Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (9 page)

The Thugs had their own hierarchy and forms of initiation, and their own secret language, which, like the Romany of the gypsies, enabled them to express hidden meanings in the presence of strangers. Its words, though Hindustani in form, were mostly peculiar to itself, and its meanings were sinister.
Bisul purna
, for instance, was a clumsy strangling;
jywaloo
was a victim left for dead but found to be alive;
kburuk
was the noise made by the pickaxe when digging a grave. The
rumal
was the yellow silk handkerchief, tied around a silver rupee, with which the stranglers killed. The
pola
was the secret sign left by one Thug for another. The
gobba
was the round communal grave of Thuggee, in which the victim corpses were packed around a central core of earth, to prevent the jackals exhuming them, or the corpses themselves, as Sleeman once put it, ‘emitting that effluvia which often leads to their discovery’.

Thuggee was strictly hereditary. A boy-child was initiated stage by stage into the full horror of the craft—as a scout first, then as a grave-digger, then as assistant murderer, and finally, if he could show the necessary attributes of steel and ferocity, as a qualified
bburtote
or strangler, an aristocrat among Thugs. A boy’s first murder was an occasion for rejoicing, like a rite of puberty or circumcision, and elaborate ceremonials attended the sacred pickaxe which every thug gang carried—
kussee
, the holy emblem of the craft, which was a tooth from the mouth of Kali, and without which no strangling could be sanctified. After every murder the Thugs sacramentally ate a morsel of consecrated sugar, and this coarse yellow
goor
, they
believed, irrevocably altered them. ‘The
goor
… changes our nature. It would change the nature of a horse. Let any man once taste of the
goor
and he will be a Thug, though he know all the trades and have ail the wealth in the world.’

The British had known about the Thugs for many years. As early as 1673, John Fryer had reported the awful bravado of a young Thug who, tied up for hanging, ‘boasted, that though he were not yet Fourteen Years of Age, he had killed his fifteen men’. But generally the British, like the indigenes, preferred not to see, or at least to convict: in 1827, when three Thugs turned informer and four more were charged with murder, the British circuit judge not only dismissed the case, but sentenced the informers to five years for giving false evidence, their sentence to be preceded by five days spent riding backwards on donkeys round and round the city of Jubbulpore. It was not until 1830 that a new Governor-General, the reformist Whig Lord William Bentinck, appointed Sleeman Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs, gave him fifty mounted irregulars and forty sepoy infantrymen, and set him loose in an area twice as large as England, Scotland and Wales put together to destroy what Sleeman himself called ‘the most dreadful and extraordinary secret society in the history of the human race’.

The evangelical mission could be merciless itself, in the knowledge of its rectitude, and civil liberties got short shrift in Sleeman’s Thug-hunt. He operated from headquarters at Saugor, a drab and dirty town set on a forbidding lake in the heart of the Thug country. His campaign depended upon the use of informers—‘approvers’, as they were called then—convicted Thugs whose lives were spared in return for information and help in the field. The informers themselves, though they might not die, never regained their liberty—‘like tigers’, it was said, ‘their thirst for blood is never to be appeased’—and captured Thugs were removed from the ordinary processes of law, and tried by a Special Commissioner. Those who were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment or more had branded upon their backs and shoulders the words ‘Convicted Thug’ in the vernacular—‘a deviation from the Regulations fully warranted by the crime of Thuggism, which justly places those who practised it beyond the pale of social justice’. Later they were
tattooed with the single word ‘Thug’ neatly on their lower eyelids.

Sleeman worked with a relentless urgency. He had a Cause. ‘I glory in it,’ he wrote, ‘and ever shall do.’ With a few assistants fired by his zeal, with his wild troop of horsemen, turbanned, sashed and sabred, relentlessly he tracked down every clue and brainwashed every captive: and ‘ever at the stirrup of … the Thug-hunting Englishman’, he wrote, ‘went one or two apostate members of their own murderous guild’. Every thread of information was passed to his headquarters at Saugor, until he had built up a detailed intelligence file on everything to do with the history, the symbolisms, the customs and the techniques of Thuggee, linked to a ten-foot map more detailed than India had ever known.

