Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (7 page)

‘My name,’ the boy confessed, ‘is Gholam Hossyn. And I am a Thug.’

The word ‘thug’
*
is an ancient one. It first appears in India’s sacred Sanskrit tongue – in which
sthaga
means to cover or conceal – and crops up in a
variety
of guises in several other languages, including Hindi and Hindustani, Gujerati and Marathi. Its literal meaning is almost always ‘robber’ or ‘cheat’, but as early as the twelfth century the word was being used as a synonym for ‘rogue’, ‘imposter’ and ‘deceiver’ too, and over the next several hundred years it was employed to describe a wide variety of swindlers. A pair of
counterfeiters
were condemned as ‘thugs’ in the first years of the seventeenth century, while in the western province of Gujerat, ‘alchemists deservedly came to be classed with them’. Virtually all the ‘thugs’ encountered in Indian history and literature before the year 1800 turn out to have been members of this class of knaves and thieves.

When Gholam Hossyn identified himself as a thug, however, he had in mind a very different meaning. His Thugs were not so much tricksters and rogues as robbers and murderers: men whose methods were quite distinct from those of dacoits, thieves and other common criminals and formed, indeed, a modus operandi of such startling and original brutality that it had had no exact parallels elsewhere in the world. The defining characteristics of
these Thugs were that they wandered the roads of India, seeking likely
victims
among the travellers whom they met along the way; that they wormed their way into the confidence of these potential victims, stealing only from those whom they had befriended; and that they invariably killed their victims before they robbed them. It is not hard to see how a word used for centuries to describe minor swindlers came to be applied to these far more dangerous criminals; Hossyn’s Thugs were ‘cheats’ and ‘deceivers’ in that they
inveigled
their way into the company of travellers, ‘imposters’ because they never openly declared themselves in the manner of dacoits, and ‘robbers’ and ‘rogues’ since they made their living from violence and theft. But they were also ruthless and cold-blooded killers, a meaning that was not reflected in the definition of the word until it found its way into the English language as a direct consequence of the Company’s encounter with the murderers of Hindustan.

The young Thug did not volunteer his information willingly. Although he was taken to Etawah almost immediately, his interrogation continued for several days, Perry probing for information, his prisoner deflecting his questions or varying the answers that he gave, gradually admitting to more and more as the stunned magistrate pressed him on each point time and again. On the first occasion that the shackled prisoner was dragged into the courtroom, Gholam Hossyn confessed to nothing more than ‘standing two fields off’ while his companions had robbed and killed a pair of travellers. On the second, he admitted taking an active part in those same killings. Under further examination, though, the number of his victims rose, to four at first and then 14, until by the end of the third day of relentless questioning, the young Thug had confessed to his involvement in nearly 60 killings. By the time Perry had taken Hossyn through his evidence for a fourth time, the total of his victims stood at 95, all murdered in a mere eight years of robbery. It was a confession so horrific as to be without precedent.

‘These examinations,’ the magistrate concluded,

The thing that puzzled Perry most of all at first was the sheer mystery that surrounded the Thugs. ‘It is certainly a matter of astonishment that we should have held the administration of justice for so many years, without any information of this detestable association,’ he wrote. But as he continued his interrogations, gradually assembling the details of the Thug gangs’ methods and techniques, Perry came to understand the reasons for this silence. His prisoners were no ordinary murderers. They were, in fact, the strangest and most remarkable criminals of the day.

 

Day by day, and gradually, Perry pieced together the story of the Thugs. Some of the evidence he took from Hossyn, some from men arrested with him, who likewise yielded under close questioning. All of it he set down in court records, preserving it for ever.

Thugs worked the lands on both sides of the Jumna, from Lucknow to Jypore. There were, Perry’s informants thought, about 1,500 of them living north of the river, and more to the south, ranging as far east as Benares – far more, certainly, than the magistrate had ever imagined existed. They lived under the protection of the zamindars of their home villages and worked in small groups, leaving their homes ‘whenever they have nothing left to live on’. The more experienced members of the gangs killed by ‘strangling with any part of their clothes’. Less expert Thugs sometimes poisoned their
victims
with
datura
– the finely ground seeds of the thorn apple, a deadly relative of belladonna, ‘which deprives the object of his senses, when they plunder him’.

Several of Hossyn’s fellow Thugs, arrested along with the boy, eventually confessed to committing numerous murders over lengthy criminal careers. One, a 60-year-old man named Dullal, had strangled 15 or 16 victims and taken a considerable quantity of loot: ‘Much have I plundered and expended, beyond all account.’ A second Thug claimed to have witnessed 50 murders in
only three years. A third had killed 45 men in eight years, strangling all of his victims with his bare hands.

