Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Such an outrage could not be left unrevenged. It was more than simply a matter of prestige; the Company was so badly outmanned in India that its entire position could be swiftly undermined if its subjects thought they could kill Europeans with impunity. Within a few days another party of sepoys, this one under a Captain Popham, was sent to Sindouse to reinforce Halhed’s men. A battery of artillery capable of reducing the rebels’ strongholds was floated down the Chambel. And a reward of 5,000 rupees was offered for the capture of Laljee himself. When news reached Halhed that the zamindar had taken refuge, with most of his retainers, in the village of Murnae, just over the Maratha border to the west, he wasted no time in crossing into Gwalior after them.

  Once again, Laljee did not stand and fight. At the first news of Halhed’s approach, he fled, accompanied by almost all his men, including a party of well over a hundred Thugs. Murnae, which had been one of the stranglers’ principal headquarters for more than a century, was left exposed. And in the second week of November, the Company’s troops descended upon it. Their orders were to raze the village to the ground.

  Murnae burned, a vivid flare of colour amid the grey of the ravines. Two months after the end of the rains, the grass roofs of the village houses were dry and combustible. It took only seconds to set them alight, and as Captain Popham’s sepoys ran from hut to hut, thrusting flaming torches into the thatch, thin columns of smoke began to rise into the air and went spiralling up over the surrounding gorges to scar the cold November sky. Long before nightfall, the settlement had been reduced to little but ash and a scattering of sagging walls, black with soot and still hot to the touch.

  Popham did not rest even then. Before he marched away, the captain had asses harnessed to the local farmers’ ploughs and sent his sepoys back into Murnae. The smouldering remnants of its mud-brick buildings were ploughed back into the earth from which they had been made, until there was nothing but rutted heaps of black, charred soil where the village had once stood. Maunsell’s death had been avenged. The destruction of the Thug headquarters was complete.

  By then, of course, the stranglers themselves had fled. At the first signs of Popham’s approach, every able-bodied person in Murnae had hastened south or west into the Maratha lands to escape the vengeance of the Company. Some did not go very far. Most of the village’s farmers and artisans probably halted no more than a few miles away, fearful for their crops, and some of these men had already returned home by the end of the year to begin rebuilding their village. Laljee himself, accompanied by a band 400 strong, did not venture much further. The zamindar sought refuge in Rampoora, a small town 15 miles to the north of his former home, and hovered for several weeks along the south bank of the River Sindh, hoping for an opportunity to cross back into British territory and seize back the cattle that were the main source of his wealth. This proved to be a serious mistake, for – surrounded by a detachment of Maratha troops despatched at the Company’s request, handed over to the British authorities for trial, and swiftly found guilty of complicity in Maunsell’s murder – Laljee found himself imprisoned for life in the British jail at Roy Barelly, east of Delhi. Some 140 Sindouse and Murnae Thugs, picked up by the Marathas in nearby villages and towns, fared only a little better. These men were thrown into a grim prison in Gwalior where almost a third of them died, apparently of rheumatic fever.* The survivors had to endure 13 months of incarceration before securing their release by paying the enormous total of 16,000 rupees as security for their future good behaviour. Every one was, in the meantime, ‘horribly maltreated’, even those with money – which usually purchased good treatment in the prisons of the Native States – for ‘those who could not pay’ (one of their number recalled) ‘were beaten in the hopes that their friends would in time pay; and those who paid, were beaten in the hopes that their friends would be made, in time, to pay more’.

