Thuggee

Thuggee

Group of Thugs around 1894
Founded	Before 1356
Named after	Hindi word for deceit
Founding location	Central India and Bengal
Years active	At least 450 years
Territory	Indian subcontinent
Activities	Murder, robbery

Thuggee or tuggee (Hindi: ठग्गी ṭhaggī; Urdu: ٹھگ; Nepali: ठग्गी ṭhaggī; Sanskrit: sthaga; Marathi: ठक; Odia: ଠକ thaka; Sindhi: ٺوڳي، ٺڳ; Kannada: ಠಕ್ಕ thakka; Bengali: ঠগি ṭhogī) refers to the acts of Thugs, an organised gang of professional robbers and murderers.

Thugs travelled in groups across the Indian sub-continent for six hundred years. The earliest authenticated mention of thugs appears in Ziyā-ud-Dīn Baranī's History of Fīrūz Shāh, dated around 1356. They operated as gangs of highway robbers, tricking and later strangling their victims.

To take advantage of their victims, the thugs would join travellers and gain their confidence; this would allow them to surprise and strangle the travellers with a handkerchief or noose. They would then rob and bury their victims. This led to the thugs being called Phansigar (English: "using a noose"), a term more commonly used in southern India. During the 1830s, the thugs were targeted for eradication by Governor-General of India, William Bentinck and his chief captain, William Henry Sleeman.

The English language word "thug" traces its roots to this, from the Hindi ठग (ṭhag), which means "swindler" or "deceiver". Related words are the verb thugna ("to deceive"), from the Sanskrit स्थग (sthaga "cunning, sly, fraudulent") and स्थगति (sthagati, "he conceals"). This term, describing the murder and robbery of travellers, is popular in the Indian subcontinent and particularly India.

History

The earliest known reference to the Thugs as a band or fraternity, rather than ordinary thieves, is found in Ziau-d din Barni's History of Firoz Shah (written about 1356):

In the reign of that sultan [about 1290], some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be conveyed into the lower country, to the neighbourhood of Lakhnauti, where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighbourhood of Delhi any more.

— Sir HM Elliot, History of India, iii. 141

Guru Multhoo Byragee Jogee, a native of Ajmere aged 90, in jail (1840)

Murdan Khan and gang from Lucknow (1840)

Membership was sometimes passed from father to son, as part of a criminal underclass. The leadership of established Thug groups tended to be hereditary, as the group evolved into a criminal tribe. In one cluster of Thugee groups, leadership was traced along family lines for eight generations. Other men would become acquainted with a Thug band and hope to be recruited, as Thugs were respected by the criminal community and had a camaraderie of numbers and shared experience. Robbery became less a question of solving problems associated with poverty and more a profession.

Sometimes young children of travellers would be spared and groomed to become Thugs themselves, since children would help allay suspicion. A fourth way of becoming a Thug was by training with a guru (similar to an apprenticeship for a guild or profession), during which the candidate could be assessed for reliability, courage, discretion and discipline. Despite the hereditary origin of many Thugs, the actual practice of strangulation was taught not by fathers to their sons but rather by experienced members who specialized in such training. These men were highly regarded, and after training a young Thug would be entitled to a portion of his spoils in perpetuity as a pension for his old age.

Modus operandi

Watercolour (1837) by unknown artist of three Thugs strangling a traveller; one holds his feet, another his hands and a third tightens the ligature around his neck. Created in Lucknow, based on descriptions from imprisoned Thug leaders (Dash, 2005)

Sketch by the same artist of a group of Thugs stabbing the eyes of murdered travellers before throwing the bodies into a well.

The Thugs' modus operandi was to join a caravan as fellow travellers, delaying their attack until the other travellers lost their initial wariness of the newcomers. Depending on the size of the target group, it might take hundreds of miles to reach a suitable place and time. There were variations on this method. When tackling a large group, a Thuggee band might disperse along a route and join a group in stages, concealing their acquaintanceship and eventually outnumbering their intended victims in small, non-threatening increments. If the travellers doubted any one party, they might confide their worries to another party of the Thuggee band; the trusted band would be best placed to deal with those members of the caravan at the appropriate time, or advise their colleagues to modify their behaviour to allay suspicion. The leader of a Thugee gang was known as a jemadar, a term borrowed from an Indian military rank roughly comparable to a captain or lieutenant.

