Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  and murdered him in the following manner: Ramsooth, inhabitant of Dultua, strangled him with a handkerchief; when he was senseless one of the party inflicted wounds with a knife in both eyes and another wounded him, in the same manner, in his belly so that no person might recognize the body. They then buried the corpse in a nullah about a mile to the left of the road.

  The dead man was carrying 100 Benares rupees, two turbans and some other clothes, which Ujba’s men appropriated. The gang then left the area, going on by forced marches to evade any possible pursuit, until they met two Afghans, whom they befriended and persuaded to accompany them on the road. Having rested for the night, the gang and their intended victims arose very early the next morning, breaking camp four hours before dawn at a time when they could be sure there would be few if any other travellers on the road.* The little party walked a further six miles, halting for a rest at a spot well away from the nearest settlement. The Afghans were then cut down with swords. The first was run through while he was relieving himself; his friend was hacked to the ground as he attempted to flee, then finished off with repeated stabs to his back and neck. On this occasion, however, the Thugs were almost immediately betrayed to the local police – Hossyn did not explain how this occurred – and brought back to Shekoabad. So ended the boy’s short and unproductive criminal career.

  Perry’s main concern, having taken down the Thug’s initial deposition, was to discover all he could of the methods of the gangs. Hossyn reluctantly obliged, describing in awful detail the manner in which the members of his gang had strangled their victims with cloth strips. Even that was not enough for Perry, who now asked his prisoner to demonstrate exactly how the strangling cloths were put to use. Hossyn called for an example and a dramatic scene unfolded. ‘The deponent,’ the court clerk recorded,

  takes a handkerchief, being a piece of Guzzy Cloth, about two yards or less in length (which the natives throw over their shoulder), he twists the cloth and makes a knot at one end; a person in Court is called, and he shews on this person how the Cloth is passed twice round the neck of the Victim. The knot remains at the back of the neck, and serves as a kind of handle by which the cloth is screwed to its utmost tightness round the neck.

  Why, the horrified Perry next asked, did Hossyn and his confederates stab their victims after strangling them? ‘Because,’ the boy replied,

  people have been known to recover after strangling partially, particularly a person who was recently strangled by Huittea, who, afterwards recovering, fled with the Cloth, and is now at Furruckabad, where he narrated all particulars … We therefore now stab, it was not formerly the practice, we used only to strangle and throw the bodies in to a well.

  Perry was disgusted by Hossyn’s detailed descriptions of the ruthless methods of the Thugs. But the magistrate was quite certain that their ‘atrocious crimes’ were not committed out of any sort of blood lust. On the contrary, the gangs’ entire modus operandi had been cleverly calculated to maximize their prospects of plunder while minimizing any chance of being caught.

  To begin with, the Thugs’ technique of befriending strangers on the road disarmed their intended victims, making it a simple matter to take them by surprise. It also allowed skilled murderers to gauge the travellers’ likely wealth. Impoverished peasants could thus be discarded in favour of richer merchants, or sepoys travelling home on leave and carrying with them their arrears of pay. Next, Thugs never tackled a party of travellers unless they greatly outnumbered them. This made the killing itself a quick and relatively simple process, and ensured that any intended victims who attempted to escape could be pursued and despatched before they could summon help.

  Obtaining evidence against such men was, Perry recognized, almost impossible. Many Thugs, although by no means all, never killed close to home, which made tracing them an unenviable task. ‘In this part of the country,’ a strangler named Kalee Khan explained, ‘we have never murdered, for it is the custom amongst us never to commit a murder within a distance of 100 coss [200 miles] round our habitations.’ Men from the Jumna ranged as far south as Nagpore and even into the Deccan on occasion, where – having disposed of one traveller – they would move quickly on, often into a neighbouring territory with a different ruler, before murdering again. This, in the fragmented India of the early nineteenth century, meant that pursuit was generally futile and prevented such authorities as existed from realizing just how many victims were being killed. By restricting themselves to despatching travellers who were often hundreds of miles from their own homes, and unlikely to be missed for weeks or even months, the gangs minimized the risk that a hue and cry would be raised while they were in the vicinity; many, in addition, chose to operate in the Native States rather than the Company’s territories, not least because it was often possible to bribe a local rajah or his men to permit Thug operations or to release captured stranglers from jail. Finally and most importantly – as Perry reluctantly conceded – the fact that the gangs invariably murdered every member of every party they inveigled meant that no witnesses survived to testify against them. The ‘precaution of the Perpetrators of this crime’, the Etawahan magistrate remarked, ‘by destroying all living testimony to the fact precluded the possibility of any complaints being preferred … and consequently in no one of the cases which has been reported to the office has any individual been directly implicated’. Were it not for the occasional confessions, made by captured criminals such as Gholam Hossyn, there would have been no evidence that specific Thugs were responsible for particular murders. ‘Had this inhuman offender chosen to have asserted his innocence,’ Perry wrote of one captured strangler who had confessed to killing 50 travellers, ‘what evidence either direct or circumstantial could have been brought against him?’

