Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  The tendency to shift blame for the failure to observe the old Thug customs existed even within the ranks of the Chambel valley gangs themselves. The Hindu members of Purusram’s band insisted that they were sometimes forced, against their will, to agree to the murder of women by the more numerous Muslims in the gang, who did not feel bound by customs based on ancient Brahmin texts. Feringeea’s men were adamant that no Hindu took part in the Mughalanee’s murder, and possibly some were sufficiently religious to be genuinely disturbed by the forbidden practice. But there were other Thugs who – while never stooping to kill a member of one of the proscribed groups themselves – were happy enough to let unscrupulous or low members of their gangs flout custom in the convenient belief that they themselves were not defiled by such objectionable practices. ‘Among us,’ one strangler explained, ‘it is a rule never to kill a woman; but if a rich old woman is found, the gang sometimes get a man to strangle her by giving him an extra share of the booty, and inducing him to take the responsibility upon himself.’ This practice eventually became common even in Oudh, whose Thugs considered themselves more scrupulous than those of Hindustan. One Oudh gang included a bhurtote by the name of Jubber, who could often be persuaded to strangle inconvenient victims ‘for the love of four additional annas’.*

  The Thugs were, in short, strikingly inconsistent in their interpretations of old customs that seem to have been common to all the gangs of northern India. The outcome of an encounter between a Thug band and travellers from one of the proscribed groups and castes could seldom be predicted; it depended upon the circumstances, the character of the jemadars involved, and the proportions of Hindus and Muslims in a gang. This was a consequence of the absence of any sort of central leadership or hierarchy among the gangs. In most cases, the Thugs’ leaders were free to act as they saw fit, and that meant that need, chance and – on rare occasions – even compassion all played their parts in determining the outcome of an expedition.

  Compassion was a subject seldom touched on by hardened stranglers. Most Thugs felt little sympathy for the people that they killed, such feelings as they possessed having been, as we have seen, squeezed from them in the course of their first few expeditions. The business was also the only way of making a living that many stranglers knew. ‘The love of money makes us kill them,’ a Thug named Dhoosoo once explained, ‘we care not for their life.’

  Yet even the most ruthless stranglers did feel compassion on occasion, sometimes when it was least expected. In about 1830, for example, a gang of 40 men working near Lucknow met

  a very handsome youth, a native officer of rank, upon horseback in the King of Oudh’s service, who had a camel with him, and six sepoys, and some servants, and some one or two thousand roopees. We inveigled him and … every Thug was ready for the destruction of the youth and his whole party – stranglers being all ready – [when] the light of the fire fell upon the hair and handsome countenance of the young man, doomed to death, who was the head of the party, and as he sat upon his horse he looked so very beautiful that we all felt compassion. I was appointed to seize the reins of his horse … but so beautiful was he as the light fell upon his face that we could not find it in our hearts to kill him, so we let him and his whole party pass on their way, though it was a rich prize! A camel and many roopees and much property! It often happens that we thus let men off from pity.

  Most such cases occurred when Thugs were confronted with the need to murder women or young children. Feringeea, the year after killing the Mughalanee, was once again working his way through Rajpootana when he and his men fell in with the handmaid of a Maratha ruler, ‘on her way from Poona to Cawnpore’. The fact that she was a woman would not in itself have been enough to save her, ‘for she and her escort had a lakh and a half of property and jewels and other things with them’. But ‘after having her and her party three days within our grasp’, the Thugs eventually let her go, ‘for she was very beautiful’, as well as being – presumably – less likely than her Muslim predecessor to cause trouble. It was not an unprecedented incident – ‘We all feel compassion sometimes,’ the jemadar concluded. But such sentiments were generally rare.

  One reason for the Thugs’ flouting of ancient proscriptions and their ruthless despatch of victims who might once have been spared was an increasing fear of arrest and punishment.

  Feringeea, whose Thug career had proceeded more or less without incident for the best part of a decade, was one of a number of prominent stranglers to fall foul of either the British or the Indian authorities in the early 1820s. No more than a year after he had left Ochterlony’s service, the young jemadar was nearing the town of Kotah with his men when the gang was waylaid by a patrol of sepoys. Feringeea’s band had enjoyed recent success, having strangled ‘four men with bundles of clothes’ less than a week earlier and killed a Hindu chief and his retinue of servants four days later, and they were carrying a considerable quantity of incriminating plunder. In consequence, no fewer than 28 Thugs were arrested, Feringeea himself escaping only because he chanced to be bathing when the troops appeared and was able to flee, naked, into the countryside and then evade pursuit. His followers were also fortunate on this occasion; the local rajah baulked at the cost of imprisoning so many men, and released them after only a day, having ‘blackened their faces’ with a dye in order to give warning to other travellers of their character. But two other gangs of Thugs were not so fortunate: 40 men whom the Kotahan patrols chanced upon while chasing Feringeea were jailed for the best part of four years, perhaps because the evidence against them was stronger.

  In these changing circumstances, fewer and fewer Thugs could afford to be scrupulous about their choice of victims. At roughly the same time that Feringeea’s men were arrested at Kotah, for example, another band of stranglers under a certain Khimolee Jemadar was committing what came to be regarded as one of the most atrocious of all Thug murders. This, the so-called ‘Beseynee affair’, began in a temple at Kamptee, just outside Nagpore, with the killing of three men working for a local merchant and the seizure of a bag of valuable spices and another containing silks. Khimolee’s men then fell in with a party coming north from the Deccan. This group was led by a man named Newul Singh, a disabled soldier who had lost one arm in the Nizam’s service and was travelling with two daughters, aged 11 and 13, the girls’ intended husbands – two youths of about their ages – and a son aged seven. Both Singh and the girls thus belonged to classes of travellers forbidden to the Thugs, and several of Khimolee’s men refused to have anything to do with the murder of a disabled man, splitting from the main party. The jemadar himself, however, successfully inveigled his way into Newul Singh’s confidence and became a great favourite of his daughters ‘from numerous acts of kindness and attention on the roads’.

  This attachment served the Thugs well when, stopping for the night in a village called Dhoma, the house in which most of the gang were staying caught fire and the occupants were arrested on suspicion of arson. Newul Singh was vocal in protesting his new friend’s innocence, and was able to call upon a relative serving with the British forces in nearby Seonee to secure their release. By the time the party reached Jubbulpore a few days later, the two groups had become so close that Newul Singh laughingly rejected several warnings from acquaintances in the town that the men he had fallen in with were dangerous characters. He was, he said, more than happy to remain in their company.

  Some Thugs, owing so much to a party of intended victims, might have searched for other prey. Khimolee and his men, however, chose to avail themselves again of the attachment of Newul Singh and his daughters only a day or so later, when messengers from Nagpore reached the town with news of the robbery at Kamptee and the Jubbulpore authorities began a search for the missing bags of silk and spices. Singh’s daughters were persuaded to sit down on the bags of loot ‘and to say that their companions were friends of theirs, and honest men’, while the police searched their lodgings. Nothing was found, and a few days later, at the village of Beseyne
e, Singh and all the members of his party were murdered and robbed, the Thugs having accompanied them ‘a distance of more than 200 miles, and were with them about 20 days on the most intimate terms, before they put them all to death’.

  The growing danger of arrest had other consequences. Many Thugs became, for example, much more cautious regarding the disposal of their victims’ bodies during the third decade of the nineteenth century. Hitherto, as we have seen, the stranglers had only roughly concealed many of the men they killed, abandoning their corpses in dried-up riverbeds or close to roads with only leaves, branches and stones to cover them; the burial of victims occurred more rarely, and then chiefly in densely populated districts – scouts would be sent ahead of the gang to find a suitable murder-spot, or bele, within a day’s march. After about 1820, however, the use of beles and well-dug graves became more common and greater efforts were made to conceal the evidence of murder.

  Feringeea was among the jemadars who began to take precautions at this time, and it is possible that his lucky escape at Kotah inspired him to take greater care whilst on the road. Certainly he and his men very carefully buried the bodies of 16 men whom they had murdered west of Seoni in 1820; two years later, near Jypore, they concealed the remains of a Company subadar-major named Akhbar Khan and eight other travellers ‘under the wall of a building’ to guard against a chance discovery. It helped, in cases such as these, to find a place ‘where the ground is soft for the grave, or the jungle thick to cover them, and where the local authorities [take] no notice of the bodies’, but really anywhere secluded sufficed. The temple of Kamptee outside Nagpore, where Khimolee Jemadar and his men had murdered three travellers, was a good example of a well-appointed bele – it was ruined and deserted, but offered welcome shelter; it retained gates that could be closed to prevent intended victims from escaping; and its earthen courtyard made it a simple matter to dispose of bodies within the grounds without risk of discovery.

  More usually, however, Thugs made use of a ready-made network of potential beles – groves and orchards that flourished a short way outside many villages and towns in the central provinces of India. These groves had long been favoured resting-places for weary travellers. They often contained around 400 trees; hardy mango saplings were favoured, but ‘orange, pomegranate and other small trees that will always require watering’ were almost equally commonplace, and so most groves were planted close to a stream or well. Many had never been intended as commercial ventures, though it was usual for the rights to harvest their fruit to be leased out by the owners. Instead they were often planted as acts of charity on the part of wealthy local notables, who hoped to earn religious merit by providing sanctuaries for travellers. As two merchants encountered by a British officer observed:

  We hope that those who enjoy the shade, the water and the fruit will think kindly of us when we are gone. The names of the great men who built the castles, palaces and tombs at Delhi and Agra have been almost all forgotten, because no one enjoys any advantage from them; but the names of those who planted the mango groves we see are still remembered and blessed by all who eat of their fruit, sit in their shade, and drink of their water.

  It was thus particularly unfortunate that the prospect of excellent cover, ready access to a nullah or a well, and soil deep enough for graves combined to make the groves and orchards planted with such good intentions irresistible to Thugs.

  In certain circumstances it remained unnecessary to dig elaborate graves. One of the Thugs’ matarbur beles (favourite murder-spots) was a stretch of dense jungle on the road between Chupara and Jubbulpore; another was near Punna, in the hills of Oudh – ‘a secret place where no tidings of our victims transpired. Hundreds of travellers were there strangled; we concealed their bodies under stones and the tigers devoured them’.* High ground was favoured, presumably because the Thugs were less likely to be caught there unawares by the police or passing troops; but the most important duty of the scouts charged with locating a bele was to find a spot near the end of a stage, where the Thugs’ inveiglers could easily persuade their companions to stop for the night.

  The increasing importance attached by most gangs to the proper disposal of their victims can be glimpsed in accounts of the numerous rituals and superstitions associated with the burial of a corpse. The most common of these, and the one most often mentioned by Thugs themselves, was the consecration of the pickaxe with which they dug their victims’ graves. This ritual was regarded as so significant that many gangs performed it prior to every expedition as a way of seeking the favour of the deity under whose protection the gang was placing itself. It was most usual for an appeal of this sort to be made to Kali, the black-skinned, six-armed Hindu mother-goddess of destruction, venerated by many low-caste Hindus and Indian criminals, and for the consecration to be attended by every member of the gang and presided over by their jemadar, or some other strangler judged ‘most skilled in ceremonies’. So important was the ritual that it was performed inside a house or tent ‘so that the shadow of no living thing might fall on or contaminate the sacred implement’.