There were numerous Thug taboos about who could not be selected as victims, though how strictly these rules were followed could vary from group to group and any murder could potentially be rationalized depending on the circumstances. Women were prohibited as victims, as were those afflicted with leprosy or other obvious physical ailments and disabilities. Fakirs (religious ascetics) were also prohibited, along with those of the Sikh faith. Certain professions were prohibited, including elephant drivers, sellers or carriers of oil, and those accompanied by cattle (an animal sacred to Hindus). When Thugs were captured or exposed, they often blamed their misfortune on violation of one of these taboos.

Thugs usually operated in small groups, but occasionally met in larger gatherings. In 1884, seven men well-armed with swords and matchlocks, bearing a treasure worth 4,500 rupees, passed by a hidden encampment of two hundred Thugs. The Thugs followed them unobserved for 7 miles, then rushed upon them and killed them all. While the Thugs were doing so, a tanner approached, "and to prevent him giving the alarm they put him to death also, and made off with the treasure, leaving the bodies unburied."

The killing place needed to be remote from local observers, with no escape (for example, a riverbank). Thugs had favoured places of execution, known as beles, and knew their geography better than their victims did. They were careful to kill those who were far from home, and thus unlikely to be missed for weeks or months. Attacks were conducted at night or during a rest break, when travellers would be busy with chores and background noises would mask any sounds of alarm. A quick, quiet method, leaving no stains and requiring no specialised weapon, was strangulation. This method, associated with Thuggee, led to the Thugs being called phansigars ("noose-operators") or "stranglers" by British troops. Usually two or three Thugs would accost one traveller: one Thug strangling the victims, while the others held the victim's limbs or torso to prevent their resistance. They then needed to dispose of the bodies, either burying them or throwing them into a well. The victims joints were often broken, and/or the major tendons severed, to allow greater flexibility in hiding the corpses in confined areas. Additionally, the victim was often stabbed in the eyes following the strangulation -- a practice that Thugs believed was introduced after some victims survived being strangled and buried in shallow graves.

The garrote is often depicted as a weapon of the Thuggee. Early references to Thugs reported they committed their strangulation murders with nooses of rope or catgut, but later they adopted the use of a length of cloth that could be used as a sash or scarf, and thus more easily concealed. This cloth is sometimes described as a rumāl (head covering or kerchief), translated as "yellow scarf"; "yellow", in this case, may refer to a natural cream or khaki colour rather than bright yellow.

The Thug preference for strangulation might have originated in a quirk of the law under the Mughal Empire, which ruled most of India from the 1500s. For a murderer to be sentenced to death, he or she must have shed the blood of their victim. Those who murdered but did not shed blood might face imprisonment, hard labor and paying a penalty -- but they would not risk execution.

A poison called datura, derived from a plant in the Nightshade family, was sometimes used by Thugs to induce drowsiness or stupefaction, making strangulation easier.

Death toll

Estimates of the total number of victims vary widely, since no reliable source confirms the length of the Thugs' existence. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the Thuggee cult was responsible for approximately two million deaths; British historian Mike Dash said that they killed a total of 50,000 people over an estimated 150 years. Political scientist David C. Rapoport estimated that 500,000 people were killed by the Thugs. According to other estimates, they murdered one million people.

British suppression

See also: Thuggee and Dacoity Suppression Acts, 1836–1848

William Henry Sleeman, superintendent of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department

The Thugs were suppressed by the British rulers of India during the 1830s. Earlier, both native rulers and British occupiers had been aware of the Thugs and their practices. But local rulers often tolerated Thugs in exchange for bribes and agreements to accost only those traveling through given regions while not slaying permanent residents. A few British leaders had been aware of robber gangs who murdered by strangulation from about 1810, but they were unaware of the vast scope of the problem. Thuggee were occasionally identified and punished, most commonly when captured with distinctive jewelry or other valuables they could not account for, but they were rarely pursued or sought out by authorities.

