Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  It was now only a little before dawn. Two settlements remained to be searched, but the next village, Kisrae, a further six miles away, was the patrol’s ‘last hope, as the alarm would be given before they could reach the fifth’. As it was, the party – accompanied on this occasion by the boy Soghur – did not reach their goal until ‘day began to appear’, and many of the villagers were already up and about their business. The nujeebs were exhausted (they had covered 24 miles in total darkness), and it was in any case useless for so large a party to enter the village in daylight; if the Thug was about, he would be sure to hear of their approach. So while the guards hid themselves a short distance away, Soghur and a single approver, Dhun Singh, made their way through the gates and casually approached the fourth of Feringeea’s hideaways.

  This time – at last – they were lucky. The elusive jemadar was still inside the house. But there was certainly no time for Soghur and Dhun Singh to call up the nujeebs. Bravely, perhaps foolhardily, for they were ‘only boys’, the pair instead rushed straight through the door, taking their quarry by surprise.

  Even then Feringeea might have escaped. He was, Sleeman later commented, ‘strong enough to have strangled both, one with each hand’. But the Thug simply did not believe that his attackers could have crept up on him alone, and ‘supposing the Guard to be round the house, he suffered his hands to be tied without resistance’. Only then did the nujeebs appear. By the end of the day the most wanted man in all the central provinces found himself securely locked in Jhansee jail, festooned with ‘a double weight of irons’ to prevent all possibility of escape.

  So important did Sleeman consider his new prisoner to be that the Thug-hunter travelled as far north as Saugor in order to escort Feringeea back to Jubbulpore in person – a precaution he was never to take with any other strangler. The two men finally reached their destination in the first days of December 1830, some 17 years after Sleeman’s captive had set out upon his first Thug expedition. He would never embark on another.

  The ride from Saugor to Jubbulpore took nearly three days. The captured Thug had been a famous inveigler, famous for his manners and fine clothes and renowned for the adroitness of his tongue. His powers did not fail him now. By the time the party arrived at Jubbulpore, Sleeman was certain that his captive was worth a good deal more to him alive than dead. The prisoner was a ‘great Thugg leader’, Sleeman informed Francis Curwen Smith, who had ‘exercised so much influence over the gangs, and is capable of giving so much assistance in their apprehension, that it would be of vast importance to hold out to him that his life shall be saved if he gives it to the utmost of his ability’.

  Much of this information must have come from the jemadar himself. Exactly what Feringeea had told Sleeman in the course of their ride was never known. But some flavour of the Thug’s claims on his own behalf can certainly be caught in Smith’s exultant response. ‘Feringeea,’ he wrote,

  though so young a man, is evidently at the head of all the gangs of Thugs which infest the countries north of the Nerbudda; is fully initiated in all their plans, secrets, places of resort, and the persons of the members of the fraternities; and, as I have no doubt, is perfectly capable of giving such information as will materially assist in breaking up these bands of atrocious murderers.

  On that basis, and although Smith privately thought the Thug ‘fully deserving of death’, it was decided to accept Feringeea as an approver – principally in the hope that his appearance in the Company’s service would demoralize the remaining Thugs, and perhaps make them more wary of crossing into British territory. More senior officials were doubtful, pointing out that Feringeea had practised Thuggee not because he knew no other way to make a living ‘but upon a deliberate calculation of the situation and wealth attached to the situation of leader’. In the end, however, Smith’s arguments prevailed. This was fortunate, as it subsequently emerged that Sleeman had in any case offered his prisoner a provisional pardon upon their arrival at Jubbulpore.

  Feringeea’s motives for becoming an approver were never questioned by the Company, but it is possible to hazard a guess at what they were. Like every other captured strangler, the jemadar must have known that his only hope of saving his own life was to turn King’s Evidence. Probably he was also encouraged to believe that by entering British service he might hope to see his wife and children once again. Finally, the actions of his fellow Thugs may also have spurred him on. So many men had begun to throw themselves on the mercy of the Company (Sleeman and his colleagues would eventually recruit a total of well over 100 Thug informants) that there was no longer anything to be gained by remaining silent.

