by Mike Dash
For all this, however, deep, well-dug graves remained a rarity in Hindustan. The depositions of the Thugs themselves abound with cases in which gangs disposed of their victims much more casually – most frequently, it seems, by hurling them into the nearest watercourse. Outside the monsoon season, these were frequently little more than dried riverbeds, in which cases the bodies would be ‘slightly buried’ or concealed under a pile of stones and leaves. Corpses might also be thrown into ravines or over cliffs where the terrain allowed. In general, it was thought enough to prevent the immediate discovery of the murder. Thug gangs moved so swiftly, and the men themselves dissembled so convincingly, that they had little fear of being captured a day or two further along the road.
Another reason for the less-than-scrupulous disposal of some bodies lay in the difficulty of preparing a secure grave, a problem often remarked upon by Thugs. Sometimes the terrain was simply unsuitable for a gobba, for ‘in some place where the ground is stony’, as one strangler explained,
the [soil] can only be about knee deep. In such cases the dead bodies must be cut to pieces and buried, otherwise the body would smell and lead to discovery. I remember being much alarmed at the first burial of this kind that I saw … I expressed fear at such a sight, for the blood flowed on the ground! But [the grave-digger] said: ‘Unless we cut them to pieces we shall be discovered!’
The grave-digger was right. Human remains did not long stay hidden if such precautions were not observed. Animals that found dead bodies generally tore them to pieces, scattering odd limbs and lumps of flesh about, and this – or the cadavers’ stench – would attract a passing villager. But it was rare, even then, for the authorities to be alerted, for those who had discovered a body knew all too well that the appearance of the police was likely to mean trouble, and might even lead to the accusation that they themselves had committed the murder.
Wells were also popular with the gangs of Hindustan, for there were thousands of them close to the roads of northern India, making it a simple matter to dispose of several bodies quickly and surely. Nearly nine-tenths of the bodies discovered around Etawah in the years 1808–11 were hauled from wells. Some sites were so popular with certain gangs that they yielded a huge quantity of bones when dredged; one was found to contain more than 100 skulls. Cautious Thugs would hurl the carcasses of dead animals into the wells after their victims, in order to disguise the source of the awful stench of rotting flesh, and a number avoided the deep, permanent wells found in many parts of the northern provinces altogether. ‘We change the wells,’ one Thug explained. ‘They are usually temporary and fall in after a year or two so that no great number of bodies will be found in one well.’
It must have taken time for the stranglers to develop these techniques. A hundred years of experience, and probably more, had burnished the gangs’ skills until few travellers who fell in with a party of Thugs had any chance of escape. Cannily assessed by scouts, flattered into carelessness by the inveiglers, surrounded at dusk by well-drilled stranglers and hand-holders, they met their deaths with an inevitability that was all the more terrible for being so utterly remorseless.
It was a system of murder without parallel: an industry of death. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Thug techniques were being practised in most of the provinces of India, from the Punjab to the far reaches of the Deccan. As many as three thousand men derived a living of a sort from Thuggee. Now one would bring it to a pitch of perfection.
* ‘These were not well-oiled complicities,’ one writer on the subject observes, ‘but ruthless relations of force that at every moment were renegotiated and could swing in favour of one or other of the parties.’
* ‘My companion Hyder,’ a strangler named Ramzan deposed, ‘was a staunch Thug, fearing nothing, but he was not a good inveigler. To inveigle a man is no easy matter, to answer all his questions and act upon them.’
* As one historian of law in the Subcontinent explains: ‘According to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence favoured in Mughal India, capital punishment could be awarded only if the homicide involved a weapon usually associated with the shedding of blood, and whether a particular weapon met this requirement was the subject of much legal debate.’
