Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult
by Mike Dash
320pp, Granta, £20
There is a menace in society that threatens thousands upon thousands of lives. This menace is a religious cult whose members employ methods of violence never before faced by the authorities. They are masters of disguise, brilliant liars and utterly ruthless. Normal laws cannot deal with this menace. Special forces with special powers are required.
It's not hard to see why the subject of Thuggee is a timely preoccupation of historians such as Mike Dash. The Indian gangs whose name became a byword for boorish yobbery created a sensation in the early 19th century, when agents of the East India Company discovered their grisly custom of strangling and robbing travellers. Tales of subtle and macabre brutality reached back to England and thrilled, among others, the young Queen Victoria.
As Dash points out, the thugs were said to be such consummate murderers that they could strangle a man on horseback, and coordinate the despatch of large groups of people. The best could charm their way into the confidence of even the most wary, usually falling into company on the road as if by accident. Their intended victims, relieved to have some extra men around for protection, often made the fatal suggestion that they accompany each other further. Then at some remote camping spot, the thugs would slip into position, and at a prearranged signal, strangle the entire party. Corpses were stripped to avoid identification, then sliced open and buried. In theory some people were spared: women, the disabled and various castes; in practice the thugs were unsparing in their cruelty.
With victims far from home and thug gangs protected by corrupt petty rajahs and landowners, few disappearances were ever investigated. When the East India Company finally recognised the problem, a campaign of wonderful efficiency was orchestrated by one of the Raj's heroes, William Sleeman. As more evidence was gathered, British officers involved in the hunt became convinced they were dealing with a hereditary cult dedicated to the goddess Kali. Even the smallest child of such a horrible sect was suspect. If they had not offended, then they surely would: it was in the blood.
Sleeman's triumph was the complete eradication of the gangs, his methods foreshadowing much of modern policework, with its need for centralised planning and its careful collation of information. Between the years 1830 and 1850 thuggee was pretty much wiped out. Travellers breathed more easily. Thuggee was finished.
That all appears pretty straightforward and Dash picks his way through this tale with a steady and determined manner. His ability to ferret out obscure documents matches Sleeman's ability to extract confessions. He also - and this is no mean feat - organises those facts into a comprehensive and readable story.
But there is a bigger tale here. Some post-colonial scholars have raised serious doubts. Was thuggee actually a religious cult? Could they really have killed so many (2m in one estimate)? Indeed, were they ever a separate gang of criminals at all (thug being, then and now, the common word in India for con-man)? Perhaps the campaign was no more than a witch-hunt drummed up by hysterical and racist British. And if so, among the 504 who were hanged, largely on the testimony of other criminals, how many were innocent victims? There may be mile after mile of files of evidence on the shelves, say the revisionists, but it's all written down by the victors. At the other extreme are those who want their Raj rosy, as perfect as a Persian miniature, in all of its two dimensions. The thugs were monstrous devotees of an evil cult; Sleeman exterminated them. Jolly good chap.
In the choppy waters between these rocks, Dash keeps a steady hand on the tiller. He establishes that murder by strangling was undeniably a feature of India's roads and deftly tells the story of how it came to British attention. He points out that although thuggee covered a multitude of sinners, it may also have hidden a hard core of killers who passed knowledge from father to son.
As for the campaign, he keeps a good pace as Sleeman's deputies race around the country picking up suspects, but he admits the scope for abuses. British and Indian voices at the time complained that thugs who had turned stool-pigeon were taking the opportunity to settle scores. Sleeman's superiors ignored them, and as the campaign progressed, a new and harsher tone emerged. Dash is undoubtedly correct in saying Sleeman's insistence that he was dealing with "a perverted cult" helped drive through laws that made this second phase "less creditable".
What exactly created this attitude is a good question and Dash probes, rather gently, into the milieu of British India. He points out the increasing cultural isolation within India of the British, the emerging fashion for denigrating all things Hindu and exaggerating its faults. I would have liked more on the intellectual, religious and political forces that had shaped the officers running this terrifyingly efficient man-hunt. After all, most had grown up in an England where habeas corpus was suspended, public meetings illegal and the faintest whiff of a secret brotherhood sufficient to arouse draconian reactions. Not only that but the home country was gripped by religious revivalism and bouts of millenarian fervour. The East India Company was forced, in 1814, to accept a bishop for India and lost its veto on missionaries.
The lethal combination of authoritarian instincts, religious intolerance and fear gradually overcame the thug-hunters. Horrified by the exhumations of thug victims, they turned to their own God - and a vengeful, angry one he proved to be. "Mercy to such wretches would be the extreme of cruelty to mankind," said Francis Curwen Smith, Sleeman's immediate superior.
Dash does allow a little external influence into the equation with the issue of opium. India had known of it for centuries, but it was the East India Company and British merchants who promoted and profited from running opium to China, then tea back to London. Inadvertently they also encouraged and sustained the thug gangs: growing the crops in central India entailed advancing large sums of money to landowners, money that was carried by treasure-bearers - ideal thug victims.
This book ends with the disappearance of strangling from India's roads. Yet the influence of thuggee and the campaign against it did not end. Sleeman's idea of a race of people inherently disposed to murder - hereditary killers - would grow well in the soggy pseudo-science of social Darwinism in the 1860s and onwards, resulting in the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), a law that allowed the incarceration of entire groups of innocent people.
Thug is a reliable and meticulous piece of work, but I wanted to see those methods given broader application, drawing out the complexities, taking a few risks. Nevertheless Dash's narrow focus does have the benefit of emphasising the historical importance of Sleeman's methods and reminding us how dreadful the murders were. Given that vast quantity of evidence on India Office shelves - sufficient to squeeze the life out of most people - his achievement in distilling a balanced and readable story is an impressive one.
• Kevin Rushby's Hunting Pirate Heaven is published by Constable and Robinson
