Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Indeed all of the Thugs’ legends concerning the goddess featured exactly the sort of cautionary notes typical of folklore. In some Kali saved worthy stranglers from their enemies, but in others she deserted men who had not been faithful to her commands. A fable told by many Thugs related that they had for many years neglected to bury the bodies of their victims, leaving them lying on the ground so that the goddess could devour them – ‘that Bhowanee may have her blood; she delights in blood!’ This their protector did with such efficiency that the Thugs were never in any danger of discovery or arrest, and the members of each gang were strictly enjoined never to look back on the scene of the murder for fear of disturbing the deity’s feast. But

  on one occasion a novice of the fraternity disobeyed this rule and, unguardedly looking behind him, saw the goddess in the act of feasting upon a body with the half of it hanging out of her mouth. Upon this she declared that she would no longer devour those whom the Thugs slaughtered; but she agreed to present them with one of her teeth for a pickaxe, a rib for a knife and the hem of her lower garment for a noose, and ordered them for the future to cut about and bury the bodies of those whom they destroyed.

  Sleeman’s approvers thus used religion not merely to justify their actions but also to explain their failures and their capture. They held that the real reason for the decline and fall of their gangs was to be found not in the Company’s tactics, nor in their own faithlessness or poor organization, but in their failure to pay proper attention to the proscriptions they had been ordered to obey. ‘That Davey instituted Thuggee, and supported it as long as we attended to her omens, and observed the rules framed by the wisdom of our ancestors, nothing in the world can ever make us doubt,’ observed an approver named Nasir. But the gangs of the early nineteenth century had failed to heed the goddess’s orders to refrain from killing women and members of the various proscribed classes. ‘Our ancestors were never guilty of this folly!’ one strangler concluded in disgust. ‘We murdered men and women of all classes. How then can Thuggee stand?’

  Captured Thugs claimed on many occasions that their crimes were simply a matter of fate; they were destined to commit them. They were ‘merely irresponsible agents’, no more liable to be held to account for their killings than were the tigers to whom they often compared themselves. This explained how Thugs could – in an admission that plainly baffled Sleeman – ‘look forward indifferently to their children, whom they love as tenderly as any man in the world, following the same trade of murder or being united in marriage to men who follow the trade’. Some elaborated further: ‘How many men have you strangled?’ one notorious jemadar was asked. ‘I have killed none,’ came the incensed response. ‘Is any man killed from man’s killing? Is it not the hand of God that kills him? And are we not mere instruments in the hand of God?’ But this dispensation applied only to men proceeding on a Thug expedition, properly consecrated. Those unwise enough to kill when they were not under the protection of Kali could expect to be punished in the same way as any other Indian. ‘If a man committed a real murder, they held that his family must become extinct, and adduced the fact that this fate had not befallen them as proof that their acts of killing were justifiable.’

  Sleeman and his associates saw matters differently. ‘A Thug,’ Sleeman concluded, ‘considers the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the Goddess’, and his habits and his actions were all determined by his devotion to Kali. This faith, moreover, had been fully rounded and worked out over the course of centuries, and was unique to the Thugs.

  Such views were controversial then. Today, it is generally agreed that the conclusions Sleeman drew from his ‘Conversations with Thugs’ were distorted by the prejudices and misinterpretations so common at the time. In truth, the Thugs’ worship of Kali and their veneration of the sacred pickaxe hardly constituted a religion. The gangs possessed no religious texts, had no agreed forms of worship, and while they certainly shared in the belief that their goddess protected them, they held this in common with thousands of ordinary Indians. Kali was commonly invoked as a protector by all sorts of Hindus; and at this time she was – later anthropologists have noted – especially popular among criminals of all sorts and men of lower caste. Pickaxe worship arose merely ‘from the common animistic belief that tools and implements generally achieve the results obtained from them by their inherent virtue and of their own volition, and not from the human hand which guides them … Members of practically all castes worship the implements of their profession.’

