by Mike Dash
Only by the most meticulous accumulation of every scrap of information let slip by the approvers could Sleeman hope to glimpse the true nature of Thuggee; only by painstaking cross-referencing and the assembly of detailed files could he know the full extent of a Thug’s crimes; and only by patient tracking, careful mapping and the intelligent deployment of his scarce resources could he bring his suspects to trial. All this work, moreover, had to be undertaken at a time when the Indian police force was fragmented, poorly paid and appallingly corrupt; when pen, paper and foolscap indexes were the best available technology; and when the techniques of photography, fingerprinting and forensic analysis were more or less undreamed of. At the time that the Company’s campaign against the Thugs first got under way, even the Metropolitan Police, at home in London, was a brand new institution, and one still regarded with the very greatest suspicion by a good number of Britons.
Sleeman’s work began, in 1829, with the careful cataloguing of every known Thug crime. ‘With regard to the mode of collecting the evidence to convict the Thugs of specific murders,’ he wrote to a colleague in the Deccan,
the first point is to ascertain from the approver present the time, place, and mode of the murders as near as possible – the place whence the murdered persons came and whither they were going – the property they had with them. On these points the approvers are always well informed. You then have to send and have the bodies taken up before the people of the neighbouring villages, whose depositions on oath are taken down by the local authorities of the [pargana] on an official form for the evidences. If they [the bodies] are not found, the people of these villages may have seen them at the time, and their depositions to this point will answer the purpose.
Reports on each case, drawn up by the officer concerned, were sent to Sleeman and combed for as much information as they could be made to yield. The raw data was then entered into a vast register that contained the names of every Thug who could be identified – not merely the handful who had already been arrested, but every man named in every deposition made by every approver. Each Thug was assigned his own unique number, and against this number Sleeman recorded his name, the location of his home, and the details of his associates and of all the crimes of which they stood accused. This was never a simple matter, for many Thugs had the same or almost identical names and none had surnames, most being identified by their tribe, their caste or their role within their gang. A good number, moreover, employed one or more aliases. Sheikh Inaent, for example – the jemadar whose apprehension in 1830 had put Feringeea to flight – appears in the earliest documents relating to his case as ‘Khuda Buksh’, while Feringeea himself used the aliases ‘Deahuct Undun’ and ‘Daviga Persaud’. To complicate matters further, it was common for Hindu Thugs to adopt Muslim names, and for Muslim stranglers to pose as Hindus, in order to inveigle their way into groups of travellers on the roads.
Undaunted, Sleeman also kept careful records of all the information he could find or deduce about each Thug’s family. The names of a man’s father, his brothers, his sons, and even his adopted children all appeared against his name. So did any distinguishing marks: ‘Persaud, alias Omraw Sing Jemadar, son of Hemmut Sing alias Runna, dark mark on his nose’; ‘Khuluk, son of Runna Lodhee, with small finger broken’; ‘Holkar, brother of Persaud Jemadar, blind of one eye’. With the great Thug register conveniently to hand, the men of Sleeman’s department had ready access to the information that they needed to plot the arrest of the ‘most notorious’ men when the gangs returned to their homes at the end of each cold season. And ‘as soon as an accused was arrested and identified’ – as the Thug-hunter himself pointed out – ‘a mass of evidence was usually at once forthcoming to secure his conviction’.