These men’s gang had been led by a man named Ujba, who lived a few miles outside Etawah and supplemented his income as an armourer with the proceeds of Thug expeditions into the Doab. Gholam Hossyn had joined this group after spending a short period as an agricultural labourer, perhaps because he found the prospect of life on the roads preferable to that endured by a peasant farmer. His most recent expedition, at the beginning of the cold season of 1809–10, had opened successfully; Ujba and his 15 men lured their first victim to a
nullah
– a dried-up riverbed – a short
distance
from the road,

The dead man was carrying 100 Benares rupees, two turbans and some other clothes, which Ujba’s men appropriated. The gang then left the area, going on by forced marches to evade any possible pursuit, until they met two Afghans, whom they befriended and persuaded to accompany them on the road. Having rested for the night, the gang and their intended victims arose very early the next morning, breaking camp four hours before dawn at a time when they could be sure there would be few if any other travellers on the road.
*
The little party walked a further six miles, halting for a rest at a spot well away from the nearest settlement. The Afghans were then cut down with swords. The first was run through while he was relieving himself; his friend was hacked to the ground as he attempted to flee, then finished off with repeated stabs to his back and neck. On this occasion, however, the Thugs were almost immediately betrayed to the local police – Hossyn did not explain how this occurred –
and brought back to Shekoabad. So ended the boy’s short and
unproductive
criminal career.

Perry’s main concern, having taken down the Thug’s initial deposition, was to discover all he could of the methods of the gangs. Hossyn reluctantly obliged, describing in awful detail the manner in which the members of his gang had strangled their victims with cloth strips. Even that was not enough for Perry, who now asked his prisoner to demonstrate exactly how the
strangling
cloths were put to use. Hossyn called for an example and a dramatic scene unfolded. ‘The deponent,’ the court clerk recorded,

Why, the horrified Perry next asked, did Hossyn and his confederates stab their victims after strangling them? ‘Because,’ the boy replied,

Perry was disgusted by Hossyn’s detailed descriptions of the ruthless methods of the Thugs. But the magistrate was quite certain that their ‘atrocious crimes’ were not committed out of any sort of blood lust. On the contrary, the gangs’ entire modus operandi had been cleverly calculated to maximize their prospects of plunder while minimizing any chance of being caught.

To begin with, the Thugs’ technique of befriending strangers on the road disarmed their intended victims, making it a simple matter to take them by surprise. It also allowed skilled murderers to gauge the travellers’ likely wealth. Impoverished peasants could thus be discarded in favour of richer
merchants, or sepoys travelling home on leave and carrying with them their arrears of pay. Next, Thugs never tackled a party of travellers unless they greatly outnumbered them. This made the killing itself a quick and relatively simple process, and ensured that any intended victims who attempted to escape could be pursued and despatched before they could summon help.

Obtaining evidence against such men was, Perry recognized, almost impossible. Many Thugs, although by no means all, never killed close to home, which made tracing them an unenviable task. ‘In this part of the country,’ a strangler named Kalee Khan explained, ‘we have never
murdered
, for it is the custom amongst us never to commit a murder within a distance of 100
coss
[200 miles] round our habitations.’ Men from the Jumna ranged as far south as Nagpore and even into the Deccan on occasion, where – having disposed of one traveller – they would move quickly on, often into a neighbouring territory with a different ruler, before murdering again. This, in the fragmented India of the early nineteenth century, meant that pursuit was generally futile and prevented such authorities as existed from realizing just how many victims were being killed. By restricting
themselves
to despatching travellers who were often hundreds of miles from their own homes, and unlikely to be missed for weeks or even months, the gangs minimized the risk that a hue and cry would be raised while they were in the vicinity; many, in addition, chose to operate in the Native States rather than the Company’s territories, not least because it was often possible to bribe a local rajah or his men to permit Thug operations or to release
captured
stranglers from jail. Finally and most importantly – as Perry reluctantly conceded – the fact that the gangs invariably murdered every member of every party they inveigled meant that no witnesses survived to testify against them. The ‘precaution of the Perpetrators of this crime’, the Etawahan magistrate remarked, ‘by destroying all living testimony to the fact precluded the possibility of any complaints being preferred … and
consequently
in no one of the cases which has been reported to the office has any individual been directly implicated’. Were it not for the occasional confessions, made by captured criminals such as Gholam Hossyn, there would have been no evidence that specific Thugs were responsible for particular murders. ‘Had this inhuman offender chosen to have asserted his innocence,’ Perry wrote of one captured strangler who had confessed to killing
50 travellers, ‘what evidence either direct or circumstantial could have been brought against him?’