Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Freed from the responsibility of family life, the daily routine followed by most Company cadets varied only according to the season. Outside the cold weather, officers slept in string cots, with thin cotton rugs thrown over them, ‘since a mattress would not only be unpleasantly hot but might breed fleas’, and under a thick mosquito net. They rose at dawn in order to make the most of the few hours they had before the heat of the day. A plethora of servants helped their masters to wash, shave and dress. One soldier described how he was roused each morning by the sound of his valet making

  an oration by my bed … I wake, and see him salaaming with a cup of hot coffee in his hand. I sit on a chair and wash the teaspoon till the spoon is hot and the fluid cold (others less delicate, or perhaps disdainful of even so trifling an effort, hand the cup to the butler, who blows vigorously on it till the coffee is cool enough to drink) while he introduces me gradually into an ambush of pantaloons and Wellingtons. I am shut up in a red coat and a glazed lid set upon my head, and thus, carefully packed, exhibit my reluctance to do what I am going to do – to wit, my duty – by riding.

  Morning exercise complete, Sleeman and his fellow officers took breakfast, and then went on parade or tackled administrative duties from 9 till 12; in the cold season office hours were from 10 until 1.30. Afternoons were spent sprawled in their cots, attempting to escape the awful temperatures; then, in the early evenings, Company men and their wives emerged to take the air and promenade in their carriages along the wide boulevards of Calcutta’s government district. Evenings were given over to balls and other entertainments, or to elaborately staged visits to each other’s homes.

  The working day being so short, there was plenty of time to devote to dining. Native dishes, widely consumed and appreciated a few decades earlier, were rarely eaten now. Instead, Indian cooks attempted traditional English favourites – Brown Windsor soup, cutlets and roasts, plum pudding – with varying results. Appetites, in Sleeman’s day, were not quite so gross as they had been 10 or 20 years earlier, when one griffin was ‘shocked to see one of the prettiest girls in Calcutta eating some two pounds of mutton chops in one sitting’, and a peculiar craze for food fights was at its height. (‘Formerly,’ one veteran officer recalled, ‘instead of drinking a Glass of Wine with a Gentleman, it was usual to throw a chicken at his Head – while the ladies pelted with Sweetmeats and Pastry. This was thought Refinement in Wit and Breeding.’) Even so, breakfast generally consisted of a considerable profusion of ‘rice, fried fish, eggs, omelettes, preserves, tea, coffee, etc.’. Tiffin – lunch – was taken ‘at two o’clock in the very heat of the day … A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, excellent Madeira …’, and a similar but even larger array of dishes appeared at dinner. It was then that the most serious drinking took place, and again the quantities consumed were staggering. Even ladies typically finished off at least a bottle of wine every night. Gentlemen would drink more than that and then – after the women had withdrawn – dispose of as many as three bottles of claret apiece with their pipes and cigars. Such conspicuous consumption (which proved fatal to many an Indian career) was more or less compulsory. Any officer attempting to leave the table before his companions had finished their drinking ‘would be pursued with cries of “Shabby fellow”, “Milk sop” or “Cock tail”.’

  It is difficult to know how the peculiarities of Calcutta society affected Sleeman himself. Probably they repelled him. He was an austere man at heart, more serious and much more academically inclined than most of his colleagues. Social life, particularly the ostentatious conviviality of Calcutta, held little interest for him; letters to his family at home never mentioned women and satirized the conventions of the time, remarking on how ridiculous it was for men posted to distant stations to pay elaborately choreographed social calls upon each other during the heat of the day. Colleagues seem to have regarded him as sober, able, perhaps a little dry, but there was no suggestion, at this early date, that he was in any way exceptional. A routine Company assessment, dating to 1817, was neither effusive nor overtly critical, describing him as ‘able, impartial and satisfactory’.

  Sleeman’s first decade in India was comparatively uneventful. His three years in Calcutta were broken by a short period of service in Bihar, followed by a posting to Mirzapore, a city on the Ganges. From there, his regiment marched north to Nepal, where it fought in the Gurkha Wars of 1814 and 1816. Sleeman was fortunate to survive these conflicts; half of the officers serving with him died, mostly of disease, and he himself contracted a severe case of ‘Nathpore Fever’ – malaria – that was to trouble him for the remainder of his life. But by 1817 he was in Allahabad, at the junction of the Jumna and the Ganges, stationed in a substantial cantonment with all the social obligations that entailed. There was little prospect, apparently, of further active service, and less of rapid promotion. It was there that the young lieutenant decided to apply to the Company’s political service.

  It had become obvious, even in the first years of Sleeman’s service, that he was best suited to life up-country, in some little station where his talents would stand him in good stead, where officers worked longer hours than was the case in Calcutta, and where fewer social demands would be made upon him. Obtaining such a position was, however, far from easy. With few exceptions, the Company’s military officers could expect postings to major cities dotted along the most important routes through the interior, or to large cantonments where substantial bodies of troops were concentrated. Positions up-country, offering greater responsibility and more scope for initiative, were largely the preserve of the political officers employed by the civil administration. And it was to this branch of the East India Company that Sleeman now transferred.

