Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  It is difficult to be sure how much Sleeman knew about the stranglers prior to 1829. He had been in India when St Leger’s order of the day, warning the Company’s sepoys to be on guard against the Thugs, was given out in every station in the Bengal Presidency. And since he was well read and loved the Subcontinent, he may perhaps have browsed through the papers that Sherwood and Shakespear had published in Asiatick Researches, too. But there is nothing to suggest that such minor brushes with Thuggee stirred any great interest in his heart. Sleeman took no notice of the considerable investigation that took place at Jhalna, 280 miles from his own station, in 1823. And although he most likely did hear, from his superior Charles Molony, of the arrest of a gang of more than a hundred stranglers, caught crossing the Nerbudda valley in that same year, he himself had – in common with almost every other officer in India – never seen a Thug nor stumbled across a Thug band.

  Occasionally, during the mid 1820s, the gangs’ activities in the mofussil must have come to his attention. Jubbulpore’s jail, the largest in the Nerbudda valley, often held a handful of stranglers and suspected stranglers, confined alongside dacoits and highway robbers of all sorts. But usually the evidence against them was not great, and the men rarely came to trial. Only a single case of Thuggee was heard in the town in the course of the whole decade: a gang 32 men strong, arrested as they passed through the district in 1826, was committed for trial later that same year. Two of the men were executed and the remainder imprisoned, mostly for life.

  Sleeman’s superintendence of Jubbulpore suggests he must have known of this case. His friend Fraser had tried it, and it is quite possible that the two men discussed the hearing then or later. But though there had been a large body of circumstantial evidence to show the prisoners’ guilt, each of the imprisoned men denied all knowledge of Thuggee, and there was no opportunity to learn anything of the other gangs at large in Saugor & Nerbudda. Sleeman can have known little more of Thugs when he first read Bentinck’s circular than he had a few years previously, when he was wholly unaware of their activities in Nursingpore.

  What he had realized, by 1829, was that a full decade of service in the interior of India had earned him little notice. A solitary promotion, from lieutenant to captain, and a modest increase in pay had been his only rewards for ten years’ labour, while brother officers lucky or influential enough to command in battle, or fill posts in the Presidency towns, had earned preferment far more quickly. Company men despatched to the mofussil were all too easily forgotten; only those who made it their business to draw their superiors’ attention to every incident and each achievement in their districts had much hope of keeping pace with colleagues in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Throughout the 1820s, Sleeman had upbraided his friend Fraser for failing to keep the government informed of his progress. Now, with a new wife to support, he was forced to take his own advice. Bentinck’s circular suggested one way forward. So when, in February 1830, rumours reached Jubbulpore that another band of stranglers was making its way through British territory, Sleeman wasted little time. He set out immediately in pursuit.

  This new gang had been engaged in a series of murders in Gwalior and Bhopal under the command of a jemadar named Sheikh Madaree, plundering more than 2,000 rupees from a total of more than 30 victims. It had evaded the attentions of the local police and disposed of its victims so securely that no sign of its presence had been discovered. In the first week of April, however, a party of six sepoys travelling home on leave was inveigled only a few miles to the north of Saugor. As was their custom, the Thugs waited until their potential victims were settled in camp for the night before the signal for their murder was given. In normal circumstances, the destruction of a small party of this sort would have presented few difficulties. But on this occasion, one member of the gang later explained, ‘the affair was mismanaged’. One of the bhurtotes failed to slip his rumal completely over the selected victim’s head. The scarf caught on the soldier’s nose and, after a brief struggle, the man got free from his assailants and ran off towards the village. The Thug lookouts and guards were quickly after him, but before they could catch up with the fleeing sepoy the Thugs caught sight of another party of soldiers approaching in the distance. Madaree’s entire gang turned and ran, leaving their fortunate victim alive to blurt out the story of his comrades’ murder.

  This one error doomed the group. It was unusual enough for the men of a Thug gang to leave one of their intended victims alive. It was unheard of for them to make such a mistake in such close proximity to a sepoy patrol. The soldiers – who were on foot like their quarry – were not quite quick enough to round up the fleeing stranglers. But they were close enough to Saugor to reach the town in only hours, and so for once the Company received intelligence of a Thug gang in good time to scour the local roads.

  With the sepoys’ reports to hand, Sleeman was able to send out strong patrols of troops along the main roads leading into the town, and it was not long before one returned leading the 30 members of the gang. Four approvers soon emerged from the ranks of the Thugs, and their evidence was laboriously compiled into a comprehensive indictment that Sleeman presented to Smith. The depositions, as Smith summarized them, offered numerous proofs of the Thugs’ guilt:

  Heera … is the Chief Witness in this case. His evidence has been corroborated by many circumstances of great weight carrying conviction of its truth in my mind –

  1st – The free, unembarrassed and consistent way in which he gave his evidence … undergoing a long and intricate cross-examination …

  2nd – The evidence of [the remaining approvers].

  3rd – The depositions of several old pardoned Thugs who recognise the prisoners and unanimously agree about their parentage, trade and other points, in which false testimony would assuredly stumble.

