Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (45 page)

Such pleasant domestic interludes were, however, rare in Sleeman’s later life. Two of his children died in infancy, while the remaining five suffered so much in the climate that they were sent home one by one to be educated in England – a voyage so lengthy, expensive and taxing, in the days before the building of the Suez Canal, that their father never saw them again. Sleeman himself continued to suffer from recurring bouts of the Nathpore fever he had contracted in Nepal. He spent much of the year 1836 on sick leave, and his wife’s health was so precarious that she and her younger children had to absent themselves for a good part of every year to one of the fashionable hill stations built in the shadow of the Himalayas for those Company officers and wives able to escape the suffocating heat and dust of summer. So disillusioned did he and Amélie become with their prospects in the country that they began planning for a retirement to the United States. For a while Sleeman had one eye on a new life in the Mississippi valley, which he considered the most suitable place for a large family such as his own to settle. ‘It is a noble country,’ he observed, ‘were it not deformed with that horrible system of slavery. If it can only shake that off, its institutions will make it a model for the world.’

The government of India was, however, anxious to retain Sleeman’s services, and his continued loyalty was eventually secured in 1848 with the
offer of the Residency at the court of Oudh. This was the most coveted post available to a political officer of the Bengal Presidency. The position brought with it not only huge influence – Oudh, strategically positioned between Delhi and Benares, was the richest and perhaps the most important Native State north of the Nerbudda – but also a good salary and substantial perquisites. It was part of the Resident’s job to impress the king and court with the power of the Company, and the holder of the post was provided with the means to live and entertain lavishly. Sleeman’s own entry to the capital, Lucknow, was made at the head of 300 elephants and camels.
*

It was, nonetheless, a difficult appointment. The king, Wajid Ali Khan, was a notorious eccentric, ‘whose sole ambition was the puerile one of becoming the finest drummer in Oudh’; and the day-to-day administration of the
kingdom
had been placed in the hands of a courtier named Wasir Ali, whom Sleeman found to be the ‘greatest knave’ in the country. Under these men’s inefficient rule, the once-rich province had slipped so close to bankruptcy that the Governor General in Calcutta had begun to threaten annexation. Sleeman – whose views of the Company’s proper role in India were shaped more by the eighteenth century than the nineteenth – strenuously opposed this policy, and he endured five miserable years in Lucknow, increasingly
frustrated
by his inability to persuade the court there to accept reform. ‘Such a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity and neglect of duty and abuse of authority,’ he wrote,

The Resident’s sympathies remained, as ever, with the Indian peasantry, who suffered most under Wajid Ali’s rule, and he became so angry at the injustices he saw that at least one historian has suggested he became
dangerously obsessed with the swirling intrigues of the court. He was also, at last, in physical decline. ‘Mentally,’ wrote one young British officer who encountered him in Oudh, ‘he was in his prime in this period, but physically he was far from that: short of stature though somewhat muscular and robust in frame, he appeared shrunken and aged.’

Matters were not helped by the three separate attempts that were made on Sleeman’s life between 1842 and 1853. Two were the work of disgruntled local people, but the third was apparently perpetrated by an escaped Thug in Lucknow. The one account of this incident comes from the recollection of Sleeman’s daughter Elizabeth, who as a little girl

before allowing himself to be disarmed.

In any event, the general strain of life in Oudh eventually proved too much for Sleeman, whose health had been severely weakened by his repeated bouts of fever. Although the government wanted him to stay, he was forced to relinquish his position late in 1855, at about the time his old enemy Feringeea also died, and – a sure sign of just how severe his illness had become – even make preparations for a return to Britain, which he had not seen since 1809. Sleeman and his wife reached Calcutta early in January 1856 and sailed for home on the first of February. But the fever suddenly worsened. On 10 February, off the coast of Ceylon, Sleeman died, and was buried at sea. Amélie survived him for a quarter of a century, spending the remainder of her life not in her birthplace, Mauritius, but close to her children in the genteel if less exotic surroundings of Southsea, on the English coast.

Sleeman thus left India before the government’s final annexation of Oudh, which took place four days after he had sailed and undid most of the work of his later years. He also died a year before the outbreak of the great Indian Mutiny of 1857. This was perhaps fortunate, for his contemporaries in the
Indian civil service were among those most distressed by the Company’s increasingly high-handed treatment of its Indian subjects, which became one of the main causes of the uprising. The Mutiny’s great epic, ironically enough, was the rebel siege of Sleeman’s old residency at Lucknow, which was grimly defended for six months by a tiny force of soldiers and political officers. When they were finally driven from it, in November 1857, one
officer
risked his life by going back, through the mutineers’ lines, to rescue a portrait of Sleeman that had been hung inside. It was carried to safety wrapped around a soldier’s musket, the last relic of the old Thug-hunter’s final years.

