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6. Special incidents (continued)

These murderers looked on all travellers as their legitimate prey, as sportsmen regard game. On one occasion the noted Thug, Feringia,⁶⁸⁶ with his gang were cooking their dinners under some trees on the road when five travellers came by, but could not be persuaded to stop and partake of the meal, saying they wished to sleep at a place called Hirora that night, and had yet eight miles to go. The Thugs afterwards followed, but found no traces of the travellers at Hirora. Feringia therefore concluded that they must have fallen into the hands of another gang, and suddenly recollected having passed an encampment of Banjāras (pack-carriers) not far from the town. On the following morning he accordingly went back with a few of his comrades, and at once recognised a horse and pony which he had observed in the possession of the travellers. So he asked the Banjāras, “What have you done with the five travellers, my good friends? You have taken from us our banij (merchandise).” They apologised for what they had done, pleading ignorance of the lien of the other Thugs, and offered to share the booty; but Feringia declined, as none of his party had been present at the loading. They were accustomed to distinguish their most important exploits by the number of persons who were killed. Thus one murder in the Jubbulpore District was known as the ‘Sāthrup,’ or ‘Sixty soul affair,’ and another in Bilāspur as the ‘Chālisrup,’ or ‘Murder of forty.’ At this time (1807) the road between northern and southern India through the Nerbudda valley had been rendered so unsafe by the incursions of the Pindāris that travellers preferred to go through Chhattīsgarh and Sambalpur to the Ganges. This route, passing for long distances through dense forest, offered great advantages to the Thugs, and was soon infested by them. In 1806, owing to the success⁶⁸⁷ of previous expeditions, it was determined that all the Thugs of northern India should work on this road; accordingly after the Dasahra festival six hundred of them, under forty Jemādārs or leaders of note, set out from their homes, and having worshipped in the temple of Devi at Bindhyāchal, met at Ratanpur in Bilāspur. The gangs split up, and after several murders sixty of them came to Lānji in Bālāghāt, and here in two days’ time fell in with a party of thirty-one men, seven women and two girls on their way to the Ganges. The Jemādārs soon became intimate with the principal men of the party, pretended to be going to the same part of India and won their confidence; and next day they all set out and in four days reached Ratanpur, where they met 160 Thugs returning from the murder of a wealthy widow and her escort. Shortly afterwards another 200 men who had heard of the travellers near Nāgpur also came up, but all the different bodies pretended to be strangers to each other. They detached sixty men to return to Nāgpur, leaving 360 to deal with the forty travellers. From Ratanpur they all journeyed to Chura (Chhuri?), and here scouts were sent on to select a proper place for the murder. This was chosen in a long stretch of forest, and two men were despatched to the village of Sutranja, farther on the road, to see that no one was coming in the opposite direction, while another picket remained behind to prevent interruption from the rear. By the time they reached the appointed place, the Bhurtots (stranglers) and Shamsias (holders) had all on some pretext or other got close to the side of the persons whom they were appointed to kill; and on reaching the spot the signal was given in several places at the same time; and thirty-eight out of forty were immediately seized and strangled. One of the girls was a very handsome young woman, and Pancham, a Jemādār, wished to preserve her as a wife for his son. But when she saw her father and mother strangled she screamed and beat her head against the ground and tried to kill herself. Pancham tried in vain to quiet her, and promised to take great care of her and marry her to his own son, who would be a great chief; but all to no effect. She continued to scream, and at last Pancham put the rūmāl (handkerchief) round her neck and strangled her. One little girl of three years old was preserved by another Jemādār and married to his son, and when she grew up often heard the story of the affair narrated. The bodies were buried in a ravine and the booty amounted to Rs. 17,000. The Thugs then decided to return home, and arrived without mishap, except that the Jemādār, Pancham, died on the way.

