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| The dandy, charming, strangling
highwaymen |
The Thugs were a colourful band of murderers
and robbers that held colonial India in thrall, writes Peter Gruner
Thug – The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult
by Mike Dash
Granta, £20
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Murderers in India’s native states could be trodden
to death by elephants
Three captured Thugs demonstrate their strangling technique
Thugs get to grips with a traveller
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THE average Thug, at first, would come across as a rather decent
and agreeable cove, not in the least fierce or aggressive, let alone
a murderer.
You’d find him – or he’d find you – quietly
walking through the rough and inhospitable terrain of 19th-century
India, with a bunch of other so-called travellers, and by coincidence
they were going your way.
They’d probably invite you and your travelling companions to
join them, saying that the bigger the party the less chance of being
attacked by bandits.
They’d be charming and disarming company for days, even weeks,
and then quick as you like, it would be out with the ceremonial
scarf – a piece of fine cotton cloth about a yard long –
and goodnight Calcutta.
As Mike Dash describes, in his brilliantly researched book Thugs
– the name given to groups of bloodthirsty Indian killers and
thieves – also saw themselves as men of honour.
That didn’t stop them, of course, doing what they did best
– mercilessly throttling to death wealthy traders and then
cutting up their remains and burying them to avoid identification.
The traders would then be robbed of everything they had.
The book, which is shortly to go into paperback, is not just an
intriguing history of British imperialists struggling to defeat
one of the world’s most mysterious and murderous religious
cults. It is also a bit of a boy’s own adventure detailing
the lengths to which investigators from the East India Company went
to track down and finally apprehend the Thug, despite threats to
the officers’ safety and a wall of secrecy.
It was only when travellers started disappearing in rather alarming
numbers that the British realised something was wrong. They were
slow to react at first, probably because in the main it was not
European travellers – usually in well-armed convoys –
who were disappearing but Indians.
The British were also so isolated within their little sphere of
privilege, that in 1810 you didn’t even admit to liking a curry,
let alone profess an interest in, for example, Persian poetry. Indeed,
one British lady when asked what she had seen of India while there
replied: “Oh, nothing, thank goodness.”
Slowly came reports of the disappeared from their families and with
them came the rumours of these strange murderous tribes, who could
strangle a man on horseback and dispatch an entire group of men
within minutes. Finally, the British administrators had to do something.
The word ‘Thug’ is an ancient one and first appears in
India’s sacred Sanskrit tongue, meaning to cover or conceal.
Its literal meaning is almost always robber, cheat, or conman. Men
from the same family would form gangs with religious rituals and
habits, which would have been passed down through generations. About
1,500 Thugs were thought to be working in small gangs around Lucknow
and Jaipur in the early 1800s.
Strangling was the preferred method of death but not the only one.
Victims would also be invited to share a hearty meal with a friendly
band of travellers, all going in the same direction. But it would
be poisoned with ground seeds of the thorn apple, a deadly relative
of belladonna, which deprives the object of his senses.
However, a Thug was also a man of principle and pride. “The
surest way to anger a captured strangler,” writes Dash, “was
to suggest that he was nothing more than a common criminal.”
Thugs were highly superstitious and there were many varieties of
humans they couldn’t kill, including women and children. You
were also safe if you were a fakir, musician or a bard. If you had
leprosy, were a member of a specific caste or profession such as
an elephant driver, oil vender, washerman or sweeper, you were spared.
Anyone travelling with a cow was okay and Sikhs were unharmed, at
least in Bengal.
The Thugs so fascinated Victorian Britain, that in 1839 Queen Victoria
demanded to see the proofs of Confession of a Thug by Colonel Philip
Meadows Taylor, a colonial officer in Hyderabad.
Finally William Sleeman, an East India Company officer, was given
the unhappy task of attempting to end the Thugs’ reign of terror
on the roads of India.
Sleeman was lucky enough to have brought before him captured Thugs,
a few of whom were persuaded to turn ‘King’s Evidence’,
or become ‘approvers’ as they were known. From these men
he wrung out as much information as possible.
But it was an uphill task for Sleeman’s tiny band of officers.
Thugs never murdered in their backyards, but hundreds of miles from
where they lived; all evidence of the victim was buried; and the
Thug was often protected by his village chiefs.
Sleeman’s brilliant innovation – later copied by the fledgling
British police – was the creation of his ‘machine’,
a paper database, which stored and processed the information provided.
In short he determined to get as much information as he could on
every Thug he could find out about – home address, aliases,
family relationships, as well as information on every crime they
committed.
“All this work, moreover, had to be undertaken at a time when
the Indian police force was fragmented, poorly paid and appallingly
corrupt,” writes Dash, “when pen, paper and foolscap indexes
were the best available technology; and when the techniques of photography,
finger printing and forensic analysis were more or less undreamed
of.” But soon hundreds of Thugs were being arrested and committed
for trial.
Sleeman and his small team were so successful in helping to wipe
out the death cult that a village to the north east of Jubbulpore
was renamed Sleemanabad, and the brass lamp Sleeman himself presented
to the temple there was kept burning for more than a century in
his honour; it is still there today. |
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