The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  Yet, if scandalously disrespectful of the rites of others, Thugs were deeply attached to their own. Where shallow graves were to be dug, a pickaxe sacred to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, albeit idiosyncratically employed by the Thugs, would be used. No Thugging expedition could begin without all the correct obsequies having been performed towards this ritual object, which in turn was carried in several pieces, to disguise its purpose if the gang were ever searched for any reason. To add to all of these gruesome details, bodies might be dismembered and deliberately disfigured, further to obscure their identity while enabling India’s plentiful fauna to take care of the evidence. Which inevitably leads to the same problem as confronted by Sleeman himself. Not only was Thugging inexplicable, it was then as now impossible fully to ascertain the range and scale of its activities.

  Thuggee may have originally been an outgrowth of a perverted understanding of Mughal-era law. The Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence held that murder entailed capital punishment only if a weapon was involved which spilt blood. Hence, the theory went, the Thugs strangled precisely because, even if they were discovered, they would not meet the same end as their victims or, more likely, any of the varied range of local punishments, which included being trodden upon by an elephant or, as the British were to do themselves after the Mutiny, being strapped to the mouth of a cannon which was then fired. British observers speculated that the appeal of strangulation lay in leaving so little physical evidence. Yet, this did not make sense either, given the fact that the Thugs were as likely to dismember their victims as not.

  Problem piled upon problem for the unsuspecting authorities. By the very act of murder being done on travellers far from home, the victims were removed in time as much as distance from their families and friends. For when should the alarm be raised, as when was it apparent that they had gone terminally missing? In the absence of a body at the scene of the crime, when could the alarm be raised there? Even when remains were discovered, the impossibility of identification, almost regardless of what was physically left, of someone so far from home was obvious. In the nature of Thugging, whole parties entirely annihilated out of sight with no witnesses left behind, was its dreadful success. These problems were virtually insurmountable.

  To add to their ghastly cleverness, Thugs tended to array themselves in imitation of the Company’s native military ranks. An individual gang was led by a jemadar, while a leader of leaders styled himself a subadar. The jemadar brought his group together, he was the individual on which group cohesion depended. Individual Thugs might drift between different gangs, they might take a break from Thugging in any given season but the jemadar was required to be consistent and visible. Accordingly, when the spoils of a Thugging expedition were divvied up at its close, the jemadar took the largest, fixed share. He was followed by the bhurtote, with an equal division thereafter for the rest of the gang.

  Many specialised roles existed. Scouts identified travelling groups of victims and warned of the approach of forces belonging to the Company or local rulers. The sotha was especially expert at inveigling, as the art of insinuating oneself into the confidence of strangers became increasingly difficult to master. As often as not, the jemadar himself did the inveigling. He had the clothes and patter to be able to convince wealthy strangers in particular that their group and his should come together for mutual protection. Children could be found on Thugging expeditions. This was in part so that they might be initiated into its mysteries but their presence also entitled their families to a share of the proceeds. Most heinously, sometimes the children with the Thugs were those whose parents had been murdered by them. It was a staple of the Victorian accounts of Thuggee to reflect on the children thus taken, who themselves grew up to be Thugs, as part of their new families.

  *

  That we know so much about the intricacies of this murderous Indian subculture owes everything to the labours of William Sleeman, and the reason that Sleeman made these discoveries was that chance set one fact after another under his eyes. Until he took an interest, the authorities were aware that something was happening on India’s roads and waterways, something criminal and murderous, but had no conception that a plethora of individual incidents were part of a greater malignant whole. As a result, owing to the sense of fragmentation across the Indian network, no systematic efforts were made to understand these transport-related crimes, much less to eliminate them. In some quarters the dawning notion that something diabolical was taking place was dismissed as an implausible fantasy. Those of Sleeman’s predecessors who had the courage to ask questions were often censured by their superiors, their local police were dismissed and even in some cases imprisoned for having pressed charges against suspected perpetrators. This was the context within which Sleeman was working.

  In 1835, however, an Indian named Feringhea was arrested and this arrest supplied Sleeman with the key to the rest of his work. Feringhea was a fifth-or sixth-generation Thug and a jemadar. He was tall, plausible, rich and, as a Brahmin, high-born. He was by no means driven to Thuggee by reason of poverty or hunger. Of his own initiation into Thuggee, made by consuming the sacred goor (sugar), Feringhea recalled:

  I never wanted food; my mother’s family was opulent, her relations high in office. I have been in office myself, and became so great a favourite wherever I went that I was sure of promotion; yet I was always miserable when absent from my gang, and obliged to return to Thuggee. My father made me taste the fatal goor when I was yet a mere boy; and if I were to live a thousand years I should never be able to follow any other trade.

  In Feringhea’s mind, the code of dubious honour that characterised Thuggee was paramount and he was clear in his own mind that his own downfall and that of Thuggee as a whole was because he had dishonoured the cult’s own rites. In his own case, he had been responsible for the murder of a Mughalanee (a high-born young Muslim woman), a transgression he became ever more convinced had accounted for his capture, although the crime in question was never discovered until he confessed to it.