Sleeman’s register proved to be an immediate success. Some 350 captured Thugs were committed for trial in Saugor in 1832. Two hundred more came before the courts in 1833, and another 170 were arraigned in Indore, Hyderabad, Poona and Cawnpore. The rapid progress of the anti-Thug campaign soon persuaded the Government of India to supplement the staff serving under FC Smith. At the beginning of the cold season of 1832, Lieutenant PA Reynolds, one of the assistant Residents at Hyderabad, was appointed to hunt down the stranglers of the Deccan and JC Wilson was placed in charge of operations in the Doab; each received command of a detachment of 40 sepoys and 20 militiamen, relieving the pressure on Sleeman’s own hard-pressed nujeebs. A year later, a Lieutenant McLeod was given responsibility for Rajpootana, Malwa and the lands around Delhi. By 1835, Smith – ‘exercising, as heretofore, a general control over the officers employed in the suppression of Thuggee’ – and Sleeman, who was at last formally appointed Superintendent of what was already widely known as the Thuggy Department in Jubbulpore, had a staff of seven assistants spread across the territories from Rohilkhand, to the north of Delhi, all the way to Hyderabad, and command over nearly 300 nujeebs. Seventeen other officers, most of them the Residents or Agents in various Native States, assisted in the pursuit and capture of wanted Thugs in their home villages. For the first time the resources available to Sleeman became adequate to the task in hand.
The newly appointed superintendent’s next idea was to map the homes of the known Thugs, the routes they followed in the course of their lengthy expeditions, and the spots where their murders were committed. Sleeman thought that this would help him to position his patrols more effectively, ‘for I shall often be liable to direct them upon a wrong road and to lose time by doubts and mistakes as to the jurisdiction of the officers with whom I have to communicate’. But the creation of such a map was no simple task. Even though the Company had established a cartographical office, the Survey of India, in 1785, large portions of the Native States had still not been mapped, and an official request for ‘a skeleton map of 10 or 12 square feet, comprising the countries north and south from Madras to Delhi and east and west from Calcutta to Bombay’ caused a good deal of head-scratching in the Survey’s offices, for no attempt had yet been made to combine all the elements that Sleeman required in a single map showing ‘all the principal rulers and lands and roads and principal stages at which travellers halt, and all the ferries at which they cross rivers, together with the seats of our own courts and military establishments’. After an exchange of letters between Sleeman, Bentinck and the Surveyor General, George Everest, however, a cartographer named Ferris Robb was given the unenviable task of producing ‘a map of peculiar construction’ that suited the Thuggy Department’s needs. His completed chart was finally delivered in 1832, and put to immediate use in planning the routes to be patrolled by parties of nujeebs during the coming cold season.
By the middle of the 1830s, then, Sleeman had equipped himself with almost all the tools he needed to apprehend suspected stranglers. Endless streams of letters, instructions, orders and encouragement poured out of his headquarters at Jubbulpore, some seeking information and help from the British Residents at Indian courts, others urging his assistants to follow his lead in compiling yet more files, more lists and tables. At least one member of the new department followed the Superintendent’s lead, creating an intricately detailed map of Thug activities within his own districts. Captain James Paton, who had been placed in charge of the anti-Thug campaign in Oudh, obtained a large-scale chart of his territory from the Surveyor General’s office and carefully plotted on it the location of as many Thug beles as his 20 approvers could identify. The results were startling. ‘As nearly as can be calculated,’ Paton observed, ‘the whole extent of those roads so thoroughly well known by Thugs, infested by them, [is] no less than 1,401 miles, and in those 1,401 miles there are no less than 274 bails [beles]… or one bail for about every 5¼ miles.’ Paton was soon persuaded that the map was proof of his approvers’ worth. ‘If false,’ he argued, ‘the Thugs could not possibly have remembered all their varied positions and localities to repeat, on cross-examination, the same falsehoods.’ He had descriptions of each of these murder spots worked up into a manuscript he called the Thug
Road Book and made plans to circulate it to other Company officials in northern India.
Sleeman’s register and maps provided him with the key to tracking down and arresting known Thugs. But that in itself was not enough for him. Firmly convinced, by the evidence of his approvers and his own understanding of Indian society, that Thuggee had become a hereditary profession for numerous large families of criminals, he also devoted long hours to the preparation of complicated genealogies, showing the lineage of more than 80 extended families of stranglers. Most of the information came from the Thug approvers, some of whom appear to have vied with each other to create the longest and most detailed pedigrees, for although some of Sleeman’s genealogies show the descent of no more than two or three generations of Thugs, others trace a family’s ancestry over as many as eight. Between them they list somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 men, and in some families as many as 100 brothers, sons and cousins had worked together in the Thug gangs. Read carefully against the voluminous notes describing each approver’s family, however, the trees show just how misleading it was to suppose that every male member of every ancient family of Thugs inevitably became a strangler himself. Dotted among Sleeman’s grim records of ‘noted Thugs’ and hereditary jemadars are occasional mentions of men who had eschewed life with the gangs to become farmers, merchants, or even common thieves.