The initiative to shatter the Thugs was due largely to the efforts of civil servant William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856), who had joined the English military in 1809 and was a member of the civil service by 1820. Thuggee activity in the late 1700s and early 1800s became particularly brazen, due to multiple factors. Between the breakdown of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700s and the subsequent expansion of British forces inland from the coastal ports, there was a power vacuum which allowed the Thugs to be more open and aggressive in their crimes. The introduction of the highly profitable opium industry led to greater wealth, and thus to more targets for the Thugs. An influx of younger Thugs were less willing to follow the traditional rules laid down by elders, thereby attracting more attention. Sepoys, the Indians hired as soldiers by the British, were also a common target for Thugs, as they were paid in large amounts of cash and often traveled long distances alone. To reduce the risk to Sepoys, the British began issuing salary in the form of bank cheques.

British authorities had occasionally captured and prosecuted Thugs, circulating information about these cases in newsletters or the journal Asiatick Reseaches of The Asiatic Society. However, Sleeman seems to have been the first to realize that information obtained from one group of stranglers might be used to track and identify other thugs in a different district. His first major breakthrough was the capture of "Feringhea" (also known as Syeed Amir Ali), who was persuaded to turn King's evidence. (Feringhea's story was the basis of the successful the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug). Feringhea brought Sleeman to a mass grave with a hundred bodies, told him the circumstances of the murders and named the Thugs who had committed them.

After initial investigations confirmed what Feringhea had said, Sleeman began an extensive campaign using profiling and intelligence. The government of India established the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in 1835, with Sleeman its first superintendent. (Dacoity was a type of organized banditry, distinguished from Thugs most notably by its open practice and due to the fact that murder was not an intrinsic element of their modus operandi.) Sleeman developed elaborate intelligence techniques that pre-dated similar methods in Europe and the USA by decades. He maintained vast, cross-referenced files on Thugs, including their aliases, associates, hometowns, travel routes, methods and locations of concealing bodies, and other important information. Sleeman's tactics were copied throughout British India, resulting in thousands of men being imprisoned, executed or expelled.

The campaign relied heavily on captured Thugs who became informants. These informants were offered protection on the condition that they told everything that they knew. According to historian Mike Dash, who carefully examined the relevant documents in the UK archives, suspects were subject to bench trials before English judges. Though the trials were lacking by later standards (e.g., suspects were not allowed legal representation), they were conducted with care to protocols of the time. While most suspects were convicted, Dash notes that the courts genuinely seemed interested in finding the truth and rejected a minority of allegations due to mistaken identity or insufficient evidence. Even by later standards, Dash argues, the evidence of guilt for many Thugs was often overwhelming.

By the 1870s the Thug cult was essentially extinct, but the history of Thuggee led to the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871. Although the CTA was repealed at Indian independence, tribes considered criminal still exist in India. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department remained in existence until 1904, when it was replaced by the Central Criminal Intelligence Department (CID).

Aftermath

The Thugs spurred passage of the Criminal Tribes Act. In Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote about an 1839 government report by William Henry Sleeman:

There is one very striking thing which I wish to call attention to. You have surmised from the listed callings followed by the victims of the Thugs that nobody could travel the Indian roads unprotected and live to get through; that the Thugs respected no quality, no vocation, no religion, nobody; that they killed every unarmed man that came in their way. That is wholly true — with one reservation. In all the long file of Thug confessions an English traveler is mentioned but once—and this is what the Thug says of the circumstance:

"He was on his way from Mhow to Bombay. We studiously avoided him. He proceeded next morning with a number of travellers who had sought his protection, and they took the road to Baroda."

We do not know who he was; he flits across the page of this rusty old book and disappears in the obscurity beyond; but he is an impressive figure, moving through that valley of death serene and unafraid, clothed in the might of the English name.

