Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (43 page)

Nevertheless, in the course of the nineteenth century at least 14 convicted Thugs escaped from prison and eluded all pursuit – presumably by fleeing to parts of the country where they had not been previously known. The only consolation for the British was that these few seem to have been convinced they would be foolish to resume their former careers. There is no evidence that any of them ever killed again.

 

The fifteen hundred or so convicted Thugs imprisoned in central India may have been housed in poor conditions, and kept hard at work, but their fate was far less terrible than that of the men sent to penal colonies overseas. Well over 1,200 of Sleeman’s captives had been sentenced to transportation for life, and these prisoners were shipped, in chains, to a desperate existence in the Malayan swamps. Theirs was a two-fold punishment, for the transportees endured not only unremitting hard labour, but also separation from
everything
and everyone they knew.

The idea of transportation was an old one. The British had been banishing ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ from their shores since 1597 – at first to the tobacco plantations of Virginia and then, when the American War of Independence put a stop to that, to Australia, where the convicts of the First Fleet made landfall at Botany Bay early in 1788. These men were transported
because it was then generally believed that the criminal classes were
irredeemable
, and Britain would be better off without them; because English prisons were increasingly overcrowded; and also because the free colonists of both the New World and New South Wales required a cheap supply of labour. The practice of shipping convicts out from Britain did not cease until 1868, and by then a total of 40,000 British and Irish felons had been sent to America and the Caribbean, and about 165,000 to Australia.

Large numbers of Indian prisoners suffered similar fates after
transportation
to the East Indies was introduced in 1787. In all, perhaps 100,000 were sent overseas from Bombay, Bengal and Madras, and for much the same
reasons
as their British counterparts. They went at first to Bencoolen, a ragged collection of half-built huts sweltering on a mud flat on the south coast of Sumatra, then to Penang, an island off the Malayan coast, and later to Burma, Aden, Malacca, the Straits Settlement (today Singapore) and the sugar
plantations
of Mauritius. These were places where the British had established footholds of sorts, and where labour was desperately needed to help build the new colonies. Some were not much more than clearings in the midst of
fever-ridden
jungle – desperately unhealthy places, even by the standards of the time – and the work that the convicts were put to, which included clearing mangrove swamps and cutting back great swathes of rainforest, ensured that mortality among the prisoners was always high.

From the Company’s perspective, the penal colonies of the east were a useful resource. They made it possible to remove convicts from British
territory
far more certainly than the old practice of deportation to the Native States. They made it difficult for the men to return, since even those
transported
for a term of years, rather than life, were generally forced to remain in their new homes as free settlers once their sentences were served. And they made escape all but impossible, which meant that even Thugs could usually be put to work outside the prison walls. In both Sumatra and Singapore, the penal settlements were surrounded by hundreds of miles of impenetrable jungle filled with tigers and home to hostile natives, whom the prisoners were encouraged to believe would kill and eat men on the run.

Perhaps most significantly of all, the punishment of transportation was believed to be a terror to Hindu convicts, whose religion forbade them to cross open water on penalty of losing caste. ‘The belief was that
transportation
would be polluting,’ writes one historian. ‘It was thus commended as
“a weapon of tremendous power” … and the effect of transportation on the whole community was believed to be greater than the death sentence.’ Sleeman, like most British administrators, was certainly convinced that he set a severe example of the Thugs whom he sentenced to be shipped to
settlements
‘across the black water’. Whether there was any truth in this belief is debatable; it was certainly no deterrent to Muslims, and since Hindu
prisoners
risked sacrificing their ritual purity in jail in India, where they could not always be sure of choosing their companions or the food they ate, some
prisoners
actually found the prospect of transportation preferable, and pleaded to be sent overseas. Nevertheless, British magistrates continued to make liberal use of their right to banish prisoners to Malaya well into the second half of the nineteenth century.

The majority of these men – certainly the majority of Thugs – went to the largest of the new settlements, Penang. Prisoners were sent, in irons, from Saugor and Jubbulpore to the coast, and there held in jail, along with other convicts, until a ship became available. A British army officer named Gould Hunter-Weston, who encountered a group of 97 Thug transportees on the Bombay waterfront in 1840, noted that the entire party had been tattooed on their foreheads with both their names and their offence, and that all were heavily shackled to prevent escape. Hunter-Weston asked one what he had done to deserve such punishment. ‘The reply was that he did not know, for he had only strangled six men.’