Sleeman’s genealogies nonetheless impressed Francis Curwen Smith, who saw in them not only confirmation that the most important Thugs were stranglers by birth, but also a useful tool to assess the statements of approvers. The trees could be used, for example, to place an informant within his extended family and thus deduce which Thugs he might favour or attempt to gloss over in his testimony. And ‘they show,’ Smith added,
the connection of the families of the principal Thugs committed for trial since 1830 with the Sindhousee (hereditary) Thugs. The tables were revised by Captain Sleeman often in the presence of the members of the different families … and the tables of their respective families have been acknowledged by them to be correct, though framed from information derived from members of opposite parties.
It was not long, then, before the pedigrees became another weapon in the Company’s war against the stranglers – ‘a blue-print, as it were, of everyone, Muslim and Hindu, linked with Thuggee by blood’. Used in conjunction with the Thug register, they enabled Sleeman and his assistants to note the fate of every known strangler and to keep track of those who remained at large. The results of their plodding clerical work were brandished, almost as trophies, in Thuggy Department papers: evidence – so it appeared – that every last Thug had been named, numbered and accounted for.*
‘There is,’ William Sleeman once observed, ‘one truth that cannot be too often repeated: that if we wish to suppress the system [of Thuggee], we must seek the murderers at their homes, and drag them from their asylums.’
The Company’s principal failing hitherto – so Sleeman’s approvers assured him – had been its inability to maintain a constant pressure on the gangs themselves. Occasional arrests, rarely followed up, had never seriously diminished the efficiency of the great mass of Thugs, and had little effect on their morale. The stranglers had long known, after all, that they were wanted men, and had grown used over the years to setbacks and even the occasional disaster. They took the resilience of their gangs for granted.
The key to the entire anti-Thug campaign thus lay in the ability of Sleeman and his record office to supply accurate and timely intelligence as to the likely movements of the principal jemadars and their gangs. Without the information supplied by the approvers and painstakingly processed and evaluated at Jubbulpore, the Company would never have acquired the ability to pursue the gangs to the very doorsteps of their own homes. And without that ability, the handful of sepoys and nujeebs at Sleeman’s disposal would have proved hopelessly inadequate to the task of hunting down the wanted men.
Perhaps the Superintendent’s most important breakthrough came during the first year of the anti-Thug campaign, when a solution was at last found to the problem of extracting consistently reliable information from the Company’s approvers. Thug informers had hitherto attempted to cooperate in shielding their own families and friends from arrest. Sleeman’s triumph was to set his most important prisoners against each other. The fresh round of denunciations that followed ended any prospect that the prisoners might continue to collude, and Sleeman was soon able to divide his approvers into three main groups according to their religion and caste. Feringeea and six other Brahmins formed one group; Kuleean Singh – the fearsome low-caste jemadar whose son had effected Feringeea’s capture – led another; the third was made up of five Muslim approvers. ‘The list,’ Sleeman commented with no small satisfaction when he reported to Smith, ‘may be relied upon, I believe. Feringeea is … animated by a deadly spirit of hatred against Kuleean Singh and Kara Khan, once the leader of the Musulman Thugs, in consequence of their having been instrumental in the conviction of Jurha and Rada Kishun, his nearest relations.* Kuleean Singh and Kara Khan are united in hatred against Feringeea and his class, but deadly opposed to each other.’ ‘Each party,’ the Superintendent added elsewhere, ‘has caused the arrest, capital punishment and transportation of many Thugs of every other party, and consequently they hate each other most cordially.’
