by Mike Dash
In these changing circumstances the Thuggy Department continued to achieve success. The central provinces were largely clear of Thug gangs after 1832, when their leaders’ old strongholds among the Native States of Bundelcund were pronounced ‘no longer a secure refuge for them or their families’, and even the tenacious stranglers of Madras were believed to be ‘completely suppressed’ by 1836. Another 50 prominent jemadars were made approvers, and their information made it possible to circulate Company officers in the Upper Provinces with a list of more than 460 Thugs still at large in the Doab, where a good many Bundelcund stranglers had sought refuge. Meanwhile, in the Deccan, the Nizam of Hyderabad offered his assistance in locating the 150 Thugs thought to have fled to his territory from Madras.
There were also new suspects to be added to the register: so many that between 1833 and 1840 the British and their allies in the Native States actually arrested another thousand alleged Thugs, a greater number, by far, than had been captured in the period to 1832. The majority of these men were detained between 1833 and 1835; some 740 prisoners were brought before the Company’s magistrates in that time, and all but 12 of them convicted. The number of arrests fell off after that, but, even so, a further 202 suspects were tried in 1836. As late as 1837, 57 additional trials were held at Jubbulpore. These cases involved 160 Thugs who stood accused of the murder of nearly 200 people and the theft of more than a lakh of rupees.
The anti-Thug campaign spread, too, until it encompassed every province in India. Although a good deal of Sleeman’s attention was directed away from Saugor & Nerbudda after 1832, it was not until the late 1830s that representatives of the Thuggy Department appeared in Oudh and Malwa, Delhi, Gujurat and Rajpootana in addition to Hyderabad, Gwalior, Nagpore and Indore. These men were expected to track down and arrest any suspected Thugs living in their territories, as well as continuing the work of gathering intelligence and logging the names of suspected Thugs. Their other principal responsibility was to persuade the native princes of their districts to cooperate in Sleeman’s campaign, which – thanks largely to pressure brought to bear by the government in Calcutta – virtually all of them now did. The destruction of the gangs’ remaining refuges in the Native States resulted in a further spate of arrests. ‘Thuggee?’ the approver Davey Deen lamented late in 1835. ‘Why, it is gone! There are not 50 Thugs of good birth left between the Ganges and the Jumna.’
The last districts to be scoured were those closest to the heart of the Company’s own territories. The provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, which had been in British hands for longer than almost every other part of India, were not cleared of Thugs until 1840. One reason for this was the low priority accorded to the provinces by the Company itself, which believed as late as 1835 that ‘the enormities of the Thugs are mostly committed in our newly acquired possessions, or in the Territories of the Native Chiefs of Bundelkhand, Malwa and Rajpootana’, and so failed to grant Sleeman permission to extend his operations to the east. But the difficulties in implementing measures against gangs active in Bengal in particular also had a good deal to do with the judicial arrangements of British India, for the system that existed there was more extensive and bureaucratic than that deemed adequate in the Ceded and Conquered districts to the west, and many of the tactics and techniques developed by the Thuggy Department were actually illegal in the ‘regulation territories’ of Bengal. The Nizamat Adalat, which administered justice in Bengal, cleaved firmly to the Islamic code of law, demanding higher standards of proof than those required in Saugor & Nerbudda. Allegations, made by convicted criminals, that a suspect belonged to a Thug gang were not sufficient in themselves to warrant the man’s arrest in the Lower Provinces, and the difficulty of proving that a particular Thug had committed a particular crime – the same problem that had confounded British magistrates throughout India in the past – made it virtually impossible to bring cases there with any prospect of success.
It was only after 1835, when Act XXX of 1836 had come into law and Sleeman had been created superintendent for the suppression of Thuggee throughout the length and breadth of India, that this situation changed. After that date, Thug-hunting parties were able to extend their operations to the east, and the difficulty of bringing captured men before the local courts was averted by the simple expediency of shipping men picked up in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa back to Saugor to stand trial. Armed as they were with information about the Bengal Thugs provided by approvers in the Doab and Oudh, the men of the Thuggy Department made rapid progress in the east. By 1840 Sleeman was stating with some confidence that the only parts of India still infested with Thugs were the foothills of the Himalayas, where some scattered communities survived in villages within easy reach of the border with Nepal.