* ‘We strangled travellers on horseback in this way,’ the notorious Thug Ramzan explained. ‘It requires three men, each being at his post. One Thug … walks near the horse’s head, ready to seize the reins – another Thug, the decoyer, walks by the side of the horseman, engaging him in conversation – the strangler, all ready for his office, walks a little to the rear by the flank of the horse. The decoyer in the course of conversation offers the horseman some tobacco, or anything else. When he puts out his hand to receive it, the decoyer seizes the victim’s hands, at the same instant giving the signal for the others to perform their offices, he himself dragging the horseman down. The strangler, the moment the hands are seized, and with the horseman’s neck within his reach, seizes him firmly by the throat and falls with him to the ground, where he completes the strangulation. The third Thug, having at the signal seized the bridle of the affrighted horse, secures him as a prize.’
* It should be mentioned that the Thugs’ methods of burial would have been highly distasteful to their Hindu and Muslim victims alike. Hindus were cremated after death, the only exceptions being those who died of cholera or smallpox. Muslims believed that the dead should be buried with their heads facing Mecca, and then only in coffins; the touch of earth was thought to cause torture in the afterlife.
CHAPTER 7
Feringeea
‘burka – a leader or chief of the Thugs, or one thoroughly instructed in the art. The Thugs consider a burka as capable of forming a Thug gang out of the rude materials around him in any part of India’
The most celebrated of all the Thugs was born, in 1800, in suitably melodramatic circumstances: in the midst of a desperate assault on his home village, surrounded by smoke and fire and without the benefit of beds, blankets or midwives.
He was called Feringeea, which means ‘European’ – a name that commemorated the destruction of Murnae, 12 years before it was burned to the ground by Nathaniel Halhed, by one of Maharajah Sindhia’s regiments under the command of French and British officers. His father, Purusram, was one of the great Thug leaders of the Chambel valley. His uncle, Rae Singh, was the richest man in the pargana, having used the proceeds of his expeditions to purchase the right to farm the district’s taxes. His mother, who gave birth to him while fleeing from the sepoys, was the daughter of a Maratha noble. Theirs was an influential and wealthy family. But it was influential because of the sway Purusram enjoyed over the gangs of Murnae, and wealthy thanks to the wages of Thuggee.
Feringeea was born a Brahmin. He was descended from the clans that ruled the arid lands to the west of the Chambel river – a race of people known throughout India for their military prowess – and was a member of the highest Hindu caste. The Brahmins were India’s hereditary priests and scholars; as well as being dvija, or ‘twice-born’ (once physically, and for a second time through an initiation ritual), they were generally well educated, and the members of other castes deferred to them. Some Brahmins earned a living as soldiers or farmers rather than as priests, but none would stoop to manual labour, and it was held to be a sin to shed a drop of their sacred blood.
Purusram’s ancestors had lived in Murnae for more than 100 years. If the family’s own traditions are to be believed, they had first appeared in the ravine country towards the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, probably at some point during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. The first members of the clan to dwell in Murnae itself were two brothers, Seeam and Assa, who married sisters from a local Brahmin family whose own ancestors had been – so later legend said – ‘initiated into the mysteries of Thuggee’ during a sojourn at the Mughal court at Delhi. Seeam and Assa consequently became Thugs themselves, and though Assa died without issue, Seeam’s descendants continued to lead the Murnae gangs for well over a centur
y. Purusram himself could trace his ancestry back through five generations of stranglers. All six of his brothers travelled with the village gangs, as did more than 30 cousins, and in each branch of the family, so it was claimed, ‘every male, as he became of age, became a Thug’.
Feringeea himself took part in his first Thug expedition some time before his fourteenth birthday. If he was introduced to the Murnae gangs by his father, he must have begun to Thug at the age of 10 or 11, for Purusram was hanged at Gwalior in 1812 with a number of his men. This is far from impossible; the sons of active Thugs often joined the gangs at a very early age. There are records of boys aged eight or nine participating in expeditions.