Sleeman’s real legacy, of course, was something more than that. In less than a decade, he and Francis Curwen Smith and their various associates had stamped out Thuggee, a crime that had persisted, in all likelihood, for several hundred years. They had arrested nearly 4,000 men and, by hanging or imprisoning the vast majority of them, made the roads of central India safe for the first time in living memory.

Sleeman’s methods have attracted increasing criticism in recent years. Today we can see, rather more clearly than was possible in the 1830s, that the evidence against some of the convicted Thugs was far from compelling. Sleeman himself admitted that his men sometimes arrested people guilty of nothing more than being found in the company of Thugs, though he always remained sanguine that such mistakes would be uncovered by the courts.

It is also no doubt true that the Company men charged with eradicating Thuggee held (as historians have charged) rather a simplistic view of the Thugs themselves. Once the original work of suppressing the Thugs was more or less complete, moreover, the men of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department did cast around for other tasks to justify their existence, and though the department might with some justification claim that its
campaigns
against the Megpunnas, the Tusma-Baz, and other supposed varieties of Thug did result in the arrest of a large number of professional criminals, they had unfortunate consequences. The tendency to classify whole tribes and castes as inevitably and irredeemably ‘criminal’ was given additional impetus by the Thug campaigns. Sleeman’s department thus helped to create the climate in which what was known as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1876 became law, effectively criminalizing entire communities – and that was one of the most discreditable of all pieces of Imperial legislation. The Superintendent’s
own growing obsession with exterminating the entire ‘race of Thugs’ became, eventually, unhealthy, and there can be little doubt that a number of innocent men were tried and found guilty of Thuggee, particularly after 1835.

Yet Sleeman himself was not to blame for all his department’s failings. He had as detailed an understanding of the Thugs’ methods and organization as any Company official, and made it clear, in both his official correspondence and his published works, that there was indeed a difference between
hereditary
and occasional Thugs, and between those who murdered out of desperation and those who killed because they had grown up doing so. Nor should it ever be forgotten – as Sleeman’s critics do forget – that the
suppression
of Thuggee did save thousands of lives. Because of him, husbands who would once have been strangled for a rupee returned home safely to their wives, and fathers lived to raise their children.

 

The Thugs of the School of Industry lived on long after Sleeman’s death: almost, some of them, to the opening of the twentieth century.

However impeccable their behaviour and industrious their sons, they could never be released, and one by one they died in jail. The number of men whose age and declining health forced them to give up work and stay within the confines of the Thug village rose steadily for two decades after Sleeman’s death. There were 100 of them in 1854, and more than 122 by 1872. After that, the totals of the infirm began to fall as the old Thugs simply expired. In 1874, the British knocked down nearly 60 vacant huts in the Thuggee Lines, and deaths among the remaining Thug and dacoit prisoners were running at as many as 30 men each year. The old Thuggee jail in Jubbulpore, where
prisoners
other than the approvers themselves were kept, was closed in 1872 and turned into a lunatic asylum; the surviving handful of inmates were
transferred
to the village, where the last of them died in 1882. By then there were only 71 of the old approvers left, where once there had been more than 200. Three-quarters of those were gone a decade later, leaving so few – no more than 20 – that the School of Industry was finally shut down and its buildings turned over to the city for use as a juvenile reform school.

The approvers’ sons were long gone by this time, encouraged or in a few cases forced to leave in search of gainful employment. The surviving Thug and dacoit prisoners were scattered. A few of the younger ones were sent to
the prison at Jhalna, and a large proportion – almost half – of the remainder begged to be allowed to end their days in the Thuggee village. They were too late; the plans for the reformatory had already been approved. The mens’
petition
was rejected, and on 31 December 1892 the last handful of imprisoned Thugs were forcibly evicted from their homes. They had lived there, some of them, for more than half a century. Now they were too old to earn a living, and had no relatives who could help them adapt to a world where they no longer belonged.

While they had been confined, India had changed so utterly that they did not recognize it. Their old cart-tracks were now railroads; the mango groves where they had murdered their victims had been uprooted to make way for ever expanding settlements; and where once it had taken weeks for a man to travel from town to town, and months for him to be reported missing, it was now possible to make the same journeys in a day and for policemen hundreds of miles apart to communicate instantaneously by telegraph. These
innovations
, which would have doomed Thuggee without the intervention of William Sleeman, could not be resisted.

Thus, for what was certainly the last time, a band of Thugs took to the roads of India. They were very old, and several walked only with the aid of sticks; they hunted not for victims, but for homes; and dreamed not of murdering and plunder, but of coming to a place where they themselves could die.

It is all but impossible to know, even approximately, how many men, women and children lost their lives to the Thugs.

