Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult

by Mike Dash

  Thus, for what was certainly the last time, a band of Thugs took to the roads of India. They were very old, and several walked only with the aid of sticks; they hunted not for victims, but for homes; and dreamed not of murdering and plunder, but of coming to a place where they themselves could die.

  * A tough fibre used to make ropes and matting.

  * Sleeman had been offered the Residency once before, in 1841, in succession to a Colonel Low, but when he heard that Low had been left destitute by the unexpected failure of his bank, he had insisted that the colonel continue in the post.

  APPENDIX

  How Many Dead?

  ‘tubae dalna – killing, being killed’

  It is all but impossible to know, even approximately, how many men, women and children lost their lives to the Thugs.

  The estimates that do exist vary wildly. Richard Sherwood, writing in 1816, supposed that all the stranglers of the Deccan between them murdered no more than a few hundred travellers a year. Lieutenant Reynolds, 20 years later, interrogated Phansigars who spoke ‘of having put their tens and twenties to death daily’ in the course of expeditions that lasted for four months at a time. The latter boast implied a number of victims so vast that even Syeed Ameer Ali – who spoke of being ‘directly concerned’ in the throttling of 719 victims – and Ramzan, an Oudh Thug who (aged 38) claimed that he had witnessed more than 1,800 murders, seemed mere dilettantes in comparison. Certainly the Sumachar Durpan (a contemporary Indian newspaper ‘of great respectability’) concluded in 1833 that the ‘Thugs slaughtered on an average eight hundred persons in a month’, and in 1920, when Sleeman’s grandson James reviewed his ancestor’s papers in an attempt to arrive at a definitive figure, the estimate he produced was higher still. The gangs, together, he wrote in his book Thug, probably killed somewhere in the region of 40,000 people every year.*

  Was such a death toll possible? Sleeman insisted that it was, pointing out that the population of India was somewhere over 250 million, and that more people were killed each year in the Subcontinent by snakes. And it is true that some of the testimonies given by the Thugs themselves do support his calculations. Paton’s approver Futty Khan, for one, estimated that a well-frequented bele might witness as many as ‘10 or 15 murders yearly’ – which, given that a total of 274 such spots had been mapped in the Kingdom of Oudh alone, certainly implied that a vast number of murders were committed every year. Paton also questioned his approvers as to the number of killings in which they had been involved. Their responses show that individual Thugs did indeed admit to having strangled dozens, and often hundreds, of victims over a period of years.

  According to depositions taken down at Lucknow during the year 1837:

  Futty Khan estimates that he has been at 508 cases of murder

  Buhram ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 931 ″ ″ ″

  Dhoosoo ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 350 ″ ″ ″

  Alayar ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 377 ″ ″ ″

  Ramzan ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 604 ″ ″ ″

  Sheodeen ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 119 ″ ″ ″

  Sirdar ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 42 ″ ″ ″

  Teja ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 103 ″ ″ ″

  Muckdoomee ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 264 ″ ″ ″

  Salar ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 203 ″ ″ ″

  Danial ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 195 ″ ″ ″

  Bukthour ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 294 ″ ″ ″

  Khunjun ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 117 ″ ″ ″

  Hyder ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 322 ″ ″ ″

  Imambux the Black ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 340 ″ ″ ″

  Rambux ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 28 ″ ″ ″

  Imambux the Tall ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 65 ″ ″ ″

  Bught ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 81 ″ ″ ″

  Adhar ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 153 ″ ″ ″

  Ungnoo ″ ″ ″ ″ ″ 24 ″ ″ ″

  Some of these figures are certainly remarkable. As Paton himself pointed out, if a mere 20 approvers could take part in 5,120 murders – ‘an average of 256 involving each Thug’ – then the death toll exacted by the Thug gangs as a whole must have been enormous. Of course, these killings were committed over many decades: Futty Khan was an active Thug for 20 years, and Buhram thugged for 40, which would mean that each was present at an average of no more than two murders a month. But this – Paton believed – made his approvers’ claims more rather than less believable. Certainly there are accounts from elsewhere in India of other stranglers who matched them; Syeed Ameer Ali’s 719 murders were the result of 30 years spent on the roads, and also represented an average of two deaths a month – a figure that the Thug himself was perfectly aware of, since he reminded Meadows Taylor: ‘Ah! Sir, if I had not been in prison twelve years, the number would have been a thousand.’

