Sleeman ought to have sailed at an even earlier age but, in an early sign of his always slightly awkward relationship with the rest of British India, and of his independence of mind, he had declined to join the Company college for cadets at Basaret. The college suffered from its closeness to Calcutta. Its cadets were at the time reckoned to be ‘in a continual uproar, blowing coach-horns and bugles, baiting jackals with pariah-dogs, fighting cocks, and shooting kites and crows’. Sleeman instead had opted for a course of private tutoring at home in England and this meant that, aged twenty, he was reckoned rather old to take up a cadetship. However, he arrived well equipped, in particular his private tutoring had revealed a gift that would stand him in the very best of steads for his career in India. He was a marvellous linguist. From the start, he showed his extraordinary facility with a range of indigenous languages. Indeed, his independent efforts at preparation proved rather more useful than did the official Company handbook, which he had taken care to study thoroughly in the course of his long journey from England. This document lacked any form of military instruction and was instead filled with hints on the number of servants one might bring with one to India and on the necessity for gentlemanly behaviour.
The India in which Sleeman arrived was undergoing two great changes, one obvious, the other less so. The obvious one was political in nature. Britain, in the form of the East India Company, was consolidating her position following a long period of relative unrest and strife. The Company had been founded explicitly as a trading enterprise, having received its Royal Charter from Elizabeth I, with a focus on the spice and textile trade. The eighteenth century on the subcontinent had seen the decline of the Mughal Empire. Simultaneously, the British gained the upper hand over French traders in the region, and a series of significant military victories saw the Company evolve slowly from a trading enterprise into a governor of much territory in Bengal and elsewhere. When Sleeman arrived in the autumn of 1809, the Company was at the height of its power. Its formal rule over territory was accompanied by informal control over a string of nominally independent princely states. The result was that British suzerainty over India was to all intents and purposes complete, which everyone knew.
The second change was rather more subtle, though arguably just as visible to those in India. It had to do with a culture change, with the moral attitudes and behaviour of the British population in India and how these would alter as the culture at home went from tyranny to Victorian. The challenge in particular was to find a role and a code of behaviour in conservative Indian society for British women, who were arriving in greater numbers as British influence across the subcontinent was consolidated. It is important to remember that in the more precarious but also more relaxed world of the previous century, there had simply been no capacity for the British to consider imposing too many of their morals on India. They had neither the inclination nor the practical strength to attempt to do so. As the nineteenth century began, however, this started to change and as the Victorian age approached and a reaction grew against what was perceived to be Regency licentiousness, so the climate of India changed too under pressure both from moralists in London and memsahibs in India. Where it had once been considered good form for the British in India to sport local apparel and relish authentic local curries, now these agreeable customs began to fall away in favour of what would be a much more starched state of affairs.
This was the slowly changing backdrop against which Sleeman set out on his Indian adventures and against which, as would soon become clear, he set his face. It is important to note that he never moved from his principle, which was that British culture was superior to all others, including the manifold civilisations of the subcontinent. Accompanying this, somewhat counter-intuitively, was his very strong sense that India was a place of the greatest value that was worth getting to know fully and intimately. His linguistic skills would provide the key to this knowledge but his cast of mind was critical too. He was open to India, to its beauty and vibrancy, but to all other aspects of life there too, including its shadows and its darkness, and this cast of mind would be critical to what he achieved there.
William Sleeman’s first great encounter with the complexity of Indian life and culture was rather conventional. It came in the form of the so-called Anglo-Nepalese Wars. Border tensions between the Nepalese authorities and an East India Company intent on inexorably widening its sphere of influence and trading network led to a two-year conflict beginning in 1814. This conflict is better known as the Gurkha Wars, which concluded with Nepal forced to cede its western provinces, enabling the Company to control the lucrative trade in Himalayan wool. As a mere foot soldier, Sleeman played no great or glorious role in the conflict but his time stationed in the lofty foothills of the Himalayas provided him with the sort of valuable insight into local life and custom that would prove valuable in his later career. His experience proved useful in the short term too not least to Sleeman’s own happiness and contentment. His superiors observed that he was better suited to a quiet life in the hill country than to the social whirl of Calcutta, so when the wars ended he was permitted to remain in the highlands, learning his administrative trade and watching the local scene.
He proved superlatively good at this, his textured and revealing reports proving of the greatest use to the Company, so it was no surprise that in 1820 he was transferred formally from the Company’s Bengal army to its political department. In other words, to be the eyes, ears and brains of the Company in India. His command of Indian languages widened and deepened further and wherever he travelled he continued to take a marked interest in all classes of Indian life. He talked to Indians, about Indians and, crucially, for Indians, advocating for their interests both against their own landlords, when faced with occasions of injustice, and against the Company itself on those occasions, which were hardly infrequent, when its behaviour seemed unjust. His life now was very far from being quiet. The professional duties of a ‘Political’ could hardly be anything other than exciting, not to mention exhausting. In times of crisis, such help as existed might be several days’ ride away. All the time the man on the spot was responsible for the welfare of maybe 100,000 souls.
