The Thugs strangled hundreds, thousands and perhaps even millions of Indians during their reign of terror. Many myths surround them - here are the main ones.
The Thugs have a long and very colourful history. Worshippers of Kali, one of the dark goddesses of India, their religious rituals included ritual murder of travellers and other unwary victims. Silently, so the stories would have it, the Thugs would slip behind the potential victim and throw a handkerchief weighted by a rumal – a metal object like a ring – around the neck of the victim before swiftly pulling it tight and completing the execution. The corpse would be tucked away in a rectangular grave swiftly dug with a special short-handled pickaxe that all Thugs carried. It is a curious thing that the same kind of pickaxe was issues to the soldiers fighting in World War One and they were used to dig the inordinately lengthy trench systems that criss-crossed northern France and Belgium.
The numbers of people said to be killed by the Thugs were enormous. Individuals brought to trial by the authorities of the British Raj were accused of killing many hundreds of people and stealing their valuables. Some authors have calculated that, given the number of people involved in the cult of Thuggee and the length of their individual careers, that the Thugs murdered more than one million individuals and perhaps many more than that. No wonder it was considered so dangerous to travel anywhere in India, given the scale and nature of this threat.
The scourge of the Thugs was one Major General William Henry Sleeman. This man, who set out to the east to earn his fortune in the service of the British Empire, turned out to be the first Briton to uncover the network of adherents to Kali, as well as the nature of her worship and the ways her followers conducted their nefarious crimes. His undercover career enabled him to penetrate the mysterious ranks of Thugs and equipped him with the knowledge to combat the cult. And combat the Thugs Sleeman certainly did. Over the next few years, he ordered hundreds of them to be hanged or else exiled for life sentences to the hated prison camps on the Andaman Islands. Thousands of murders were confessed to and many murderers slung over the branches of a tree. Many Thugs placed the noose around their own necks and leapt to their deaths unbidden to avoid the touch of the hangman, who was believed to be a part of a horrible caste of people it would have been a terrible sin to touch. And if a few innocent people were also included in the dragnet then, well, making an omelet requires breaking a few eggs.
The next article looks beyond the myth of the Thugs and considers the truth.
