

In these changing circumstances the Thuggy Department continued to achieve success. The central provinces were largely clear of Thug gangs after 1832, when their leaders’ old strongholds among the Native States of Bundelcund were pronounced ‘no longer a secure refuge for them or their families’, and even the tenacious stranglers of Madras were believed to be ‘completely suppressed’ by 1836. Another 50 prominent jemadars were made approvers, and their information made it possible to circulate Company
officers
in the Upper Provinces with a list of more than 460 Thugs still at large in the Doab, where a good many Bundelcund stranglers had sought refuge. Meanwhile, in the Deccan, the Nizam of Hyderabad offered his assistance in locating the 150 Thugs thought to have fled to his territory from Madras.