We have now followed the big official book through, and we understand what Thuggee was, what a bloody terror it was, what a desolating scourge it was. In 1830 the English found this cancerous organisation embedded in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates —big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom. If ever there was an unpromising task, if ever there was a hopeless task in the world, surely it was offered here—the task of conquering Thuggee. But that little handful of English officials in India set their sturdy and confident grip upon it, and ripped it out, root and branch! How modest do Captain Vallancey's words sound now, when we read them again, knowing what we know:

"The day that sees this far-spread evil completely eradicated from India, and known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalise British rule in the East."

It would be hard to word a claim more modestly than that for this most noble work.

— Chapter xlvi, conclusion

Thug view

The Thugs Worshipping Kalee, around 1850

Although Thugs trace their origin to the battle of Kali against Raktabija, their foundation myth departs from Brahminical versions of the Puranas. Thugs considered themselves children of Kali (a Hindu goddess), created from her sweat. However, many of the Thugs who were captured and convicted by the British were Muslims, perhaps up to a third.

File:664026168 1456923048 725x725.jpg

Thug Behram, who was responsible for 931 deaths.

According to colonial sources, Thugs believed they had a positive role in saving human lives. Without the Thugs' sacred service, Kali might destroy all mankind:

• "It is God who kills, but Bhowanee has [a] name for it."
• "God is all in all, for good and evil."
• "God has appointed blood for [Bhowanee's] food, saying 'khoon tum khao': feed thou upon blood. In my opinion it is very bad, but what can she do, being ordered to subsist upon blood!"
• "Bhowanee is happy and more so in proportion to the blood that is shed."

According to historian Mike Dash, the Thugs had no religious motive to kill. When religious elements were present among Thugs their beliefs, in principle, were little different from many others on the Indian subcontinent who attributed their success or failure to supernatural powers: "Indeed all of the Thugs's legends concerning the goddess [Kali] featured exactly the cautionary notes typical of folklore."

21st-century views

Since the 1970s and 1980s, some scholars have questioned the concept of Thugee. For example, Martine van Woerkens of École Pratique des Hautes Études has suggested that evidence for a Thug cult in the 19th century was partly the product of "colonial imaginings", arising from British fear of the little-known interior of India, as well as limited understanding of the religious and social practices of its inhabitants. Mike Dash, however, has pulled the debate the other way, as in Krishna Dutta's review of his book Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult:

"In recent years, the revisionist view that Thuggee was a British invention, a means to tighten their hold in the country, has been given credence in India, France and the US, but this well-researched book objectively questions that assertion."

In his book, Dash agrees the revisionist perspective raises valid points, noting that colonial British observers and early scholarship into the Thug movement brought their own preconceptions and misunderstandings that led to wide acceptance of inaccuracies. For example, Dash notes that colonialists believed the motivation for Thug murder was primarily religious devotion to Kali -- but a closer look at the data reveals that monetary gain was the primary motivation for Thuggee and men routinely became Thugs due to extreme poverty. According to Dash, the Thugs were highly superstitious; although they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, their faith was little different from that of contemporary non-Thugs. However, he notes that the Thugs had group-specific superstitions and rituals. Another common error among early British observers was the belief that roaming Thug groups were tightly-knit fraternities or fixed groupings who traveled and murdered together in for many years. In reality, Thug groupings were typically more informal and often ad-hoc. They frequently came together for short periods periods of time or seasonally (recognizing each other by coded verbal cues or subtle details of dress), then parted ways after committing their crimes.

At the same time, Dash rejects extreme scepticism that argues against the existence of Thugs as a secret network of groups with a modus operandi different from highwaymen. He contends that the weight of evidence proves beyond doubt that Thugs existed more or less as commonly imagined. No where else in recorded history, he maintains, was their another group with the same basic pattern of befriending and inveigling travelers to allay suspicion, and then strangling victims as a prelude to theft, followed by concealment of their corpses. He cites evidence such as a consistency of reports from both native and colonial sources across many decades, and excavated corpses in graves whose locations were revealed to Sleeman's team by Thug informants. Dash examines Sleeman's extensive, thorough documentation, which he contends contains much reliable and valuable information even after adjusting for biases and other limitations.