  Paton’s figures, which found their way into print a few years later, were to prove highly influential. In the absence of any similar document from Sleeman or Smith, the manuscript pages of his ‘Dialogues with Thugs’ make up one of the very few pieces of evidence produced during the anti-Thug campaign that purports to show the number of murders committed by individual stranglers. In 1901 the Quarterly Review used the list to estimate that the average Thug killed three victims a year. Two decades later, James Sleeman based his estimate of 40,000 Thug murders per annum upon it.

  Yet it is very dangerous to extrapolate a death toll for the whole of India from the confessions of a few approvers. For one thing, Futty Khan, Buhram and Syeed Ameer Ali were hardly ordinary Thugs; their testimonies place them at the head of their profession, and it cannot be assumed that other stranglers enjoyed equal success. For another, the claims they made were never tested in a court of law and were not even broken down and enumerated month by month and year by year, much less cross-referenced against any register of murders suspected to have been committed by the Thugs. In these circumstances, there was nothing to prevent Paton’s men from lying in the hope of pleasing their captors, or simply to seek notoriety. Approvers were useful only while they had fresh information to impart, and claiming involvement in a large number of murders may well have struck some of Paton’s Thugs as a way of increasing their value to the Company.

  It is apparent, from other depositions preserved among the Paton papers, that their testimony could be highly inconsistent. Buhram, for one, who claimed in 1837 to have taken part in more than 930 killings, had told a very different story only a year earlier. In his first deposition, he confessed to involvement in a mere 275 murders (‘I may have strangled with my own hands about 125 men, and I may have seen strangled 150 more’), a discrepancy that neither he nor Paton ever bothered to explain. The lower total, spread over the four decades of his career, equates to no more than seven killings every year.* Similarly, Ramzan, who figured prominently in Paton’s table with the claim to have participated in 604 murders, once deposed that he had actually ‘seen between 80 and 90 men strangled yearly’ during his 22 years as a Thug, the latter estimate producing a death toll three times greater than the former. Once again, Paton failed to comment on the inconsistency. The best that can be said of his approvers’ testimony is that it requires corroboration. Certainly no policeman and no court would take it at face value.

  The value of Paton’s data is further undermined by the fact that he understates the frequency with which his approvers would have had to kill in order to reach the totals he attributed to them. The idea that a successful Thug might help commit two murders a month does not seem utterly outlandish – but when it is remembered that even the most ruthless gangs were rarely at large outside the cold season, the requirement triples to 24 deaths in only four months, or one murder every five days. This is a much harder figure to credit, not least because it was comparatively rare for the Thugs to despatch large parties of victims. The number of victims killed in the average affair turns out to be four, and each of these groups had to be encountered, inveigled, taken to a suitable bele and strangled before the next could be pursued. The depositions assembled for the various Thug trials s
uggest that this whole process often took more than 20 days to complete.

  Finally, there is the matter of the Thugs’ modus operandi to consider. All attempts to produce a total death toll by multiplying the number of killings confessed to by one man by the number of Thugs at large is fatally flawed by the fact that few members of most gangs actually committed murder. Perhaps no more than one Thug in every 6 to 10 was a strangler or a hand-holder. His companions – scouts, lookouts, inveiglers, grave-diggers and mere hangers-on – never personally disposed of a single victim. Thus, when a man such as Syeed Ameer Ali spoke of taking part in 719 killings, he was referring to the murders committed by an entire gang, on average at least 25 men strong and frequently numbering 100 or more Thugs, over the course of three decades. Even if Ameer Ali’s claims were true, the number of victims despatched by his gang in the course of a typical expedition turns out to be no more than 24: an average of at most one murder per man per year.