The Company had by then captured almost all the gangs at large in Oudh and successfully disposed of a group known as the Goolah Thugs, whose men had been ‘protected for years by a petty independent rajah on the western borders of the Pooree district’. There were still rumours of ‘an isolated colony or two’ of stranglers hiding in the countryside near Midnapore, but there seemed to be no evidence they were committing any crimes. Even Sleeman, always vigilant for the faintest whiff of Thugs, was inclined to believe that these colonies did not exist.
So the anti-Thug campaign came to an end. In retrospect, it would appear that the gangs actually posed little threat after 1835. No more than 20 cases of murder by strangulation were recorded throughout the whole of the Deccan in the following year, and the most striking thing about the Jubbulpore sessions of 1837 was that only two of the 57 cases for which the prisoners were tried had occurred after 1832. The remainder of the hearings concerned killings that had been committed as long ago as 1811, and nearly a third of them were ‘subsidiary trials’ – proceedings brought against individual members of large Thug gangs whose principals had been captured and convicted long before. In most cases, the men arraigned in the subsidiary trials had taken no direct part in the murders for which they were now tried, and were incapable of raising or organizing a Thug gang of their own. Many had been picked up by Sleeman’s nujeebs years after they had last ventured on the roads, and had spent the intervening seasons working harmlessly on the land in their native villages. Their limited importance was reflected in the sentences that were handed down during the sessions of 1837 as a whole. Only 19 of the prisoners were hanged, and though a further 69 were transported and 19 sent to prison for life, nine were actually released – one in 20 of the total, a high proportion by the usual harsh standards of the anti-Thug campaign.
Thuggee had in any case faded from the consciousness of British India during the later 1830s. The known gangs were virtually destroyed, and their leaders either imprisoned or hanged. The few jemadars who were still at large were relentlessly pursued, and (largely because they proved incapable of cutting off all ties with their homes and families) the approvers tracked down almost all of them in the end. Their arrests deprived the remaining rank-and-file Thugs of leadership, and they lacked the skills and the determination to continue on their own. Certainly Thug murders became increasingly rare after 1835, when Sleeman was pleased to find that, for the first time in living memory, not a single sepoy had vanished without trace between his home and his barracks while on leave. By 1840, the annual circular that required every magistrate in British territory, and the Company’s agents in the Native States, to report on the activities of Thugs showed that no instance of Thuggee had been reported anywhere in India. The gangs, Sleeman declared, had been broken up at last. An ancient menace had been finally extinguished.
* Inroads.
CHAPTER 18
The Gallows and the Drop
‘lokharna – yelling loudly while being strangled’
The Company’s victory was not, in fact, quite so clear-cut as Sleeman’s later reports claimed.
A large number of Thugs were never caught – several of the most notorious burkhas, and perhaps 1,000 rank-and-file members of various gangs, simply me
lted back into their towns and villages to be eventually forgotten. The great majority settled in the Native States, where little effort was made to secure their arrest once it became clear that the Thug murders had ceased. Nevertheless the Thuggy Department did make some attempts to keep track of their whereabouts, and Sleeman’s register was kept up to date by his successors. As late as 1879, it contained the names of 340 suspected Thugs who remained at liberty.
It can be said with some confidence that none of these men ever set out again on strangling expeditions, but the many among them who remained poor and desperate may well have turned to other forms of crime. Sleeman’s critics have suggested that some cases that would have been classed as instances of Thuggee before the British announced, in 1840, that the gangs were finished were written off as instances of highway robbery or dacoity afterwards – in part to save face, but also because the Company could not believe that Thugs were capable of anything but Thugging. There is some truth in this criticism. Sleeman’s men had become so committed to the notion of Thugs as ingrained hereditary stranglers that they refused to see the survivors as little more than common criminals, capable if necessary of adopting different methods. Yet many of them were.
