Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (9 page)

Whether or not the Thugs of the Jumna valley were truly as ancient or unique as they thought themselves to be, the confessions made by Gholam Hossyn and his fellow prisoners soon led to the apprehension of other
members
of the fraternity. The members of Ujba’s band had been arrested in March 1810. By the middle of May, the British had seized a further 70 men, most of them associates of one or other of his original prisoners. Several of the stranglers’ most influential leaders did contrive to slip through the Company’s net. But, alarmed by the rapid progress of the British campaign, others abandoned their homes along the north bank of the Jumna and fled south, out of the Company’s lands, to escape similar fates.

From the Company’s perspective, then, this first drive against the Thugs of the Doab seemed to have been a considerable success. The number of bodies discovered on the high roads around Etawah and in the wells of the district fell sharply almost at once, from 67 in 1808–9 to only 14 in 1810. ‘As a further proof of the decrease of this species of offence,’ Perry added in a report drawn up for his superiors in Bengal, ‘it may be necessary to observe that only four murdered bodies have been found during the [last] period of six months.’

It was, in truth, no more than a partial victory. The captured Thugs who had been sent for trial before the
Nizamat Adalat
(the Company’s supreme court) in Bengal retracted the confessions they had made in Etawah and were
eventually acquitted. The law, as it then stood, required that formal
complaints
be lodged by the families of the Thugs’ murdered victims and that the statements of other witnesses, as well as circumstantial evidence, should
supplement
the testimony of even admitted criminals if a conviction was to be secured. Perry – who had been unable to establish the identity of the
mutilated
corpses discovered within his jurisdiction, much less find living witnesses to the Thugs’ depredations – was reprimanded for his ‘irregular’ proceedings. But it was only towards the end of the cold season of 1812, when bodies began appearing once again on the High Road outside Etawah, that the magistrate fully realized his enemies’ resilience. The men whom he had driven from their villages north of the Jumna two years earlier had not given up Thuggee. Nor had most fled far from their old homes. Many had travelled no more than a few miles, establishing themselves in the district immediately south of Etawah, on the far bank of the Jumna. There, amid the badlands along the Company’s border with the Maratha territories, they
continued
to practise their familiar trade, secure in the knowledge that their new home was one of the most inaccessible and lawless places in the whole of the Subcontinent, and that the powerful local zamindars who ruled it would
protect
them – for a price.

The villages that welcomed the fleeing Doab gangs were already home to more Thugs than any comparable district in India. There were several dozen such settlements in all, scattered across three
parganas
.
*
The northern
portion
, which lay below the Jumna and the valley of its clear, fast-flowing sister river, the notorious Chambel, fell within the district of Sindouse. This region, nominally part of the Company’s possessions since 1807, was as bleak as anywhere in India: a sparsely inhabited wilderness of scrub and naked rock, with ‘only here and there a patch of culturable ground’, all but
impenetrable
to outsiders. Its principal feature was a maze of jagged ravines which scarred the land in either direction for as far as the eye could see, twisting and turning back upon themselves so frequently that it was all too easy to become lost. The rest of the district was ‘made up of a succession of steep ridges, low sloping hills, deep hollows and winding streams. In places the soil is devoid of all vegetation, while elsewhere it is covered with low scrub jungle.’

A few miles to the south – on the far side of a second tangle of impenetrable
gorges – British territory butted up against the furthest flung of Sindhia’s lands along the rugged banks of the Sindh and the Coharry. These districts, too, had been settled by Thugs in considerable numbers. Contemporary estimates put the number of stranglers living in Sindouse at around 400, while in the Maratha territory there were at least 500 more, many of them living in the large village of Murnae, a mile or two to the west of Sindouse and only a few hundred yards on Sindhia’s side of the border.

Dealing with the Thugs of these recalcitrant parganas was no easy matter. So formidable were the inhabitants, and so strong the natural defences afforded to them by the fortified villages they had built in the ravines, that the district had been more or less ignored by the Company authorities at Etawah ever since its acquisition. The local zamindars appeared to be ‘almost invincible’, and were certainly strong enough to resist the limited British forces in the area. Virtually the entire population was armed, and ‘instances of prowess’, Perry’s assistant magistrate, Nathaniel Halhed, observed, ‘are common occurrences. The Sindouse
Sirdar
(headman) can turn out 2,000 armed men and with the assistance of his connections in the Mahratta states can call for 2,000 more.’ These irregulars, in turn, could summon reinforcements amounting to another 12,000 men, and though even this combined force would never stand and fight a pitched battle, the ease with which they could retreat over the Maratha border made it almost impossible to defeat them.

It is scarcely surprising, in these circumstances, that Thomas Perry and his colleagues left the inhabitants of Sindouse largely to their own devices. Effective control of the district thus passed from its former ruler, a minor Maratha potentate known as the Rajah of Rampoora, to a group of
zamindars
whose principal aim was to prevent the British authorities from interfering in their territory. Under the leadership of a certain Raja Madho Singh, these men contrived to obstruct the Company at every turn for several years, while conceding just enough to make British intervention south of the Jumna seem unnecessary and unwise.