  The wisest of Laljee’s followers were those who left the district altogether. A number of Thugs fled south into their traditional hunting grounds in the lands south of the Nerbudda river known as the Deccan, and 200 more found sanctuary amidst the mosaic of tiny semi-independent states that made up eastern Gwalior and the province of Bundelcund. Many settled with their families along the south bank of the Jumna in districts ruled by petty chiefs who – like Laljee and the zamindars of Murnae – were happy to extend their protection to men able to pay for the privilege; the remainder headed south towards the towns of Jhansee, Saugor and Bhopal. These men, too, found secure boltholes. Two decades later, one Jhansee official was still lamenting the fate that had brought Thugs into his master’s lands in 1812 and prompted them to settle in a score of villages scattered across the district of Khyrooah, where the local chiefs shielded them from all manner of threats:

  The Khyrooa Thakoor [local notable] will not give up the Thugs at the order of the Jhansee Chief because he desires a service from them, and pays no attention to the Jhansee Chief’s orders. This residence is on a hill, and is a strong castle, and he confides in its strength, and has put two pieces of cannon on it; and has a thousand followers at command. He has never paid any regard to his Chief’s order and always takes a fourth from the booty the Thugs bring home with them from their expeditions, and this prevents his giving them up.

  The Company’s officers in Etawah remained quite ignorant of the fate of these fleeing Thugs. They had little knowledge of events in the Native States of central India, and their concern, in any case, was not so much to catch and try the stranglers themselves as to ensure that Sindouse was pacified and the pargana’s rents and taxes paid on time. The dispersal of the Thugs and bandits living in the district had been necessary to achieve this aim. But while Halhed’s actions did secure the disputed revenues, and deter the Chambel valley Thugs themselves from operating in British territory, it must be doubted whether they saved many lives. The destruction of Murnae did not even prevent the district from becoming a Thug headquarters again, for by the end of 1813 the village had already been rebuilt. Several prominent families of stranglers soon settled back into the ravine country, and in no more than a year or two the parganas south of Sindouse were once again notorious for harbouring all manner of Thugs, dacoits and rebels. The Marathas tolerated their presence while they paid for protection, and the British took little interest in their activities while they confined themselves to the districts south of the Jumna. No attempt was made to capture them or drive them out again.

  The Thugs themselves did curtail their operations in the Company’s territories as a result of Perry’s efforts. But this did not mean that there were fewer stranglers on the roads, nor that the number of Thug murders actually decreased, even in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Murnae itself. Most gangs were content to direct their attentions southwards, into the central provinces of India and away from Company lands. These provinces were then made up entirely of small, poorly resourced native states, where policing was often inadequate and the Thugs went largely unmolested. During the cold season of 1813, several new or enlarged Thug bands had taken to the roads of southern Hindustan with considerable success. In the course of the cold season several parties of Thugs united to seize 27,000 rupees from one group of travellers outside the town of Rewah, and another 13,500 rupees from a gang of 27 dacoits who were tracked and slaughtered close to Lucknadown. This made the year 1813–14 one of the most successful ever known by the Thugs.

  In later years, the Company would come to see the destruction of Murnae as a mistake. ‘It is, to me, extremely doubtful whether by this dispersion of the Thug headquarters we performed any real benefit to India,’ one senior judge observed two decades later. Yet this was scarcely Halhed’s fault. There were, in 1812, already many precedents for expelling undesirables from British territory into the Native States; it was a cheap and simple – if scarcely effective – solution to the problem of tackling crime, and it was still almost unheard of for large gangs to be smashed by the mass arrest and trial of their members. Had the Etawah magistrates wanted to tackle
the Sindouse Thugs in this way, there was no prospect of them mustering the resources required to arrest, try and imprison the hundreds of bandits and rebels living in the ravines.

  For Company officials such as Halhed and Perry, cast more or less adrift in Etawah, the activities of the Thugs – and indeed criminal justice in general – were little more than unwelcome distractions from more pressing tasks. The idea of pursuing highly mobile gangs of stranglers through central India was certainly impractical. Even the cost of imprisoning the Thugs who were in custody was such that the Company was glad to let others bear it. When news reached Etawah that Maharajah Sindhia had arrested 130 men from Laljee’s band, no effort was made to have more than a handful of the Thugs most responsible for Maunsell’s death transferred to British jails, though Halhed and Perry must have known that the rest were unlikely to spend long in a Maratha prison. There was a simple reason for this failing: no one, in 1812, was greatly concerned to discover the fate of the unknown number of travellers who vanished on the roads of the Subcontinent each year. Even after Murnae had been razed to the ground, most of the Thugs who had lived there felt quite safe in their new homes in Bundelcund.

