by Mike Dash
Relationships of this sort were eminently practical. Experienced stranglers knew full well that they could expect little help from any but fellow Thugs once on the roads. They were glad to share the knowledge of each other’s crimes, and took pride in the exploits of other gangs. Informal ties were strengthened when Thug gangs cooperated in inveigling and murdering large parties of travellers, and it was not uncommon for stranglers from one part of India to serve with those from another for a while, occasionally out of sheer curiosity as to the customs and methods of their hosts. Even more revealingly, the depositions made by captured Thugs often feature striking instances of gangs sharing the proceeds of their murders equally with others, even in cases in which one group of Thugs had done far more of the work than had their companions. The cooperation and the selflessness displayed on such occasions strongly suggest that the Thug gangs shared a heritage and displayed a degree of mutual trust that simply did not exist between groups of dacoits or other highway robbers. They were – as Perry and his assistants quickly recognized – something utterly unique.
* Properly spelled thag and pronounced ‘t’ug’.
* Rising early and persuading sleeping companions that the time was much later than it really was, in order to assuage any suspicion, was a common Thug trick – one easily played on poorer travellers in an age when watches were only rarely carried.
* Needles used to create tattoos.
** This group, Uthman wrote, could be divided into several distinct categories: the sahib baj – that is, disembowellers – the sahib radkh, ‘crushers and pounders’, and the early Islamic stranglers themselves. Both the latter groups bore a certain resemblance to the Thugs of India; the ‘crushers and pounders’ befriended travellers on the road and, having ingratiated themselves with them, crept up on their victims while they were praying or asleep and struck them over both ears simultaneously using two smooth stones, taking care to kill them in order to avert the risk of being identified later. The stranglers’ favoured method, on the other hand, was to throw their victims’ robes over their heads to disorientate them while they were being throttled, or to lure them into a house where they could be despatched while accomplices drowned out the sound of the murder by playing music or wailing like lamenting women.
* An alternative explanation was that these Thugs descended from a strangler named Jumulud Deen.
* Thug ‘passwords’ were said to include the phrase ‘Peace to thee, friend’. ‘This,’ claimed one British officer, ‘to anyone but a Thug would seem a common salutation, but it would instantly be recognised by a Thug. Anyone who should reply in the same manner would be quite safe.’
CHAPTER 4
Mr Halhed’s Revenge
‘cheyns – noise, confusion, clamour’
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 Sindou
se 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,
it was their intention in case the poison had taken effect, to have attacked and cut up the whole of the detachment, which they might have done with ease, if it had not been commanded by a European, for during the night they assembled in large bodies in the Ravines, close to the camp, and frequently sent up reconnoitring parties, but the alertness of the sentries prevented an attack being made, and every hope on their part of our deaths had to be given up from our appearance on the parade yesterday, which, tho’ still very unwell, we made considerable efforts to accomplish, to prevent their receiving confidence, or our own people being deprived of it.
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.
Worse followed. On the evening of 22 October, Halhed took an evening ride through the ravines along the Maratha border, accompanied by Maunsell and a bodyguard of a dozen sepoys and three mounted guides. The evening had been a quiet one, but as Halhed rode along a dried-up riverbed outside the village of Bindawa, ‘a party of about 500 armed men, headed by Loll Jee and his son, Suntak Arn, who had it seems laid in wait for us, rushed out’. The attack was quite unexpected. ‘I had no reason to apprehend any such disturbance in our own Territories at that time,’ Halhed protested. ‘Nor had anyone the least idea that it was possible to happen. We offered no provocation whatever and were proceeding quietly on our road, and I certainly deemed the protection of 12 horsemen sufficient.’ In a matter of moments, however, the British party found itself entirely surrounded and cut off from their base.
Their situation was desperate. ‘To move forward,’ the magistrate would recall, ‘was death, to stand still to prolong our existence for a very short time, to return was equally danger
ous, for it is the custom of these villagers to rush on when the opposing or defending party retreat.’ Only the Sindouse men’s reluctance – common among Indian irregulars at this time – to assault armed Europeans prevented an immediate attack. But, even so, there was no obvious escape and Halhed swiftly realized that his men’s one hope was to retreat to the top of the ravines, under cover provided by a desperate rearguard action.
All was confusion as the ascent began. Halhed placed himself with the rearguard and was overseeing the retreat of the last of the sepoys when
at this instant a shower of Balls assailed us, and the road was so narrow as only to admit of one horse at a time … A man was shot just before me by a rascal who had aimed at me; he fell and at this moment the Rebels cried out, ‘We have killed a Ferringee!*’
Turning, Halhed found that Maunsell was nowhere to be seen. Four wounded sepoys, coming up the ravine after him, confirmed that the lieutenant ‘had been shot and cut down, that Manoolah, horseman, was killed, and also one of the mounted guides, and that the villagers were coming up’. There was very little the magistrate could do, but he ‘went to the braw of the cliff and fired my pistols at them, which they returned with matchlock balls’.
Halhed’s flight brought him and the remaining members of the party to the village of Bindawa, a few hundred yards from the Maratha border. The village zamindars – whom the magistrate ‘had every reason to suppose would try to destroy us’ – refused to offer any help, and though Halhed was anxious to counter-attack, the most he could do was return to the foot of the ravines to recover Maunsell’s corpse. It had been ‘cut into pieces … stripped and covered with numberless wounds, most of them apparently inflicted after life had left them’.