Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  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:

  This is tomorrow’s [itinerary]: ‘1st mile – ruff and dusty (he evidently thinks ruff a more emphatic mode of spelling), 2nd, 3rd and 4th mile rugged and sandy, 5th mile a brute no water, very bad passage – better go on the left of it; 6th, 7th and 8th miles, very rugged and heavy, 9th, 10th and 11th miles, better but ruff and dusty – encamping ground dusty and not good.

  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 rul
e, 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.

  ‘My name,’ the boy confessed, ‘is Gholam Hossyn. And I am a Thug.’

  * The word derives from the Hindi daka parna, meaning to plunder, and perhaps ultimately from dakna, to shout.

  * These low-caste confidential messengers began their training at the age of six with regular ‘walking practice’. A year later, chosen boys started to run three miles at a stretch, moving at ‘a handsome trot’, and gradually increased this distance so that by the age of nine they could cross 10 miles of rough country without rest. Training continued for a further nine years until, at the age of 18, a freshly qualified hucarra would be issued with a water bottle, bread pan and other equipment and set to work. By then he would be capable of running anything up to 100 miles a day, and would be expected to possess a detailed knowledge of the sacred Vedic texts, astronomy, music, five Indian languages and six varieties of script – not to mention being a master of disguise.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Awful Secrets’

  ‘kyboola – a novice Thug’

  The word ‘thug’* is an ancient one. It first appears in India’s sacred Sanskrit tongue – in which sthaga means to cover or conceal – and crops up in a variety of guises in several other languages, including Hindi and Hindustani, Gujerati and Marathi. Its literal meaning is almost always ‘robber’ or ‘cheat’, but as early as the twelfth century the word was being used as a synonym for ‘rogue’, ‘imposter’ and ‘deceiver’ too, and over the next several hundred years it was employed to describe a wide variety of swindlers. A pair of counterfeiters were condemned as ‘thugs’ in the first years of the seventeenth century, while in the western province of Gujerat, ‘alchemists deservedly came to be classed with them’. Virtually all the ‘thugs’ encountered in Indian history and literature before the year 1800 turn out to have been members of this class of knaves and thieves.

  When Gholam Hossyn identified himself as a thug, however, he had in mind a very different meaning. His Thugs were not so much tricksters and rogues as robbers and murderers: men whose methods were quite distinct from those of dacoits, thieves and other common criminals and formed, indeed, a modus operandi of such startling and original brutality that it had had no exact parallels elsewhere in the world. The defining characteristics of these Thugs were that they wandered the roads of India, seeking likely victims among the travellers whom they met along the way; that they wormed their way into the confidence of these potential victims, stealing only from those whom they had befriended; and that they invariably killed their victims before they robbed them. It is not hard to see how a word used for centuries to describe minor swindlers came to be applied to these far more dangerous criminals; Hossyn’s Thugs were ‘cheats’ and ‘deceivers’ in that they inveigled their way into the company of travellers, ‘imposters’ because they never openly declared themselves in the manner of dacoits, and ‘robbers’ and ‘rogues’ since they made their living from violence and theft. But they were also ruthless and cold-blooded killers, a meaning that was not reflected in the definition of the word until it found its way into the English language as a direct consequence of the Company’s encounter with the murderers of Hindustan.

  The young Thug did not volunteer his information willingly. Although he was taken to Etawah almost immediately, his interrogation continued for several days, Perry probing for information, his prisoner deflecting his questions or varying the answers that he gave, gradually admitting to more and more as the stunned magistrate pressed him on each point time and again. On the first occasion that the shackled prisoner was dragged into the courtroom, Gholam Hossyn confessed to nothing more than ‘standing two fields off’ while his companions had robbed and killed a pair of travellers. On the second, he admitted taking an active part in those same killings. Under further examination, though, the number of his victims rose, to four at first and then 14, until by the end of the third day of relentless questioning, the young Thug had confessed to his involvement in nearly 60 killings. By the time Perry had taken Hossyn through his evidence for a fourth time, the total of his victims stood at 95, all murdered in a mere eight years of robbery. It was a confession so horrific as to be without precedent.

  ‘These examinations,’ the magistrate concluded,

  are undoubtedly the most extraordinary which ever came before a Court of Justice; they contain the avowal of crimes which could never be presumed to have had existence in one place under the protection of the British administration. They afford also an abundant proof of the shocking depravity and merciless unfeeling disposition of a great portion of the Inhabitants of these provinces. They are in fact so extraordinary that the whole might be considered fabulous, were we not aware that it is no unusual circumstance to discover six or eight murdered bodies, and sometimes a greater number, in pits and wells.

  The thing that puzzled Perry most of all at first was the sheer mystery that surrounded the Thugs. ‘It is certainly a matter of astonishment that we should have held the administration of justice for so many years, without any information of this detestable association,’ he wrote. But as he continued his interrogations, gradually assembling the details of the Thug gangs’ methods and techniques, Perry came to understand the reasons for this silence. His prisoners were no ordinary murderers. They were, in fact, the strangest and m
ost remarkable criminals of the day.

  Day by day, and gradually, Perry pieced together the story of the Thugs. Some of the evidence he took from Hossyn, some from men arrested with him, who likewise yielded under close questioning. All of it he set down in court records, preserving it for ever.

  Thugs worked the lands on both sides of the Jumna, from Lucknow to Jypore. There were, Perry’s informants thought, about 1,500 of them living north of the river, and more to the south, ranging as far east as Benares – far more, certainly, than the magistrate had ever imagined existed. They lived under the protection of the zamindars of their home villages and worked in small groups, leaving their homes ‘whenever they have nothing left to live on’. The more experienced members of the gangs killed by ‘strangling with any part of their clothes’. Less expert Thugs sometimes poisoned their victims with datura – the finely ground seeds of the thorn apple, a deadly relative of belladonna, ‘which deprives the object of his senses, when they plunder him’.

  Several of Hossyn’s fellow Thugs, arrested along with the boy, eventually confessed to committing numerous murders over lengthy criminal careers. One, a 60-year-old man named Dullal, had strangled 15 or 16 victims and taken a considerable quantity of loot: ‘Much have I plundered and expended, beyond all account.’ A second Thug claimed to have witnessed 50 murders in only three years. A third had killed 45 men in eight years, strangling all of his victims with his bare hands.

  These men’s gang had been led by a man named Ujba, who lived a few miles outside Etawah and supplemented his income as an armourer with the proceeds of Thug expeditions into the Doab. Gholam Hossyn had joined this group after spending a short period as an agricultural labourer, perhaps because he found the prospect of life on the roads preferable to that endured by a peasant farmer. His most recent expedition, at the beginning of the cold season of 1809–10, had opened successfully; Ujba and his 15 men lured their first victim to a nullah – a dried-up riverbed – a short distance from the road,