  * An Indian term used to describe an administrative district of anywhere between 20 and 200 villages.

  * In later life NB Halhed became a long-serving Member of Parliament and, notoriously, the vocal supporter of an eccentric millennial cult.

  * European.

  * The Thugs themselves firmly believed that these deaths were inflicted by ‘a great Demon that every night visited our prison and killed or tortured some one’. One of their number, Thukoree, recalled: ‘I saw him only once myself. I was awake while all the rest were asleep; he came in at the door, and seemed to swell as he came in till his head touched the roof, and the roof was very high, and his bulk became enormous. I prostrated myself, and told him that “he was our Purmesur [great god] and we poor helpless mortals depended entirely on his will”. This pleased him, and he passed me by; but took such a grasp at the man Mungulee, who slept by my side, that he was seized with spasms all over from the nape of the neck to the sole of his foot … This was his mode of annoying them, and but few survived … This spirit came most often in the cold and rainy weather.’

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘The Infamous System of Thuggee’

  ‘tupjana – changing direction’

  Even as the Murnae and Sindouse Thugs vanished into the patchwork of independent and semi-independent states that made up Gwalior and Bundelcund, the East India Company was forgetting them. Halhed left Etawah for a better position at a larger station within a few weeks of his return from Sindouse at the end of 1812. Perry, who remained in the town until the early 1820s, concentrated more and more on other work, and though Etawah’s new magistrate, George Stockwell, took up the task of harrying any Thugs bold enough to settle within the Company’s borders, he was very much alone. Few other British officers in India knew or cared about the stranglers.

  A scant and scattered body of knowledge concerning the Thugs did exist, had Perry only known it. British officials had first encountered organized bands of stranglers a full quarter of a century before Halhed ventured into Sindouse, and, even before that, there had been indications that such gangs, or something very like them, were roaming India. But the almost total lack of communication between the Company’s three Presidencies – each of which maintained its own administrative system, its own army and its own police – made it difficult for anyone to draw together the few reports that did exist. News of Perry’s activities in Etawah barely penetrated further than the Jumna at first; the proceedings of magistrates in Madras were filed in the archives of that Presidency and forgotten. And so long as Thuggee was perceived as a local problem – with officers expelling criminals from their territories without worrying too much where they would settle next – the situation was unlikely to change.

  The first unequivocal description of an Indian strangling gang had been composed nearly a thousand miles from Etawah, in the vicinity of Madras. Writing home in 1785, more than a century after John Fryer had witnessed the execution of what may have been a gang of Thugs outside Surat, a Company administrator by the name of James Forbes reported that

  several men were taken up for a most cruel method of robbery and murder, practised on travellers, by a tribe called phanseegurs, or stranglers … Under the pretence of travelling the same way, they enter into conversation with the strangers, share their sweetmeats, and pay them other little attentions, until an opportunity offers of suddenly throwing a rope round their necks with a slip-knot, by which they dexterously contrive to strangle them on the spot.

  The arrests that prompted Forbes to compile this brief account can no longer be traced in the records of his Presidency. But his letter is important for several reasons. It is the first British account to mention the word ‘phanseegur’ (Phansigar), which the Emperor Aurangzeb had used to describe the stranglers whom he condemned in his farman of 1672, and which would henceforth be applied to all Thug-like bandits living south of the River Tapti. It is the first, too, to describe one of the Thugs’ most distinctive tactics: the practice of inveigling their way into their victims’ confidence and awaiting the perfect moment to murder them. And its mention of the Phansigars’ favoured weapon – the noose – is a useful reminder that the gangs’ habits and methods evolved over time, for only a few decades later this weapon was superseded by the strangling scarf or cloth, which, while less effective, was far less conspicuous. The noose (often made of catgut and sometimes mounted on a stick) seems not to have been employed after about 1810, and even experienced Phansigars questioned on the subject in later years had no recollection of ever seeing it in use. This they attributed to the danger of being stopped by police and found with such a compromising object in their possession.