In ones and twos at first, later in scores, the Thugs were brought chained and hangdog into his courtyard, to be registered, interrogated, and locked up in the gloomy castellated prison which overlooked the lake. They were, to judge by drawings of the time, distinguished-looking men, mustachio’d more often than bearded, wearing turbans, white sashed dhotis over pantaloons, and sandals with curled toes. Sometimes the relatives of innocent victims passed by them in the yard, to identify exhumed corpses, or claim the possessions of murdered relatives. Inside Sleeman’s offices, day after day for years, the painstaking questioning and interpretation of evidence proceeded. Once caught, a Thug suspect seldom returned to the world: condemned upon the evidence of his own comrades, he very soon found himself branded on the back and shoulders, thrown into jail at Saugor or Jubbulpore, or summarily hanged.

Sleeman found Thugs everywhere. He winkled them out from village and from castle. Some were senior officials in the service of Indian princes: one experienced strangler was spotted drilling the soldiers of the Ruler of Holkar in the courtyard of His Highness’s palace. Some were the trusted servants of Europeans: the most important of all Sleeman’s captives, the great Thug leader Feringheea of Gwalior, had been an intelligence agent in the employ of Sir
David Ochterlony. Several Thugs had spent half a lifetime in the service of the East India Company’s armed forces, and one caught by Sleeman’s irregulars was a well-trusted police informant on other varieties of crime. Sleeman also hounded down the bankers and patrons of Thuggee—‘capitalists of murder’, as he splendidly called them—and by the end of 1833 the Special Commissioner was able to report to Bentinck that ‘the final extirpation of these enemies to mankind cannot be far distant, and will afford the noblest trophy to adorn His Lordship’s return to his native country’.

This was the first systematic attempt to deal with organized crime in India—something quite new in Indian history. Yet even more effective than all the forensic and administrative skill, so characteristic of the new age, was the moral zeal behind it. The power of Sleeman’s Christian conviction proved far stronger than the power of the Thugs’ fraternal oath. Informers were obtained in surprising numbers, and once within the range of Sleeman’s steady blue eyes, not to speak of those fierce horsemen in the lines outside, they talked freely and fluently—sometimes even engagingly.

‘I am a Thug,’ ran the confession of one eminent assassin, ‘my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have Thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.’ Each Thug-hunting posse, with its attendant apostates ready for betrayal, was a triumphant confirmation of Christian superiority over the forces of evil and ignorance. The Thugs themselves recognized this spiritual ascendancy. They had always believed their own powers to be supernatural. They worked to auguries and omens, and they were in occult partnership with their kin of the animal world, the tiger—‘those who escaped the tigers fell into the hands of the Thugs’, reminisced a famous strangler of Oudh, ‘and those who escaped the Thugs were devoured by the tigers’. Yet even these arcane advantages, it seemed, were not enough to withstand the
iqbal
or auspice of the British. It was so powerful, one Thug assured Sleeman, that ‘before the sound of your drums sorcerers, witches and demons take flight. How can Thuggee stand?’ The powerful patrons of Thuggee, too, prudently recognized this force: Dhunraj Seth, for instance, a rich banker of Omrautee who had invested deeply in Thug enterprises, now directed his funds into a securer field—the
East India Company’s monopoly of the opium trade with China.

Sleeman was not surprised. He was a true son of his times. Fascinated though he was by the intricacies of Indian religion, he trusted in the omnipotence of western right and reason. We have verbatim records of his conversations with captured Thugs, and from them we can hear him, muffled but still indefatigable across the years, deliberately pitting his own convictions against the superstititions of his captives. Once or twice he seems to falter. One persuasive prisoner, who had admitted to 931 murders by his own hand, tried to convince Sleeman that the pleasures of Thuggee were merely akin to, though distinctly superior to, the pleasures of big-game hunting, to which Sleeman was himself addicted. ‘For you, sahib, have but the instincts of the wild beasts to overcome, whereas the Thug has to subdue the suspicions and fears of intelligent men and women, often heavily armed and guarded. … Can you not imagine the pleasure of overcoming such protection during days of travel in their company, the joy of seeing suspicion change to friendship, until that wonderful moment arrives when the
rumal
completes the
shikar
—this soft
rumal
, which has ended the life of hundreds? Remorse, sahib? Never! Joy and elation, often!’