Children took no part in the killing of the gang’s victims, and were taken on the road largely in order to increase their family’s income, since each member of a Thug gang, whatever his age, received an equal share of the loot. ‘If you love your sons,’ one strangler was asked, ‘why do you teach them to be Thugs?’ ‘How [else] could they be supported?’ came the reply.
Fathers are glad when their children accompany them – why should that not be? They get a share; they instruct their sons in Thuggee and the mode of inveigling travellers; and they are glad when their children become proficient and expert. If the family be in no pecuniary want, the father will tell their sons to remain at home. But when in want, they take them with them.
Children were generally introduced to the Thug’s way of life quite gradually. ‘At first they know nothing of what we do,’ one strangler explained. ‘They accompany us and are allowed a pony, and soon become fond of the wandering life. At the end of the first year they know that we steal, and some suspect that we do more. At the end of the second year all know we murder, and in the third year they will see it.’
This careful introduction to the ways of Thuggee seems to have been intended to ease the shock that novice Thugs inevitably felt on witnessing murder for the first time. Such caution was necessary. Feringeea himself told the story of a nephew who was so terrified by the sight of the men of his gang falling on a party of travellers that he collapsed in shock and never properly recovered.
Although it seems entirely probable that older Thugs instructed their sons in the methods and tactics employed by their gangs, many Thugs insisted that ‘a father does not initiate his son in strangling’. This duty fell to a ‘Teacher of the Duties of a Thug’, or guru, usually a man of considerable experience. The novice murderer, one Thug explained,
proceeds to the fields, conducted by his Gooroo previously selected who carries with him the Roomal or shred of cloth, and anxiously looks out for some favourable omen, such as the chirping of certain birds or their flight past the right hand. He knots the Roomal at each end the moment that either occurs, and delivers it to the candidate imploring success upon him … It is the seniors only who confer this office, generally old Thugs held in some estimation.
Some Thug informants made a great deal of the relationship between a novice strangler and his guru, insisting that a strangler would betray his own family before he allowed any harm to come to his mentor. There is no trace of such strong and mystical relationships in the surviving records of Thuggee. But if the depositions made by captured stranglers can be believed, the appointment of a guru may have been intended to benefit the teacher as much as it did his pupil. ‘The preceptor who initiated a novice,’ one jemadar explained, ‘is afterwards looked up to by the Thug so initiated, who through life will always give part of his spoil to the teacher.’ Other Thugs described how elderly stranglers of this sort, too old to be of any use out on the roads, were maintained into their old age by donations made by grateful former pupils.
It was the guru who presided over the feast, or tuponee, at which a boy was accepted into the fraternity. A key feature of this feast was the ritual consumption of unrefined sugar, or goor – a sacrificial meal that the Thugs also consumed after each successful killing. ‘The leader of the gang and the other bhurtotes sat on a blanket with the rest of the gang around them. A little sugar was dropped into a hole and the leader prayed for the gods to send them some rich victims. The remainder of the sugar was divided among all present.’ This ceremony – unlike the majority of the religious trappings associated with the gangs – seems to have been unique to the Thugs, although the members of many other castes and professions celebrated with ritual feasts at which other foodstuffs were consumed.
Novice stranglers attached particular importance to their first taste of goor. They were told that the consecrated sugar they consumed during the tuponee would prepare them for the grisly work they undertook in the course of their expeditions. Feringeea was no exception. His own initiation ritual, he firmly believed, changed his character fundamentally and for ever.
‘We all feel pity sometimes,’ he explained two decades later.
But the goor of the tuponee changes our nature. It would change the nature of a horse. Let any man once taste of that goor and he will be a Thug though he know all the trades and have all the wealth in the world.
I never wanted food; my mother’s family was opulent, her relations high in office. I have been high in office myself, and became so a great 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 of that 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.