  Having listened to several days of graphic testimony, the magistrate found himself persuaded of one thing. The Thugs’ habits were quite different from those of the dacoit gangs, and apparently unique to India. The Thugs themselves believed that their methods set them apart from other robbers and made them special – an opinion apparently shared by their fellow villagers, who sometimes referred to them by the honourable term sipahee (soldier) and described their murderous expeditions as cakari (military service). The surest way to anger a captured strangler – at least one of long experience, who derived a good portion of his income from the practice of ‘Thuggee’ – was to suggest that he was nothing but a common criminal. ‘There are many thieves in my village,’ one of the Company’s prisoners explained, ‘but I would not go with them. My father, a Thug, used to counsel me: “Do not join them! They take money without thugging!”’

  Not every member of every gang was quite so scrupulous, of course; a few years after Perry interrogated the first captured stranglers, a British traveller heard evidence ‘which proves that they conceive themselves to be occasionally justified in robbing from tents’. But many Thugs insisted that they spurned other forms of crime, and were wont to decry other sorts of robber in the strongest terms. Ordinary theft was ‘low and dirty’ and dacoits ‘men of force and violence – they have no science!’ ‘The Thug is the king of all these classes!’ the eminent leader of one gang concluded in great indignation:

  A Thug rides his horse! Wears his dagger! And shows a front. Thieving? Never! 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!

  Thugs had lived in the district around Etawah for at least a hundred years. If the gangs’ own oral traditions are to be believed, their ancestors probably arrived on the banks of the Jumna late in the seventeenth century, some coming from the town of Himmutpore and others from Sursae, to the south of the river. These early immigrants prospered so much in the course of the eighteenth century that by 1797, when the Marathas had established themselves at Gwalior and could levy taxes on the people of the Ju
mna valley, they recorded no fewer than 440 ‘families of Thugs’ in one small area south of Etawah alone.

  It is difficult, if not impossible, to say how closely these early criminals resembled the men whom Perry interrogated in 1810. The first-hand recollections of the oldest stranglers ever to recount their histories date only to 1760, and contain no hint that these Thugs’ methods and habits were not broadly the same in those days as those encountered in the nineteenth century. Many families, indeed, took great pride in their traditions and lineage, and could recite genealogies tracing their ancestry back through at least seven or eight generations of stranglers – which, if true, would place the Thugs’ origins somewhere in the period 1650–1700. Gholam Hossyn told his interrogator that his fellow Thugs believed that their fraternity had existed since the days of Alexander the Great. A more plausible fragment of tradition, though, takes the story back no more than another century, for many of the men living in the first decades of the 1800s firmly believed that their forebears had lived together in Delhi in the time of the third Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great.

  In those days – Akbar ruled northern India from 1556 until 1605 – there were said to have been seven great Thug families. All of them were Muslim and most had their headquarters in the ancient city, and it was only when one clan incurred the wrath of the Great Mughal himself by murdering one of his favourite slaves that ‘the whole of the Thugs fled from the capital and spread themselves about the country’. Some went no further than Agra, while others scattered hundreds of miles to the south, into the Deccan. A handful – among them several of the families whose descendants finally established themselves near Etawah – crossed the Jumna into Oudh, where they lived for several decades under the protection of the Rajah of Akoopore.

  The reliability of these purely oral histories is difficult to gauge. There seems to have been broad agreement among many Thugs that their ancestors had come from Delhi, but various traditions – not set down until the 1830s – can hardly be entirely true. The supposedly ‘Muslim’ clans of Delhi had Hindu names, for example; and for all the Thugs’ proud boasts that their forebears had defied the Emperor himself, there were hints that their true origin was much more humble. At the weddings of one Thug clan, a grizzled murderer conceded, ‘an old matron will sometimes repeat: “Here’s to the spirits of those who once led bears, and monkeys; to those who drove bullocks, and marked with the godnee,* and those who made baskets for heads”’ – an account suggesting that, far from being aristocratic Muslims, the earliest members of this family were actually khunjurs, wandering tradesmen who roamed through Hindustan with their herds of cattle. Many Thugs hotly disputed this explanation. ‘By no means,’ protested one. ‘Our ancestors, after their captivity at Delhi, were obliged to adopt these disguises to effect their escape. Some pretended to be khunjurs, but they were not really so; they were high-caste Musulmans.’ But even this man admitted that the glorious genealogies he had often heard recited were probably false, and guessed that some early Thugs, at least, had sprung from among the impoverished camp followers of the Mughal army.

