Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (6 page)

For all these reasons, dacoity had long been common in India, even at the height of the Mughal Empire. But it became considerably more widespread during and after the Maratha wars, and particularly with the advent of a British rule, which so often entailed sharp increases in demands for rent. Figures from the Company’s possessions in Bengal suggest that violent crimes rose rapidly after 1793, the number of people tried for what were then termed ‘heinous offences’ increasing by nearly a third between 1794 and 1801. It seems entirely likely that robbery and violence were even more prevalent in the Doab and among the central provinces of India, where the authorities were weaker, the police almost non-existent, the lot of the peasantry
considerably
worse and the bandits of the Chambal ravines lurked.

Dacoits rarely worked out in the countryside itself, preferring to launch their raids on homes in towns and villages and to depend on surprise and superior numbers to achieve their aims. In the course of Perry’s first year in Etawah, for instance, a gang of dacoits ransacked an Etawahan banker’s house, stealing 2,000 rupees and leaving 13 servants injured and another
dead; an armed band seized a large quantity of jewels; then, shortly before Christmas, a third gang burst into an important local temple and looted it of all its treasure, carrying off some 60,000 rupees’ worth of cash and goods. But even in the first years of the nineteenth century, when British rule was
well-established
throughout much of the Subcontinent, rural districts could be just as hazardous as the largest cities – and here again the men of the Chambel played their part. Thomas Perry’s attention might have been focused
principally
on dacoity in Etawah. But the magistrate would have been still more concerned had he known that other groups of thieves and robbers from his jurisdiction were active many miles from his headquarters. These men made their living on India’s dangerous roads.

 

Before the advent of the Great Mughals, even the most important Indian
highways
were not much more than unpaved tracks, dusty and pitted and liable to turn into impassable quagmires during the rainy season. Travel through the mofussil was almost always slow and frequently uncomfortable. But the sheer size of the Empire made it important to ensure swift communication and the free movement of armies. By 1700 the busiest roads had been roughly
surfaced
with gravel, gathered from riverbeds, and stones collected from the fields to make them more resistant to the rains and to the grinding wear and tear inflicted by the wheels of bullock carts.

Several new routes were also opened up through the interior. Most were in the Mughal heartlands in the north and west of the Subcontinent; few led far into the south, and only a handful stretched as far east as Bengal. But the longest of them – the celebrated Grand Trunk Road, which ran from Dacca up to Delhi and then on to the Afghan border – was 3,000 miles from end to end and thickly lined with trees to offer shade and shelter. All the most vital imperial arteries were provided with mosques and wells for the
convenience
of travellers; 30-foot pillars known as
kos minars
were thrown up to act as milestones, and comfortable inns and caravanserais were built every few miles so that messengers could change horses and wealthy travellers engage fresh relays of bearers. The Great Mughals were conscious of the importance of this work. For years, repairs to bridges and inns along the Empire’s major highways were paid for by the Emperor himself, out of his private purse.

By the early eighteenth century travel through the heartlands of the Empire had thus become comparatively easy. The imperial postal service, manned by the fabled messengers known as
hucarras
,
*
was capable of 50 miles a day across unbroken country, while well-off Indians in palanquins – the elaborate litters widely regarded as the most comfortable form of transport then available – moved at twice that speed on major roads by changing bearers frequently. The cost of crossing the interior by palanquin was, however, so staggering – as much as a rupee a mile, excluding tips – that almost no one could afford it, and the vast majority of ordinary travellers made their way through India on foot, or (if they were moderately well off) on the backs of the little ponies known as
tattoos
that were a common sight in every province.

Away from the handful of major roads, though, little changed during the Mughal period. Much of the terrain was arduous, and almost nothing was done to improve the web of minor tracks and paths that criss-crossed the mofussil. In poorer districts there was often ‘not a vestige of a road to be found, and nothing but impoverished villages to be encountered’ for mile after mile. Dried-up riverbeds were used as roads during the dry season, and such paths as did exist were dusty and uneven, being broken up by ‘cracks crossing and recrossing one another, some so large that the soil in between was in isolated, loose, irregular squares, and the cracks difficult to jump over’. All were badly scarred by the wheels of innumerable carts. Thomas Bacon, a British officer making his way inland from Calcutta in 1831, complained bitterly of the impossibility of following ‘in the ruts of what the natives call a road. When the traffic has been limited to one narrow line, be the soil sandy or swampy, the ruts are sure to be knee-deep.’

There were no milestones or signposts to guide men forced to travel on these lesser roads, and it was often difficult to persuade bearers or palanquin boys to venture away from the established routes. Other forms of transport were more or less unheard of. ‘Such conveniences as stage coaches, public wagons, and boats’ – London’s
Foreign Quarterly Review
observed – simply ‘did not exist’,
and it was impossible to find ‘any conveyances which a person might hire from stage to stage’. Even as late as 1840, those proceeding on foot or horseback through the central and southern provinces of India, or across the western deserts or the badlands of Hindustan, found it a most unpleasant business.