  The evidence assembled by Smith and Sleeman and presented at the trials of Thugs arraigned in the central provinces supports the view that few Thugs killed huge numbers of travellers. Plenty of depositions make it plain that victims were very often hard to come by. Some men spoke of being forced by sheer destitution to murder travellers whom they doubted bore so much as a rupee. Others referred to expeditions that saw whole gangs of Thugs go for weeks, and even months, without committing murder. Thus, while the number of victims claimed by a gang could vary dramatically according to their location, luck, and the skill of their inveiglers, only a few enjoyed conspicuous success. We know that Essuree and the 150 men of the Lucknadown gang killed 37 victims in six different beles during the cold season of 1822–3, and that Feringeea, at the head of gangs totalling anywhere from 25 to 220 men, confessed to the murder of 105 men and women in 1827–8, another 80 in 1828–9, and 48 more up to the moment of his arrest in 1830 – a total of 233 victims in a mere three years. But these were Thugs at the height of their powers. A good many gangs accounted for no more than 10 or 12 travellers a year, and some murdered even fewer. Sleeman told of one group of 30 men – led by a subadar, no less – that killed only nine people in the season 1827–8. One of his assistants, a Captain Vallancy, described a group of low Thugs that experienced similarly modest success, for though the members of this gang ‘were most inveterate murderers, sparing neither sex nor age; nor did they pay any respect to those castes which other Thugs thought it a heinous offence to murder’, their lack of discrimination was evidently offset by a lack of skill, and they accounted for a mere 80 victims in the course of 11 years. Many Deccan Thugs struggled, too. Sheikh Dawood Newly, one of Reynolds’s informants, recorded that 17 gangs, working together for two seasons, had committed only slightly more than 60 murders, and his colleague, Sayeed Ally, informed on 10 more jemadars who had inveigled no more than two dozen travellers over the same period. Between them, then, these two approvers supplied evidence against 27 gangs – a grand assembly of stranglers who had, between them, accounted for only 50 travellers a year.

  Most of these less able Thugs, it might be conjectured, were mere novices, forced onto the roads during the grim years of the 1820s and the 1830s with little idea of how to go about their task. But even the most capable jemadars rarely matched the success enjoyed by Feringeea and his men. The Arcottee Thugs, a gang of Deccan stranglers 60 strong reckoned by all who knew them to be particularly ruthless and skilful, killed no more than 150 victims over the course of 13 years, an average of fewer than a dozen travellers a year. The gang of an approver known as Rama Jemadar the First murdered 46 men and women in four years for a similar average. Perhaps the most startling statistic was produced by Francis Curwen Smith, who calculated – based on the interrogation of thousands of stranglers at dozens of trials – that the 584 Thugs expeditions that criss-crossed the central provinces and Upper Provinces between 1827 and 1834 had accounted for a total of just 1,803 victims.

  The truth seems to be this: even in the 1820s, a single Thug gang 25 men strong would be fortunate to murder more than a dozen travellers each year. A similarly sized group of novice stranglers, in this same period, might well account for half that number. Since no more than 200 jemadars of Thugs appear to have been active at this time, each with his own small group of followers, it might be estimated that in 1829, when the Company’s campaign began, the Thug gangs committed somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 murders a year across the length and breadth of India. The real total, given the Thugs’ habit of banding together in large and inefficient groups, was most likely closer to the lower figure than the higher.

  This is a revealing analysis. The 1820s were, after all, the great days of Thuggee. The economic hardships of that harsh decade, together with the break-up of the Pindari bands and a sharp decline in the size of the Maratha armies, meant that there were probably more Thugs on the roads in that decade than there had ever been before. Even the great famines of the late 1700s, which were more destructive than the great depression of the 1820s, probably forced fewer men into a life of banditry, for there were then abundant opportunities for the unemployed to seek military service. Perhaps – this can be no more than a guess – the number of gangs active in the worst years of the eighteenth century was between a quarter and a third of the total that existed in 1829. These groups probably did contain a high proportion of ruthless and experienced Thugs, and may well have been more efficient and successful than their successors. But, even so, it seems unlikely they accounted for, between them, more than 1,000 deaths a year. In times of war or plenty, the total would have been less.