  The Thugs’ beliefs, indeed, may be better understood as folklore than as a distinct faith. This may be seen most clearly in the manner in which members of various gangs differed sharply in the interpretation of even the most fundamental customs – as Sleeman discovered when he questioned his approvers regarding their obedience to omens:

  Sleeman When you have a poor traveller with you, or a party of travellers who appear to have a little property about them, and you hear or see a very good omen, do you not let them go, in the hope that the virtue of the omen will guide you to better prey?

  Dorgha, Musulman Let them go – never, never.

  Nasir, Musulman, of Telingana How could we let them go? Is not a good omen the order from Heaven to kill them, and would it not be disobedience to let them go? If we did not kill them, should we ever get any more travellers?

  Feringeea, Brahmin I have known the experiment tried with good effect – I have known travellers who promised little let go, and the virtue of the omen brought better.

  Inaent, Musulman Yes, the virtue of the omen remains, and the traveller who has little should be let go, for you are sure to get a better.

  Sahib Khan, of Telingana Never! Never! This is one of your Hindustanee heresies. You could never let him go without losing all the fruits of your expedition. You might get property, but it could never do you any good. No success could result from your disobedience.

  Nasir The idea of securing the good will of Davey by disobeying her order is quite monstrous. We Duckun Thugs do not understand how you got hold of it. Our ancestors were never guilty of such folly.

  Feringeea You do not mean to say that we of Murnae and Sindouse were not as well instructed as you of Telingana?

  Nasir and Sahib Khan We only mean to say that you have clearly mistaken the nature of a good omen in this case. It is the order of Davey to take what she has put in our way; at least, so we, in the Duckun, understand it.

  Most strikingly of all, the evidence so carefully recorded by Sleeman and his men makes it clear that Indian villagers did not engage in Thuggee because they worshipped Kali. Rather, Kali worship was a facet of life as a Thug – one that could safely be neglected or abandoned by a man no longer practising the trade. The first hints that this was the case emerge from questions posed to Muslim Thugs: ‘Do Mussellman Thugs continue to follow the rites of their religion?’ Paton asked. ‘Or does Bhowanee supercede Mohammed?’ ‘What?’ exclaimed the approver Allyar. ‘Is Bhowanee the equal of Mohammed? He is the lord of our faith and of our religion.’ ‘Bhowanee,’ added his colleague Bakh Mohammed, ‘is only for Thuggee.’ But it was when Paton turned to the question of the religion practised by the Thugs now they were in Company custody that the most instructive exchange took place:

  Paton You paid great reverence to Bhowanee, but she deserted you. What do you think of her now?

  Futty Khan God is above, and what do we care for Bhowanee now? We get food from you now.

  Dhoosoo, Mussellman I think now that Bhowanee is a non-entity, for if she were not so, why should I be in trouble now?

  Allyer, Mohammedan If I had the image of Bhowanee now, I would fling it into a well!

  Paton You say so now – but if you ever went on Thuggee again, would you not invoke Bhowanee?

  Allyer Yes. If I went on Thuggee I would still pay my devotions day and night to Bhowanee. She is the chief of that trade.

  The emphasis placed by Sleeman and – through him – by the Company a
uthorities on the role of religion in Thug life was thus enormously exaggerated. But in a country such as India, in which most Europeans felt barely at home, such exaggerations were accepted without question. To take only one example, references made by the Thugs to the pilgrimages some made to a temple to Kali maintained in the village of Bindachul, just outside Mirzapore, were built up into suggestions that the temple was itself an important headquarters of Thugs, maintained by Thug priests and funded by the proceeds of Thuggee. Sleeman formed this opinion at an early stage, writing in October 1830: ‘Kali’s temple at Bindachul … is constantly filled with murderers from every quarter of India, who go there to offer up in person a share of the booty they have acquired from their victims strangled in their annual excursion … The priests of this temple know perfectly well the source from which they derive their offerings [and] they suggest expeditions and promise the murderers in the name of their mistress immunity.’

