Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Careful study of the surviving records of Thuggee nevertheless suggests that blood ties of one sort or another lay at the heart of every gang. In one case, from the Deccan, 25 members of a gang of 31 stranglers were related to other members of the band, the gang’s jemadar alone being accompanied by his father, a son, four nephews and a son-in-law. No single instance has been found of a gang composed entirely of men unrelated to one other. But, equally, there are no records of any gangs in which every member was related to at least one of his comrades by blood.

  Hereditary stranglers – if the expression can be used – made up a good proportion of most Thug bands met with up to 1835 (the situation is a good deal less certain after that date). Among the 25 members of one gang brought to trial in 1829, 13 had fathers who had practised Thuggee. A table listing their names, castes and homes shows that one was the ‘son of a noted leader, and has followed the trade since his boyhood’ and another ‘a very noted Thug lately taken on a Thug expedition (his ancestors Thugs)’. But the remaining dozen members of the gang were new to the trade, and had come to it in a variety of ways. One had ‘followed [Thuggee] for many years since his connection with the Thugs by marriage’. Another was the son of a mere pickpocket, but ‘has followed the trade of Thuggee from his youth’. A third ‘seized on Thuggee lately after the murder of some men near Cawnpore, [joining] a gang of seven Thugs’.

  No sharp distinctions seem to have existed between the hereditary Thugs and those who had only recently taken up the trade. Half of the newcomers in this particular gang were described by the Company authorities as ‘noted Thugs’. Nor is there any suggestion that burkas, the most respected of all Thugs, and the only men thought capable of successfully forming a new gang made up entirely of novice stranglers, were required to be, or were usually, the sons or grandsons of Thugs.

  Feringeea’s first Thug expeditions were made in the company of just such a mixed gang of murderers. In 1813 he joined a large band of some 150 men on an expedition to Kotah in the North Western Provinces, and it was there that he helped to inveigle what may well have been his earliest victim, a wandering mendicant whom he encountered bathing in a river. A few years later the young Thug was not far from the town of Seonee when he and a gang of 60 men killed no fewer than 14 travellers in a single night. On both occasions, Feringeea’s companions included not only Brahmins and Rajputs, whose status was roughly equivalent to his own, but also bullock drivers, weavers and ordinary peasants with whom he would never usually have mixed. Still more surprisingly, perhaps, both gangs included a substantial proportion of men who did not even practise the same religion as the young Thug.

  The make up of the Thug gangs puzzled many of the British officers who encountered them. Most gang members professed to be Hindu, though a good number – perhaps a third – were Muslim. ‘The castes chiefly to be met with are Brahmans, Rajputs, Sodhis and Kolis,*’ one Company official calculated, but – given the suspicion that the earliest Thugs probably were low-caste men from wandering tribes – police officials speculated, no doubt correctly, that low-caste Thugs often appropriated fine clothes and horses from their victims in order to pose as high-born men. There were certainly practical advantages to travelling in mixed groups. It was difficult for men of different castes to meet and mix in India, and a gang composed solely of high-caste stranglers would find it impossible to strike up any sort of friendship with most of the people they encountered on the roads. Islamic Thugs, who were unconstrained by the requirements of the caste system, must have found it easier to inveigle potential victims, and several Company officials – discovering that many Thugs possessed a wide variety of aliases – became convinced that Hindu stranglers often passed themselves off as Muslims.

  Each gang, then, contained members drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Thugs did have many things in common – not least a shared history of murder – but because most came together for only a few months at a time, they often lacked a strong sense of community and felt less loyalty to each other than the Company’s officials anticipated. The British, influenced by their own preconceptions concerning India’s religion and society, often assumed that the gangs they encountered were tight-knit groups of hereditary murderers, sons following fathers into a profession that was both exclusive and preordained. But the reality was rather different.

  Feringeea’s Thug career seems to have been a success almost from its outset. He claimed the title of jemadar at the very early age of 12, perhaps by using his late father’s money to fund an expedition. But the testimony of the boy’s companions suggests that he possessed a talent to match his inherited wealth. He was a handsome young man of youthful appearance, well spoken and of high caste – ideally suited, in short, to impress any wealthy and high-born travellers whom he encountered on the road. Indeed, some of his companions began half-jokingly to refer to him as ‘subadar’ because, one explained, ‘He was a charming young man of noble appearance, and so useful to us.’

  Feringeea’s activities in his earliest years remain obscure. He certainly Thugged between the years 1813 and 1817, and was present, with the other members of his gang, at the murder of a party of treasure bearers and a passing buffalo driver near the village of Sujaina in 1814, an affair that yielded the 40 Thugs involved an impressive 4,500 rupees. Shortly thereafter, however, he abandoned Thuggee for a while and sought service in the Company’s army, a decision that he himself claimed was taken after he fell out with his cousin Aman Subadar on a Thug expedition, but which possibly owed something to the endemic disorder afflicting central India between 1814 and 1818, when the Company renewed its war with the Marathas and it was far more dangerous to seek a living on the roads. The four years that Feringeea spent in British service demonstrated, nonetheless, the jemadar’s evident charm and talent, for by 1821 he had risen to the post of chief of the messenger service controlled by David Ochterlony, the powerful British Resident at Delhi. He might even have remained among Ochterlony’s entourage had not a friend, the captain of the guard, not been caught ‘in an awkward position’ with one of the Resident’s maidservants, prompting Feringeea to flee ahead of Ochterlony’s retribution and resume his Thug career.