  When Feringhea was revealed to Sleeman as being a leading Thug, Sleeman had his family placed in custody. He knew that Feringhea was devoted to them and would not be able to resist staying close so that he might hear of them. The 500-rupee reward placed on Feringhea’s head also spurred endeavour and eventually two boys in the service of the Company tricked Feringhea into revealing himself. He fell into Sleeman’s hands as the best-connected jemadar yet. He took Sleeman and his courageous wife to a mass grave to verify the extraordinary claims he made in the course of his confession and he named his accomplices. The campaign had begun.

  Feringhea’s arrest was the pivotal moment, and it remained the most famous incident of Thuggee in the collective consciousness. Indeed, the tale of Feringhea spawned a novel, Confessions of a Thug, published in London in 1839. It sold wonderfully well, proving that a silver lining can sometimes be taken from the most unprepossessing of situations. Before this crucial moment, Sleeman had been convinced of a pattern of murderous behaviour in the Indian countryside and had set himself to solve the puzzle. He had noted the crimes of various lesser Thugs and had slowly become convinced that these crimes were part of that puzzle, that the practice of Thuggee, not that he knew it yet by this name, was a real one and that the East India Company was failing grievously in not paying attention to deaths taking place, by the hundreds, in territory under its administration. Now he had something material on which to build a case.

  Sleeman showed his ability to think through a problem. Aware of the unwillingness in many quarters to open up the vistas of this appalling case, Sleeman wrote an anonymous article and sent it to the Calcutta Literary Gazette. The article detailed the material on Thuggee which had so far been accumulated and even in its slenderness it was ghastly enough. The piece was quickly picked up by the mainstream newspapers. The story of Thuggee landed on the breakfast table of the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, and suddenly there was no avoiding doing something about these cr
imes. Indeed, it is worth pointing out the significant thread which runs not only through this story of Sleeman but through so many of these Victorian stories. Many of their great works were underpinned by having a strong and energetic press willing them on in their endeavours and able to support their works.

  Following the arrest of Feringhea, Sleeman had another stroke of luck. Sepoys, armed Indian infantrymen, had long been a favoured target of Thugs. Their return home on leave meant they had their pay with them and their disappearance was something which would only eventually be noticed when they failed to return to the ranks from leave. Sleeman’s second piece of luck was that for once a victim, in this case a sepoy, did escape the clutches of his would-be killers. He was able to raise the alarm and the gang members were then captured. On top of this train of good fortune, moreover, came a third piece of luck. This incident happened in Sleeman’s own district, ensuring that he saw at once the opportunity, the chain of evidence, that fate had handed to him. The pieces of the puzzle were forming now before his very eyes.

  What made Sleeman unique, however, was that he was the first British official to extrapolate outwards from the evidence afforded him by the capture and trial of the Thugs. After all, he was not the first magistrate or political officer to stumble upon Thuggery but he was the first to set a system in place. He gathered his knowledge piece by piece and applied it methodically in a fashion which European police work would take another fifty years to match. Most significantly, he challenged the laws which had enabled Thuggery in the first place. Archaic Mughal provisions meant that prisoners’ words could not be used against other prisoners. This was swept away, because central to Sleeman’s scheme were so-called approvers, Thugs who turned informer. These individuals had to satisfy him that they had given a full confession. Then they would go out in the field, offering him full cooperation in catching Thugs still at large. If they failed to do so, their conditional pardons would be void, and they would be hanged. If they were seen to cooperate, on the other hand, their fate was life imprisonment, with pensions arranged for the families they could no longer support with murder.

  There was seldom glamour in Sleeman’s approach but there was heft, power, quiet authority, an iron will to succeed. The scale, ambition and energy of Victorian industry is something to be wondered at but this sense of limitless ambition, this Victorian trademark, was at the heart of what he did. He had maps made where none had previously existed and he compiled Thuggee genealogies, essentially as another form of mapping. An exhaustively detailed collation and indexing of the evidence enabled him to set about a process that had seemed impossible. He established the identity of the Thugs and their victims. The evidence Thugs gave was checked, as much as was possible, against testimony from such relatives as could be found and against the physical remains exhumed once approvers had led Sleeman and his officials to the makeshift graves. These were all aspects of ‘Sleeman’s machine’ and, as revealed in one of the thousands of detailed interrogations still available, Sleeman himself took the form of an avenging angel:

  Q: Have you ever heard of Capt Sleeman?

  A: Yes, for years we heard he was hanging and banishing Thugs, and that he has made a machine, for torturing Thugs! For breaking our bones … some said that the Thugs were ground to death in this machine!

  Rather than literal torture, these were the mills of justice at work, something which rightly terrified those who had been beyond the reach of justice for at least a century.

  To consider only the victims of Feringhea is to recognise the scale of Sleeman’s achievement and to recognise, incidentally, the form of the happy hunting Thugs had enjoyed as a result of the peace the Company’s eighteenth-century victories had restored to India. On the course of just one Thugging expedition, Sleeman wrote, as well as ‘the usual mass of undifferentiated “travellers”, “Marathas”, “Rajpoots” and “Brahmins” … the Thugs had murdered two dozen sepoys, eight bearers, six merchants, three pundits [learned teachers of religion and the law], a messenger, a fakir, two shopkeepers, an elephant driver and a bird-catcher. Their victims also included four women.’