7. Disguises of the Thugs

They were not particular, however, to ascertain that their victims carried valuable property before disposing of them. Eight annas (8d.), one of them said,⁶⁸⁸ was sufficient remuneration for murdering a man. On another occasion two river Thugs killed two old men and obtained only a rupee’s worth of coppers, two brass vessels and their body-cloths. But as a rule the gains were much larger. It sometimes happened that the Thugs themselves were robbed at night by ordinary thieves, though they usually set a watch. On one occasion a band of more than a hundred Thugs fell in with a party of twenty-seven dacoits who had with them stolen property of Rs. 13,000 in cash, with gold ornaments, gems and shawls. The Thugs asked to be allowed to travel under their protection, and the dacoits carelessly assenting were shortly afterwards all murdered.⁶⁸⁹ As already stated, the Thugs were accustomed to live in towns or villages and many of them ostensibly followed respectable callings. The following instance of this is given by Sir W. Sleeman:⁶⁹⁰ “The first party of Thug approvers whom I sent into the Deccan to aid Captain Reynolds recognised in the person of one of the most respectable linen-drapers of the cantonment of Hingoli, Hari Singh, the adopted son of Jawāhir Sukul, Sūbahdār of Thugs, who had been executed twenty years before. On hearing that the Hari Singh of the list sent to him of noted Thugs at large in the Deccan was the Hari Singh of the Sadar Bazār, Captain Reynolds was quite astounded; so correct had he been in his deportment and all his dealings that he had won the esteem of all the gentlemen of the station, who used to assist him in procuring passports for his goods on their way from Bombay; and yet he had, as he has since himself shown, been carrying on his trade of murder up to the very day of his arrest with gangs of Hindustān and the Deccan on all the roads around and close to the cantonments of Hingoli; and leading out his band of assassins while he pretended to be on his way to Bombay for a supply of fresh linen and broad-cloth.” Another case is quoted by Mr. Oman from Taylor’s Thirty-eight Years in India.⁶⁹¹ “Dr. Cheek had a child’s bearer who had charge of his children. The man was a special favourite, remarkable for his kind and tender ways with his little charges, gentle in manner and unexceptionable in all his conduct. Every year he obtained leave from his master and mistress, as he said, for the filial purpose of visiting his aged mother for one month; and returning after the expiry of that time, with the utmost punctuality, resumed with the accustomed affection and tenderness the charge of his little darlings. This mild and exemplary being was the missing Thug; kind, gentle, conscientious and regular at his post for eleven months in the year he devoted the twelfth to strangulation.”

8. Secrecy of their operations

Again, as regards the secrecy with which murders were perpetrated and all traces of them hidden, Sir W. Sleeman writes:⁶⁹² “While I was in civil charge of the District of Narsinghpur, in the valley of the Nerbudda, in the years 1822–1824, no ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my becoming aware of it, nor was there a robber or thief of the ordinary kind in the District with whose character I had not become acquainted in the discharge of my duties as magistrate; and if any man had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village of Kandeli,⁶⁹³ not four hundred yards from my court, and that the extensive groves of the village of Mundesur, only one stage from me on the road to Saugor and Bhopāl, were one of the greatest beles or places of murder in all India, and that large gangs from Hindustān and the Deccan used to rendezvous in these groves, remain in them for many days every year, and carry on their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by and branch off from them, with the knowledge and connivance of the two landholders by whose ancestors these groves had been planted, I should have thought him a fool or a madman; and yet nothing could have been more true. The bodies of a hundred travellers lie buried in and around the groves of Mundesur; and a gang of assassins lived in and about the village of Kandeli while I was magistrate of the District, and extended their depredations to the cities of Poona and Hyderābād.”

9. Support of landholders and villagers

The system of Thuggee reached its zenith during the anarchic period of the decline of the Mughal Empire, when only the strongest and most influential could obtain any assistance from the State in recovering property or exacting reparation for the deaths of murdered friends and relatives. Nevertheless, the Thugs could hardly have escaped considerable loss even from private vengeance had they been compelled to rely on themselves for protection. But this was not the case, for, like the Badhaks and other robbers, they enjoyed the countenance and support of landholders and ruling chiefs in return for presenting them with the choicest of their booty and taking holdings of land at very high rents. Sir W. Sleeman wrote⁶⁹⁴ that, “The zamīndārs and landholders of every description have everywhere been found ready to receive these people under their protection from the desire to share in the fruits of their expeditions, and without the slightest feeling of religious or moral responsibility for the murders which they know must be perpetrated to secure these fruits. All that they require from them is a promise that they will not commit murders within their estates and thereby involve them in trouble.” Sometimes the police could also be conciliated by bribes, and on one occasion when a body of Thugs who had killed twenty-five persons were being pursued by the Thākur of Powai⁶⁹⁵ they retired upon the village of Tigura, and even the villagers came out to their support and defended them against his attack. Another officer wrote:⁶⁹⁶ “To conclude, there seems no doubt but that this horrid crime has been fostered by all classes in the community—the landholders, the native officers of our courts, the police and village authorities—all, I think, have been more or less guilty; my meaning is not, of course, that every member of these classes, but that individuals varying in number in each class were concerned. The subordinate police officials have in many cases been practising Thugs, and the chaukīdārs or village watchmen frequently so.”

