Thuggee
Thuggee was a crime phenomenon in the Indian subcontinent that saw gangs of thugs traverse the region murdering and robbing travellers, often by strangling.
The thuggee phenomenon came to prominence in the early 19th century, in the course of which the British colonial authorities came to view the thuggee gangs collectively as a religious fanatic fraternity purported to have ancient origins. Colonial administrator William Henry Sleeman led a policing campaign against thuggee in the 1830s that saw the Thuggee Department formally established in 1835 and legal innovations that facilitated convictions. Thuggee was portrayed as 'hereditary criminality' and provided a precedent for the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act.
Contemporary historians are generally sceptical of the colonial-era portrayal of thuggee, though they offer varying hypotheses as to the actual nature of the phenomenon. Historians' reinterpretations differ on the significance of religion to thuggee and the extent to which there was an archetypal thug. Some scholars reject the historicity of the colonial sources and therein hold the thuggee phenomenon to be entirely imagined by or an invention of the colonial regime.
Following the publication of the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, thuggee became a Victorian sensation. Notable depictions in modern popular fiction include the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Etymology
translates to 'swindler' or 'deceiver' and is derived from the Sanskrit word स्थग meaning 'to cover' or 'to conceal'. The earliest generally accepted usage of the word dates to 1350 and the Janamsakhis evidence that 'thag' came to be used more or less interchangeably with 'robber' in precolonial India. The English word thug is from the same roots. The word literally meaning 'strangler' was used interchangeably with 'thug' during the 19th century and tended to be the term used in the Madras Presidency. refers to the practise of thugs and the crime itself.History
During his travels across India in the 7th century, the Chinese monk Hsüen Tsang was attacked by pirates on the Ganges and narrowly escaped being sacrificed to Durga. On another occasion and while he was journeying to Pataliputra, Hsüen Tsang was told while passing a temple that no foreigner who entered it ever came out again. These incidents have been interpreted as early accounts of thuggee. Kim A. Wagner asserts the view that, by this rationale, every account of banditry and human sacrifice in ancient India could be linked to the thugs of the 19th century. According to a 14th century chronicle by Ziauddin Barani, Sultan of Delhi Jalal-ud-Din Khalji deported 1,000 arrested 'thags' from Delhi to Bengal sometime between 1290 and 1296, however the chronicle makes no mention of what they were arrested for. The 15th–16th century poet Surdas wrote illustratively of a 'thag' luring a pilgrim with sweets and wine and then murdering and robbing them.Following his travels across India in 1666–1667, Jean de Thévenot wrote in 1684 of the "cunningest robbers in the world" operating in the Delhi area that strangled their victims with a running noose and used attractive women to lure travellers. In 1672, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a specifying the punishment to be meted out to stranglers, including those that were "habituated to the work" or were notorious for it among the local population. John Fryer wrote of his experience in 1675 witnessing the execution of fifteen members of a bandit gang near Surat that had strangled and robbed passing travellers using a cotton bowstring. In 1785, James Forbes recounted how an Indian acquaintance had witnessed the arrest of several men that belonged to a tribe he referred to as phanseegars, describing how they would deceive and strangle travellers. A November 1797 tax list prepared for Maharaja Daulat Rao Sindhia covering 20 villages across the of Parihara and Sursae lists 318 houses as belonging to thugs, who were subjected to a soldier tax.