The gangs led by Purusram and Feringeea were made up mostly of men who lived with them in Murnae. These Thugs came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were Purusram’s close relatives – uncles, brothers, cousins, sons – who belonged to the same extended family and had these bonds in common. A few were old and trusted associates who had served the same jemadars for decades; Purusram’s gang included one aged Thug named Lalmun, whose grandfather had arrived in Murnae early in the eighteenth century and Thugged with Purusram’s ancestors for years, ‘adopting their notions on all points of Thuggee’. Others had married into families that practised the trade, as Purusram’s own family had themselves done generations earlier, but others again were ordinary villagers with no ties to the jemadar or his family. These men became Thugs because they needed money or found it easier to make a living from murder than from the back-breaking work of farming the poor local soil. There are numerous examples of men who did not become Thugs until they were well over 20 years old, and some of stranglers who had never ventured onto the roads of India until they were 40 or even 50. Some of these men worked on the land for years at a time before being tempted back into service with the gangs. A good number had once been soldiers, and were forced to resort to Thuggee by the sharp fall in the demand for military service that occurred in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth. But other Thugs had been labourers or drovers. One, seized in central India in 1829, turned out to be a former elephant-keeper for the Rajah of Jhalone.
Many gangs, perhaps most, included a fourth variety of Thug. These men were the children of parents who had been murdered by Thugs years earlier, and whose lives had been spared because they were too young to escape or give evidence against the killers. Children as old as six or seven were often forcibly ‘adopted’ in this way, which meant that many of them grew up remembering their mothers and fathers and the manner of their parents’ deaths. They were, in effect, treated as a form of capital by their abductors. The boys were made to serve their adoptive fathers until they were old enough to be inducted into the Thug gangs; initiation made them eligible to receive a share of the loot, which added to the wealth of their adoptive family. Girls stayed at home, assisting the Thugs’ women with domestic work until they could make a profitable marriage. The interrogations of captured Thugs preserved by the Company sometimes refer to such adopted children as ‘slaves’, which no doubt says a good deal about the way in which they were treated after the murder of their parents. Even so, the stranglers’ life was all these children knew, and vir
tually all the males, when they grew up, became murderers themselves; many were eventually hanged for the same crimes that their adoptive fathers had committed against their natural parents. The gangs, indeed, depended heavily upon adoptive children to augment their ranks. Almost one in 10 of the Thugs known to the British were men whose families had been murdered by their own associates.
Ghoolam Hossyn, the very first Thug captured by the Company, was one of the many men adopted in this way. He was about four years old when, in 1798, he left the town of Rampoora, just south of the Chambel ravines, with his father and uncle to sell horses. The party came to a well where a group of 15 Thugs were resting. The Thugs killed all the adults on Ghoolam Hossyn’s party and took the boy back to their own village, where ‘in the evening I cried and called for my father. They told me my father had sold his horses to them and had gone away but would return. They also gave me sweetmeats and told me to remain quiet.’ After three days, the child was taken to another village and presented to the local zamindar, who treated him kindly. But when, a month later, Ghoolam Hossyn asked the man to ‘carry me to my father, he told me in reply that if I ever again made such a request he would kill me … [and] moreover suspended me in a well for two days with a view to deterring me from mentioning the subject, and I have never spoken of it since.’ Ghoolam Hossyn instead grew up to be a Thug himself.*
There was, then, little homogeneity among the ranks of a Thug gang. The leaders of many bands were in effect hereditary Thugs, coming from families in which the trade had been practised for generations and among whom sons followed their fathers and served alongside brothers, cousins and uncles. These men were sometimes known as aseel, or well-born, Thugs, and it seems likely that a good number of the most influential Thug jemadars came from such a background, and that these men passed on the skills and tricks of the Thug trade to newer members of their gangs. But even in the most eminent Thug families men did not become stranglers either automatically or inevitably. Some sons followed other professions; others Thugged only occasionally, at times when money was short. There were many cases of men leaving off the trade for years or sometimes even decades at a time, only to be lured back to it by need or the importuning of a passing gang.