  Sleeman was, by Indian standards, now in the prime of life. He was 29 years old, tall, stocky, with a round, open face and red-gold hair that was beginning to recede. His languages were by now so much better than those of the vast majority of his peers that he would be described, later in his career, as ‘probably the only British official ever to have addressed the King of Oudh in correct Urdu and Persian’. His service in Nepal had helped him to add at least the elements of Pushtu and Gurkhali to his fluent Hindustani. Like many intelligent men born late in the eighteenth century, Sleeman was interested in almost everything: agronomy, ethnography, political economy, palaeontology – even the contentious subject of ‘wolves nurturing children in their dens’. Politically a liberal free trader who once refused to commandeer private stores of grain to relieve distress during a famine, he was otherwise an eminently practical man. Later in his career he supervised the introduction of new varieties of Mauritian sugar cane to India, taught himself the art of printing, and even installed a small press in the parlour of his home so that he could print his own copies of the numerous reports and books he wrote.

  Most significantly of all, Sleeman possessed a passionate interest, most unusual in any British officer of the time, in the lives of the ‘respectable peasants’ of India, among whom he found ‘some of the best men that I have ever known’. This fascination with the local people dated to around 1816, when his service in Nepal had taken him into the foothills of the Himalayas to question landholders and farmers. From then on, Sleeman made a habit of talking to the people of all the districts through which he passed. He was insatiably curious about their customs and habits, their lands and rights, and their opinion of the East India Company itself. In time he developed a pronounced sympathy with the lot of peasant farmers prey to the exacting financial demands made by rapacious rajahs and zamindars, and indeed by the Company itself. Nor were these enthusiasms limited to mere conversation. They formed the bedrock of numerous official reports remarkable for their detail if not for their conciseness. The 800-page journal that Sleeman produced, during the 1840s, on the state of the Kingdom of Oudh was so much more detailed than any equivalent work that it remains, even today, the most complete source of
information on the condition of that province in the early nineteenth century.

  The love Sleeman professed for India and the Indians had its limits. He never doubted the superiority of European civilization, that the British soldier was innately superior to the sepoy, or that the Company’s rule, for all its many exactions, was a considerable improvement on that of most native princes. He believed that the British system of justice, founded though it was on ideas (such as the private ownership of land) that had no direct parallel in India, could and should be imposed throughout the Company’s territories. And he despised the peculation and corruption that were an established and inevitable part of government in India. But he never referred to his servants or his sepoys as ‘blacks’ or ‘niggers’, as did many of his contemporaries; he opposed the annexation of any state that had showed itself capable of ruling its people moderately and justly; and he was genuinely determined to improve the lot of the ordinary people of the Subcontinent.

  This unusual agglomeration of skills and interests made Sleeman peculiarly well suited to the life of a political officer. The scattered members of this group, whether revenue collectors or magistrates,* were the men who actually ruled Britain’s Indian empire. Each was placed – often in his late twenties or early thirties, and without any special training – in charge of a district that was home to several hundred thousand people. ‘Politicals’ were required to be conversant with rural India and well versed in its customs and languages; self-confidence and self-sufficiency were necessary and highly prized. Help, in the shape of the nearest military force, could be several days’ ride away, and the work was physically arduous. Officers toured throughout their districts, calling on Indian notables, inspecting the land, hearing legal cases, and – in the absence of British clerks – writing out their own reports in longhand and in duplicate. One, serving a few years later in the Maratha country, described a routine of almost constant work:

  Up at 5am, and go out about the survey of the roads. In by 8 o’clock and answer letters, English and Mahratta, till ten; bathe and breakfast over at eleven. Then to cutcherry [court] work, trials, etc. till 6pm, without stirring – often, indeed, until seven. Dine and sit an hour or so with Palmer, if he is there, or with some native friend, by way of a rest, which brings up the time to half-past eight or nine. Then to my room, and work at translations and other business till eleven or twelve. Count up all this and you will see there is no time for anything except hard work.

  What made the job worthwhile, of course, was the enticing prospect of freedom of action. Unlike an army lieutenant, whose every duty was ordered from above, political officers possessed ‘broad and broadly undefined’ powers that made them little princes in their own districts. The best used their influence to improve the administration and the infrastructure of their territories – and, by extension, the lives of the Indians who lived within them. The worst rode roughshod over local feelings, cowed the notables of their districts, and extracted the maximum in rents and taxes. Either way, the very nature of the job ensured that a political officer’s actions ‘were almost invariably high-handed and independent, lacking precedent, and – given the unavoidable delays in communication – without the endorsement of “higher authority”’.