Ordinary policing was of no avail in such a district. As late as 1810 there were no Company police in Sindouse at all, and though a detachment 40 strong was sent to the pargana in that year, it proved so pathetically
inadequate
that the men were soon reduced to cowering within the walls of their half-ruined mud-brick fort in the village of Sindouse itself, on the south bank
of the Coharry some 30 miles south-east of Etawah. Over the next two years the police ventured out of their headquarters so infrequently that – Halhed noted with disgust – ‘an entire village was only discovered six months ago, even though it was only half a mile from the fort’. Law and order was thus non-existent. Travellers foolhardy enough to wander into the district, the assistant magistrate observed, ‘never go out of it alive’.

It was not until late in 1812 that Perry at last received the information he required to disperse the Thugs who dared to make their homes on British
territory
. Early in the cold season of that year, an argument flared up between the members of several Sindouse gangs and a zamindar by the name of Tejun, who had been their landlord for some years. The dispute soon became so serious that the Thugs decided to move to another part of Sindouse and seek the protection of another zamindar called Laljee. Tejun – who had no doubt claimed a considerable proportion of the profits of his Thugs and so stood to lose a good portion of his income – asked his colleague to force the disgruntled stranglers to return to their old homes. When Laljee refused, an angry Tejun took his revenge by informing the authorities in Etawah of the existence of the Thugs.

Perry wasted little time in acting on such important information. Assembling all the troops at his disposal – 40 sepoys from the Company’s 23rd Regiment, Native Infantry, led by a young Irish lieutenant named John Maunsell, and the men of his own guard – he placed them under Halhed’s command and ordered his assistant to march south and impose order on the rebellious pargana. The inhabitants were to be disarmed, in so far as this was possible, and the district’s zamindars, including Laljee, compelled to observe the Company’s regulations. Once that had been achieved, the police would be in a better position to deal with the Thugs and dacoits so prevalent in the district.

Nathaniel Halhed was well suited to the task Perry had set him. He was the nephew of a distinguished Company servant, NB Halhed, who was the author of the first codification in English of Hindu laws,
*
and he had been in India since 1804. He spoke the local languages so well that – suitably disguised – he could pass undetected among native Indians. Most importantly,
he was tough. He had already brought order to several recalcitrant districts around Allygurh and had survived at least one skirmish with rebellious locals in the Doab, in the course of which he had been struck full in the forehead by an arrow. He was supremely confident in his own authority and determined to ensure that the zamindars of Sindouse, like those he had encountered elsewhere, yielded to the Company’s authority.

 

Halhed and his men reached Sindouse on the evening of 9 October 1812, their first day in the ravine country. Their march south from Etawah had been without incident. But the magistrate – hearing that ‘Laljee and others, principal zamindars … had assembled a large force to cut me off in the Ravines’ – was determined to approach the village cautiously. He picked up some reinforcements in the shape of Indian troops sent by his friend, the Rajah of Bhurdaweree, stationed a small party in the ravines to protect his line of retreat, and set up his camp outside the village of Sindouse itself.

The local inhabitants proved to be friendly – disconcertingly so. ‘The people of the village,’ Halhed noted, ‘were extremely assiduous in offering milk and flour to the people who came in with me.’ But it was not until late that first evening that the magistrate discovered the real reason for this show of cooperation. Shortly after supper had been taken, he and Lieutenant Maunsell were prostrated by sickening stomach cramps, ‘and from the
violence
and suddenness of the symptoms I had every reason to suspect poison had been administered’. A large dose of datura had been added to the milk purchased in the village, and though both officers immediately dosed
themselves
with violent purgatives, they lay virtually incapacitated in their tents throughout the night. ‘I imagine,’ Halhed added,

The sight of Halhed and Maunsell reviewing their men disconcerted Laljee and the force of Thugs and armed retainers he had assembled in the ravines. Rather than launching an attack, the zamindar prudently retreated towards the Maratha border, leaving the Company’s troops in possession of his village. But Halhed knew that he was worryingly exposed. Thousands of well-armed rebels lurked nearby, ready to attack, and the pargana could scarcely be
pacified
until they had been dispersed. Until that could be achieved, Sindouse itself, with its limited resources, had to be occupied and its recalcitrant
inhabitants
faced down. It was far from an appealing prospect.

The magistrate’s mood – probably not good to begin with – can only have been worsened by the sight of his new quarters in the village’s barely
defensible
mud fort. The walls were in a poor state of repair, and were unlikely to resist determined assault. A cursory inspection revealed that there were no reserves of food. In the event of an attack, Halhed grimly concluded, the place could hardly be relied on to do more than ‘provide [for] the lives of every soul belonging to the Government for a few hours’.

Halhed and Maunsell spent the first half of October struggling to impose any sort of order on the pargana. Their attempts to disarm the people of the
surrounding
settlements were only partially successful. Twenty stands of muskets were seized in the village of Chourella – ‘which has been noted above all others for obstinacy and violence’ – but Halhed’s sepoys had only been in the village for a matter of hours when Laljee and 300 of his men appeared in the surrounding ravines, ‘from which they kept up a smart fire on us for about five minutes’. Three villagers were wounded and a horse killed before the Thugs and their
supporters
made good their escape and a worried Halhed retired to his ruined fort.