The estimates that do exist vary wildly. Richard Sherwood, writing in 1816, supposed that all the stranglers of the Deccan between them murdered no more than a few hundred travellers a year. Lieutenant Reynolds, 20 years later, interrogated Phansigars who spoke ‘of having put their tens and
twenties
to death daily’ in the course of expeditions that lasted for four months at a time. The latter boast implied a number of victims so vast that even Syeed Ameer Ali – who spoke of being ‘directly concerned’ in the throttling of 719 victims – and Ramzan, an Oudh Thug who (aged 38) claimed that he had witnessed more than 1,800 murders, seemed mere dilettantes in comparison. Certainly the
Sumachar Durpan
(a contemporary Indian newspaper ‘of great respectability’) concluded in 1833 that the ‘Thugs slaughtered on an average
eight hundred persons in a month
’, and in 1920, when Sleeman’s grandson James reviewed his ancestor’s papers in an attempt to arrive at a definitive figure, the estimate he produced was higher still. The gangs, together, he wrote in his book
Thug
, probably killed somewhere in the region of 40,000 people every year.
*

Was such a death toll possible? Sleeman insisted that it was, pointing out that the population of India was somewhere over 250 million, and that more people were killed each year in the Subcontinent by snakes. And it is true that some of the testimonies given by the Thugs themselves do support his calculations. Paton’s approver Futty Khan, for one, estimated that a well-frequented bele might witness as many as ‘10 or 15 murders yearly’ – which, given that a total of 274 such spots had been mapped in the Kingdom of Oudh alone, certainly implied that a vast number of murders were committed every year. Paton also questioned his approvers as to the number of killings in which they had been involved. Their responses show that individual Thugs did indeed admit to having strangled dozens, and often hundreds, of victims over a period of years.

According to depositions taken down at Lucknow during the year 1837:

Some of these figures are certainly remarkable. As Paton himself pointed out, if a mere 20 approvers could take part in 5,120 murders – ‘an average of
256 involving each Thug’ – then the death toll exacted by the Thug gangs as a whole must have been enormous. Of course, these killings were committed over many decades: Futty Khan was an active Thug for 20 years, and Buhram thugged for 40, which would mean that each was present at an average of no more than two murders a month. But this – Paton believed – made his approvers’ claims more rather than less believable. Certainly there are accounts from elsewhere in India of other stranglers who matched them; Syeed Ameer Ali’s 719 murders were the result of 30 years spent on the roads, and also
represented
an average of two deaths a month – a figure that the Thug himself was perfectly aware of, since he reminded Meadows Taylor: ‘Ah! Sir, if I had not been in prison twelve years, the number would have been a thousand.’

Paton’s figures, which found their way into print a few years later, were to prove highly influential. In the absence of any similar document from Sleeman or Smith, the manuscript pages of his ‘Dialogues with Thugs’ make up one of the very few pieces of evidence produced during the
anti-Thug
campaign that purports to show the number of murders committed by individual stranglers. In 1901 the
Quarterly Review
used the list to
estimate
that the average Thug killed three victims a year. Two decades later, James Sleeman based his estimate of 40,000 Thug murders per annum upon it.

Yet it is very dangerous to extrapolate a death toll for the whole of India from the confessions of a few approvers. For one thing, Futty Khan, Buhram and Syeed Ameer Ali were hardly ordinary Thugs; their testimonies place them at the head of their profession, and it cannot be assumed that other stranglers enjoyed equal success. For another, the claims they made were never tested in a court of law and were not even broken down and
enumerated
month by month and year by year, much less cross-referenced against any register of murders suspected to have been committed by the Thugs. In these circumstances, there was nothing to prevent Paton’s men from lying in the hope of pleasing their captors, or simply to seek notoriety. Approvers were useful only while they had fresh information to impart, and claiming involvement in a large number of murders may well have struck some of Paton’s Thugs as a way of increasing their value to the Company.

It is apparent, from other depositions preserved among the Paton papers, that their testimony could be highly inconsistent. Buhram, for one, who claimed in 1837 to have taken part in more than 930 killings, had told a very
different story only a year earlier. In his first deposition, he confessed to involvement in a mere 275 murders (‘I may have strangled with my own hands about 125 men, and I may have seen strangled 150 more’), a discrepancy that neither he nor Paton ever bothered to explain. The lower total, spread over the four decades of his career, equates to no more than seven killings every year.
*
Similarly, Ramzan, who figured prominently in Paton’s table with the claim to have participated in 604 murders, once deposed that he had actually ‘seen between 80 and 90 men strangled yearly’ during his 22 years as a Thug, the latter estimate producing a death toll three times greater than the former. Once again, Paton failed to comment on the inconsistency. The best that can be said of his approvers’ testimony is that it requires corroboration. Certainly no policeman and no court would take it at face value.