  For all the attractions of the central provinces, newly restored to peace under the Company’s rule, Feringeea did not return immediately to his home in the Maratha lands after leaving Ochterlony’s service in the early 1820s. If the Resident really did want to extract vengeance from his young Rajput servant, he would seek him in his village in Khyrooah first, and Feringeea found it expedient to spend the years after 1821 working with the Thug gangs of Rajpootana, to the west, and Telingana, in the Deccan. Living ‘among these clans … for years together’ offered certain advantages to an ambitious but still relatively inexperienced jemadar, for a man who spent the cold season with the men of Telingana could remain active during the monsoon by shifting his base to the arid lands of Rajpootana, where the rains rarely fell, and so avoid having to wait out the six or eight months that otherwise passed between expeditions. A number of comrades already Thugged in this way. One, an Oudh bhurtote named Ramzan, boasted of being ‘at work for nine years without returning to my home’.

  It was while making their way into southern Rajpootana at the very end of the cold season of 1822–3 that Feringeea and the men who now made up his gang fell into the company of the girl who would become one of their most notorious victims. She was a Mughalanee – a young Muslim woman of high birth – who was travelling alone, protected by only the lightest of escorts (‘an old female servant, mounted upon a pony, one armed manservant, and six bearers for her palanquin’), because she had, rather impulsively, taken leave of some friends and decided to go on to her destination near Agra without them. She was also ‘very fair and beautiful’, and apparently somewhat flirtatious, too, for she quickly took a great liking to Feringeea. The Thug jemadar, who was by now ‘a handsome young man, [who] looked like a man of rank’, evidently enjoyed her attentions. He and the Mughalanee spent the next few days t
ogether, deep in conversation.

  In other circumstances, the girl’s advances might have provided welcome proof of Feringeea’s prowess as an inveigler. As it was, he had no interest in strangling her. His gang had decided, almost as soon as they had fallen in with the girl’s party, that she was carrying too little money to be worth murdering, and so the Mughalanee’s growing affection for their leader was not merely embarrassing, but deeply inconvenient. Several attempts to shake off her party failed, and the Thugs were just beginning to despair of enticing more worthwhile prey when the girl turned to Feringeea and told him she would like him to escort her to her home. Sensing his reluctance, she added slyly that she would ‘get him into trouble’ if he refused.

  This threat sealed the Mughalanee’s fate. Feringeea knew all too well that he had already been compromised by his friendship with the girl; as a Brahmin, he could not enjoy intimate relations of any sort with a Muslim woman, and should they be accused of ‘improper intercourse’, he could even be turned out of caste. His men were still reluctant to murder her – ‘We were very averse to it,’ insisted one, ‘and often said that we should not get two rupees apiece, and that she ought to be let go’ – but the jemadar held firm, and the members of the gang were searching for an appropriate spot to kill the Mughalanee’s men when their scouts lost their way in the early hours of a March morning. There was a moment’s confusion; ‘the young woman became alarmed, and began to reproach us for taking her into the jungle in the dark’, and Feringeea had just been summoned to quieten her when, ‘dreading that some of her party might make off, the signal was given’, and the girl and her servants were all strangled on the spot.

  The Thugs, when they recalled this sad affair at all, did so because their gloomy forecast of the likely profit proved only too correct: each man received, as his share of the loot, the sum of only four rupees. Feringeea, too, dismissed his brief friendship with the girl, believing that the unusual circumstances fully proved ‘it was her fate to die by our hands’. But the murder would eventually attract more attention than any of the jemadar’s other crimes – not because of the Mughalanee’s position, or even her youth and great beauty, but because she should never have been a victim of the Thugs at all.

  There can be little doubt that the first decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a deterioration in the discipline maintained within many strangling gangs. The reasons for this decline were complex, though they evidently owed at least a little to the appearance of large numbers of novice Thugs with few ties to old families such as Feringeea’s and little respect for their established practices, and more to the difficulty many bands experienced in making a decent living from their murders. One consequence was that rules that had been followed by the gangs were increasingly flouted, and a number of the customs and proscriptions that had guided the Thugs for years began to be ignored. The Mughalanee and her travelling companions were merely a handful among many hundreds of the gangs’ victims who died as a result of this sea change.

  The Thugs, like almost every Indian of the time, were highly superstitious. No strangler was supposed to kill a woman. Nor a fakir. Nor a musician, a dancer or a bard. Indeed, the list of those whom the gangs were prohibited from harming, by custom or superstition, was a lengthy one. It included the maimed and the leprous, as well as the members of several specific castes or professions, such as elephant drivers, oil vendors, washermen and sweepers. Anyone travelling with a cow was to pass unharmed, and Sikhs were also spared, at least in the province of Bengal.