In 1828, on a break from his posting to recover from malaria, Sleeman travelled to Mauritius, and there he met the beautiful, intrepid and intelligent Amélie de Fontenne, the daughter of a sugar plantation-owning noble exiled from France by the Revolution. They married and theirs was a love match, so much so that Amélie joined her husband at his various postings and later on some of his most gruesome journeys of investigation. Their life together was accompanied by the all too common Victorian heartache: several of their seven children died and those who lived were sent, each in turn, to an England none of them had ever known. As each one left, moreover, it was to be the last they saw of their father or he of them. Five-year-old Henry was packed off from Calcutta with a small sword in case of shipwreck and this serves as a chilling reminder of the dangers faced on journeys to and from Europe in those days. At least it can be said that the family shared a good life in India, when, that is, there were all under the one roof.
The newly married Sleeman was transferred to Jubbulpore in central India, now the city of Jabalpur, in those days a place so remote the route there was not marked on such maps as the Company possessed. In addition to a stable family life, his fame and reputation were about to flourish, and his attention to and study of India would pay great dividends. As noted above, fatalism was not a characteristic one associates with the Victorians. Certainly, William Sleeman was not, when a challenge presented itself, prepared to accept that things should just continue in their usual course even if the challenge in question was almost beyond comprehension. This was why, when the existence of a horrifying cult in Indian life made itself known to him, Sleeman set to work. It was another case to be dealt with, another memo to be addressed, another file to be studied and resolved. Such was the attitude of this excellent administrator. The case in question was the opposite of
a common or garden case study but there is much to be said for taking facts on the chin and being practical, regardless of the context. At any rate, such an approach worked for William Sleeman, for whom duty and morality, energy and sincerity were all part of a professional whole.
Naturally, he was not above taking righteous pride in his achievements. When his friend Charles Fraser became the foremost magistrate involved in the unrelenting campaign about to be set in motion, Sleeman wrote to him as follows:
Do not I pray you get tired of the duties – neither you nor any other man can ever be employed in any more interesting or important to humanity. I shall look back with pride to the share I have had in them as long as I live … Believe me, Fraser, I would not exchange the share I have had in this work for the most splendid military service that man ever performed in India. I glory in it and ever shall do.
This ‘splendid military service’ was accomplished against the presence of Thuggee in Indian life and the great achievement of Sleeman’s career was to grapple with this phenomenon and sweep it away. Let us turn to examine Thuggee, in all its complex horror.
*
Even at this remove in time, the phenomenon of Thuggee remains unfathomable. There had been many glimpses of it long before William Sleeman’s era but never any serious, coordinated effort by the Company authorities to tackle it, much less eradicate it. This was not least because the British did not truly know what it was. It is only fair to add that any attempt to describe what Thugs did is to appreciate the difficulties anyone then or since has encountered in believing that such practices ever existed.
Simply put, Thugs travelled the highways of India as groups or gangs. They behaved and spoke as conventional travellers and they befriended others travelling likewise. Then, at some prearranged point, they strangled and robbed their victims. It is all too evident that this confederacy was in its essence and nature evil but it is important to add that, as the phenomenon is studied further and each deeper stage perceived, Thuggee becomes not merely evil but also utterly incomprehensible. Incomprehensible, both that it could happen at all and that it did happen and happened for so long before the arrival on the scene of William Sleeman. His part in encountering and then exterminating Thuggee came about by chance. He happened to be on the spot when several incidents occurred. On the other hand, perhaps fate or destiny had ordained precisely that Sleeman be on the spot, for it needed such a man as he to deal with a situation that so many before him had failed to resolve.
It is necessary to emphasise that the Thugs were not what is named in Hindi dacoits, the fiendish bandits who had plagued a war-afflicted subcontinent for decades. These gangs were most certainly highly disagreeable, they assembled in large numbers, were open in their movements, moved swiftly and sped away after they had attacked, dissolving in formation only to reassemble elsewhere at some later point. The dacoits were perfectly representative of a thread of criminality present in many disordered states. Such gangs had existed for centuries and they would exist for another century to come, as the experience of Republican China was to show. Every society has had to deal with antisocial elements and every society finds ways of doing so but at least such gangs tend to be visible and comprehensible. It is possible to take steps to avoid them and a functioning justice system will deal with them. Moreover, travel in India for the unguarded had in any case rarely been safe. The country had few roads to begin with. In addition, it was home to an infernal Noah’s Ark of tigers, snakes, wolves, jackals and bears, the presence of which made transport a trying affair, even before men, especially Thugs, entered the picture. India had her thieves: common or garden thieves, light-fingered thieves, violent thieves, murderous thieves, thieves in every imaginable form. Yet the Thugs were something quite different with no known parallel anywhere, ever.