An example of Sleeman’s detailed genealogies of the main Thug families, this one extending over eight generations. The name of the celebrated approver Feringeea can be seen towards the left.
The efficiency and the morale of the patrols despatched to hunt down the wanted Thugs was also high. Service with Sleeman was highly popular among the Company’s soldiers and nujeebs, who relished the opportunity to track down ‘the Thugs by whose hands so many of their comrades have perished’. The work itself was exciting, and men chosen for the service had good prospects of distinguishing themselves. Their biggest incentive, nonetheless, was money, for the rewards offered for the capture and conviction of leading Thugs were substantial, even when divided between the members of an entire patrol. The largest ever offered for a jemadar seems to have been the 1,000 rupees put on the head of Hurree, ‘the notorious Thug leader of Jhalone’. The men responsible for capturing Feringeea shared rewards amounting to 500 rupees, and 200 more were paid for ‘Zolfukar, son of Thugs, whose father has just been captured with eight men of his gang in the jagir of Poona’. During the six years in which the Company’s efforts against the Thugs were at their height, a total of more than 10,000 rupees was distributed among the thousand or so soldiers who took part in the campaign.
The nujeebs sent in search of Thugs were well equipped for their task. Each party travelled in the company of at least two approvers, each representing one of the four rival groups noted by Sleeman – who were weighted down with irons to prevent their escape. By consulting their informants, separately, the Company men were supposed to confirm the identities of the members of any gangs they met on the roads, and each was supplied with warrants giving them the power to arrest wanted Thugs wherever they were found. Most importantly of all, Sleeman’s troops received detailed intelligence from the record office at Jubbulpore informing them of the names, aliases and home villages of the Thug jemadars they were pursuing. Provided with definite objectives, the patrols usually achieved what was expected of them.
There were, hardly surprisingly, instances suggesting that parties of nujeebs were sometimes over-zealous. A few of these occasions – Sleeman himself contended – were relatively harmless; on one occasion a patrol passing through Gwalior discovered two known Thugs who had entered Sindhia’s service as sepahees, and went off to the nearest magistrate to secure an order for the men’s arrest. By the time they returned the Thugs, forewarned, had escaped, and when the patrol caught up with them at Bhurtpore a few days later, the suspects were detained while a warrant was secured. ‘In this,’ Sleeman added a little piously, ‘they exceeded their orders, and have been punished for it.’ But there were other instances that sugges
ted some Company sepoys were corrupt. Sleeman was forced to forbid his patrols from hunting for Thug loot in the homes they searched; the lure of so much cash and goods proved too much for some. The leader of one patrol was found to have accepted bribes from a moonshee known to be an associate of Thugs. On another occasion, RT Lushington, the Company’s Resident at Bhurtpore, complained bitterly to Sleeman that a party of nujeebs had entered his rajah’s territory and arrested three suspected Thugs on the word of a prostitute and her pimp. One of the arrested men turned out to be a Brahmin and another was a member of the rajah’s palace guard; none of their names appeared on any of an embarrassed Sleeman’s lists of Thugs. ‘On this mere hearsay,’ Lushington protested in a letter sent directly to the Governor General, ‘respected members of the community are apprehended as murderers and are to be sent in chains to Saugor. I beg to ask whether it is consistent with justice to capture persons on such a charge and evidence, and this, too, without allowing the prisoners to say a word in their own defence?’
Despite occasional setbacks of this sort, the campaign progressed rapidly. Most Company officers, including most Residents, supported it. By the middle of 1832, Sleeman’s detachments had swept the roads in a circle through Baroda and Nagpore in the south, Bundelcund in the north-west and Jodhpore in the west. Gwalior and Rajpootana had been scoured and scores of alleged Thugs seized. Sleeman had also sent Major Stewart, the Company’s Resident at Hyderabad, a list of 150 Thugs believed to be at large in the Nizam’s domains with the request that he arrange for their arrest. Similar letters went out to the Residents at Indore and Delhi.