  Probably this impression of a harsh and murderous cult owed something to Sleeman’s own religious beliefs, for he added: ‘To pull down [Kali’s] temple at Bindachul and hang her priests would no doubt be the wish of every honest Christian.’ But the impact of such pronouncements – made, as they were, in the almost total absence of information to the contrary – on British consciousness in India was significant. By 1835 the impression that Thuggee was an alien religion of the most horrible sort was firmly established among the European communities in India. A few years later, with the publication of the sensational novel Confessions of a Thug, written by Meadows Taylor, Sleeman’s contemporary in Hyderabad, a similar view was introduced to Britain. The consequence was a distinct loss of perspective. The determined criminal, anxious to provide for his family, seeking rich prizes and schooled in the ways of the Thug trade by other members of his gang became ‘that fiend in human form, luring his victims to their doom with soft speech and cunning artifice, committing the cold-blooded murder of every man he met’. The murder of potential witnesses became ‘the taking of human life for the sheer lust of killing’, and ‘the plunder, however pleasant … a secondary consideration’.

  The most unexpected consequence of this perversion of the Thug’s religion was the romanticization of Thuggee itself. ‘The histories of these men,’ the Company magistrate Edward Thornton exclaimed, ‘are as romantic as the most ardent lover of Oriental adventures could desire.’ Men driven to kill by their beliefs were far more compelling than mere highway robbers, however lethal, and the stranglers were, it seemed clear to Sleeman and his men, no ordinary criminals. Their devotion to Kali could even be perceived as noble. Sharp distinctions could be drawn between the dacoits, who tortured their victims and killed indiscriminately, and the Thugs, who were forbidden – however nominally – from murdering the members of certain classes and castes, and who killed comparatively quickly and cleanly. ‘However unscrupulous and treacherous the Thugs were,’ Sleeman’s grandson concluded, looking back, ‘one thing at least stands to their credit, that while they sometimes killed women – though contrary to their faith – they never maltreated them beforehand.’

  Seen in this way, the Thugs could appear ‘sporting’, even chivalrous opponents: men who possessed a code – however obscene – and who lived by it, men to whom faith and honour were important. These were not, of course, the men encountered by the unfortunate victims actually inveigled on the roads, killers devoid of compassion and – at least in the early nineteenth century – more than willing to flout the proscriptions that supposedly governed their behaviour. But it was undoubtedly an attractive image, not least because it elevated and flattered those involved in the pursuit of the Thug ‘cult’ as well as those engaged in it. The stranglers, one officer of Sleeman’s department later wrote, possessed ‘noble and chivalrous instincts … [there were] specimens who in habitual courtliness and fair faith, were clothed with both dignity and manliness’.

  Admiration for the captured Thugs emerged gradually, and was often qualified, at least in print, for reasons of Christian propriety. ‘I know not whether most to admire the duplicity with which they continue to conceal their murderous intentions, or to detest the infernal apathy with which they can eat out of the same dish, and drink out of the very cup that is partaken of by the victims they have fixed on to destroy,’ wrote Sleeman’s assistant in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Reynolds. But prolonged exposure to the approvers – and the destruction of the gangs themselves, which at last rendered the surviving Thugs more of a curiosity than a menace – led some members of the Thuggy Department to become more open. Even James Paton, a stern Presbyterian, whose transcriptions of his Thug interrogations are peppered with disapproving footnotes and Biblical allusions,* succumbed eventually to the romantic lure of his prisoners and ‘made positive pets of some’.