10. Murder of sepoys

A favourite class of victims were sepoys proceeding to their homes on furlough and carrying their small savings; such men would not be quickly missed, as their relatives would think they had not started, and the regimental authorities would ascribe their failure to return to desertion. So many of these disappeared that a special Army Order was issued warning them not to travel alone, and arranging for the transmission of their money through the Government treasuries.⁶⁹⁷ In this order it is stated that the Thugs were accustomed first to stupefy their victim by surreptitiously administering the common narcotic dhatūra, still a familiar method of highway robbery.

11. Callous nature of the Thugs

Like the Badhaks and other Indian robbers and the Italian banditti the Thugs were of a very religious or superstitious turn of mind. There was not one among them, Colonel Sleeman wrote,⁶⁹⁸ who doubted the divine origin of Thuggee: “Not one who doubts that he and all who have followed the trade of murder, with the prescribed rites and observance, were acting under the immediate orders and auspices of the goddess, Devi, Durga, Kāli or Bhawāni, as she is indifferently called, and consequently there is not one who feels the slightest remorse for the murders which he may have perpetrated or abetted in the course of his vocation. A Thug considers the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the goddess; and he remembers them as a priest of Jupiter remembered the oxen and a priest of Saturn the children sacrificed upon their altars. He meditates his murders without any misgivings, he perpetrates them without any emotions of pity, and he recalls them without any feeling of remorse. They trouble not his dreams, nor does their recollection ever cause him inquietude in darkness, in solitude or in the hour of death.”

And again: “The most extraordinary trait in the characters of these people is not this that they can look back upon all the murders they have perpetrated without any feelings of remorse, but that they can look forward indifferently to their children, whom they love as tenderly as any man in the world, following the same trade of murder or being united in marriage to men who follow the trade. When I have asked them how they could cherish these children through infancy and childhood under the determination to make them murderers or marry them to murderers, the only observation they have ever made was that formerly there was no danger of their ever being hung or transported, but that now they would rather that their children should learn some less dangerous trade.”

12. Belief in divine support

They considered that all their victims were killed by the agency of God and that they were merely irresponsible agents, appointed to live by killing travellers as tigers by feeding on deer. If a man committed a real murder they held that his family must become extinct, and adduced the fact that this fate had not befallen them as proof that their acts of killing were justifiable. Nay, they even held that those who oppressed them were punished by the goddess:⁶⁹⁹ “Was not Nanha, the Rāja of Jālon,” said one of them, “made leprous by Devi for putting to death Budhu and his brother Khumoli, two of the most noted Thugs of their day? He had them trampled under the feet of elephants, but the leprosy broke out on his body the very next day. When Mūdhaji Sindhia caused seventy Thugs to be executed at Mathura was he not warned in a dream by Devi that he should release them? And did he not the very day after their execution begin to spit blood? And did he not die within three months?” Their subsequent misfortunes and the success of the British officers against them they attributed to their disobedience of the ordinances of Devi in slaying women and other classes of prohibited persons and their disregard of her omens. They also held that the spirits of all their victims went straight to Paradise, and this was the reason why the Thugs were not troubled by them as other murderers were.

13. Theory of Thuggee as a religious sect

The fact that the Thugs considered themselves to be directed by the deity, reinforced by their numerous superstitious beliefs and observances, has led to the suggestion by one writer that they were originally a religious sect, whose principal tenet was the prohibition of the shedding of blood. There is, however, no evidence in support of this view in the accounts of Colonel Sleeman, incomparably the best authority. Their method of strangulation was, as has been seen, simply the safest and most convenient means of murder: it enabled them to dispense with arms, by the sight of which the apprehensions of their victims would have been aroused, and left no traces on the site of the crime to be observed by other travellers. On occasion also they did not scruple to employ weapons; as in the murder of seven treasure-bearers near Hindoria in Damoh, who would not probably have allowed the Thugs to approach them, and in consequence were openly attacked and killed with swords.⁷⁰⁰ Other instances are given in Colonel Sleeman’s narrative, and they were also accustomed to cut and slash about the bodies of their victims after death. The belief that they were guided by the divine will may probably have arisen as a means of excusing their own misdeeds to themselves and allaying their fear of such retribution as being haunted by the ghosts of their victims. Similar instances of religious beliefs and practices are given in the accounts of other criminals, such as the Badhaks and Sānsias. And the more strict and serious observances of the Thugs may be accounted for by the more atrocious character of their crimes and the more urgent necessity of finding some palliative.

