Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (41 page)

The fact that peripheral associations such as the Megpunnas and the Tusma-Baz Thugs could be drawn into the Thuggy Department’s orbit (and be widely perceived as threats equal in potential, if not in practice, to the original Thug gangs) is very revealing. The British authorities had been badly shaken by the revelations of the anti-Thug campaign, which had uncovered depredations on a scale that had barely been suspected. The unveiling of apparently respectable stranglers in the most unexpected places had added to the growing feeling of unease.
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Evidently, some Company officials now admitted, India remained far from understood. They were more than willing to concede that other criminal bands – some perhaps as deadly as the Thugs – still lurked undiscovered elsewhere in the vastness of the Subcontinent.

All this made it imperative to retain the expertise built up within the Thuggy Department. By the late 1830s, its remit had already been widened to include the suppression of dacoity – a still more difficult task, perhaps, but one that Sleeman himself took on, with his usual vigour, between 1835 and 1847. After that, the department evolved again – first into a sort of pan-Indian police force with overall responsibility for the suppression of a wide range of
violent crimes, and then, in the last years of the nineteenth century, into a central intelligence office, gathering information on Indian nationalist groups and other potential rebels. This was a job its officers – with their intimate knowledge of criminal behaviour in the mofussil – were assumed to be
particularly
well suited to, and the department thus survived for a further half a century, being abolished, with the empire itself, only in 1947. As late as the latter years of the Second World War, the Government of India’s intelligence agency – then based at Simla – was popularly known as the
thagi daftar
: the ‘Thug office’.

 

Sleeman’s unique creation – the one arm of the East India Company whose jurisdiction extended across the entire Subcontinent – had been
extraordinarily
successful. In little more than a decade it had destroyed a menace that the whole vast Indian police system had left unchecked for years. Its officers had developed new methods for suppressing crime; its men had learned the art of tracking down endlessly elusive criminals. Sleeman himself had
transformed
Indian policing from an almost entirely local affair, dependent on officers with few resources and working, in effect, alone, into a recognizably modern operation, one in which the diligent accumulation of intelligence held sway, and careful record-keeping was as important as drill. He had also abandoned the purely reactive policing characteristic of the time. India’s untrained and often inexperienced darogahs, whose jurisdiction and interests were limited to a few square miles, almost always restricted their efforts to solving crimes that had already occurred. Sleeman’s men, rather than waiting for their enemies to strike, actively pursued them. In doing so, they created a new template for police work.

These were remarkable achievements, and – for all the excesses of the
occasional
nujeeb, the exaggerated importance attached to the Thugs’ religious beliefs, and the harrying of minor criminals in the later 1830s – they were appreciated by the Company’s subjects themselves. A village to the north-east of Jubbulpore was renamed Sleemanabad, and the brass lamp Sleeman himself presented to the temple there was kept burning for more than a century in his honour; it is still there today. Writing in 1840 to the head of the local Thuggee office, a Hyderabadi noble named Hussain Dost Khan, often a vocal opponent of the British, conceded that ‘seeing that the best arrangements have been
made in this matter, the whole of the inhabitants of this country, and travellers, have been emancipated from the fear of Thugs … Where are the murdered men? How can there be any, when you do not hear even the slightest allusion to Thugs? The whole world is giving thanks for this.’

Sleeman, too, felt pride in his campaign. Writing to his friend Charles Fraser, who had succeeded Francis Curwen Smith as magistrate of Jubbulpore, he ended his letter by urging:

 

The Thug trials continued with grim regularity throughout the 1830s. It was not long before the prosecutions became a mechanical process, in their way as devoid of humanity as the Thugs’ own murders. One hundred men had been committed in 1830, and tried by FC Smith: the first of the great Thuggee trials. A further 389 were dealt with in the sessions of 1831–2, at Saugor and Indore, and another 316 the following year, this time at Poona and Hyderabad as well as at Saugor. By 1835, the number of suspected Thugs brought before the Company’s courts had passed 1,500, Smith alone trying three-quarters of that total. By 1840, by which time Sleeman had extended his campaign into Bombay and Madras, the number of committals had reached 3,689.

