Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (46 page)

This is a revealing analysis. The 1820s were, after all, the great days of Thuggee. The economic hardships of that harsh decade, together with the break-up of the Pindari bands and a sharp decline in the size of the Maratha armies, meant that there were probably more Thugs on the roads in that decade than there had ever been before. Even the great famines of the late 1700s, which were more destructive than the great depression of the 1820s, probably forced fewer men into a life of banditry, for there were then abundant
opportunities
for the unemployed to seek military service. Perhaps – this can be no more than a guess – the number of gangs active in the worst years of the
eighteenth
century was between a quarter and a third of the total that existed in 1829. These groups probably did contain a high proportion of ruthless and
experienced Thugs, and may well have been more efficient and successful than their successors. But, even so, it seems unlikely they accounted for, between them, more than 1,000 deaths a year. In times of war or plenty, the total would have been less.

Assume, then, that Thuggee came into existence when the oral histories of its practitioners suggest it did, around 150 or 250 years before its ultimate
suppression
, and that it was indeed distinct from other forms of highway robbery for the whole of that time. What might its true death toll have been? Probably no more than 50,000 or 100,000 men, women and children seems to be the answer, and twice that number at most. This is a far cry from the millions proposed by James Sleeman or the hundreds of thousands suspected by other writers. Yet even 50,000 murders is an inconceivably large number – not many deaths, perhaps, when set against the toll of war, famine and
pestilence
during the same period, but a vast total nonetheless. And when it is remembered that each of the unlucky travellers inveigled by the gangs left family behind them, and that so far as these loved ones were concerned their husband, wife, brother or child simply vanished from the earth with
neither
warning nor explanation – leaving, in many cases, their relatives quite destitute – the sum total of human misery inflicted by the Thugs remains beyond computation.

A vast mass of primary source material relating to the East India Company’s government of India survives in archives in the UK and India. The India Office records kept in the Oriental and India Collections (OIOC) at the British Library in London alone fill approximately nine miles of shelving, and a similarly extensive collection of material has been retained by the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi and by regional depositories elsewhere in the Subcontinent. Many of the volumes preserved in India are filled with duplicates of originals that still exist in London, but thousands of letters and reports deemed unimportant at the time were never copied and sent home. Accurate histories of British India thus require research in both countries.

The proportion of the Company’s records that relate to Thuggee and the anti-Thug
campaign
is of course relatively small, but the files that do survive are so considerable that it is probably fair to say that no historian has ever read his way through every document
available
. I would estimate that the Thug records held in London alone comfortably exceed 60,000 large pages, many of them written in cramped and sometimes virtually illegible hands.

The most accessible of the British Library’s records consist of what are known as Board’s Collections. These volumes consist of selected material of particular importance that was copied and sent home from India to London for the attention of the Board of Control, the body with overall responsibility for the government of India. The Collections contain around 80 large files primarily or wholly devoted to Thuggee, many of which consist of copy
depositions
made by various Thug informants and the transcripts of Thug trials. A good deal of administrative correspondence relating to the anti-Thug campaign was also included in the selections prepared for transmission home.

Once received, the Board’s Collections were bound up in enormous volumes, containing on average well in excess of 1,000 pages of manuscript apiece. Virtually all of these volumes
contain
several individually paginated files. Thus a reference in the notes to, say, ‘BC F/4/1898 (80685) fos. 66–188’ refers to folios 66 to 188 of file number 80,685, which can be found in volume 1,898 of the Collections.

The broad mass of material from which the Board’s Collections were drawn also survives, and very often includes material of considerable importance that for some reason or other was never selected for presentation to the Board. This material originally formed three distinct archives maintained by the Company Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, which have been combined to form the bulk of the OIOC. Although I have searched for relevant material in the archives of Madras and Bombay, virtually all of the most important files were produced by the Bengal Presidency, which had responsibility for the districts in northern and central India where the anti-Thug campaign began and was prosecuted with the greatest vigour.

The great majority of this material can be located in two series, known as the Bengal Political Consultations (BPC) and the Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations (BCJC), which record the weekly transactions of the Governor General in Council as he and his colleagues worked their way through huge piles of correspondence and reports sent in by political officers, magistrates and judges stationed all over the Presidency. A week’s work on either might typically produce somewhere between 25 and 60 separate ‘Consultations’, or written summaries of the decisions taken regarding the lengthy submissions received in each category, most of which include
copious
extracts from the submissions themselves. Unlike the Board’s Collections, the Consultations were, unfortunately, not paginated and have to be referred to by the number and date of the relevant discussion. Thus a reference to ‘Consultation No. 46 of 18 Jan. 1811, BCJC P/130/27’ is the best that can be done to guide the interested reader to important extracts from the records of the Court of Circuit, Bareilly, Zillah Etawah, for the second Sessions of 1810, as preserved in volume 27 of the Judicial Consultations of the Bengal Presidency – a document that, as it happens, runs to the better part of 40 outsize manuscript pages.

