Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (58 page)

Thug murders
Richard Sherwood, ‘Of the Murderers Called Phansigars’,
Asiatick Researches
13 (1820) pp. 270–71; PA Reynolds, ‘Notes on the T’hags’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
4 (1837) p. 213; Meadows Taylor,
Confessions of a Thug
p. vi; ‘Deposition of Rumzan, a noted Thug … taken at Lucknow, 20 April 1837’, Paton papers Add.Mss. 41300 fo. 122v.

Sumachar Durpan
Cited by Iftikhar Ahmad,
Thugs, Dacoits and the Modern World-System in Nineteenth-Century India
p. 126.

James Sleeman’s estimate
Fearing that this total would not be believed, Sleeman reduced it to one million quite arbitrarily, by assuming the number of deaths to be 10,000 a year over no more than a century. James Sleeman,
Thug
pp. 232–6.

Futteh Khan’s estimate
Paton papers fos. 28, 122v.

Paton’s map of Thug beles
See ibid. fos. 172v, 202v–203. A copy of Paton’s map of Oudh can be found at BC F/4/1898 (80685) fo. 305, and a photograph of it appears in Francis Tuker’s book.

Syeed Ameer Ali’s estimate
Meadows Taylor,
Confessions of a Thug
p. vi.

‘
Not broken down
’ See, however, Paton papers fos. 202v–203, where Buhram’s murders are broken down by location.

Quarterly Review
‘A religion of murder’,
Quarterly Review
Oct. 1901 pp. 506–19.

‘
Buhram, for one
…’ ‘Narrative of a Thuggee expedition in Oude during the cold weather,
supposed
to have been in 1830 … related by Buhram, a leader of Thugs’, Paton papers fo. 118.

Ramzan’s estimates
Ibid. fos. 122v–123, 172.

Average number of victims
Median figure calculated from an analysis of all the incidents
mentioned
in
Ramaseeana
,
Depredations
and Thornton’s
Illustrations
. Even this figure may be an exaggeration, since both Sleeman and Thornton naturally described the most sensational Thug murders rather than the everday.

Number of killings
For the Lucknadown gang, see Smith to Swinton, 21 May 1832, BC F/4/1404 (55517) fos. 207, 209. For Feringeea’s gangs and the subahdar’s gang, see
Depredations
pp. 22–68. For Sayeed Ally and Dawood Newly (the latter, other depositions
suggest
, being actually a corruption of the name ‘Duriow Nujeeb’), see ‘Deposition of Sheikh Dawood Newly …’, 24 Nov. 1834 and ‘Deposition of Sayeed Ally …’, 25 Nov. 1834, both T&D D2/1, NAI.

Opening quotation from the interrogation of Hurree Singh is from Sleeman,
Ramaseeana
I, 35n–36n.

The quotations at the head of each chapter are phrases drawn from Sleeman’s lexicon of Thug slang, in
Ramaseeana
I, 67–140, and Martine van Woerkens,
The Strangled Traveller
pp. 295–315.

[a] British Library

Oriental and India Office Collections

[i] East India Company papers

E Correspondence with India

F Board’s Collections

P Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations Bengal Political Consultations

V Official Publications

X Maps

[ii] Bengal Obituaries

[iii] European manuscripts

Mss. Eur E/258

Charles Fraser papers

Add.Mss
.

Add.Mss. 41300

James Paton papers

[b] Manuscript department, University of Cambridge Library

Add.Mss. 5375–6

Perry letter-books

[c] National Archives of India, New Delhi

Records of the Office for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoitee

[d] State Archive of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal

Satpura Bhawan

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