The disappearance of the Thugs did not, in any case, mean that the Thuggy Department had exhausted its usefulness. During the last years of Sleeman’s campaign, the Company became increasingly concerned at the discovery of other varieties of thieves and murderers who appeared to share some characteristics with the strangling gangs. Its officers were by now so highly sensitive to any evidence of covert practices and rituals, family ties between members of a gang, or the existence of a predisposition to murder among criminals of any sort that nearly a dozen new groups of ‘hereditary criminals’ were uncovered in the course of the anti-Thug campaign. Most of them were nothing of the sort, being, rather, loose associations of criminals, sometimes united by bonds of family or origin, whose activities included robbery with violence, poisoning (often with the datura seed), and even a form of fairground gambling. The responsibility for investigating them was assumed by Sleeman’s department – in part, perhaps, to justify its continued existence after the Thug campaign had been concluded, but also on the grounds that the victims were travellers who had fallen foul of murderous criminals, at least occasionally.
As it turned out, only one of the newly discovered associations was directly connected to the main Thug gangs. This was a group known as the River Thugs, a collection of stranglers some 300 strong who inveigled and killed their victims on the brown waters of the Ganges. There was, in one sense, nothing particularly special about them; the river was, after all, one of the great highways of India, and tens of thousands of travellers used it to travel from Calcutta to the holy city of Benares and on as far inland as Allahabad, nearly a thousand miles from the sea. Gangs of dacoits and pirates, lured by the prospect of loot, had infested the rivers of the Lower Provinces for hundreds of years. Probably the first River Thugs were stranglers who had worked the busy roads leading to Benares and guessed there was also plunder to be taken from the many pilgrims on the river.
The Ganges Thugs had much in common with their counterparts on land. They killed their victims with the rumal and employed a species of Ramasee that at least some land Thugs found intelligible, though it differed considerably in its vocabulary. Their gangs included inveiglers and hand-holders, and they always killed their victims before robbing them. Like the Thugs of Murnae, Bundelcund and Oudh, they were generally active only during the cold season, and many evidently derived at least part of their income from farming. They were not particularly wealthy. Most River Thugs did not even own their own boats, hiring them from a compliant boat-builder or from the most powerful of their jemadars, a man named Khuruck Baboo. Khuruck led a group of 50 men and controlled seven craft that were identical to hundreds of others plying to and fro along the waters of the river, being about 20 feet long and equipped with a single cabin, ventilated by a large porthole on either side. Like most boats on the Ganges – where there was often little wind – these craft were towed by gangs of boatmen rather than sailed.
The River Thugs inveigled victims in much the same way as did their brethren on land. Small groups of them would lurk on roads and paths close to the Ganges, seeking to strike up conversations with likely parties of travellers. When they succeeded, talk would soon turn to the discomforts of life on the roads, and the River Thugs would suggest to their new friends that they would all be much more comfortable travelling by boat. If this suggestion was accepted, the inveiglers would lead their intended victims to a craft moored nearby, and – should the travellers be for any reason suspicious – there would usually be two or three more Thug boats tied up nearby, skippered by men who would gravely share the party’s concerns and confirm them in their suspicions that they had been lucky to escape from a group of ruffians.
Once aboard one of the River Thugs’ craft, of course, the intended victims were practically helpless. Outnumbered by the crew, far away from any help, and in most cases unable to swim, they had no chance of escape. Even a bungled attempt at murder could easily be rectified, and there are no records of any of the River Thugs’ prey escaping them, as the land Thugs’ victims occasionally did. The principal danger came from searches by suspicious customs officials, and for that reason Khuruck Baboo and his confederates were always careful to dispose of their victims’ personal possessions, keeping only money and any jewels they could plunder. Such discipline was necessary to avoid detection, but loot in the form of goods, clothing and cooking utensils was an important part of most Thugs’ income, and this no doubt explains the River Thugs’ comparative poverty. One Ghazeepore Thug named Shumsheera, who took part in a single expedition along the Ganges, soon abandoned his companions ‘as I got very little and grew melancholy, as there were no Thugs of my own clan or district’.