Several lesser series of India Office papers were also consulted. In London, letters relating to Thuggee sent by the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Governor General and the Governors of the various Presidencies are preserved in series E/4, ‘Correspondence with India: Court of Directors despatches, judicial, 1795–1858’, and reports relating to the Indian prison system in series V, ‘Official Publications’. The Records of the Office for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoitee (T&D) in the National Archives of India (NAI) cover the period from the late 1820s to the 1840s and beyond, but most of the Office’s holdings for the vital years prior to 1835 are duplicated in London. More than a thousand pages of William Sleeman’s official correspondence have also been preserved and are currently to be found in the Satpura Bhawan in the State Archive of Madhya Pradesh in Bhopal, alongside a peculiarly organized collection known as the ‘Appa Sahib and Thuggee papers’ (peculiar in that Appa Sahib, the fugitive Rajah of Nagpore, had absolutely no connection to Thuggee or the
anti-Thug
campaign). Again, a large portion of the material in Bhopal is duplicated elsewhere: Sleeman’s correspondence after 1832 in the T&D papers in the NAI, and the Appa Sahib and Thuggee papers in one of only two significant printed collections of documents relating to Thuggee – an anonymously edited 1939 volume entitled
Selected Records Collected from the
 
Central Provinces and Berar Secretariat Relating to the Suppression of Thuggee, 1829–1832
, printed in Nagpore.

Two significant private manuscripts relating to Thuggee survive. Letter-books once
belonging
to Thomas Perry, magistrate at Etawah in the first years of the nineteenth century, can be found in the Department of Manuscripts at Cambridge University Library, while the ‘Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee’ made by one of William Sleeman’s assistants, James Paton, in Oudh in the later 1830s are preserved among the Additional Manuscripts series in the British Library. The former collection contains some of the earliest surviving British papers relating to Thuggee; the latter, transcriptions of a fascinating series of ‘Dialogues with Thugs’ together with a number of illustrations, drawn under the supervision of various informers, showing the members of Thug gangs going about their work.

Documentation concerning the British response to Thuggee is thus relatively complete. What is sorely lacking is material presenting an Indian perspective. Neither the independent states of the Subcontinent nor the Thugs themselves compiled any notable collection of
contemporary
documents. This omission is only partly remedied within the pages of the single most important book published on the subject, William Sleeman’s two-volume
Ramaseeana
, which incorporates a considerable quantity of roughly edited primary material. Sleeman’s own collection of official papers, published in the second volume, is an important supplement to the surviving manuscript sources discussed above. More illuminating by far, however, are Sleeman’s own ‘Conversations with Thugs’, published in the first volume, which consist of transcriptions of several lengthy interrogations of a number of Thug approvers, during which Sleeman’s
prisoners
discussed many of their most celebrated crimes as well as recounting traditions, customs and beliefs that go entirely unreported elsewhere.
Ramaseeana
is far from an ideal source; the ‘Conversations’ have been translated and perhaps edited, losing nuance in the process, and the Thug prisoners answer only the questions Sleeman saw fit to pose, which are not always those we might wish to ask today. Nonetheless, the material – containing as it does numerous
repetitions
, contradictions and even statements that fly directly in the face of opinions that Sleeman himself put in print – does seem to have been published in a more or less raw state. The ‘Conversations’ offer the most fascinating and compelling insight into the thoughts and motives of the Thugs themselves.

Among secondary sources, the most important contemporary works are probably Edward Thornton’s
Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs
– a book that, while cribbed largely from Sleeman, does include some material not featured in
Ramaseeana
– and Sleeman’s own
Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India From the Cold Season of 1836–37
. This book, despite its title, actually concerns itself with events going as far back as 1827–8.

Modern scholars have contributed enormously to a full understanding of Thuggee and have done much to place the subject in its proper context – something contemporary writers conspicuously failed to do. Among their works, I have found those of Christopher Bayly, on Indian society and British colonial intelligence, Ranjan Chakrabarti and Basudeb Chattopadhyay, on crime and policing, and Radhika Singha, on criminal justice, the most illuminating.