The value of Paton’s data is further undermined by the fact that he
understates
the frequency with which his approvers would have had to kill in order to reach the totals he attributed to them. The idea that a successful Thug might help commit two murders a month does not seem utterly outlandish – but when it is remembered that even the most ruthless gangs were rarely at large outside the cold season, the requirement triples to 24 deaths in only four months, or one murder every five days. This is a much harder figure to credit, not least because it was comparatively rare for the Thugs to despatch large parties of victims. The number of victims killed in the average affair turns out to be four, and each of these groups had to be encountered, inveigled, taken to a suitable bele and strangled before the next could be pursued. The
depositions
assembled for the various Thug trials suggest that this whole process often took more than 20 days to complete.

Finally, there is the matter of the Thugs’ modus operandi to consider. All attempts to produce a total death toll by multiplying the number of killings confessed to by one man by the number of Thugs at large is fatally flawed by the fact that few members of most gangs actually committed murder. Perhaps no more than one Thug in every 6 to 10 was a strangler or a hand-holder. His companions – scouts, lookouts, inveiglers, grave-diggers and mere
hangers-on
 
 – never personally disposed of a single victim. Thus, when a man such as Syeed Ameer Ali spoke of taking part in 719 killings, he was referring to the murders committed by an entire gang, on average at least 25 men strong and frequently numbering 100 or more Thugs, over the course of three decades. Even if Ameer Ali’s claims were true, the number of victims despatched by his gang in the course of a typical expedition turns out to be no more than 24: an average of at most one murder per man per year.

The evidence assembled by Smith and Sleeman and presented at the trials of Thugs arraigned in the central provinces supports the view that few Thugs killed huge numbers of travellers. Plenty of depositions make it plain that
victims
were very often hard to come by. Some men spoke of being forced by sheer destitution to murder travellers whom they doubted bore so much as a rupee. Others referred to expeditions that saw whole gangs of Thugs go for weeks, and even months, without committing murder. Thus, while the number of victims claimed by a gang could vary dramatically according to their location, luck, and the skill of their inveiglers, only a few enjoyed
conspicuous
success. We know that Essuree and the 150 men of the Lucknadown gang killed 37 victims in six different beles during the cold season of 1822–3, and that Feringeea, at the head of gangs totalling anywhere from 25 to 220 men, confessed to the murder of 105 men and women in 1827–8, another 80 in 1828–9, and 48 more up to the moment of his arrest in 1830 – a total of 233 victims in a mere three years. But these were Thugs at the height of their powers. A good many gangs accounted for no more than 10 or 12 travellers a year, and some murdered even fewer. Sleeman told of one group of 30 men – led by a subadar, no less – that killed only nine people in the season 1827–8. One of his assistants, a Captain Vallancy, described a group of low Thugs that experienced similarly modest success, for though the members of this gang ‘were most inveterate murderers, sparing neither sex nor age; nor did they pay any respect to those castes which other Thugs thought it a heinous offence to murder’, their lack of discrimination was evidently offset by a lack of skill, and they accounted for a mere 80 victims in the course of 11 years. Many Deccan Thugs struggled, too. Sheikh Dawood Newly, one of Reynolds’s informants, recorded that 17 gangs, working together for two seasons, had committed only slightly more than 60 murders, and his colleague, Sayeed Ally, informed on 10 more jemadars who had inveigled no more than two dozen travellers over the same period. Between them, then, these two approvers supplied
evidence against 27 gangs – a grand assembly of stranglers who had, between them, accounted for only 50 travellers a year.

Most of these less able Thugs, it might be conjectured, were mere novices, forced onto the roads during the grim years of the 1820s and the 1830s with little idea of how to go about their task. But even the most capable jemadars rarely matched the success enjoyed by Feringeea and his men. The Arcottee Thugs, a gang of Deccan stranglers 60 strong reckoned by all who knew them to be particularly ruthless and skilful, killed no more than 150 victims over the course of 13 years, an average of fewer than a dozen travellers a year. The gang of an approver known as Rama Jemadar the First murdered 46 men and women in four years for a similar average. Perhaps the most startling statistic was produced by Francis Curwen Smith, who calculated – based on the interrogation of thousands of stranglers at dozens of trials – that the 584 Thugs expeditions that criss-crossed the central provinces and Upper Provinces between 1827 and 1834 had accounted for a total of just 1,803 victims.

The truth seems to be this: even in the 1820s, a single Thug gang 25 men strong would be fortunate to murder more than a dozen travellers each year. A similarly sized group of novice stranglers, in this same period, might well account for half that number. Since no more than 200 jemadars of Thugs appear to have been active at this time, each with his own small group of
followers
, it might be estimated that in 1829, when the Company’s campaign began, the Thug gangs committed somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400
murders
a year across the length and breadth of India. The real total, given the Thugs’ habit of banding together in large and inefficient groups, was most likely closer to the lower figure than the higher.