by Mike Dash
The School of Industry did succeed, even so, in turning the sons of Thugs away from a life of Thuggee. By the early 1850s, the children born to the approvers were working as soldiers, porters and even shopkeepers in Jubbulpore itself; and for all Sleeman’s fears, none seems to have shown any inclination to take up his father’s profession. In time, the School’s warders came to trust their prisoners completely. The families in the Thug village, it was noted in 1878, ‘have entire liberty to come and go as they like’; indeed, by then even the surviving approvers themselves were ‘subject only to certain mild restrictions’.
The Thugs’ evident disinterest in either escape or further killing seems to have taken the officers of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department by surprise. Yet it is not hard to explain. One reason, evidently, was the fact that the men and their families were so well provided for that they no longer had any need to steal or kill. Another was the increasing age of the prisoners themselves. Fewer than half of the Thugs arrested in the 1830 and 1831 would have still been active by 1857. Those swept up in the later stages of the anti-Thug campaign were themselves growing old by 1888, when the quantity of tents and carpets made in Jubbulpore was already in steep decline and it was observed that the School of Industry remained profitable only because the cost of feeding approvers who were too old and feeble to work was not set against its revenues.
More important than mere decrepitude, however, was the disapproval of the Thugs’ own children. It was here that the benefit of establishing a School of Industry was most apparent, for unlike their old comrades in Agra and Cawnpore, whose enthusiasm for recreating their past exploits remained undimmed for more than 20 years, the Thugs of Jubbulpore proved increasingly reluctant to gratify British visitors’ interest in their crimes.
Sleeman himself – who continued to visit the School even after he was given additional duties in Gwalior and Bundelcund – charted the decline in their enthusiasm for murder in a letter composed shortly before his final departure from India. In 1843, he noted, the approvers still liked to talk of the old times with curious European visitors, and would do so without prompting, mulling over
their old trade, its scenes and excitements, and in showing them how they had perfected its various operations. At the second visit [1844], I found that they were not anxious to do this, though willing, when encouraged; but at the last visit [1848], I found that they were very averse to answer any questions on this subject, and quite ashamed to look back on the events and incidents of these past lives. They no longer talked among themselves of the scenes of early days. Their sons, who had never seen any of these scenes and incidents, were now become able, industrious, well-behaved young men, who felt no interest in what their fathers could tell them of a trade so abhorrent to the rest of mankind, and were evidently ashamed to see their fathers asked any questions about it by European visitors. All had learned to read and write and were proud of the thought of their independent condition.
William Sleeman’s long involvement with the Thugs and dacoits continued almost to the end of his lifetime’s service in India. Though he was recognized as one of the most able of the Company’s administrators, and repeatedly promoted and asked to assume additional responsibilities, he retained charge of the old Saugor & Nerbudda Territory well into the 1840s, was promoted to the rank of colonel, and remained General Superintendent of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department as late as 1849. These duties – combined with the new roles he assumed as Agent in Bundelcund and later Resident at Gwalior – exhausted him, and although some were discharged by subordinates, he nevertheless tired in his later years.
In truth, Sleeman had no one but himself to blame for his mounting exhaustion. He was ‘altogether too willing a horse’, as ambitious as ever and as ready to take on the tasks that the government in Calcutta pressed on him as he was reluctant to relinquish his many outside interests. In addition, he wrote several books – his best-known work, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, still ranks among the most important memoirs of the Victorian Raj – and, with Amélie, produced five daughters and two sons.
By 1845, indeed, Sleeman was responsible for well in excess of 100,000 square miles of India, if Gwalior is included. Inevitably, he spent a large part of each year on horseback, touring his district – an arrangement that suited him admirably, for he had never been happiest behind a desk. But he tried, nevertheless, to make a home for his growing family. His niece, who visited his new headquarters at Jhansee in the late 1840s, noted at the end of one cold season that
with infinite care and at great expense, Colonel Sleeman has made a beautiful garden and in this we are used to walk every evening, regaling ourselves with oranges and loquats, both of which fruits are now in great perfection … There are, besides, numerous citron and lime trees, looking extremely pretty with their rich, ripe fruit and dark green leaves. The pomegranate, with its brightly scarlet flower and its beautiful fruit in every stage, and the vine, the fig, the custard apple and the pombello giving promise of delicious fruits during the next three intolerable months of heat, mosquitoes and monotony. Of a morning we used to ride on a high rocky common over which my uncle has cut a nice, wide road and covered it with sand and gravel. We were never early enough to accompany him in his ride, but we used to gallop out and meet him just as he turned homewards when, with the sun behind us and a delicious westerly breeze in our front, we cared not how long we lingered on our homeward path … Books, of which Colonel Sleeman has a greater number than I have ever seen in a private collection, work, chess, and visitors agreeably occupied the rest of the day.