  Whatever his reasons, Feringeea began his new career anxious to impress his jailers. ‘He has,’ Sleeman wrote in the first days of January 1831, ‘already given me abundant proof of his disposition to be instrumental in the seizure and conviction of several gangs of robbers.’ The Thug’s intelligence included details of a planned rendezvous of numerous large groups of stranglers in the province of Candeish and news concerning the massing of other gangs near Jypore, in Rajpootana. But Sleeman was not yet ready to place confidence in his newest prisoner. The jemadar’s testimony could, after all, be a trick, an attempt to decoy the Company’s scarce reserves of troops away from the Thugs’ real targets for the coming season. Some proof of his reliability was required.

  It did not take much time for Feringeea, with his long career of murder behind him, to convince Sleeman of his trustworthiness in the most gruesomely practical of manners. ‘To prove his disposition to tell the truth,’ the disbelieving magistrate explained, ‘he offered to show me the bodies of about 25 men who had been strangled and buried at different intervals during the last 10 years by Gangs of which he had been a member.’ The murdered men had been interred, the jemadar continued, in a favourite spot outside the nearby village of Salohda, ‘lying on an open and fully cultivated and peopled plain upon the high road … only two stages from the town of Saugor.’ The necessary arrangements were swiftly made, and early in January 1831, the magistrate, the approver and a small party of Company troops set out for Feringeea’s bele.

  The journey was an easy one – pleasant, even, in the delicious chill of the cold weather – and Sleeman’s pregnant wife had begged permission to accompany her husband to enjoy the air. The party reached its destination, a small grove of mango trees a short distance outside Salohda, as dusk drew in on the second evening. Sleeman could see no sign of any graves, but it was in any case too late to begin the work of exhumation that evening. The tents were pitched, the guard set, and next morning – the date was 7 January 1831 – the magistrate and the approver rose at dawn to begin the arduous work of excavating the grove.

  ‘He pointed out,’ Sleeman would recall,

  three places in which he and his gang had deposited at different intervals the bodies of three parties of travellers, [informing me that] a Pundit and six attendants, murdered in 1818, lay among the ropes of my sleeping tent, a Havildar and four Sipahaes, murdered in 1824, lay under my horses, and four Brahman carriers of Ganges water and a woman, murdered soon after the Pundit, lay within my sleeping tent. The sward had grown over the whole, and not the slightest sign of its ever having been broken was to be seen. The thing seemed to me incredible; but after examining attentively a small brick terrace close by, and the different trees around, he declared himself prepared to stake his life upon the accuracy of the information.

  My wife was still sleeping over the grave of the water carriers unconscious of what was doing or to be done. (She has often since declared that she never had a night of such horrid dreams, and that while asleep her soul must consequently have become conscious of the dreadful crimes that had there been perpetrated.) I assembled the people of the surrounding villages, and the Thanadar and his police, who resided in the village of Korae close by, and put the people to work over the grave of the Havildar. They dug down five feet without perceiving the slightest signs of the bodies or a grave. All the people assemb
led seemed delighted to think that I was becoming weary like themselves, and satisfied that the man was deranged; but there was a calm and quiet confidence about him that made me insist upon their going on, and at last we came upon the bodies of the whole five laid out precisely as described.

  My wife, still unconscious of our object in digging, had repaired to the breakfast tent which was pitched some distance from the grove; and I now had the ropes of her tent removed, and the bodies of the Pundit and his six companions, in a much greater state of decay, exhumed from about the same depth, and from the exact spot pointed out.

  The grim process went on for the rest of the day. By the time the corpses of the Ganges water carriers had been disinterred, and the rotting remains of the Thugs’ victims laid gently on the ground between the remaining tents, Sleeman was convinced of his prisoner’s good faith. Feringeea himself was not yet finished, even offering to point out graves that still lay hidden in neighbouring groves, but Sleeman professed himself so ‘sick of the horrid work, and satisfied with what had already been done,’* that the whole party set off instead to return to Jubbulpore. There was more important work to do.