  Although Indian legal officers had bridled at such innovations as general warrants, which allowed Sleeman to get hold of suspected Thugs for interrogation, central government, once aroused by the publicity Thuggee quickly attracted, acted decisively to back the political officer. Calcutta, as an extraordinary provision required to tackle the unique menace of Thuggery, set aside its usual squeamishness about intruding upon the prerogatives of local rulers and now Thugs would be chased wherever they hid. These developments inevitably gave rise to resentment. Sleeman, by now Superintendent of the splendidly named Thuggery Department, had to put up with sour looks directed by his peers. British Residents in the Princely States bridled at these legal intrusions into their bailiwicks and protested loudly to the Governor-General that the ‘delicate balance’ upon which British rule of India rested was being heedlessly upset by Sleeman and his agents.

  Yet higher authority, to its enormous credit, stood firm. George Swinton, Secretary to the Government of India, commended Sleeman’s crusading:

  [the Governor-General] relies on the approved zeal and activity already displayed [by] Captain Sleeman, in bringing to condign punishment some of the most notorious of these inhuman wretches, and [if] the abominable [Thugs] should be ultimately exterminated, your services in the cause of humanity would entitle you to the highest meed of applause.

  When all was done in the anti-Thuggee campaign, perhaps one in seven Thugs were hanged. It is important to note that this was no orgy of extrajudicial slaughter in response to the evil which was discovered. Rather, justice prevailed in its extirpation. It was justice rough at the edges, without doubt, but always proceeding by design, as per the law it sought to uphold. Evidence was sought and crimes treated proportionately. To be a scout, for example, was not to be a strangler and was not to be punished as such. It is important to note too that, whatever jealousy Sleeman provoked, most of his peers admired him, and his superiors backed and promoted him.

  Occasional reverses were inevitable. Even when he began to assemble hard-won facts and to compile a dossier of irrefutable evidence, Sleeman was then forced to battle the ‘blind prejudice’ of some senior judges. Their refusal to accept that any sort of plausible evidence had been presented for Thugging meant that Sleeman was more than ever reliant on the approval of public opinion and on the support of his political superiors. In his lengthy reports to the latter, he admitted, ‘These proceedings are voluminous, but [Thug] depredations … which under the sanction of religious rites … make almost every road in India between the Jumna and the Indus from the beginning of November to the end of May a dreadful scene of hourly murder, are becoming a subject of awful interest, and these proceedings have swelled from my anxiety to collect all the material that would be found to bear upon this particular case.’ In the face of such external pressure, the courts were obliged to back down, and mete out justice where it was due.

  As for the trials themselves, these were duly sensational, especially given that the Thugs were revealed as ordinary, regular Indians. As Sleeman himself was to put it, ‘These common enemies of mankind [who] strangle other people of whatever age or sex without the slightest feeling of compunction, feel towards their relations as strongly as other men.’ It was exactly these discordant virtues which served to deepen the fascinated British horror at what Sleeman’s work revealed. Thugs at home could be and almost always were upright and entirely correct. Of one who was a cloth dealer, for example, Sleeman noted that he ‘was so correct in his deportment and all his dealings, that he had won himself the esteem of all of the gentlemen of his station’. The Thugs also rejected absolutely any idea that they were merely common thieves. Indeed, upstanding men that they were, they deprecated ‘low and dirty’ robbers. To provoke a Thug, all one had to do was to accuse him of mere criminality:

  A Thug rides his horse! Wears his dagger! And shows a front. Thieving? Ne
ver! Never! If a banker’s treasure were before me and entrusted to my care, though in hunger and dying, I would scorn to steal. But let a banker go on a journey, and I would certainly murder him. Dacoits and robbers are contemptible, I despise a dacoit. Let him come before me!

  Remarkably the evidence from their trials shows that many Thugs really did believe they were discharging something that resembled military service and that, in doing so, they were honourably providing for their families. The consequence of this, as one displayed in one confession, was that legitimate loyalties could easily switch in the mind of a Thug. ‘I am a Thug,’ one such captured said, ‘my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have Thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.’

  *

  Sleeman had uncovered what the Thugs thought, what their victims’ families thought and eventually what the Indian courts thought. As for what the British themselves thought of the fantastical specimens upon whom they inflicted justice, that was always bound to be a much more exotic undertaking. Certainly, Thugs were part of a delicious mystery to the Victorians. There was nothing the Victorians relished more than a delicious mystery, all the tastier for being revealed a safe distance away. Add to the list of ingredients a dash of the cult of Kali, of which there was no need for the spectating Victorians to worry too much about the metaphysical complexities, and the mystery improved still further. Here was a crime, stupendous in scale, incomprehensible in its motivations and form and, best of all, irresistibly easy to tell as a story. What could be more unsettling in an age, where any mind could easily comprehend the banditry of dacoits, than to be told that the innocent were also stalked by killers who turned out to be among the most unassuming and well-spoken men in all the land, to be the Indian equivalent of a British gentleman?