  The laws that guided the choice of the first victim of every expedition were, if anything, more complex still. Many Thugs invoked what was known as ‘The Rule of the Bones’, which forbade them to kill any victims accompanied by a horse, an ox or any other quadruped until some other traveller had first been strangled. Men wearing gold ornaments were likewise to be spared until another victim had been murdered, as were Brahmins and Sayyids, the most holy members of the Hindu and Muslim faiths.* It was also considered unlucky to select a poor man as the first victim of an expedition, no doubt for fear that every other traveller met along the way would be similarly impoverished.

  Yet more rules existed to govern special situations. Kawrutties (the carriers of sacred Ganges water) could only be killed if their pots were empty, while blacksmiths and carpenters – who could be strangled if they were encountered separately – were to be spared if they were travelling together.

  Most of these proscriptions were firmly rooted in the folk religion and the superstitions practised in the main Thug villages. Oil vendors and sweepers were generally thought to be unlucky, while seriously ill or physically disabled travellers were (as one strangler explained) spared on account of their misfortune: ‘These, God has afflicted; we may not touch them.’ Criminals who harmed women had been singled out for particular punishment in even the most ancient Hindu texts. The Thugs’ superstition concerning the killing of travellers accompanied by beasts of burden, meanwhile, probably reflected the sanctity accorded to those conveying the remains of their deceased parents to be consigned to the Ganges.

  This mass of laws was, in any case, not scrupulously observed. Most jemadars were simply too pragmatic to be entirely bound by customs that so limited their prospects of inveigling worthwhile victims, and though the most successful Thugs did indeed pass over members of the forbidden groups and castes, poorer stranglers were sorely tempted to kill any travellers whom they were certain had money on them. Others struggled with the practical difficulties involved in sparing some members of a party, while contriving to strangle others. Even if it were possible – and the Thugs certainly did employ considerable ingenuity on occasion to separate those they could not kill from those they fully intended to** – it was horribly dangerous to leave witnesses capable of identifying the members of a gang alive, and there were, thus, numerous cases in which victims who should have been safe from attack were killed. In particular, women accompanying large parties of travellers were frequently murdered because the alternative would have been to allow the entire group to escape.

  Captured Thugs invariably lamented this development and a good number believed that their gangs had lost the divine protection that shielded them from capture when they first defied the old proscriptions. Reverses or misfortunes of all kinds were commonly attributed to failures to observe the sacred laws, and when the jemadars Punchum and Himmut strangled no fewer than 6 women in the course of disposing of a group of 40 travellers near Nagpore in 1809, the awful deaths suffered by many of their men were widely attributed to divine retribution. ‘How was Punchum punished?’ Feringeea asked. ‘Did he not die before he could reach home? And was not his son, Bughola, hung the November following …? And was not Bhugwan hung with him? And what a horrid death did Himmut die! He was eaten alive by worms.’*

  Probably it had once been easier to obey the various proscriptions that bound Feringeea and his men than it eventually became. Most of the customs followed by the Thugs seem to have come into existence before the British appeared in central India, at a time when comparatively few stranglers were active and the countryside was peaceful and prosperous enough for highway robbers to make a decent living on the roads. Certainly most Thugs dated the earliest lapses from their informal code to around the year 1800, when there was great disorder, fewer travellers and a good many more men trying to eke out a living from Thuggee. The first woman murdered by the gangs of the Chambel valley was said to have been the Kale Bebee, the wife of a prominent Maratha officer, who was killed, together with the 12 men of her bodyguard, by Feringeea’s father Purusram around the year 1801. Purusram and another Thug jemadar attempted to atone for the crime, and restore their ritual purity, by hosting a feast for all the Brahmins of their district, and this, the other members of their gang believed, would have been enough to conciliate their gods, had they not given way to temptation once again and strangled other women in 1805, 1809 and 1813. This repeated flouting of the old proscriptions was sometimes said to have le
d not only to the jemadars’ own deaths but to have doomed their relations as well. It was, Feringeea said, ‘from that time that we may trace our decline’:

  Our family was never happy; not a year passed without [Purusram] losing something, or being seized; he was seized every year somewhere or other. Ghasee Subadar was another leader, and he suffered similar misfortunes, and his family became miserable. Look at our families; see how they are annihilated.

  The gangs led by Purusram and Feringeea may have been among the first to stoop to killing women. In the years that followed their flight from Murnae in 1812–13, the men of the Chambel valley were often harshly denounced by Thugs from other districts for killing indiscriminately and even for corrupting their fellow Thugs. The Lodhees of Bengal and Bihar were proverbially strict, for ‘no prospect of booty could ever induce them to kill a woman’. But three Doab jemadars, accused of strangling some girls in the central provinces, protested that they had been led astray by ‘the Bundelcund and Saugor men’, and insisted that such things never happened north of the Jumna, where ‘we do not even murder a person that has a cow with him’. The Phansigars, or stranglers, of the Deccan were also loud in their denunciation of the ‘Hindustani heresies’ that they believed had brought bad luck down upon the heads of their compatriots.