Such pleasant domestic interludes were, however, rare in Sleeman’s later life. Two of his children died in infancy, while the remaining five suffered so much in the climate that they were sent home one by one to be educated in England – a voyage so lengthy, expensive and taxing, in the days before the building of the Suez Canal, that their father never saw them again. Sleeman himself continued to suffer from recurring bouts of the Nathpore fever he had contracted in Nepal. He spent much of the year 1836 on sick leave, and his wife’s health was so precarious that she and her younger children had to absent themselves for a good part of every year to one of the fashionable hill stations built in the shadow of the Himalayas for those Company officers and wives able to escape the suffocating heat and dust of summer. So disillusioned did he and Amélie become with their prospects in the country that they began planning for a retirement to the United States. For a while Sleeman had one eye on a new life in the Mississippi valley, which he considered the most suitable place for a large family such as his own to settle. ‘It is a noble country,’ he observed, ‘were it not deformed with that horrible system of slavery. If it can only shake that off, its institutions will make it a model for the world.’
The government of India was, however, anxious to retain Sleeman’s services, and his continued loyalty was eventually secured in 1848 with the offer of the Residency at the court of Oudh. This was the most coveted post available to a political officer of the Bengal Presidency. The position brought with it not only huge influence – Oudh, strategically positioned between Delhi and Benares, was the richest and perhaps the most important Native State north of the Nerbudda – but also a good salary and substantial perquisites. It was part of the Resident’s job to impress the king and court with the power of the Company, and the holder of the post was provided with the means to live and entertain lavishly. Sleeman’s own entry to the capital, Lucknow, was made at the head of 300 elephants and camels.*
It was, nonetheless, a difficult appointment. The king, Wajid Ali Khan, was a notorious eccentric, ‘whose sole ambition was the puerile one of becoming the finest drummer in Oudh’; and the day-to-day administration of the kingdom had been placed in the hands of a courtier named Wasir Ali, whom Sleeman found to be the ‘greatest knave’ in the country. Under these men’s inefficient rule, the once-rich province had slipped so close to bankruptcy that the Governor General in Calcutta had begun to threaten ann
exation. Sleeman – whose views of the Company’s proper role in India were shaped more by the eighteenth century than the nineteenth – strenuously opposed this policy, and he endured five miserable years in Lucknow, increasingly frustrated by his inability to persuade the court there to accept reform. ‘Such a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity and neglect of duty and abuse of authority,’ he wrote,
I have never before been placed in and I hope never again to undergo … Had I come here when the treasury was full, I might have covered Oudh with useful public works, and much do I regret that I came here to throw away the best years of my life among such a set of knaves and fools as I have had to deal with.
The Resident’s sympathies remained, as ever, with the Indian peasantry, who suffered most under Wajid Ali’s rule, and he became so angry at the injustices he saw that at least one historian has suggested he became dangerously obsessed with the swirling intrigues of the court. He was also, at last, in physical decline. ‘Mentally,’ wrote one young British officer who encountered him in Oudh, ‘he was in his prime in this period, but physically he was far from that: short of stature though somewhat muscular and robust in frame, he appeared shrunken and aged.’
Matters were not helped by the three separate attempts that were made on Sleeman’s life between 1842 and 1853. Two were the work of disgruntled local people, but the third was apparently perpetrated by an escaped Thug in Lucknow. The one account of this incident comes from the recollection of Sleeman’s daughter Elizabeth, who as a little girl
was in his study one day when her father suddenly had a premonition of evil, drew aside a curtain concealing an alcove, and disclosed an Indian standing there armed with a dagger. Unarmed as he was and not expecting such an attack, Sleeman had spent too much of his life in the midst of danger to be perturbed by anything like this, and, pointing a finger at the man, he said, ‘You are a Thug.’ The man promptly dropped his dagger and said, salaaming profoundly, ‘Yes, sahib’
before allowing himself to be disarmed.
In any event, the general strain of life in Oudh eventually proved too much for Sleeman, whose health had been severely weakened by his repeated bouts of fever. Although the government wanted him to stay, he was forced to relinquish his position late in 1855, at about the time his old enemy Feringeea also died, and – a sure sign of just how severe his illness had become – even make preparations for a return to Britain, which he had not seen since 1809. Sleeman and his wife reached Calcutta early in January 1856 and sailed for home on the first of February. But the fever suddenly worsened. On 10 February, off the coast of Ceylon, Sleeman died, and was buried at sea. Amélie survived him for a quarter of a century, spending the remainder of her life not in her birthplace, Mauritius, but close to her children in the genteel if less exotic surroundings of Southsea, on the English coast.