  No more was heard of the stranglers of the Deccan for two decades after Forbes wrote his report, although some sources suggest that, in 1799, a large gang of suspected Phansigars was detained outside the southern city of Bangalore during the Company’s war against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The fact that such murderous bands existed was recognized outside the borders of Madras, for a dictionary published in Bombay in 1808 defined the word ‘Phanseeo’ as ‘a term of abuse in Guzerat,* applied also, truly, to thieves or robbers who strangle children in secret or travellers on the road’. But the Phansigars and their methods were certainly not widely known, nor discussed in newspapers or journals during the first decade of the century. The great majority of British officers, it seems safe to say, heard nothing of their activities. Nor, apparently, did the Indians themselves, for ‘among some 2,000 fragments of oral tradition’ collected from the central provinces, one historian searching, many years later, for evidence of the stranglers’ existence found ‘many stories about robbers, but none specifically about Thugs’.

  It was not until 1807 that first-hand reports of the Phansigars’ activities began to appear. In that year, purely by chance, several stranglers ‘belonging to a gang that had just returned laden with booty from an expedition to Travancore’ fell into the hands of William Wright, the British magistrate of the district of Chittoor, 75 miles inland from Madras. These men were thrown into jail and, confronted with the prospect of lengthy prison sentences, several of them confessed to playing minor roles in a number of murders. Their crimes included the theft of 2,500 pagodas – the property of a Company officer – and the killing of five of the officer’s servants at Coimbatoor in 1805; the throttling, two years later, of seven men carrying 1,000 pagodas for a Lieutenant Blackston of the Engineers; and, most spectacularly, the murder, on the coast south of Madras, of three men who had been escorting treasure valued at 160,000 rupees. There seemed little doubt that the same band had murdered other victims, including many whose disappearances had never been reported to the police. Wright soon became convinced that gangs of Phansigars were active throughout the Deccan, killing hundreds, if not thousands, every year.

  The Chittoor
magistrate’s reports, which were the first to describe the stranglers’ activities in any detail, would have proved invaluable to Perry, for the Phansigars of southern India were practically identical to the Thugs of Hindustan. By careful questioning of a number of informants, Wright discovered that most Phansigars lived under the protection of local landholders in his own district (which had been an independent territory until it was ceded to the Company in 1807), and that their gangs were active chiefly during the cold season. Like the Thugs of Etawah, many Deccan stranglers worked on the land for the remainder of the year, apparently because few derived large incomes from banditry. Phansigars played a full part in village life, and the loot they acquired in the course of their expeditions ensured that they were welcomed, rather than feared, when they returned to their homes. ‘They and their families,’ the magistrate was told, ‘lived peaceably with their neighbours, whom they never attempted to molest.’

  Wright’s evidence also revealed something of the gangs’ methods for the first time. The Chittoor magistrate was the first official to draw attention to the defining characteristic linking the Thugs and Phansigars – the fact that ‘they never commit a robbery unaccompanied with murder’. He determined that the Deccan stranglers generally travelled in bands 30 to 50 strong, seldom disposed of any victims within 30 miles of their own homes, and frequently used aliases or changed their names, so that ‘it may generally be said there is no discovering Fauseegars while travelling’ – all information that might have aided Perry in his interrogation of Gholam Hossyn. Wright also noted that the members of several Chittoor gangs were well known to one another, and that they often combined forces on the roads to overwhelm large parties of travellers, dividing into groups of about a dozen men in order to cover more ground and arouse less suspicion in the minds of their intended victims. They had their own slang or argot, impenetrable to ordinary travellers, and their method of killing was generally the same as that practised in Hindustan: