Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  * Priests, soldiers, farmers and herdsmen.

  * The title ‘Sayyid’ denotes a Muslim claiming direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad; that of ‘Sheikh’, a man of Arab (rather than native Indian) stock – a descendant, in other words, of an invading Muslim soldier, rather than the offspring of a later, local convert. Numerous Thugs laid claim to these distinctions, among them the great strangler Sayeed Ameer Ali and the fêted leader of the Arcottee Thugs, Sheikh Ahmed.

  ** When one gang of Thugs encountered a group of 14 men near Hattah, in Bundelcund, they were dissuaded from murdering them by the fact that they were travelling with a cow. An inveigler persuaded the animal’s owner that he had made a vow to present a cow to a local priest. Unwilling to stand in the way of such piety, the travellers agreed to sell the animal, which was indeed presented to the Brahmin. All 14 were then strangled forthwith.

  * This was not the only indignity suffered by the unfortunate Himmut. ‘He died,’ another Thug named Punna recalled, ‘barking like a dog.’

  * This Thug was eventually captured by the British authorities, one officer noting, ‘This Jubber, now in jail here, is a poor, wretched-looking being, whose head continually shakes from palsy … 6 Feb. 1837: Jubber died in jail this day; his skeleton is to be preserved as one of the most relentless and notorious assassins in the world.’

  * ‘Travellers in that wild country used from fear to go in small bodies through the Ghat,’ added the Thug who described this bele, ‘lest the tigers or Thugs should fall upon them. Those who escaped the tigers fell into the hands of Thugs, and those who escaped the Thugs were sometimes devoured by the tigers.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Sleeman

  ‘dhaundhoee – a hunter of Thugs’

  Sleeman was a Cornishman. He was born, in 1788, in a wild stretch of countryside, as unlike India as it is possible to imagine. His first home, the hamlet of Stratton on the coast north of Bodmin Moor, was bleak and grey and blasted by fierce sea winds that howled in from the north, sending waves crashing in against the cliffs and stunting and bowing the handful of trees that clung to the heights. This was smuggling country, and the Sleemans themselves had once been heavily involved in the importation of illegal cargoes. But the family had grown respectable. Many of its sons now served in the army or the navy. Sleeman’s father, Philip, was the Supervisor of Excise for his stretch of coast, charged with catching the smugglers his ancestors had once employed.

  Philip Sleeman had a large family: eight boys and a girl. It was scarcely possible, on an exciseman’s salary, to provide liberally for so many sons, and when the old man died in 1802 his wife was reduced to comparative poverty. Her two eldest sons had already been set up in business and a third was studying medicine, but the younger children were forced to seek less expensive careers. Three brothers became sailors (two were to drown at sea), and William himself – the fifth son of the eight – was forced to set aside his ambition of becoming an officer in the British Army, which in those days required a man to have a private income sufficient to make a good show in the mess. With his family’s approval, he determined to make his career in India instead.

  The East India Company had long been a popular refuge for the sons of impoverished British gentry. The vast sums seized by Robert Clive and his colleagues in the 1760s were still vivid in many people’s memories, and even though government regulation had put an end to the prospect of building a substantial private fortune, there was still plenty of money to be made and honours to be won in the Subcontinent. The 20 or 30 ‘writerships’ that provided entry to the Indian civil service every year were so highly sought after that nominations occasionally (and illegally) changed hands for as much as £1,300. Service with the Company’s three armies – one in Bengal, another in Bombay and the third in Madras – was less lucrative, and the 100 or 120 young cadets recruited annually to fill the vacancies within their ranks joined regiments that were neither so grand nor so socially exclusive as those of the King’s Army. But there were advantages to a military career in India nonetheless. Not the least of them, in Sleeman’s eyes, was the fact that officers without private means could survive there on their pay alone.

  There was, of course, still a good deal of demand for the handful of cadetships available each year. But open examinations and formal competition were half a century away. In Sleeman’s day, recruits were still drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the English gentry, and ‘influence’, in the form of an acquaintance with one of the directors of the Company, was all that was required to secure one of the coveted nominations. The Sleeman family possessed the necessary connections, and in 1809 William – by then aged 20 – was gazetted as an ensign in the Bengal Army. He sailed for India that same March, and disembarked at Calcutta six months later after a long sea voyage around the Cape.

  Sleeman was old for a newcomer to India. A good proportion of his fellow cadets had gone out to Calcutta at the age of 16 or 17 to enrol at the military college established at Basaret by Richard Wellesley. The college was so close to the temptations of the city, so badly staffed and poorly disciplined, that it soon acquired an evil reputation. It was peopled with rambunctious cadets who took little interest in their lessons and remained (one contemporary observed) ‘in a continual uproar, blowing coach-horns and bugles, baiting jackals with pariah-dogs, fighting cocks, and shooting kites and crows’. Students learned ‘drinking, coarse language, vulgar amusements and gaming’ rather than Indian languages, and Sleeman – an ambitious, serious-minded boy – had chosen not to enrol there, remaining at home and hiring a private tutor instead.

  The education Sleeman thus received was mixed. He displayed a considerable talent for languages, which would stand him in good stead throughout his Indian career. He picked up a fair knowledge of Hindustani, once the lingua franca of educated men throughout the Mughal Empire and now the language spoken in the Bengal Army. He also read, with some attention, the handbook supplied to each cadet during the long voyage out. This manual dealt copiously with the importance of behaving as a gentleman and proffered advice on the treatment of servants in Calcutta. But it contained nothing whatsoever about a cadet’s military duties and did not discuss the qualities or habits of the soldiers he would soon command.

  Sleeman therefore arrived in India with at best a merely theoretical grasp of military affairs and no first-hand knowledge of Bengal. These deficiencies could only be remedied by practical experience.

  If even the callowest novice in the Company’s service knew one thing about India, it was this: the Subcontinent was a dangerous place in which to live.

  Mortality among British officers stationed in the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras had long been staggering. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not uncommon for half the Europeans scattered through India to die of fever, drink or heatstroke in a single year. In Bombay, in 1692, nearly 90 per cent of the British population succumbed to disease in just three months; in the same city, 15 years later, a mere seven men were fit for duty, and an ambassador from Persia, arriving unexpectedly offshore, had to be refused permission to leave his ship ‘lest he should relate to his master the nakedness of the land’. Even a century later, in Sleeman’s time, an officer joining the Company’s army ‘said goodbye to his family in England knowing that there was only a slender chance that he would ever see them again’. Statistics show that six out of every seven British officers despatched to the Subcontinent between 1800 and 1825 never returned.

  The principal difficulty was surviving long enough to develop resistance to India’s main diseases. In any given year the great majority of those who died were comparatively recent arrivals; fatalities were most common in men under the age of 30 and women aged 25 or less. As late as the 1830s, when Emily Eden studied the gravestones filling the European cemetery at Meerut, she failed to discover ‘any one individual who lived to be more than thirty-six’.

  Those who did survive the dangerous first years might well enjoy long careers. It wa
s not unusual for an officer to serve in India for 20, 30, even 50 years. But none emerged unscathed from the experience. Repeated bouts of illness left them prematurely aged, with yellowed skin, peppery tempers and greatly reduced stamina. Protracted confinements, followed by lengthy convalescences, were normal in this period; in the course of his own 45 years in India, Sleeman would be absent on sick leave for almost all of 1825–6, the whole of 1836, and much of 1855.

  The Subcontinent could kill in many ways. Dysentery, often carried on the wind in dust laden with organic matter, was one of the most common illnesses; typhoid was another; smallpox and plague were common, too. But cholera, the fever carried in the water, was the most feared of all diseases. This was not merely because it was generally lethal (nine out of ten of those infected with the bacillus died, the linings of their intestines eaten away, voiding as many as 25 pints of diarrhoea in a day), but because it struck with awful speed. The interval between the first emergence of the symptoms and the victim’s death might be as little as two or three hours, and corpses decomposed so rapidly in the damp heat of India that they had to be interred almost immediately. ‘We have,’ one Company officer noted in 1805, ‘known two instances of dining with a gentleman [at midday] and being invited to his burial before supper time.’ It was all profoundly depressing, particularly during the monsoon season, when all sorts of fevers raged unchecked. One Company wife, writing a few years after Sleeman’s arrival in India, confided in her diary: ‘Here people die one day and are buried the next. Their furniture is sold on the third and they are forgotten the fourth … O lord! Preserve my husband and me!’*

  The unforgiving Indian climate contributed its own share to the difficulties confronting Sleeman and his fellow cadets. Those fortunate enough to reach the Subcontinent during the cold weather, between October and March, found the place delightful; the days were warm, the evenings cool and sometimes frosty, and it was possible to indulge in all manner of outdoor activities. But the hot season, which followed, was a different matter. For the best part of three months, newcomers and old India hands alike sweated as the temperature rose to levels never experienced in northern Europe. Merciless sun, tight woollen uniforms and – all too often – choking dust combined to make life all but unbearable for British officers, and though the first rains were invariably refreshing after months of searing heat, it was difficult to bear the monsoon humidity for long.

  Sleeman, disembarking in September, was unlucky enough to reach India at ‘the worst time of the year’. The wet season was drawing to a close, and there were now long and oppressive intervals between the cascades of torrential rain – lasting, one British officer observed, ‘often for 10 days. The heat and the humidity became very trying. This was the time when people got boils and probably felt most run down.’ The heavy pall hanging over Bengal drained men of all their energy, rotted furnishings and ruined clothes. Heavily robed judges, sitting in the central court, had to change their soaking vestments as often as four times a day, and their wives knitted with silver needles instead of their usual iron ones, which turned to rust in the damp air.

  Not even the worst extremes of weather, though, could suppress the cadets’ high spirits. Calcutta, where Sleeman would spend three of his first four years of service, was a bustling, raucous city, not much more than a hundred years old. It had been founded, in 1690, as a mere trading post in the interior of Bengal. But it had been the capital of the British administration for almost 50 years and by the early nineteenth century was, if not the largest, then certainly the richest and the most important city in the entire Subcontinent.

  The place had changed a good deal since the 1750s, when it had been described by Robert Clive himself as ‘one of the most wicked places in the Universe’. The Calcutta of 1809 might not even have been recognized by Mrs Sherwood, the chronicler of the latter half of the eighteenth century who lived in the city before the stinking marshes that surrounded it were drained, and scathingly described ‘the splendid sloth and languid debauchery of European society’ at a time when ‘great men rode about in State coaches, with a dozen servants running before and behind them to bawl out their titles’. Since then, thanks in large part to Wellesley, Calcutta had grown considerably and had acquired its share of monumental architecture. It was now ‘the City of Palaces’, and the government district was so splendidly laid out along the banks of the Hooghly river that William Hunter, a newly arrived Company writer, could observe: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’

  The public portions of the city were, however, merely one of Calcutta’s several faces. The back streets seethed with taverns and bordellos, where youthful ensigns and clerks – freed for the first time in their lives from adult supervision – frittered away their pay and contracted venereal diseases. And outside the European quarter squatted ‘Black Town’, a vast Indian settlement where the streets were filthy and unpaved, dogs and rats picked through piles of refuse, and houses that were little more than hovels piled up crazily against each other. Europeans never went there, but the thousands of Bengalis who scratched a living within its walls endured extremes of poverty and misery that were considered shocking, even at the time.