  4th – The arrest of the prisoners in a gang, and their inability to give a consistent account of themselves.

  5th – The nature of the property found upon them …

  It did not take long to bring the case to court. In only a few months, fifteen members of the gang were sentenced to be hanged, and eight more to transportation. The remainder were imprisoned for seven or 14 years. ‘I beg leave to state,’ concluded Smith in his report to Calcutta, ‘that the gang of Thugs, or Land Pirates, against whose hand no ordinary traveller can stand, stands condemned on evidence not in the least apocryphal. I am satisfied that, thanks to the exertions of Captain Sleeman, this Territory has seen the last of them.’ In this last sentiment, however, Smith was wrong. Sleeman had by no means finished with the Thugs. He had, indeed, only just begun.

  The confessions made by captured Thugs had hitherto been used solely to convict the other members of their own gangs. Sleeman was the first Company officer to perceive that depositions taken from men with long experience of Thuggee were packed with clues that, followed up, would inevitably lead British officials to other gangs and other jemadars. He was also the first to interrogate and deploy his approvers with penetrating intelligence. The system that he evolved at Jubbulpore in the years 1829–30 would later be applied throughout the Subcontinent with great success.

  The real difficulty, in almost every case, lay in obtaining sufficient evidence to secure convictions in courts governed by Islamic law. The Muslim code inherited from the Mughal Empire, and only partially modified since then, frowned on the testimony of approvers when it was unsupported by other evidence. Indeed it was unlawful to arrest, much less convict, a man solely on the basis of the testimony ‘of any number of confessing prisoners’. The great majority of captured Thugs knew this and realized that their best chance of acquittal was to flatly deny all the charges brought against them.

  Sleeman was anxious, first, to establish some sort of rapport with the captured men. ‘In order to make them assent to us to the extent of their ability, we require to raise them a little bit in their own esteem, and make them feel a little exalted as the servants of a state which … will always be found to provide for their dec
ent subsistence,’ he decided.

  They require to be decently clothed and well fed, and to be kept separate from the mass of Thugs who are arrested by their aid, for these men, like all others who are leagued against the lives and property of their fellow creatures, at first look down with scorn on those who betray them, and we must either take them out of the reach of their odium or place them above it.

  That done, each Thug who had indicated a willingness to turn approver would be brought before a British officer for questioning. The prisoner would receive assurances that his life would be spared in exchange for his testimony, but it would be made clear to him that this promise would apply only if he fulfilled a number of conditions, which (since they generally applied to all Thug informants, and help to explain how the Company was able to extract such a flood of information from its approvers) are worth repeating here:

  First He shall make in your presence and before witnesses a full and unreserved disclosure of every Thuggee, murder or Robbery at which he has either aided, abetted, or connived, with the names, residence, caste and descriptions of all the persons engaged in these crimes.

  Second He shall through the means of his followers and his influence assist you with all his might in arresting and bringing to condign punishment all Persons guilty of Thuggee and murder and Robbery, whether they be relations, connections, or associates of his.

  Third On failure of these conditions, or on proof of his having concealed any Thuggee murder at which he was present or aided or abetted or was acquainted with the persons, conditional pardon to be null and void.

  Approvers who fulfilled all three conditions received the promised conditional pardons for their crimes, but – Sleeman and his fellow officers were constantly reminded by their superiors in Calcutta – ‘it is of the greatest importance that none are led to believe that they will ever be released from prison’. The loyalty of each man was buttressed with the information that ‘a small maintenance shall be allowed to his wife and child, who must however for some time to come be kept under surveillance’.

  A long period of questioning would follow. ‘The mode of proceeding,’ a contemporary article in the Foreign Quarterly Review informed its readers,

  is to take the deposition of those who turn approvers, wherever this may happen to be. These men are then required to give, to the best of their recollection, a full account of every expedition on which they have been, mentioning the dates of every one, and the detail of every murder; together with the names of those who had formed the gangs, their residence, caste, &c., &c. All this is registered in [Sleeman’s] office. It is obvious that when depositions, thus taken almost simultaneously from different people hundreds of miles apart, who have no means of collusion, and none of them expecting to be apprehended, agree in describing the same scenes and the same actors, it is next to impossible to refuse belief.

  It was a complicated business. Approvers were questioned in Hindustani and their testimony taken down by Sleeman’s moonshees in Persian, before being translated into English when required by the courts. Sleeman made a practice of leading each captured Thug slowly through his entire career, concluding only at the moment of his capture. Great pains were taken to note the details of every murder that could be recalled, including the names or the occupations of the victims and the quantity and nature of the loot taken from their bodies.

  Sleeman did everything he could to ensure that suspect Thugs were properly identified. Depositions taken from approvers and witnesses all over India were collated and indexed, and whenever a gang of suspected Thugs was captured, its members were placed, one at a time, in an identity parade, and all the approvers at the station were ‘sent for singly, and required to point out any individual of the party whom they may know’. For many months Sleeman was never quite satisfied that all the information he took down in this way was accurate, and his superiors, both in Britain and Bengal, feared that captured Thugs would do their utmost to protect their friends and relatives from arrest. In some cases approvers undoubtedly did conceal information in this way. But there is no evidence that any approvers who were confronted with an unknown suspect guessed at or simply invented an identity for the man.