Sleeman thus left India before the government’s final annexation of Oudh, which took place four days after he had sailed and undid most of the work of his later years. He also died a year before the outbreak of the great Indian Mutiny of 1857. This was perhaps fortunate, for his contemporaries in the Indian civil service were among those most distressed by the Company’s increasingly high-handed treatment of its Indian subjects, which became one of the main causes of the uprising. The Mutiny’s great epic, ironically enough, was the rebel siege of Sleeman’s old residency at Lucknow, which was grimly defended for six months by a tiny force of soldiers and political officers. When they were finally driven from it, in November 1857, one officer risked his life by going back, through the mutineers’ lines, to rescue a portrait of Sleeman that had been hung inside. It was carried to safety wrapped around a soldier’s musket, the last relic of the old Thug-hunter’s final years.
Sleeman’s real legacy, of course, was something more than that. In less than a decade, he and Francis Curwen Smith and their various associates had stamped out Thuggee, a crime that had persisted, in all likelihood, for several hundred years. They had arrested nearly 4,000 men and, by hanging or imprisoning the vast majority of them, made the roads of central India safe for the first time in living memory.
Sleeman’s methods have attracted increasing criticism in recent years. Today we can see, rather more clearly than was possible in the 1830s, that the evidence against some of the convicted Thugs was far from compelling. Sleeman himself admitted that his men sometimes arrested people guilty of nothing more than being found in the company of Thugs, though he always remained sanguine that such mistakes would be uncovered by the courts.
It is also no doubt true that the Company men charged with eradicating Thuggee held (as historians have charged) rather a simplistic view of the Thugs themselves. Once the original work of suppressing the Thugs was more or less complete, moreover, the men of the Thuggee & Dacoity Department did cast around for other tasks to justify their existence, and though the department might with some justification claim that its campaigns against the Megpunnas, the Tusma-Baz, and other supposed varieties of Thug did result in the arrest of a large number of professional criminals, they had unfortunate consequences. The tendency to classify whole tribes and castes as inevitably and irredeemably ‘criminal’ was given additional impetus by the Thug campaigns. Sleeman’s department thus helped to create the climate in which what was known as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1876 became law, effectively criminalizing entire communities – and that was one of the most discreditable of all pieces of Imperial legislation. The Superintendent’s own growing obsession with exterminating the entire ‘race of Thugs’ became, eventually, unhealthy, and there can be little doubt that a number of innocent men were tried and found guilty of Thuggee, particularly after 1835.
Yet Sleeman himself was not to blame for all his department’s failings. He had as detailed an understanding of the Thugs’ methods and organization as any Company official, and made it clear, in both his official correspondence and his published works, that there was indeed a difference between hereditary and occasional Thugs, and between those who murdered out of desperation and those who killed because they had grown up doing so. Nor should it ever be forgotten – as Sleeman’s critics do forget – that the suppression of Thuggee did save thousands of lives. Because of him, husbands who would once have been strangled for a rupee returned home safely to their wives, and fathers lived to raise their children.
The Thugs of the School of Industry lived on long after Sleeman’s death: almost, some of them, to the opening of the twentieth century.
However impeccable their behaviour and industrious their sons, they could never be released, and one by one they died in jail. The number of men whose age and declining health forced them to give up work and stay within the confines of the Thug village rose steadily for two decades after Sleeman’s death. There were 100 of them in 1854, and more than 122 by 1872. After that, the totals of the infirm began to fall as the old Thugs simply expired. In 1874, the British knocked down nearly 60 vacant huts in the Thuggee Lines, and deaths among the remaining Thug and dacoit prisoners were running at as many as 30 men each year. The old Thuggee jail in Jubbulpore, where prisoners other than the approvers themselves were kept, was closed in 1872 and turned into a lunatic asylum; the surviving handful of inmates were transferred to the village, where the last of them died in 1882. By then there were only 71 of the old approvers left, where once there had been more than 200. Three-quarters of those were gone a decade later, leaving so few – no more than 20 – that the School of Industry was finally shut down and its buildings turned over to the city for use as a juvenile reform school.
The approvers’ sons were long gone by this time, encouraged or in a few cases forced to leave in search of gainful employment. The surviving Thug and dacoit prisoners were scattered. A few of the younger ones were sent to the prison at Jhalna, and a large proportion – almost half – of the remainder begged to be allowed to end their days in the Thuggee village. They were too late; the plans for the reformatory had already been approved. The mens’ petition was rejected
, and on 31 December 1892 the last handful of imprisoned Thugs were forcibly evicted from their homes. They had lived there, some of them, for more than half a century. Now they were too old to earn a living, and had no relatives who could help them adapt to a world where they no longer belonged.
While they had been confined, India had changed so utterly that they did not recognize it. Their old cart-tracks were now railroads; the mango groves where they had murdered their victims had been uprooted to make way for ever expanding settlements; and where once it had taken weeks for a man to travel from town to town, and months for him to be reported missing, it was now possible to make the same journeys in a day and for policemen hundreds of miles apart to communicate instantaneously by telegraph. These innovations, which would have doomed Thuggee without the intervention of William Sleeman, could not be resisted.