  Sleeman himself was not immune to the stranglers’ allure. He appears to have been not merely puzzled but actually captivated by Feringeea, whose pursuit had presented him with such difficulties. The prisoner was far from being the insensate brute, coarsened by his long career of murder and incapable of any finer feeling that Sleeman seems to have expected, and Feringeea’s youth, considerable good looks, firm bearing and unexpected sensitivity took him by surprise. The jemadar, Sleeman discovered, was a paradox, a man who, by his own account, could have escaped the Company’s net scot-free were it not for the love he bore for his own family. ‘I could not forsake them,’ the captured Thug explained, ‘and was always inquiring after them, and affording my pursuers the means of tracing me. I knew not what indignities my wife and mother might suffer. Could I have felt secure that they would suffer none, I should not have been taken.’ The Thugs’ love of their families, remarked upon by several British authorities, became regarded as one of their principal characteristics. ‘These common enemies of mankind,’ Sleeman wrote after one interview with Feringeea, ‘who … strangle other people of whatever age or sex without the slightest feeling of compunction, feel towards their relations as strongly as other men. At different times during his deposition, this man had occasion to mention his foster brother, Radha Kishun, and his nephew, Sinha, two of the 11 hung, and every time the tears filled his eyes and ran over his cheeks.’

  Other officers found the same contrast between the senior jemadars’ murderous behaviour on the roads and the principled lives they led (or claimed to lead) in their own homes a source of endless fascination. ‘Mr Wilson,’ Sleeman noted, ‘describes approver Makeen Lodhee as “one of the best men I have ever known!”, and I believe that Makeen may be trusted in any relation of life save that between a Thug who has taken the auspices and a traveller with something worth taking on him.’

  Another of Sleeman’s assistants, Lieutenant Reynolds, who had charge of the anti-Thug campaign in Hyderabad, was ‘quite astounded’ to discover that a certain Hurree Singh, whom he had known for several years as a highly respectable cloth dealer in the Sudder Bazaar, ‘was the Hurree Singh of the list sent to him of noted Thugs at large in the Duckun’. Singh, a strangler of such notoriety that the reward placed on his head was twice that offered for the capture of Feringeea, turned out to be the adopted son of a Thug subadar executed at Hyderabad in 1816 ‘for the murder of a party of two women and eight men’. He had, Sleeman concluded, been ‘so correct in his deportment and all his dealings, that he had won himself the esteem of all the gentlemen of the station … and yet he had, as he has since himself shown, been carrying on his trade of murder up to the very day of his arrest … and leading out his gang of assassins while pretending to be on his way to Bombay for a fresh supply of linens and broad cloth’.* Even the Holkar of Indore was greatly astonished when, ‘only about two months ago, a party of mine pointed out, as a notorious Thug, a non-commissioned officer who was superintending the drill of soldiers in the very Court Yard of His Highness … He was instantly secured and soon after acknowledged that during the whole twenty years that he has been a Sepahee in the service of the Honourable Company or that of different Native Chiefs, he has been himself a Thug or
in league with the Gangs that passed up and down the country, and that there was not a Thug of any note in the Hyderabad territories, in the Scindhia, Holcar and Bundelcund states, with whom he had not in that time become personally acquainted.’

  Sleeman, who hunted game, as did most British officers in India, even seems to have felt some slight stirring of common feeling with a few of his approvers for this reason. ‘They all look upon travellers as a sportsman looks upon hares and pheasants,’ he wrote, ‘and they recollect their favourite beles, or places of murder, as sportsmen recollect their best sporting grounds, and talk of them, when they can, with the same kind of glee!’ It is an extraordinary statement, and if the Thugs were being truthful at all (for Sleeman’s captives probably dwelled more fondly on their days on the roads of India after their capture – when it was obvious to all of them that they would never be free to wander them again – than they had at the time, when every expedition was, for many of their number, a struggle to provide for themselves and their families), it can only have been true for a handful of the best and most successful jemadars. Yet a few Thug leaders seem to have drawn similar parallels between themselves and the men who had hunted them down. ‘Are you yourself not a shikari,’* one asked Sleeman,

  and do you not enjoy the thrill of stalking, pitting your cunning against that of an animal, and are you not pleased at seeing it dead at your feet? So with the Thug, who regards the stalking of men as a higher form of sport.