  Accounts of such ceremonies, given by Feringeea and a number of his fellow jemadars, suggest that the Thugs’ pickaxe was simply an ordinary agricultural implement – typically consisting of a curved blade forged from wrought iron about 10 inches long, sharply pointed at one end and mounted on a long wooden shaft – but one usually made in such a way that it could be easily disassembled so as to avoid detection. Once taken to pieces, one man would be entrusted with the haft, and another – the gang’s most experienced gravedigger – would conceal the blade within his clothing so that it could not be seen by casual passers-by. Reassembled, the implement would be brought out as the ceremony began; a pit would be dug in the ground and the pickaxe held over it and washed, successively, with water, a sugar solution, sour milk and alcohol. Finally it would be marked seven times with vermilion, symbolizing the blood of future victims.

  According to the testimony given by one Thug, a cow-dung fire – made fragrant with incense, sandalwood and coconut – would then be lit, and the blade of the pickaxe passed through it seven times. At the height of the ceremony the gang’s jemadar would take a coconut, place it on the ground and ask the members of the assembled band, ‘Shall I strike?’ Receiving a positive response, he would break open the coconut with the butt of the pickaxe amid ‘a loud cry of devout approval’ and share pieces of the flesh amongst the principal stranglers. Finally, the blade of the pickaxe would be placed on a piece of clean white cloth and the assembled Thugs would bow to it. The expedition, suitably blessed, was ready to begin.

  Elaborate rituals of this sort have always been common in rural India, and similar ceremonies – appealing, for example, for protection from danger on the roads – would have been conducted by many of the travellers who would eventually fall prey to the wiles of the Thugs. But the stranglers’ superstitions regarding their sacred burial tool were so extensive that they went far beyond the consecration of the pickaxe. Thugs recounted numerous tales concerning their veneration of the implement. Once properly blessed, one said, it could only be carried by the member of the gang ‘most noted for his sobriety, shrewdness and calm’, and it was believed to be practically a living thing. When in camp, it was buried in a secure place with its point facing in the direction that the gang intended to go, and it was sometimes believed that Kali would move the point around in the course of the night if another route were likely to be more propitious. Some elderly Thugs added further and more mystical details, alleging that in earlier times the pickaxe had been thrown into a well whenever the gang halted for the night, from which it would rise of its own accord when summoned with due ceremony. A handful even claimed to have witnessed the feat, one recalling a time when several gangs had camped together ‘and at the call, the pickaxes of the various gangs came up of themselves and went to their respective bearers’. Similarly, the Thugs insisted that as long as the implement was cleansed after each use, the sound made by it in dig
ging a grave could not be heard by anyone but a member of their gang. The pickaxe was so sacred that it could never be allowed to fall to the ground; if such a calamity occurred, the bearer was instantly deprived of his office, and the gang-members either returned to their homes to begin a fresh expedition, or chose a fresh route, consecrating the implement anew.

  The tool’s most important property, however, was neither its supernatural silence nor its ability to prophesy good fortune. It was the security it was believed to offer to the Thugs under its protection. Properly consecrated, scrupulously maintained and treated with reverence, the pickaxe was believed to protect the members of a gang from detection or capture.

  This protection was not absolute. A great priest, or a man so favoured by the gods that his iqbal (good fortune) was superior to that of the stranglers themselves, could overcome the powers of even the most sacred symbols of Thuggee. Admittedly the very oldest Thugs, men whose memories stretched back halfway into the eighteenth century, could never recall encountering such a man. But, in fact, one did exist. His name was William Sleeman, and he had only recently arrived in India. Sleeman knew nothing whatever of Thuggee. But he was about to learn.

  * It was generally impossible to treat older children in this way. When, in 1809, a gang of 360 Thugs fell in with a mixed party of 31 men, seven women and three children on the road near Nagpore, Punchum Jemadar wished to spare the life of one beautiful girl ‘as a wife for his son Bukholee. But when she saw her mother and father strangled, she screamed, and beat her head against the stony ground, and tried to kill herself. Punchum tried in vain to quiet her, and promised to take great care of her, and marry her to his own son who would be a great chief; but all was in vain. She continued to scream, and at last Punchum put the roomal around her neck and strangled her.’