For one thing, they got themselves up with special care. They were noted at the time as being ‘closely shaved and oiled all over, so that if caught they could slip out of your grasp like eels’. They also exploited what many observers recognised as a weakness implicit in Indian society as a result of the governance of the East India Company. Because the subcontinent was split between regions ruled directly by the Company and native states under varying degrees of British sway and regulation, such law and order as there was tended to be fragmented. Justice did not work very well in any case but it habitually failed the victims of Thuggee. The British attitude to the syndrome can be partly explained by a degree of ignorance as to how India worked while many local chiefs actually connived in Thuggee by means of taxes greedily levelled on men whose income came from this crime. There was, in other words, a dysfunction implicit in Indian life and governance. This in part stemmed from ignorance of the language and local culture and custom but it allowed Thuggee to slip through the holes in the net, leaving its victims with no recourse to justice.
Thuggee, a term which itself emerges from the Sanskrit word for cover or conceal, tended to be hereditary in nature. Thugs hailed from long lines of Thugs before them. Father to son, the habit would be handed down and, when flushed into the open by Sleeman, it emerged that long oral genealogies were claimed. There was, in other words, a complex subculture to the phenomenon. Some of the venerable family trees held by practitioners of this dubious art, stretching back to the days of Alexander the Great’s rampage through Asia and into India itself, were deemed highly implausible but it does seem apparent that Thuggee had probably been practised, in one form or another, for several centuries but certainly for more than a century. Moreover and heredity notwithstanding, the gangs habitually included many outsiders. One of the most striking things about the Thugs is just how heterogeneous the gatherings were by the standards of their times. Muslim and Hindu, high and low caste, newcomers and old-established members, all were to be discovered as having Thugged together, in murderously multicultural abandon. Gangs might be in the order of twenty men, although their numbers could fall lower, depending on the charisma of their leader, or swell, although probably never to more than fifty individuals. While gangs could have core members, individuals were as likely to go ‘Thugging’ with one gang as another. As for the season, attacks were more likely to take place during the brief Indian winter, simply because it was the period during which travel was more tolerable.
Thugs retained something of an honour code. They were, according to their own lore and traditions, not permitted to murder women, together with a whole range of sub-categories of men. These included fakirs, dancers, musicians, bards, lepers, elephant drivers, oil vendors, washermen, sweepers, Sikhs (in some though not all provinces), the halt and otherwise physically afflicted, and anyone who was accompanied by a cow. This is by no means a comprehensive list nor was it always observed. In general terms, however, a failure to follow these rules was taken seriously, as a result of the evil that might flow from a violation of a taboo. In general terms, sometimes, a certain blasé spirit of ‘necessity’ governed the actions of Thugs in their choice of victim.
This, the actual process of choosing, was to European minds one of the most infernal aspects of the whole business. Wealth per se was not, as far as could be made out, the sole settling factor. Cult rites could see almost anyone being murdered. The poor were generally regarded as being unfortunate choices for a first victim on a Thugging expedition. There were byzantine mysteries to the whole process and the sheer absence of reason, by British lights, thereafter added its own peculiarly hellish flavour to how Thuggee was reported.
As for how it was done, Thuggee was managed by stealth, deceit and well-honed technique. At least one of their number would seek to insinuate his way into the affections of a traveller, who might be journeying alone or, more likely, as part of a group. The aim was to befriend them and travel together, for greater security. Thugs might travel with their would-be victims for days or even weeks. Then, at some appointed hour, a secret signal would go up among the Thugs. Perhaps a victim would be urged by his new friend to look at the stars. Often these final journeys together
were started before dawn, at Thug prompting, so that they might be surer still of avoiding prying eyes, while another in the party of strangers would be behind him. This was the strangler and to be an accomplished one (a bhurtote) was to have risen high in Thug esteem. The cry would go up and he would slip the roomal (a simple piece of knotted cloth) round his victim’s neck, while the hand-holder did just that and the deed was done in seconds, as many times as they were victims in the group and Thugs to slaughter them.
Strangulation is a most appallingly intimate form of murder and this fact adds to the horror. That bands of men actually existed who committed this crime time and again makes the Thuggee still more nauseating to imagine. Further detail deepens the fear. Dusk was another favoured time for striking. A seated victim, tired and resting from the labours of the road, was easy prey to a man standing behind and, for this reason, sleeping men were generally stirred into rising by a false alarm about a snake or scorpion, as recumbent forms were apparently surprisingly hard to despatch. Then, further repellent details: Thugs on dry land, for example, might stab bodies in the eyes to make sure they were dead, victims travelling on the Ganges would have their backs snapped after strangulation, to assist the work of the following crocodiles. In both cases, victims were disposed of speedily. Experience gained over years of Thugging meant that gangs tended to have favoured spots (matarbur beles) for committing their murders. Likewise, they had long lists of charnel houses for disposing of the bodies, from wells to groves. India turned out to be defiled by them. When Thuggee was finally challenged by Sleeman and its secrets revealed, legions of bodies emerged from the deep, an aspect which particularly disgusted Indian sensibilities. It showed that both Hindu prescriptions (cremation) and Muslim ones (burial facing Mecca) had been ignored and the bodies of the dead desecrated.
The Victorians Page 12