Colonial era
Etawah crisis (1809–1811)
The British colonial authorities first encountered what they would come to refer to as thuggee in Southern India in 1807 and in Northern India in 1809. In April 1809, ten bodies were discovered in a well in the Etawah district, with the Magistrate of Etawah James Law tasked with investigating the killings. Amid the failure of Law's inquiries and the discovery of four strangled native soldiers in a jungle within his jurisdiction in July, the two magistrates of the neighbouring Aligarh and Farrukhabad districts were assigned to the matter. In November, Law's assistant made the first officially recorded reference to 'Thugs', describing them as "a set of people... who have from time immemorial carried on their abominable and lamentable practices" in secret.Following the discovery of two strangled travellers in December and the initiation of a more thorough investigation, Law wrote: "It is presumed that the murdered persons were travellers and fell victims to that detestable race of monsters called T,ugs... The T,ugs have infested the whole of the Doab, and this district in particular, from time immemorial, and they are so strongly leagued together, that scarcely an instance has ever been known of their having betrayed each others secrets." More bodies were discovered throughout December and early 1810, in the midst of which Law was removed from his post, and when questioned by an investigation in February, local reported that the perpetrators were "Thugs". The findings reported by the colonial authorities in the north were nearly identical to those reported in the south in 1807 despite there having been no formal exchange between the Madras and Bengal presidencies.
Law's replacement Thomas Perry offered a large reward of Rs 1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators. After eight suspected thugs were arrested in March 1810, a young thug who had been adopted by the gang after they had murdered his father and uncle agreed to testify at trial in return for a pardon and claimed that there were some 1,500 thugs based in Etawah. At the trial in November he demonstrated for the court how the gang would strangle their victims with strips of cloth and testified to having been on five expeditions with the thugs, witnessing 95 murders. However, he repeatedly changed his testimony regarding the extent of his own involvement and ultimately had his evidence rejected for repeated perjury, whereafter Perry was forced to release the suspects.
1810s and 1820s
Regulation VI of 1810 first referred to Thugs as a distinct criminal category, alongside Dacoits, Cozauks, and Buddecks. Though many individuals were convicted and sentenced to death by the circuit courts in the early attempts to combat thuggee, all the cases were ultimately dismissed by the superior courts owing to strict evidentiary requirements. In October 1812, Nathaniel John Halhed was tasked with leading an expedition to introduce British law and order and to set up a in Sindouse, where thugs were retained by Rajput as local mercenaries. The operation caused the thugs to disperse into neighbouring Maratha territory, though led to the death of a British officer for which the village of Murnae was razed the following month. Regulation VIII of 1818 effectively allowed notorious Dacoits to be held indefinitely, with Regulation III of 1819 extending its provisions to also apply to Thugs. In the 1820s the colonial authorities began to adopt a new strategy of handing captured thugs over to local rulers and chiefs to circumvent the British colonial legal system and convict them by proxy.The first Thugs were convicted in Sagar in 1826, whereby two were sentenced to be hanged and a further 29 sentenced to transportation for life. This was possible due to Sagar and Narbada being established in 1818 as 'Non-Regulation Territories', meaning that the Agent at Sagar could operate outside the usual Company regulations with virtually unlimited powers. In 1829 in the Bombay Presidency, two Thugs were sentenced to hanging, six to transportation, and one to life imprisonment for the murder of six men carrying Rs 100,000 of valuables in February. Later that year, the Agent at Mahidpur Captain William Borthwick arrested 74 Thugs for the murder of five travellers. Up until this point, efforts to combat thuggee were led by local authorities and the case marked the first time the central government intervened to ensure that the Thugs were convicted and to develop a judicial argument that saw Thugs treated in the same vein as pirates. Forty of the Thugs were hanged, 20 sentenced to transportation for life, and a further 12 received limited sentences.