The Goddess Kāli

The veneration paid to the pickaxe, which will shortly be described, merely arises from the common animistic belief that tools and implements generally achieve the results obtained from them by their inherent virtue and of their own volition, and not from the human hand which guides them and the human brain which fashioned them to serve their ends. Members of practically all castes worship the implements of their profession and thus afford evidence of the same belief, the most familiar instance of which is perhaps, ‘The pestilence that walketh in the darkness and the arrow that flieth by noonday’; where the writer intended no metaphor but actually thought that the pestilence walked and the arrow flew of their own volition.

14. Worship of Kāli

Kāli or Bhawāni was the principal deity of the Thugs, as of most of the criminal and lower castes; and those who were Muhammadans got over the difficulty of her being a Hindu goddess by pretending that Fātima, the daughter of the Prophet, was an incarnation of her. In former times they held that the goddess was accustomed to relieve them of the trouble of destroying the dead bodies by devouring them herself; but in order that they might not see her doing this she had strictly enjoined on them never to look back on leaving the site of a murder. On one occasion a novice of the fraternity disobeyed this rule and, unguardedly looking behind him, saw the goddess in the act of feasting upon a body with the half of it hanging out of her mouth. Upon this she declared that she would no longer devour those whom the Thugs slaughtered; but she agreed to present them with one of her teeth for a pickaxe, a rib for a knife and the hem of her lower garment for a noose, and ordered them for the future to cut about and bury the bodies of those whom they destroyed. As there seems reason to suppose that the goddess Kāli represents the deified tiger, on which she rides, she was eminently appropriate as the patroness of the Thugs and in the capacity of the devourer of corpses.

15. The sacred pickaxe

When the sacred pickaxe used for burying corpses had to be made, the leader of the gang, having ascertained a lucky day from the priest, went to a blacksmith and after closing the door so that no other person might enter, got him to make the axe in his presence without touching any other work until it was completed. A day was then chosen for the consecration of the pickaxe, either Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday; and the ceremony was performed inside a house or tent, so that the shadow of no living thing might fall on and contaminate the sacred implement. A pit was dug in the ground and over it the pickaxe was washed successively with water, sugar and water, sour milk, and alcoholic liquor, all of which were poured over it into the pit. Finally it was marked seven times with vermilion. A burnt offering was then made with all the usual ingredients for sacrifice and the pickaxe was passed seven times through the flames. A cocoanut was placed on the ground, and the priest, holding the pickaxe by the point in his right hand, said, ‘Shall I strike?’ The others replied yes, and striking the cocoanut with the butt end he broke it in pieces, upon which all exclaimed, ‘All hail, Devi, and prosper the Thugs.’ All then partook of the kernel of the cocoanut, and collecting the fragments put them into the pit so that they might not afterwards be contaminated by the touch of any man’s foot. Here the cocoanut may probably be considered as a substituted sacrifice for a human being. Thereafter the pickaxe was called Kassi or Mahi instead of kudāli the ordinary name, and was given to the shrewdest, cleanest and most sober and careful man of the party, who carried it in his waist-belt. While in camp he buried it in a secure place with its point in the direction they intended to go; and they believed that if another direction was better the point would be found changed towards it. They said that formerly the pickaxe was thrown into a well and would come up of itself when summoned with due ceremonies; but since they disregarded the ordinances of Kāli it had lost that virtue. Many Thugs told Colonel Sleeman⁷⁰¹ that they had seen the pickaxe rise out of the well in the morning of its own accord and come to the hands of the man who carried it; and even the several pickaxes of different gangs had been known to come up of themselves from the same well and go to their respective bearers. The pickaxe was also worshipped on every seventh day during an expedition, and it was believed that the sound made by it in digging a grave was never heard by any one but a Thug. The oath by the pickaxe was in their esteem far more sacred than that by the Ganges water or the Korān, and they believed that a man who perjured himself by this oath would die or suffer some great calamity within six days. In prison, when administering an oath to each other in cases of dispute, they sometimes made an image of the pickaxe out of a piece of cloth and consecrated it for the purpose. If the pickaxe at any time fell from the hands of the carrier it was a dreadful omen and portended either that he would be killed that year or that the gang would suffer some grievous misfortune. He was deprived of his office and the gang either returned home or chose a fresh route and consecrated the pickaxe anew.