  From the moment that the first of Feringeea’s victims emerged from his grave outside Salohda, the Thug became Sleeman’s favourite approver. In years to come, other informants, among them some of the jemadar’s closest associates, would contribute copious testimony of their own, each new piece of information being meticulously recorded and analysed in the hope that it might lead to another arrest, a further conviction. But of the hundred or more Thugs made approvers by Sleeman and his colleagues, Feringeea was by far the most influential. His capture was a critical turning point in the anti-Thug campaign.

  Feringeea’s principal importance lay in the sheer breadth of his knowledge. Long experience and a prodigious memory (honed, no doubt, by the jemadar’s duty of noting a gang’s victims and the loot taken from them so that the proceeds could eventually be divided equally) combined to make him an effective witness. He could identify literally hundreds of other stranglers by name, and his depositions feature more often than those of any other approver in the Company’s records, taking pride of place in the enormous summaries of evidence assembled by Sleeman as he prepared cases for trial. In almost all of the surviving files, Feringeea’s testimony appears last, as if to supply final corroboration of the evidence given by other Thugs. The details of his evidence are placed in columns that have been made twice as wide as those allocated to other approvers in order to accommodate the sheer bulk of the information he supplies.

  The detail of Feringeea’s recollections supplied Sleeman with endless clues. ‘I know Badaloo,’ he said of one suspect brought in for identification. ‘He is a jemadar of Thugs and has 30 or 40 followers. Last [year] with 40 men he went to Baroda and murdered four travellers … got dollars, gold and pearls from them. Seven of the gang [have been] taken before. He has been engaged in hundreds of murders, besides he murdered Gumush Chuprassee, whose chuprassee* has been found on them.’ The Thug Golab was identified with the comment: ‘He is the son of Bukkee Thug. He quarrelled with Jadae in Lahra, they fought and he was cut in the right shoulder. I was present. He was at the Murder of Lieutenant Maunsell in Murnae, and he got a coat, pantaloons and the Gentleman’s horses. He was seized at Etawah but escaped. Mr Parry offered 1,000 rupees for him.’ In a single week, confronted with no fewer than 289 Thugs captured in a sweep through the villages of Jhansee, Feringeea was able to identify and name 283, a far greater total than that of any other approver. In most cases he also supplied comprehensive details of the men’s murderous careers.

  The approver’s statements proved to be critical in almost every case. In ‘Trial no. 6 of 1832’, to take only one example, the jemadar was able to identify 13 of the 16 prisoners by name, and all of these men were convicted. In the next case to be heard, he named 10 of the 18 prisoners in the dock and supplied details of their criminal careers, explaining that he had Thugged with several of the accused for as many as 18 years. Unlike most of his fellow approvers, Feringeea also supplied Sleeman with valuable information concerning the future movements of Thug gangs. Even when word that the great Thug had turned approver caused other gangs to change their plans and alter predetermined routes, he continued to track their movements with the help of members his own extended family – Thugs who remained at liberty serving under other leaders – still contriving to lead Sleeman to his quarry.*

  The significance of Feringeea’s evidence can plainly be seen in the growing numbers of stranglers confined in the Company’s jails. Before the jemadar’s arrest, no more than a few hundred Thugs had fallen into British hands in the course of an entire decade. Afterwards, the number increased swiftly. More than 700 suspected stranglers were arrested in 1831 and 1832 alone, three-quarters of them in the central provinces. A substantial proportion of these men were either betrayed by Feringeea himself, or convicted as a consequence of the depositions he made at their trials.

  Before the jemadar’s capture, Sleeman’s knowledge of the Thugs, their numbers, their leaders, their plans and their methods had been only partial. With Feringeea in custody, the Company’s understanding of the strangling gangs was far more complete. And the destruction of those haunting the central provinces of India was now only a matter of time.