The physical discomforts of life on the road were so ever-present and inevitable that few Indians bothered to mention them. But it was rare for
travellers
on the minor roads to spend the night in any of the villages they passed. The few inns dotted through the mofussilwere shabby and dirty and, during the cold season at least, the climate favoured those who wished to camp outdoors in some bosky grove. Men who knew the roads – the most experienced
wayfarers
were merchants, pilgrims and soldiers going to and from their homes on leave – carried everything they needed with them: ‘a blanket or a quilt for a bed, a pot of brass or copper to boil pulse in or make a curry, a smaller one to drink out of’. Round plates of sheet iron raised on stones or clods of earth were used as stoves, little fires of sticks or dried cow dung being kindled underneath. Those who could afford to cooked rough
chapattis
and ate them with a little dried fish, spiced rice, or vegetable curry prepared with ingredients bought locally or carried with them. The staple diet of the impoverished traveller was, however, considerably less appetizing, consisting as it did of the intoxicating betel nut, chewed to sustain those on the road, and lumps of coarse and
dampened
flour known as
suttoo
, rolled into the shape of sausages and eaten raw.

It was left to foreign visitors, more accustomed to the roads of Europe, to grumble at the heat and choking dust, the insects, poor food, contaminated water, lack of privacy and sheer tedium that combined to take their toll on even hardy spirits making their way through India. ‘The traveller,’ Bacon complained, ‘often has to find his way over trackless plains, or through crops and jungul, without any better guide than the sun’, and the highly cultured Fanny Eden – who set out on an unhurried tour ‘up the country’ during the 1830s – was so appalled by the conditions she encountered that she copied down one of the reports compiled by scouts sent to survey the road ahead:

Fanny’s sister Emily, who had joined the progress in order to escape the
horrors
of summer in an Indian city, was just as much dismayed by the experience. ‘I shall,’ she sighed in her own journal, ‘always respect marching, for making me like Calcutta.’

 

Thomas Perry’s main concerns were with the roads around Etawah itself.

In the first years of the nineteenth century, highway robbers of all sorts found it easy enough to prey on men and women travelling through India. Even armed parties were vulnerable to attack. Once away from the main roads, there were few police and no patrols to offer protection, and many isolated spots were well suited to ambush. Robbers fleeing the scene of an attack could lose themselves amid the spider’s web of minor tracks and paths that threaded through the mofussil, and it was only rarely that the alarm could be raised in time to mount an effective pursuit.

Etawah, under British rule, was as poorly policed as it had been decades earlier. Within weeks of his arrival in the city, Perry was ordered to cut the costs of his patrols by 32,000 rupees, a severe reduction that forced the
magistrate
to reduce the number of policemen he employed and to revise the salaries of those who remained. In consequence, all the outlying areas in his district were left poorly protected, and the loyalty of the men serving in Etawah itself was greatly tested. By the first months of 1809, Perry’s police found themselves badly outnumbered by the groups of armed retainers assembled by the district’s more powerful zamindars, and more or less
powerless
to prevent local landholders from flouting the Company’s authority. ‘Daily experience,’ the magistrate vainly protested to his superiors, ‘teaches them that they have nothing to fear from any force that the [police] can bring against them, and ignorant as they profess to appear of our System of Government, they have acuteness enough to discern that military aid cannot be resorted to except in cases of the most pressing necessity.’ So it was scarcely surprising, all things considered, that the bodies of murdered men continued to appear in ditches and wells along the main routes leading into the city from both the east and west.

There were no suspects, for the sheer ruthlessness of the murders
suggested
they were not the work of dacoits or any ordinary criminals. And there were no precedents for how best to proceed, for homicide, even in
those violent times, was not especially common in India. Such cases as did occur were almost always the products of land disputes or domestic violence and were, as such, rarely difficult to solve. Cold-blooded murder – visited, apparently, by one or two gangs on a succession of strangers – was more or less unknown.

The magistrate responded as best he could. He set up a checkpoint, manned by a dozen policemen, on the main road between Mynpooree and Agra, where a good proportion of the bodies had been discovered. He offered a large reward – 1,000 rupees, the equivalent of well over 10 years’ earnings for most peasants in the Doab – in exchange for information leading to the murderers themselves. Then he settled back to wait.

For the better part of 18 months, nothing happened – nothing, that is, but the discovery of yet more mutilated bodies in the Etawahan wells. The new checkpoint proved utterly ineffective, no arrests were made, and no
informants
came forward with worthwhile information. Perry may even have begun to doubt that he would ever solve the mystery that tormented him. Then, in the first weeks of the new hot season, news came from nearby Shekoabad that ‘private information of a very important nature’ had at last been received from a police informant. Eight men had been arrested on suspicion of murder and questioned by local police officials. Each, in turn, had been asked his name and occupation. One, 20 years old, had talked.