In any case, Thugs habitually insisted, they did not kill irresponsibly, like common murderers—God was in effect the strangler, and God allowed them the profits of their trade. Mere thieving they despised. ‘A thief is a contemptible being, but a Thug—rides his horse—wears his dagger—shows a front! Thieving? Never! Never! If a banker’s treasure were before me, and entrusted to my care, though in hunger and dying I would spurn to steal. But let a banker go on a journey and I would certainly murder him.’ Thuggee was holy work. God was the killer.

‘Then by whose killing,’ asked Sleeman once, perhaps a little anxiously, ‘have all the Thugs who have been hanged at Saugor and Jubbulpore been killed?’

‘God’s, of course.’

‘And there is but one God?’

‘One God above all Gods.’

‘And if that one God above all Gods supports us we shall succeed?’

‘We see that God is assisting you, and that Devi has withdrawn her protection on account of our transgressions. We have sadly-neglected her worship. God only knows how it will end.’

There was a nagging sense of incompleteness to such an exchange. Sleeman had to work hard to convince himself that his methods were fair, however unimpeachable his cause, and once, having lately learnt of the existence of yet another Thug gang, 300 strong, he was plunged into self-mortification. ‘What a sad but faithful picture of our ruined nature does this present! Three hundred sons of fallen Adam leaguing themselves together for the purpose of
murder
! Are we by nature in the sight of God better than they? Certainly not … we are all—even you, gentle reader—in the sight of God as those 300 Thugs. As it is written, there is none righteous, no not
one
!’

By 1841 the cult had been virtually exterminated.
1
Several thousand Thugs had been tried, hundreds had been hanged, many were imprisoned or transported to the penal settlements of the Andaman Islands. The less terrible of them were sent to a trade school within the prison at Jubbulpore, where they learnt such useful crafts as carpet-making, cloth-weaving, carpentry and brick-laying. As the assassins lost their lust for blood, Sleeman built a walled village near the jail, where their wives and families lived. Later still the prisoners moved in there too, and until late in the Victorian era curious Anglo-Indians used to visit them as they aged, to gain a horrible thrill from their glimpses over the wall, and imagine all the terrors of noose, dismemberment and burial which had given the old reprobates such holy pleasure long before.

Almost to the end the campaign had found its opponents among the British themselves, for there were still men who believed such practices as Thuggee to be the prerogative of the Indian condition, and who doubted if reformist zeal could properly be applied to such
a people. As Sir Thomas Munro, one of the most celebrated of Anglo-Indian administrators, had said long before: ‘I have no faith in the modern doctrine of the improvement of the Hindus, or of any other people. When I read, as I sometimes do, of a measure by which a large province had been suddenly improved, or a race of semi-barbarians civilized almost to Quakerism, I throw away the book’. Thuggee was an Indian tradition: what was more, it was a religious custom, and even Macaulay did not believe in trying to wean the Indians from their religions.

So Sleeman was not without his critics. Some were old-school administrators who believed in the principle of non-interference—‘do nothing’, as it used to be said, ‘have nothing done and let nobody do anything’. Others were legalists who objected to his authoritarian methods. Others again, especially British Residents at the courts of independent Indian princes, thought he behaved unconstitutionally. The Resident at Gwalior, for example, opposed the Thug-hunters so resolutely that Gwalior became a Thug sanctuary, and after murder expeditions, so Sleeman maintained, stranglers could return there with as much safety as an Englishman to his inn. The Resident at Bharatpore was no less hostile: he was astonished to learn, he wrote to the Governor-General, that in the hunt for Thugs the end justified the means, ‘a doctrine which I had erroneously supposed to have been long since exploded alike from morals and polities’.

But these were eighteenth-century voices, arguing against the times. Sleeman’s campaign against the Thugs exactly fitted the developing ethos of Empire, even to its element of righteous ruthlessness. Charles Grant had expressed it perfectly. ‘We cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindustan,’ he had written, ‘a race of men lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners’. No class of Hindu, clearly, was more degenerate and base than the fraternity of Thugs, or was governed by more malevolent and licentious passions; their practices offended against a universal moral law which, the evangelical imperialists
argued, stood above religious faiths, and which it was the first duty of Empire to uphold.