Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (44 page)

The approvers themselves, who had proved their usefulness to the Company and atoned – in some small measure – for their crimes, were treated rather differently.

Feringeea’s fellow informants remained out on the roads long after he himself was returned to jail in 1832, travelling about with their escorts of nujeebs and chasing the diminishing bands of Thugs of whom they had
personal
knowledge. This information was the key to their temporary freedom, for they could only avoid confinement for as long as they remained of
service
to their new masters, and it was certainly suspected – then and now – that a few, at least, levelled false allegations against innocent men in the hope of appearing useful. Even so, 56 approvers had been returned to prison by the late 1830s, where they were, naturally, widely hated by the men they had betrayed. The only way to guarantee their safety was to keep them in
isolation
from the other convicts, and so they were confined together in a lock-up just outside the gates of Jubbulpore’s Central Jail.

This state of affairs endured until 1837, when a new model prison, called the School of Industry, was opened in the town. It was specially designed to house the approvers in relatively comfortable conditions, and unlike the other prisons and penal colonies to which convicted Thugs were sent, it served two
purposes
, being not merely a prison but a reformatory as well. The approvers themselves were, of course, regarded as beyond salvation; the commutation of their death sentences to life imprisonment, in exchange for their services to government, was the most they could expect. But their sons – those who had never been on a Thuggee expedition, and were (it was thought) too young to have been fully exposed to the full horror of their fathers’ lives – were also imprisoned, to be educated and, if possible, brought up as useful citizens. They, too, were forcibly confined, over a good number of protests, for the Company remained convinced that they would take up strangling if they were released. Because they were as yet innocent of any crime, however, they were permitted much more freedom than their fathers could enjoy.

The Jubbulpore School of Industry did not look much like a prison. It was located in the centre of the town, and was close to, but not a part of, the
central
jail. It was long and low and built of brick, with tiled and sloping roofs to drain the monsoon rains, and it enclosed a large dirt quadrangle, where the inmates ate and exercised. The approvers themselves were housed nearby, alongside the soldiers assigned to guard them, in what were called the ‘Thuggee Lines’. The Lines were, in effect, a model native village, built by the prisoners themselves with Company help, in which the informers lived with their wives and children. This was a particular indulgence. The British always took great pains to prevent their other Thug prisoners from breeding, for fear that any children would turn to Thuggee. But here, in what amounted to
controlled
conditions, the practice was tolerated. By 1870, the village had grown to a substantial size; in that year it housed 158 Thugs (the great majority of them men arrested in the 1840s and 1850s) and 202 of the approvers’ dacoit counterparts, together with their wives and more than 1,500 children.

Sleeman’s approvers were not, of course, permitted to be idle. The School of Industry was, as its name implied, a place of work – not of numbing toil, like other jails, but of useful labour. This, it was believed, would help to develop the inmates’ self-respect, and thus contribute to the process of reform. It was an advanced notion for the time, and also helped the School to become self-supporting, for successive governors sold the products made there on the open market, thus covering the costs of upkeep.

The central provinces, indeed, turned out to be a first-rate market for the goods turned out by the School of Industry. The cost of importing anything from Bombay or Bengal – much less Britain – was prohibitive, and there was little in the way of local manufacturing. The School’s first products, bricks, were soon in great demand, and from then on the reformatory paid its way, and even made a net contribution to government funds.

The greatest difficulty that the warders faced was to make the inmates work. The Thugs themselves regarded the whole idea as degrading, and though many of their sons were less reluctant, their fathers prevented them from labouring. It was only when the School’s first governor, a Captain Brown, explained that the prisoners would be paid for their work that these objections were overcome. ‘The approvers,’ wrote Brown, ‘are all very fond of money, and when they see they are to share in the profits of the
manufacture
, they will cheerfully join in the work.’

By the early 1840s even Thugs who had previously lived almost entirely on the profits of robbery and murder were doing manual work to set examples for their sons. The approvers next petitioned for their children to be taught to read and write – a request that was at first refused, on the grounds that
superior
education would leave the children dissatisfied with their drab existence in the jail – and when Sleeman’s successors decided to turn the School into a tent-and carpet-making factory they proved eager to learn how to use the new machines that were brought in. Tent-making was taught by artisans from the Doab town of Futtehpore, and the art of carpet-weaving by men from Mirzapore, the great centre of that trade; by 1847 the men and women of the Thug village were turning out more than 130 tents and 3,300 yards of Kidderminster carpet a year. Revenues for that year exceeded 35,000 rupees, and the School of Industry had placed itself firmly in profit.