  * He was secretary to the Government of India, a position equivalent in stature to that of a present-day secretary of state.

  * Feringeea himself always insisted that he had kept his wife entirely ignorant of his way of life.

  * Upon further investigation, Sleeman discovered that ‘the proprietor of the village of Salohda connived at all this, and received the horse of the Pundit as a present. [The gang] used to encamp in this grove every year in passing, and remain there for many days at a time, feasting, carousing and murdering.’

  * Stick used as a badge of office.

  * Feringeea’s value seems only to have been questioned once, in 1832, when he was sent into the Doab – an area he evidently did not know well.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sleeman’s Machine

  ‘beelha – a great enemy of Thugs’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Captain Sleeman?’ one eminent Thug was asked when he was captured by a party of the Company’s nujeebs in Oudh. ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘We heard that he was hanging and banishing Thugs, and that he had made a machine for torturing Thugs and for breaking our bones.’ ‘Some said,’ added one of his companions, ‘that Thugs were ground to death in this machine!’

  The captured stranglers were wrong, of course. The Company possessed no infernal contraption for maiming and dismembering guilty Thugs. Yet in one sense there was a shred of truth in this strange rumour. William Sleeman had indeed constructed a machine capable of detecting and destroying the Thug gangs. It was constructed not of grindstones and gears but of books and papers, and armed not with racks and whirling knives, but with maps and piles of manuscripts and a collection of spidery genealogies that the captain had sketched out himself, laboriously, by hand. It was a deadly machine, though, nonetheless, for more Thugs were identified and marked for punishment in the record office that Sleeman established in the Saugor & Nerbudda Territory than were ever picked up by mere chance on the roads.

  The meticulous collection of documents and indexes assembled in the course of long months of listening to and noting testimony was what made the swift progress of the Company’s campaign against the Thugs possible. Had the effort not been made, dozens of stranglers would have slipped through the British net, and some, no doubt, would have continued to haunt the roads of India, throttling unwary travellers until they were eventually caught. Sleeman’s machine may be dry and dusty now, and lying in pieces in the libraries of London, Delhi and Bhopal. But it was a marvel in its day, saving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

  The men of the East India Company had long been enthusiastic record-keepers. Even today, the vast sprawl of their musty archives, assembled in the course of three
and a half centuries in India, fill mile after mile of shelves. So tremendous was the amount of business transacted by the Governor General and his council at Calcutta that the documents relating to a single day’s business could run to well over 150 closely written pages, and the central records of the Company’s three Presidencies alone filled more than 34,000 substantial volumes.* They covered almost every subject: revenue, administration, relations with Indian rulers, court cases, the police. But, until Sleeman began to work towards the suppression of the Thugs, there was no sizeable archive relating to crime or criminals. He was to be a pioneer in this field, and not merely in India. Some of the techniques that he developed in the early 1830s presaged methods that would not come into common use in police departments at home in Europe for another 50 or 60 years.

  The creation by Sleeman of several vast databases packed with information concerning wanted Thugs was a necessary response to the back-breakingly difficult work of bringing captured stranglers to trial. The officers charged with prosecuting the anti-Thug campaign faced almost insuperable difficulties. Police investigating a case of murder will generally possess at least a body, from which they can deduce the time, the manner and perhaps the place of death. In the great majority of cases they will also know the identity of the corpse. The killer they are seeking will often prove to be someone who knew the victim well; husbands or wives, friends and business partners are all likely to be suspects. Sleeman and his associates, on the other hand, did not always have a body, and when they did, they rarely had any idea of its identity. Nor did they have the slightest clue – unless some approver told them – which gang had been responsible for the crime, let alone which Thug, among many, had actually committed it. Yet convictions could only be secured in cases in which the fact of murder could be proved and the identity of the murderer himself demonstrated to the satisfaction of a judge.