  That, really, is as far as the available evidence can take us. All attempts to trace the history of the seven clans further back than Akbar’s day founder on the difficulty of interpreting earlier sources, for the first incontrovertible use of the word ‘thug’ to refer to murderers, rather than to thieves and swindlers, dates only to the 1600s. It is interesting – given the Thugs’ own insistence that their earliest ancestors were Muslims – to note that ‘stranglers and assassins’ formed one of the five classes of brigands discussed by the Arabic author Uthman al-Khayyat in a work dating to the tenth century AD.** The seventeenth-century travellers Jean Thévenot and John Fryer, meanwhile, both described gangs of Indian highway robbers whose methods resembled those employed by the Thugs two hundred years later; Thévenot heard of the existence of cunning highwaymen who murdered their victims with ‘a certain slip with a running noose, which they can cast with so much sleight about a man’s neck … that they almost never fail’, while Fryer recalled an encounter with a fifteen-strong gang of robbers captured near Surat, who ‘used to lurk under Hedges and in narrow Lanes’ and possessed ‘a Device of a weight tied to a Cotton Bowstring made of guts of some length’ which they threw over the heads of passing travellers. But references in old chronicles and histories to gangs of stranglers may simply demonstrate that the Thugs had no monopoly on this method of killing their victims. Certainly murder by strangulation was common enough in Mughal times for the Emperor Aurangzeb to draw up a farman (law) specifying the punishment to be meted out to those found guilty of the practice. The Thugs, awful as they were, were merely one product, among many, of India’s lawless interior.

  By the early nineteenth century, moreover, Thug gangs were far from the socially exclusive clans described in their early traditions. Most, the surviving evidence suggests, were thoroughly heterogeneous, recruited from men of all backgrounds, classes and castes. Their members were defined by the manner in which they made a living, rather than by their racial or religious identity. There was no such thing as a typical Thug, and the Thugs of the Jumna valley, whom Perry had stumbled across by chance, were far from the only sort of Thug gang.

  There were, indeed, more than a dozen varieties of strangler scattered across much of the length and breadth of India. Almost all were distinguished by their place of residence, a detail that may suggest there was some truth in traditions of a general flight from Delhi. The men of the Doab and Oudh were ‘Jumaldahees’, from their homes along the Jumna river.* In the northern reaches of the Deccan, the Telinganies, Arcottees and Beraries hailed from Telingana, Arcot and Berar respectively. Other Thugs, however, seem to have taken their name from the occupations followed by their principal leaders. The Lodahas, who came mostly from the province of Bihar, were caravan drivers named for the lodh (load) they carried; the Motheeas were ‘from a class of weavers’; the Moltanees were bullock drivers who strangled their victims with the leather thongs they used for driving their oxen.

  Few outsiders – even the British officers who questioned captured Thugs – ever really penetrated the complex interrelationships that seem to have developed between the various groups. So scanty is the evidence for the mere existence of some classes of Thug that their importance remains largely a matter of guesswork, even today, and some authorities have argued that most of the gangs mentioned in early nineteenth-century sources do not deserve to be classed as ‘Thugs’ at all. The captured stranglers questioned by Perry and the Company officers who came after him do seem, nonetheless, to have recognized the existence of a number of different groups of Thugs, and were insistent that each saw itself as ‘distinct’. ‘The Hindu Thugs of Talghat,’ for example, ‘were admired by all,’ one Deccan man explained. ‘They are extraordinary men. They have three painted lines on their foreheads extending up from a central point at the nose … They always wear them. They and the Arcot Thugs associate and act together; but they will never mix with us of Telingana … They will never intermarry with our families, saying that we once drove bullocks and were itinerant tradesmen, and consequently of lower caste.’ The Lodahas, meanwhile, had left their original homes in Oudh around the year 1700 and lived, in Perry’s time, along the border with Nepal, restricting their activities to the provinces of Bihar and Bengal. ‘They are,’ a Doab Thug recounted, ‘descended from the same common stock as ourselves … Their dialect and usages are all the same as ours, but they rarely make Thugs of any men but the members of their own families. They marry into other families who do not know them to be Thugs, but their wives never know their secrets, and can therefore never divulge them.’

  The various bands of Thugs seem, in any case, to have mixed relatively freely amongst themselves. Most gangs were lead by stranglers of long experience who had become acquainted with the principals of other groups and knew a number of their followers. The sheer range and mobility of many Thugs – who thought nothing of walking hundreds of miles in the
course of a single expedition – may help to explain how such relationships developed. In the course of a long career, a strangler could expect to fall in with gangs from all over India. Men from Etawah often knew Thugs from Oudh, Bengal and the Deccan, who could be recognized by ‘certain signs’ that many of the gangs had in common, in much the same way that groups of vagabonds passed information to each other on the roads of rural England. Special phrases, or the particular shape of a purse or a campfire, were among the signals that identified a Thug.* This system, informal though it undoubtedly was, seems to have worked surprisingly well. A captured strangler named Morlee recounted how

  I was one day walking with some of our party near Jypore by an encampment of wealthy merchants from the westward, who wore very high turbans. I observed to my friends as we passed, ‘What enormous turbans these men wear!’ using our mystic term aghassee. The most respectable among them came up immediately and invited us to sit down with them, saying: ‘My good friends, we are of your fraternity, though our aghassees are not the same.’ They told us that they were now opulent merchants, and independent of Thuggee, the trade by which they had chiefly acquired their wealth, though they still did a little occasionally when they found in a suitable place a bunjj [merchandise] worth taking; but that they were now beyond speculating in trifles! We were kindly entertained, and much pleased with our new friends, but left them the same day, and I have never met any men of the same kind since.