Of the 4,500 men who eventually stood trial for Thug crimes between the years 1826 and 1848, a total of 504 – or nearly one in every nine – was hanged. Three thousand more were sentenced to life in prison, more than half of whom were transported to penal colonies in the Far East. Most of the rest served either seven or 14 years’ hard labour, or died in prison while awaiting trial. Virtually none escaped the Company’s wrath altogether. Fewer than 250 were acquitted.

Sentences were passed with reference to guidelines issued by the
government
in Calcutta. Between 1830 and 1836, at least, these were relatively straightforward:

In the event, almost all Thugs were found guilty of active complicity in their gang’s crimes. Shorter terms of imprisonment were imposed only rarely, particularly at first, and almost always involved cases in which the defendant was no more than a boy. And there was never any case in which the initial verdict was overturned on appeal. The willingness of the Governor General to confirm even the harshest sentences seems to have been influenced by the pleas of FC Smith who, having heard all the evidence marshalled for the numerous cases brought before him, became utterly convinced that no Thug deserved mercy.

‘They never should recover their unrestricted liberty,’ Smith argued,

Men sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment or more suffered an additional punishment. Each convicted Thug was forcibly branded or tattooed with the details of his crime, a form of punishment often employed in India at this time, though it had previously been reserved for those who had been handed
life sentences.
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The most common formulation specified ‘branding on the forehead or on the back, with the word “Thug” marked by the process of the
godna
[tattooing needle] in the Hindee and Persian characters’. Other men received the tattoo ‘Convicted Thug’, and some contemporary drawings show stranglers with tattoos on their lower eyelids, though there is no
written
evidence that such markings were actually applied. The principal aim of this punishment was to enable escaping prisoners to be easily recaptured. But it was also seen as a shameful imposition; Muslims were forbidden by their religion to wear tattoos, while Hindus believed that the markings endured after death and would be legible to those who met them in the afterlife.

 

The Company had planned to execute convicted Thugs in their home
villages
, where it was thought their deaths might best act as a deterrent to their fellow stranglers. In the end, however, the scheme was rejected on the grounds that it made escape too likely. Those who were condemned to death met their ends in the towns where they had been tried. Most were hanged in either Jubbulpore or Saugor.

Among the first prisoners to be executed were the Thugs of Feringeea’s gang, who went to their deaths in Jubbulpore late in September 1830. Betrayed by their leader, they faced their ends with a show of equanimity that impressed the crowd gathered to watch their execution and struck Sleeman as worthy of comment. ‘I was,’ he wrote to the editor of the
Calcutta Gazette
,

suffering they were made small and formed partly of thongs to ensure strength.

As the sun rose, the eleven men were brought out from the Jail
decorated
with chaplets of flowers, and marched up to the front of the drop, where they arranged themselves in a line each seeming to select the noose or situation that pleased him best, with infinitely more self-possession than men generally select their positions in a dance or at a dinner-table. When arranged, they lifted up their hands and shouted ‘
Bindachul Ke Jae, Bhowanee Ke Jae
’,
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every one making use of precisely the same invocation, though four were Mohammedans … They all took their positions on the
platform
… and taking the noose in both hands, made the same invocation to Bhowanee, after which they placed them over their heads and adjusted them to their necks with the same ease and self-possession that they had first selected them; and some of the younger ones were actually laughing during the operation … Being directed to have their hands tied to their sides that they might not in their agonies seize the rope, and thereby prolong their sufferings, one of the youngest, a Mohammedan, impatient of the delay, stooped down so as to tighten the rope, either to prevent it breaking with a jerk, or with a view to prevent pain from it, and stepped deliberately one leg after the other over the platform and hung himself,
precisely
as one would step over a rock to take a swim in the sea.