The School was not unique in specializing in a certain sort of
manufacturing
. Other Indian prisons did the same; the maximum security jail at Alipore had a noted print shop that sold more than 200,000 rupees’ worth of books and pamphlets in the year 1861 alone. But the superior quality of the Thugs’ work was widely recognized, and by the 1850s, the carpets woven at the School of Industry were noted as the best made anywhere in India. An example of the Thugs’ work was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and a few years later the men of the School wove a huge, seamless carpet, 80 feet by 40 feet in size, for Queen Victoria herself. It weighed more than two tons and found its way to the Waterloo Chamber in Windsor Castle, where it remains today – still, by repute, the largest that has ever been hand-woven. By then the Thugs had also become one of the main suppliers of tents to the Indian Army, their products – notably latrine, or ‘necessary’, tents – finding their way to every cantonment from the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin. In time, successive superintendents turned the School into a fully commercial concern, improving capacity by bringing in prisoners from the Thuggee jail in Jubbulpore and even free labourers from the surrounding districts to work alongside the approvers from the village. The most important portions of the annual reports compiled by these officers became the figures for turnover and profit, and the records of the School contain far more about the problems of accounting for the cost of tent-cloth woven, cheaply, in other prisons, than they do about the process of reform or the lives of the prisoners themselves.

The School of Industry did succeed, even so, in turning the sons of Thugs
away from a life of Thuggee. By the early 1850s, the children born to the approvers were working as soldiers, porters and even shopkeepers in Jubbulpore itself; and for all Sleeman’s fears, none seems to have shown any inclination to take up his father’s profession. In time, the School’s warders came to trust their prisoners completely. The families in the Thug village, it was noted in 1878, ‘have entire liberty to come and go as they like’; indeed, by then even the surviving approvers themselves were ‘subject only to certain mild restrictions’.

The Thugs’ evident disinterest in either escape or further killing seems to have taken the officers of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department by surprise. Yet it is not hard to explain. One reason, evidently, was the fact that the men and their families were so well provided for that they no longer had any need to steal or kill. Another was the increasing age of the prisoners themselves. Fewer than half of the Thugs arrested in the 1830 and 1831 would have still been active by 1857. Those swept up in the later stages of the anti-Thug campaign were themselves growing old by 1888, when the quantity of tents and carpets made in Jubbulpore was already in steep decline and it was observed that the School of Industry remained profitable only because the cost of feeding approvers who were too old and feeble to work was not set against its revenues.

More important than mere decrepitude, however, was the disapproval of the Thugs’ own children. It was here that the benefit of establishing a School of Industry was most apparent, for unlike their old comrades in Agra and Cawnpore, whose enthusiasm for recreating their past exploits remained undimmed for more than 20 years, the Thugs of Jubbulpore proved
increasingly
reluctant to gratify British visitors’ interest in their crimes.

Sleeman himself – who continued to visit the School even after he was given additional duties in Gwalior and Bundelcund – charted the decline in their enthusiasm for murder in a letter composed shortly before his final departure from India. In 1843, he noted, the approvers still liked to talk of the old times with curious European visitors, and would do so without
prompting
, mulling over

 

William Sleeman’s long involvement with the Thugs and dacoits continued almost to the end of his lifetime’s service in India. Though he was recognized as one of the most able of the Company’s administrators, and repeatedly
promoted
and asked to assume additional responsibilities, he retained charge of the old Saugor & Nerbudda Territory well into the 1840s, was promoted to the rank of colonel, and remained General Superintendent of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department as late as 1849. These duties – combined with the new roles he assumed as Agent in Bundelcund and later Resident at Gwalior – exhausted him, and although some were discharged by subordinates, he
nevertheless
tired in his later years.

In truth, Sleeman had no one but himself to blame for his mounting exhaustion. He was ‘altogether too willing a horse’, as ambitious as ever and as ready to take on the tasks that the government in Calcutta pressed on him as he was reluctant to relinquish his many outside interests. In addition, he wrote several books – his best-known work,
Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official
, still ranks among the most important memoirs of the Victorian Raj – and, with Amélie, produced five daughters and two sons.

By 1845, indeed, Sleeman was responsible for well in excess of 100,000 square miles of India, if Gwalior is included. Inevitably, he spent a large part of each year on horseback, touring his district – an arrangement that suited him admirably, for he had never been happiest behind a desk. But he tried, nevertheless, to make a home for his growing family. His niece, who visited his new headquarters at Jhansee in the late 1840s, noted at the end of one cold season that