English language

The Thugs were popularised by books such as Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug, which introduced the word "thug" to the English language. Ameer Ali, the protagonist of Confessions of a Thug, was said to be based on Syeed Amir Ali. A Bollywood film is being made based on the novel. It is titled Thugs of Hindostan and stars Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Katrina Kaif and Fatima Sana Shaikh in lead roles and is being directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya. It is being produced by Aditya Chopra under the Yash Raj Films production banner. Filming began in Malta in June 2017 and the film is scheduled to release during Diwali 2018.

Indian pronunciation of "Thuggee" and "Thug" is closer to "Tug-gee" and "Tug", than the English pronunciations.

In popular culture

• The 1931 crime novel The Case of the Frightened Lady by Edgar Wallace makes an indirect reference to the Thuggee murders by featuring "Indian scarves" used as murder weapons, as do its 1940 and 1963 West German film adaptations.
• The 1939 film Gunga Din features British soldiers' conflict with a resurgent sect of Thuggee cultists.
• Sympathy For The Devil (1968), a song by The Rolling Stones, features the lyrics: "And I laid traps for the troubadors / Who get killed before they reach Bombay" possibly referencing the murder of Tibetan musicians by Thugee cultists.
• The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), a film centering about a lone British officer investigating and uncovering the doings of the Thuggee cult.
• Sunghursh (1968), an Indian Bollywood film, has a fictionalized account of a thug trying not to join his family business of Thuggee
• The Deceivers (1988) is an adventure film based on the 1952 John Masters novel of the same name regarding the murderous Thugs of India. Pierce Brosnan plays William Savage, a tax-collector of a British-Indian company in 1825 who goes under cover to investigate a Thuggee sect.
• Sikh Guru Nanak's Janamsakhis describe an encounter with a Thug Sheikh Sajjan
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom showcases the Thuggee cult with fictionalized religious ritual and the primary antagonist, Mola Ram, being a Thuggee High Priest of Kali.
• The fictional DC Comics villain Ravan, a member of the Suicide Squad, is a modern-day member of the Thugee cult.
• The Black Company, a dark fantasy series by Glen Cook, features a cult called the Deceivers, largely based on the Thugee, who play a major role in the later novels.
• Ameer Ali thug na peela rumal ni gaanth, a novel in 3 parts by the famous Gujarati thriller writer Harkisan Mehta, is a fictionalized account of the thug Amir Ali, with references to the infamous Pindari chief Chitu Pindari.
• Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru (2017; Tamil) an honest police officer finds himself transferred again and again due to his sincerity. After his latest transfer, he comes across a file that involves a gang of ruthless thieves who loot and kill along the highway.
• Thugs of Hindostan
• A Tamil movie Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru (2017), was also made in reference to this group. A group of 13 people whose roots go back to these thugee tribes camouflaged themselves as a logistics and goods delivery vendors and plundered random cities and brutally murdered families, women and children included. Tamil Nadu police took this matter seriously when a member of legislative assembly was victimized. It took them over 18 months a country wide spread operation with limited resources to pin down this cult group.

See also

• Dacoity

Bibliography

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Thuggee". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Dash, Mike Thug: the true story of Indias murderous cult ISBN 1-86207-604-9, 2005
• Dutta, Krishna (2005) The sacred slaughterers. Book review of Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. In The Independent (Published: 8 July 2005) text
• Guidolin, Monica "Gli strangolatori di Kali. Il culto thag tra immaginario e realtà storica", Aurelia Edizioni, 2012, ISBN 978-88-89763-50-6.
• Paton, James 'Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee', British Library Add. Mss. 41300
• Woerkens, Martine van The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002),

External links

• Acting in the "Theatre of Anarchy": 'The Anti-Thug Campaign' and Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early-Nineteenth Century India by Tom Lloyd (2006) in PDF file format
• Parama Roy: Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee. In: idem, Indian Traffic. Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. University of California Press 1998. (in html format)
• Confessions of India's real-life Thugs