The tattoos were generally effective in marking out Thugs from other prisoners once they arrived at their destinations. The stranglers detested them and took no pride in this visible identification of their status as members of a notorious fraternity; when they could, they hid them by wearing their turbans ‘inconveniently low down on their brows’. Such deceptions were, however, difficult to maintain in the confined conditions in which the men were held. In the early years of the Penang settlement, for example, convicts were crowded together inside a small stockade, and went out to work in gangs each day – at first on the roads, and later, in the 1850s, making ‘lounging chairs’ for sale to British officers. The area was malarial, and since the medical wisdom of the time suggested that fevers were borne by a ‘noxious effluvia’ that rose from the surrounding jungle, the
transportees
slept in cramped dormitories raised on wooden stilts. Charcoal braziers burned day and night in every room to drive off diseased air, and
the men contributed to their own well-being by coating the floors each morning with a fresh layer of cow dung mixed with water, a common Indian prophylactic.

In some respects, in fact, conditions in the penal settlements were better than they were in India. The leg irons worn by most felons were much lighter than those used on the Subcontinent, and so confident were the authorities that their prisons were secure that even these were generally
discarded
once the men had served a probation of three months. Such liberal regulations did not, of course, apply to convicted Thugs, who were made to work in heavy fetters and forbidden to cook their own food. The most
notorious
among them, in common with other ‘irredeemable’ criminals, were not allowed out of the stockade, where they ‘were confined in the refractory ward on severe task work, such as making coir
*
from the rough husks of cocoa-nuts’.

The knowledge that the penal colonies dotted about the Indian Ocean were full of Thugs only added to the frisson that many Britishers felt when confronted by groups of transportees, whom they were already inclined to see as implacable villains. The shiver that ran down the spine of a Mrs Bartrum, who encountered one gang of prisoners in Mauritius in the 1830s, seems to have been entirely typical. ‘I remember being struck with the
appearance
of the Hindoo convicts, at work on the roads,’ she recalled. ‘They had a most ferociously scowling aspect. The dark, malignant glance, the bent brow, the turban of dirty white or dusky red; the loose drapery, only half clothing the body, gave them a wild, picturesque appearance, to which mountain scenery added still greater effect.’

Yet the warders responsible for the penal settlements had – or at least
professed
to have – no fear of the Thugs. Prison officers thought of their charges as cowards, who had relied on the force of numbers to commit their crimes and were harmless when kept isolated from the other members of their gangs. In this they were apparently correct, for despite the casual violence that was commonplace in many jails, there are no records of convicted Thugs strangling either fellow prisoners or civilians. According to JFA McNair, the officer who commanded the penal colony at Singapore until its abolition,

The contempt that British officers felt for individual Thugs left them
determined
to prevent any resurgence in Thuggee. Though the authorities occasionally showed mercy to other long-term prisoners with exemplary jail records, no Thug lifer was ever paroled. Even when the convict settlements at Penang and Singapore were closed down between 1867 and 1873, and many of the prisoners freed, the 250 Thugs found there were simply transferred to a brand new penal colony being established in the Andaman Islands. There they passed the remainder of their lives in the uniquely harsh environment of what became the most feared of all Indian prison settlements: a jail built in a jungle on islands that lay two hundred miles out in the Bay of Bengal and were scarcely ever visited; a place whose ‘utter unfamiliarity – a deliberately maintained vacuum of knowledge and experience – was expected to make the Andamans a kind of black hole in the imagination of the Indian criminal’.

Those Thugs who survived to be sent to the Andamans found themselves confined, as they had always been, to separate quarters, arranged so that they could not corrupt the lesser prisoners who made up the remainder of the prison population – habitual thieves, occasional murderers and rebellious sepoys rounded up after the Mutiny of 1857. Nevertheless, by the 1870s the tides of penal reform were at last shifting in the Thugs’ favour. By now the
centuries
-old certainty that such criminals could never be redeemed was at last giving way to belief in the potential for reform. Isolated as they were from the mainland, the remaining Thugs posed little danger to society, and – safe in the Andaman Islands – it was at last agreed that they might be rehabilitated within the confines of the settlement. To mark the great Imperial durbar of January 1877, at which Queen Victoria was created Empress of India, a number of the Thugs, dacoits and poisoners on the islands were granted conditional and
local releases, and allowed thereafter to live and work with the free men in the island capital, Port Blair. The chance of a return to India was still denied them; but for the time that remained to them, these minor Thugs – men who were, in British eyes, less evil than those who had been hanged, and less useful than those made approvers – were returned to society of a sort.