  Testimony recorded in this way possessed an eerie fascination that the officers involved in its collation frequently commented on. The Thugs’ statements were generally exact and almost always curiously emotionless. One typical deposition, among hundreds collected by Sleeman over the ensuing months, began when the approver who had been brought before him was asked how often he had travelled with his gang before he witnessed his first murder. ‘It was on my return from the first expedition which I made with my father to the Deccan, when I was 15 years of age,’ remembered the Thug,

  and about 35 years ago [1801–2]. We were a gang of about 80 or 90 Thugs, under my father, Hinga, and some of the Deccan chiefs lodged in the mausoleum outside the town of Ellichpore. Two of our leaders, Gumboo and Laljoo, on getting into the bazaar, fell in with the grooms of the Nawab Subzee Khan, the uncle of the Nawab of Bhopal, who told them that their master … was now on his way home. They came back and reported, and Dulele Khan and Khuleel Khan, and other leaders of fame, went and introduced themselves to the Nawab, pretending that they had been to the Deccan with horses for sale, and were now on their way back to Hindustan. He was pleased with their address and appearance, and invited them to return the next day, which they did; and the following day he set out with as many of our gang as it was thought safe to exhibit. He had two grooms, two troopers, and a slave girl, two horses, a mare with a wound in the neck, and a pony. The slave girl’s duty was to prepare him his daily portion of subzee;* and he told us that he had got the name of Subzee Khan from the quantity of that drug which he was accustomed to drink.

  We came on together three stages; and during the fourth stage we came to an extensive jungle on this side of Dhoba, in the Baitool district; and on reaching a nullah, about nine o’clock, Khuleel said, ‘Khan Sahib, we have had a fatiguing journey, and we had better rest here and take some refreshment.’ – ‘By all means,’ said the Nawab, ‘I feel a little fatigued, and will take my subzee here.’ He dismounted, laid his sword and shield upon the ground, spread his carpet, and sat down. Dulele and Khuleel sat down by his side, while the girl was preparing his potion, of which he invited these two men, as our supposed chiefs, to partake, while the grooms were engaged with the horses and the troopers were smoking their pipes at a distance.

  It had been determined that the Nawab should be first secured, for he was a powerful man, and, if he had a moment’s warning, would certainly have cut down some of the gang before they could secure him. [So] Laljoo also went and sat near him, while Gomanee stood behind, and seemed to be much interested in the conversation. All being now ready, the signal was given; and the Nawab was strangled by Gomanee, while Laljoo and Dulele held his legs. As soon as the others saw the Nawab secured, they fell upon his attendants and all were strangled, and their bodies buried in the bed of a watercourse. On going back to Ellichpore, Gomanee sold the Nawab’s shield for eight rupees, but it was worth so much more that the people suspected him, and came to our camp to search for him. Our spies brought us timely notice, and we concealed him under the housings of our horses.

  ‘This, the approver added in conclusion, ‘was the first murder I ever witnessed, and it made a great impression on my mind. You may rely upon the correctness of what I state regarding it.’

  The truth of depositions of this sort was never taken at face value. Approvers’ statements would be checked against the testimony of other members of the gang concerned, where that was possible, and Sleeman also devoted considerable energy to obtaining such corroboration as was possible from surviving witnesses. In the case of Subzee Khan – one of the most difficult he had to investigate, given the 35 years or more that had passed since the murder had been committed – he wrote to the Company’s political agent at Bhopal for further information; the agent referred the matter to the chief minister of the
city’s ruler, and he in turn located ‘an old resident of Bhopal’ by the name of Sultan Khan Afghan who recalled the commotion caused by the Nawab’s unexplained disappearance. ‘When his son came home,’ Sultan Khan’s deposition explained, ‘he got 200 rupees and, with four attendants, set out in search of him. He went to Nagpore and Ellichpore, and found traces of his father to the last place, but could find no trace of him beyond it.’ The evidence of a second elderly resident substantiated Sultan Khan’s in every particular.

  Approvers employed under Sleeman’s system were confined and kept in chains, but many of the more useful men were often released temporarily from prison into the custody of patrols of nujeebs – mounted militiamen. Equipped with lighter irons, concealed by a pair of long and flowing trousers, they accompanied Company troops sent in search of Thug gangs in order to identify wanted men. In most cases at least two approvers would be used in the hope that they might confirm each other’s testimonies.

  Other informants were put to work identifying those already in prison. As always, the approvers were carefully segregated so that their testimonies could be checked against each other. Each suspected strangler was then brought forward in turn, and the approver would say whether he knew him and, if so, which village he came from, and which Thug expeditions, if any, the pair had shared in. Other details – such as the names of the prisoner’s associates and family – were taken down at the same time, if known. ‘Ormea took part in the murder of 60 on the road to Indore, four years ago,’ ran one typical denunciation. ‘During this expedition he himself strangled seven men and a woman.’