  All this seemed very strange to newcomers to the Subcontinent. Novice writers and cadets freshly out from England – they were always known, for obscure reasons, as ‘griffins’ – were stock figures of fun in British India. The griffin ‘fell off his horse, he shot the wrong birds, he speared domestic pigs [rather than wild hogs], he produced comic situations by using the wrong words and by misunderstanding Indian customs.’* Naive young officers of Sleeman’s type were taken advantage of by nearly everyone they met.

  A griffin’s ordeal generally began the moment he stepped ashore, to be met by a collection of the rascals, touts and criminals common to ports throughout the world. Unwary novices were easily persuaded of the need to hire throngs of porters to carry their baggage, and a dragoman to command them, and the better-off might be tricked into paying over the odds for a fine horse or an unwieldy carriage. Such purchases were, of course, well beyond the means of all but the most affluent, but it did not take the new arrivals long to make the acquaintance of a moneylender who would be pleased to advance the necessary funds. So considerable were the loans, and so great the rate of interest, that it was common for Company men to remain in debt until they reached the rank of major, some 20 or 25 years after first stepping ashore in India.

  Nor were the griffins’ problems over once they were ensconced with their regiments. New men would be offered, as a ‘particular favour’, the opportunity to hire whatever useless servants their brother officers were anxious to be rid of, and the really unfortunate were taken in by some roguish major-domo, bearing apparently impeccable references, who would at once arrange for numerous friends and relatives to join the young man’s household at inflated rates of pay.

  In fairness to the unfortunate griffins, most officers arriving in India found it difficult to make sense of the sheer quantity of servants they were expected to employ. Indian households were anywhere between four and 10 times the size of those at home in Britain. In part, this was because servants were cheap in the Subcontinent, and there was a tendency to ostentation among the wealthier British residents – in the richest households, according to one lady who lived up-country from Madras, every horse had not only its own groom, but a grass-cutter as well, and every dog a boy. (‘I inquired,’ the woman added, ‘whether the cat had any servants, but found that she was allowed to wait upon herself, and, as she seemed the only person in the establishment capable of doing so, I respected her accordingly.’) But the real problem, as those anxious to economize quickly discovered, was caste, the Hindu social system that prevented servants from performing tasks that were properly the business of another group. Maids could not be told to sweep, sweepers would not make beds, and many officers employed men whose sole duty
was to manage their master’s hookah. A British family living in Malaya in the first half of the nineteenth century, and employing Muslim servants, found that two or three staff could do the work of a dozen or more of their equivalents in India.

  The most senior officers were, of course, expected to employ the largest retinue of servants. Somewhere between 30 and 40 was considered a mere minimum,* enough for the officers concerned to be washed and shaved and clothed and horsed and, when the time came for dinner, to be surrounded by a ‘living enclosure’ of bearers flicking constantly at flies. But even Sleeman, as a newly arrived ensign, was expected to allocate approximately half his monthly salary of 100 rupees to pay for the most essential half a dozen servants. By the time he had reached the exalted rank of lieutenant and drew three times that pay, he would have a retinue of a dozen.

  The great majority of British officers soon grew used to the plethora of servants and relied on them implicitly. This was, in part, because cadets remained almost invariably single. Few Indian officers married before the age of 40, the age when most could expect promotion to the rank of major and with it the increase in pay that would at last enable them to support a wife and children. The ‘spins’ (spinsters) of ‘the fishing fleet’ – as the single women, mostly plain, despatched each year to Bengal by their families in search of husbands, were cruelly known – understood this, and rarely displayed much interest in even the most dashing youths. ‘India,’ the lady of Madras explained, ‘is the paradise of middle-aged gentlemen. When they are young they are thought nothing of; but at about 40 when they are “high in the service”, rather yellow and somewhat grey, they begin to be taken notice of and called “young men”. These respectable persons do all the flirtation too in a solemn sort of way, while the young ones sit by, looking on.’ The perhaps inevitable consequence was that marriages between teenaged girls and men aged somewhere between 40 and 65 were commonplace.*