Shumsheera’s experience was not unique, for Thugs who worked on land recognized the River Thugs as members of their fraternity, and it seems to have been not uncommon for stranglers from the Doab and Oudh to serve for short periods on the Ganges. Their motive was often simple curiosity as to the methods of the River Thugs, who had no need for beles and were never forced to murder only under the cover of darkness. Victims, too, were easily disposed of, since the Ganges was so filled with the corpses of devout Hindus, set adrift on the holy waters by their families, that a few more bodies attracted no attention.
For these reasons, Sleeman discovered, the River Thugs’ murders were
always perpetrated in the day time. Those who do the work of the boatmen are dressed like other boatmen; but those who are to take part in the operations are dressed like travellers of great respectability; and there are no other boats kept so clean and inviting. When going up river they always pretend to be men of some consideration going on pilgrimage … [and when victims had been brought on board] they go off into the middle of the river, those above singing and playing and making a great noise, while the travellers are murdered inside at the signal given by three taps.
Corpses were disposed of in a brutal manner, ‘the back broken by bending the body backwards and striking the spine with the hand, the most tender parts of the body destroyed, and the corpse thrown into the waters and devoured by the crocodiles which follow the boat’. The practice of snapping a traveller’s spine ensured that he was dead, and was the River Thugs’ equivalent of the stabbing favoured by the gangs on land. Even on the Ganges it was evidently not a good idea to tip a bloody, mutilated corpse into the water.
Such ruthless efficiency helped the River Thugs to avoid detection for years after the most important of their counterparts on land were captured. So did the location of their bases, which were mostly in the far south of Bengal, hundreds of miles from the districts where Sleeman and his assistants worked. In the end, though, the existence of the River Thugs was betrayed by the Oudh men they had welcomed onto their boats, several of whom were captured and became approvers. Sleeman’s subordinat
es in Bengal destroyed most of the river gangs in 1836, when 160 of their number were at last arrested and arraigned for murders dating back to 1820. Others were picked up by Paton in Oudh. The remainder did not last very much longer, although as Sleeman’s men did not extend their operations to the numerous pirates and dacoits on the Ganges, the river was not rendered entirely safe by their arrest.
At around the time that the River Thugs were finally dispersed, Sleeman began to pick up information concerning another group of criminals with similarities to the old Thug gangs. These were the Megpunnas, a loose association of thieves uncovered in the vicinity of Delhi. The Megpunnas relied for part of their living on murdering small parties of travellers – not to rob them of their possessions but in order to steal their children, who were subsequently sold into slavery or prostitution. Sleeman saw definite parallels between their practices and those of the Thugs, although he stopped short of suggesting that the two groups shared a common heritage. The Megpunnas, he wrote in another of his enormous reports, resembled the Thugs in strangling their victims on lonely Indian roads, and invariably killed the adults in the party before seizing their children. Like the Thugs, they consisted of several interrelated bands, travelled in gangs as many as 50 strong, and offered prayers up to Kali.
There were, however, clear distinctions between the two groups. The Megpunnas lacked the stranglers’ sophistication, range and numbers, and were involved in a wider variety of crimes than were the Thugs, who rarely if ever concerned themselves with burglary and petty theft as the Megpunnas were compelled to do. One reason for this was the difficulty of locating and inveigling whole families travelling in a group. It is hard to imagine that any large gang of child-stealers could make a living solely from murder, even during the cold season, as a group of Thugs could do. Perhaps for this reason, the Megpunnas rarely struck outside the districts of Delhi and Rajpootana and were never numerous, numbering no more than 200 men and women. The latter (who rarely took part in Thug expeditions) were brought along to mind the children stolen by the gangs.