Centralised campaign (1830–1839)
Captain William Henry Sleeman, as assistant to the Agent at Jabalpur, began assigning approvers that he had in custody to escort detachments of troops along exposed routes and his methods led to the arrests of 24 thugs in late 1829. Sleeman and Borthwick's arrests led to an extensive exchange of information between officials and the sharing of approvers, resulting in a spate of arrests over the course of 1830. In October, Sleeman contributed an anonymous letter to the Calcutta Literary Gazette entitled Thugs that recounted the execution of 11 Thugs and asserted that thugs were fanatical worshippers of the, including Kali. The letter also asserted that the thugs were headquartered at the Vindhyachal Temple in Mirzapur where their expeditions were planned by the temple priests. He further provided details on the alleged religious nature of thuggee and demanded that the government "put an end in some way or other to this dreadful system of murder, by which thousands of human beings are now annually sacrificed upon every great road throughout India".The letter made an impression on the Government, with the Chief Secretary to the Governor-General of India George Swinton writing the following day that the destruction of "this Tribe would... be a blessing conferred on the people of India" comparable to the abolition of sati. Swinton was the prime instigator within the Government of efforts to combat thuggee and, while the author of the letter remained anonymous, appointed Sleeman Agent at Sagar later that month. Agent of the Sagar and Narbada Territories Francis Curwen Smith submitted a plan in November that he had written with Sleeman and which called for an officer to be appointed Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs, who would send Thugs to be tried in the Sagar and Narbada Territories. The report marked the first portrayal of thuggee as an irredeemable identity, based on the Thug's purported personality and thuggee gangs often involving sons of members. Governor of Bengal Lord William Bentinck declined to establish a specific office for thuggee, though provided Sleeman with 50 to pursue and apprehend the gangs.
Anti-thuggee operations continued under the direction of Smith and Sleeman whereby approvers were sent out with detachments of troops to disinter bodies and point out their former associates, with the campaign's supply of approvers growing as more Thugs were caught. In November 1830, Sleeman captured thuggee leader Feringheea after holding captive his relatives, whereafter he became Sleeman's most valuable approver. In 1832 and 1833 respectively, officials were despatched to the Doab and Rajputana to oversee anti-thuggee operations there. Thugs were convicted based on circumstantial evidence and approver testimony and, across 1832 and 1833, 145 Thugs were hanged, 323 sentenced to deportation, and 41 given life in prison by the Sagar and Narbada courts. Sleeman successfully played different thuggee factions off of one another to secure approver testimony, exploiting the varying loyalties between different families and castes within the gangs, for example between Hindu and Muslim thugs.
In 1834, Smith began to call for a central agency for the suppression of thuggee that would station officials in more territories. Backed by an official report, the Government established the Thuggee Department in January 1835 and appointed Sleeman 'General Superintendent of the operations for the suppression of Thuggee' in March. In 1836, river-thugs operating on the Ganges were discovered in Bihar, Orissa, and Bengal, whose methods of throwing their victims overboard meant that there was very little circumstantial evidence with which to convict them. Sleeman used this to argue that new regulation was required to enable convictions and the groundbreaking Act XXX of 1836 was passed, which made simply belonging to a thuggee gang punishable by life imprisonment with hard labour. The term 'Thug' was not defined and it thereafter became a legal umbrella-term for a range of crimes such as poisoning, while the original thuggee gangs that could be traced back to Sindouse had practically ceased to exist by this point. Dacoity was added to Sleeman's responsibilities in 1838 as thuggee activity had been effectively suppressed and, in 1839, Sleeman declared that thuggee had been eradicated, marking the end of the campaign. As of 1840, 3,869 Thugs were estimated to have been hanged, 1,564 sentenced to deportation, 933 imprisoned for life, and 86 acquitted while 56 became approvers and 208 died before trial.
File:The_Thugs_of_India_-_Halt_at_the_Shrine_of_Ganesh,_by_August_Schoefft,_ca.1841.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|The Thugs of India: Halt at the Shrine of Ganesh by August Schoefft,. The painting depicts a Sikh being deceived by thugs and a murder about to happen.
In 1839, Philip Meadows Taylor published the historical fiction novel Confessions of a Thug, which derived much of its material from Sleeman's writings. Thuggee thereafter became a Victorian sensation, with Queen Victoria herself requesting a copy of Taylor's book, witnessing the birth of a literary tradition. Among those to write about thuggee were Eugène Sue in his 1844 book Le Juif errant and Mark Twain in his 1897 book Following the Equator.
The thuggee campaign of the 1830s provided a model for the later shift to a centralised police bureaucracy and established an all-India framework for policing and surveillance. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department remained in existence until 1904, when it was replaced by the Central Criminal Intelligence Department. The legal model of thuggee constructed by Sleeman set a precedent that culminated in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Though the CTA was repealed in 1949, tribes considered criminal still exist in India today.