  Assume, then, that Thuggee came into existence when the oral histories of its practitioners suggest it did, around 150 or 250 years before its ultimate suppression, and that it was indeed distinct from other forms of highway robbery for the whole of that time. What might its true death toll have been? Probably no more than 50,000 or 100,000 men, women and children seems to be the answer, and twice that number at most. This is a far cry from the millions proposed by James Sleeman or the hundreds of thousands suspected by other writers. Yet even 50,000 murders is an inconceivably large number – not many deaths, perhaps, when set against the toll of war, famine and pestilence during the same period, but a vast total nonetheless. And when it is remembered that each of the unlucky travellers inveigled by the gangs left family behind them, and that so far as these loved ones were concerned their husband, wife, brother or child simply vanished from the earth with neither warning nor explanation – leaving, in many cases, their relatives quite destitute – the sum total of human misery inflicted by the Thugs remains beyond computation.

  *This – since Sleeman accepted that the Thugs had practised their trade ever since the Muslim conquests of the thirteenth century – implied a staggering total of some 20 million victims in all, throttled in the course of five centuries of unchecked brutality.

  * While Paton himself made it clear that his informants were describing murders committed by their gangs as a whole – ‘Futty Khan estimates that he has been at 508 cases of murder’ – most writers who cite his figures assume that the various approvers personally strangled the victims concerned. This is a vital point, for there is all the difference in the world between suggesting that a single Thug could average two murders a month and attributing the same figure to an entire gang.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations used in the notes

  Add.Mss. Additional Manuscripts series in the BL and CUL

  BC Board’s Collections, OIOC

  BPC Bengal Political Consultations, OIOC

  BCJC Bengal Criminal & Judicial Consultations, OIOC

  BL British Library

  CUL Cambridge University Library

  IESHR Indian Economic and Social History Review

  NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi

  OIOC Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library

  Sel.Rec. Anon. (ed.), Selected Records Collected from the Central Provinces and Berar Secretariat Relating to the
Suppression of Thuggee, 1829–1832 (Nagpur: Govt. Print., CP & Berar, 1939)

  SB Satpura Bhawan, State Archive of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal

  T&D Thuggee & Dacoity Department files, NAI

  Notes on the sources

  Primary sources

  A vast mass of primary source material relating to the East India Company’s government of India survives in archives in the UK and India. The India Office records kept in the Oriental and India Collections (OIOC) at the British Library in London alone fill approximately nine miles of shelving, and a similarly extensive collection of material has been retained by the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi and by regional depositories elsewhere in the Subcontinent. Many of the volumes preserved in India are filled with duplicates of originals that still exist in London, but thousands of letters and reports deemed unimportant at the time were never copied and sent home. Accurate histories of British India thus require research in both countries.

  The proportion of the Company’s records that relate to Thuggee and the anti-Thug campaign is of course relatively small, but the files that do survive are so considerable that it is probably fair to say that no historian has ever read his way through every document available. I would estimate that the Thug records held in London alone comfortably exceed 60,000 large pages, many of them written in cramped and sometimes virtually illegible hands.

  The most accessible of the British Library’s records consist of what are known as Board’s Collections. These volumes consist of selected material of particular importance that was copied and sent home from India to London for the attention of the Board of Control, the body with overall responsibility for the government of India. The Collections contain around 80 large files primarily or wholly devoted to Thuggee, many of which consist of copy depositions made by various Thug informants and the transcripts of Thug trials. A good deal of administrative correspondence relating to the anti-Thug campaign was also included in the selections prepared for transmission home.