  The work suited Sleeman perfectly. It was also a real step up. The Company’s civil servants saw themselves as far superior to their military brethren. They certainly took more responsibility and were significantly better paid, being known to the avaricious women of the fishing fleet as ‘three-hundred-dead-or-alive men’ because most earned a salary of about £300 per annum and the same sum was payable, once they had accumulated a few years’ service, to their widows should they die. The soldiers, whose jobs were – if not as taxing – certainly more dangerous, resented the politicals and found them arrogant. Before long they were calling them ‘The Heaven Born’, a derisive reference to the Brahmins who comprised the highest Hindu caste and considered themselves ‘twice-born’. The lady of Madras recalled that one evening, at dinner, an army officer turned to her and said: ‘Now I know very well, Mrs ____, you despise us all from the bottom of your heart; you think no one worth speaking to in reality but the Civil Service. Whatever people may really be, you just class them all as civil and military – civil and military; and you know no other distinction. Is it not so?’*

  Sleeman’s first posting, as a freshly minted political officer, was to the town of Jubbulpore in central India. The job was scarcely one of the administration’s plums. The beauty of the surrounding countryside did make it perhaps

  the pleasantest of Indian stations; situated in a green hollow among low rocky granite hills always covered with verdure; with tidy hard roads and plenty of greensward about them … remarkable for the delicacy and abundance of its fruits and other garden products, including the pineapple, which will not grow anywhere else in Central India.

  But Jubbulpore itself was of little intrinsic importance, being merely a collection of neat, low houses and listless markets, built amidst ponds and lakes, clustering in the lee of a second-rate Maratha fort and sustained by traffic passing through on the main road leading from Poona to the Ganges. Even 50 years after Sleeman’s time, when another British officer posted to the central provinces enquired about the town, he found it was a station ‘of which few who had not been there knew anything, except that it was situated somewhere in the wilds … I remember when we first got our orders to march there from Upper India, no one could give us a route to it.’

  Life in Jubbulpore was harsh. Although the climate was by no means so severe as that of northern India, temperatures still rose precipitately during the hot season, and many of the whitewashed bungalows dotted across the district were provided with not one but two thatched roofs, one over the other, to help keep out the sun. During the hot weather the windows and doors could be covered with screens of dampened khas-khas grass, which cooled and perfumed such gasps of wind as could be made to enter, but relays of servants were still required to labour inside the buildings, tugging lazily at punkahs, the thick cotton mats that swung to and fro from all the ceilings to circulate currents of air.*

  The most unpleasant single aspect of existence around Jubbulpore was undoubtedly the plague of insects, and it was remarked upon by many visitors. ‘Moths, flying ants, beetles – besides creatures which leap or crawl’ were all attracted to lights left burning after sunset; and they appeared in such profusion that, one disgruntled officer complained, ‘Sometimes dinner is a difficult task, as they may even make the tablecloth more black than white, so numerous are they … They settle on the food as it is being passed from one’s plate to the mouth, and the fork and spoon has to be shaken to drive them off before the mouthful can be taken.’ Worse still were the swarms of ants; the red and black varieties found their way into stores of food, or dropped from the ceilings into bowls of marmalade or sugar, while the even more voracious white ants attacked clothes and paper, ‘sometimes eating important documents and small articles of clothing so quickly as to destroy them in a single night’. Dining tables stood in bowls of water, and uniforms were stored in sealed tin boxes, to deter attack.

  For all these reasons, Jubbulpore was little visited by British officers. The town’s only real significance lay in the fact that it had been chosen as the administrative capital of a district bounded to the north by the town of Saugor and to the south by the valley of the Nerbudda river, and known accordingly as the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory. This province, which had been British for only two years when Sleeman arrived there in 1820, was in a ruinous state. It had been acquired as a result of a campaign waged by the Company against vicious bands of freebooters known as Pindaris, whose ranks were filled with former soldiers and armed retainers thrown out of work by the British-imposed peace that had descended upon India since Wellesley’s day. For more than a decade, Pindari bands with a combined strength of as many as 50,000 men had looted and raided their way across the district, often at the behest of one or other of the rival Marat
ha princes. Most of the villages of Saugor & Nerbudda were sacked and plundered at least once during these years; many of the inhabitants were killed or compelled to abandon their homes. It was only in 1818, with the final destruction of the marauders and the defeat of their Maratha overlords, that any sort of order was restored.* Even then, it took years for the territory to recover. Sleeman thus reached Jubbulpore to find the surrounding districts still in turmoil and his task by and large a thankless one.

  To begin with, Saugor & Nerbudda was unusually isolated. It was the only British possession in the central provinces, being completely surrounded by at least nominally independent territories. The district itself was tableland, largely flat and fertile, but much of the highest ground was nothing but bare rock, and to the north ‘it appears to a traveller as if hills, small and great, have been sown broadcast over the face of the country’. Much of the countryside had been depopulated and in many places jungle was encroaching on once-flourishing settlements. Then there was the matter of the Company’s rents and revenues, which were falling well below Calcutta’s expectations.

  It took Sleeman two years to learn to meet this challenge. He had been sent to Jubbulpore as assistant to Charles Welland, the Company’s political agent in the new province, and served what was effectively an apprenticeship. Only in 1822, after two years in the town, did he at last receive orders to proceed to the village of Nursingpore, 50 miles to the south, to take charge of a district of his own.