Episode #221 - Did India's Thugs Really Exist? (Part II)

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In October of 1812, the British magistrate N.J.

Halhead found himself in a part of India that that was not friendly to men wearing red coats.

By that time, Hellhead was no stranger to the violent side of the British East India Company's colonial project on the subcontinent.

Over the past two years, he had earned a reputation for being a tireless campaigner against Indian fighters and freebooters deemed rebels by the British authorities.

Between 1810 and 1812, Hellhead had personally overseen a handful of campaigns against groups of bandits and the local Indian lords, known as Zamindars, who were accused of supporting them.

To this end, Helhead and a small army of British and Indian troops, equipped with artillery, besieged strongholds and leveled forts around central India in what were known as the Ceded and Conquered Provinces.

These were areas that had recently come under company control after the end of the most recent Maratha War.

But British control over much of this territory was tenuous at best.

The border between what was now a British jurisdiction and what still belonged to the remnants of the Maratha state was of particular concern to the colonial authorities.

Neither government seemed to exert much control over these regions, and as such, they became known as haunts for bandits who could bounce between either side of the newly established border to evade capture.

So it was that in July of 1812, Hellhead was given authority over the region around the British stronghold of Itawa.

For years, the colonial authorities in Itawa had been reporting that the roads around the region were plagued by murderous bandits.

Every year, dozens of bodies of travelers that had been robbed and murdered were discovered by by the roadside, in the town well, or in chilling mass graves.

In 1809, the authorities started using the word thugs to describe these roadway murderers.

Although what it actually meant to be a thug was still unclear.

One area that particularly concerned Halhead was a group of villages south of Itawa, the largest of which was called Sindus.

While technically under company jurisdiction, the British had been unable to bring this area into the colonial fold.

The local lords, or Zamindars, acted more or less independently, and there were rumors that some of them were protecting gangs of thugs in exchange for a cut of their booty.

Not long after coming to Itawa, Halhead was given information that one of the Zamindars from the Sindhus region, a man named Lalji, was doing exactly this.

According to one informer, Lalji had been supporting a small community of thugs who were behind many of the region's murders.

So, Halhead and a group of 40 Indian soldiers, or Sepoys, as they were known, and 16 horsemen made their way to Sindus to investigate.

Right from the outset, the vibes were bad.

Often, a line on a map does not represent a reality on the ground, and that was certainly the case with Sindus in 1812.

A British magistrate with an armed guard was perceived as an invader.

His first night camped outside of Sindus, Halhead wrote, quote, I beg to leave the state that I have arrived at the risk of my life, which is now by no means secure.

I expect every hour to be attacked.

⁇

He had reason to be wary.

Just a few hours after he wrote those words, Halhed fell violently ill.

Upon arriving in Sindus, a group of villagers had offered the magistrate and his officers milk and flour in what seemed to be a welcome gift.

It now became clear that these offerings had been poisoned.

The timely ingestion of a purgative meant that Halhead survived, but tensions could not have been higher.

To head off any potential attack, Halhad commanded his troops to search Sindus and a number of other nearby villages for weapons in an attempt to disarm the villagers.

However, in the neighboring village of Turella, the local people were having none of this.

Some 300 armed villagers came out in force against the company's soldiers, forcing them to retreat back to their camp near Sindus.

Both the local villagers and the British officers were convinced that the other side was about to attack them at any moment.

This all came to a head on the evening of October 22nd.

Hallhead and a small group of horsemen went out for an evening patrol, accompanied by three local guides.

Then, in a ravine near a village called Murnaea, hundreds of armed local people emerged emerged from the brush and started firing muskets and arrows at the British party.

Halhead and his horsemen were completely overwhelmed.

Getting out of the narrow ravine proved difficult, but Halhead just barely escaped with his life.

The same could not be said for one of the magistrates' young officers.

In the Fracas, one Lieutenant Monsall from Limerick, Ireland was fatally shot.

This proved to be a turning point.

If there was one thing the British East India Company took seriously, it was the death of a European officer in their employ.

It was practically a matter of policy that if any white colonial officer was killed, that death would be met with the most serious reprisals.

It was believed that the entire colonial enterprise might be threatened if the vastly outnumbered British didn't respond to a killing of their own with an overwhelming show of force.

Over the next few weeks, Halhead was reinforced by a fresh detachment of British horsemen.

Several artillery pieces were also floated down the river to aid his retaliatory campaign.

Once fully reinforced, the British made an example of the villages in the region that were thought to have been home to thugs and others who may have aided in the attack that killed Monsal.

This culminated in the complete destruction of the village of Mernea.

Every building was burnt to the ground, and then the ashy remains were plowed into the earth.

By the end, Mernea was nothing more than a blackened plot of land.

Hundreds of people fled the region, and it's still unclear exactly how many people died in the retaliatory campaign.

The confrontation between Halhead and the people of the Sindus region is often pointed to as one of the first proper campaigns against the thugs.

The traditional colonial narrative is that Halhed went to Sindus because of problems associated with thuggy, that being a specific type of murderous banditry that was plaguing the region.

It's often assumed that he was poisoned by thugs, or thugs disguised as villagers.

His forces were then attacked by an army of thugs, or were they thug sympathizers?

Lieutenant Monsell was killed by thugs, or by rebellious villagers who might as well have been thugs.

Or at least so goes the colonial tale.

In any case, the campaign in this region was justified as essential in the quest to impose law and order.

The area was a known haunt of thugs, and when the British came in force, they met violent resistance, which seemed to confirm that the entire place was lawless.

In years to come, when the British campaigns against thuggie became more focused and organized, the Sindus incident was often referenced as a key early encounter between the company and India's thugs.

As historian Kim Wagner has explained, quote, the British had a very tangible demonstration of how easily the heinous crime of thuggy could develop into a full-blown rebellion, end quote.

But even a cursory glance at the facts reveals that the Sindus incident was far more complicated than simply thugs attacking British lawmen.

Were those people who took up arms against Halhad all thugs?

Even Halhad wasn't sure.

In his letters, he refers to to his attackers variously as villagers and rebels, and only occasionally as thugs and marauders.

Deeper research into the incident by Kim Wagner has revealed that the entire Sundus incident was brought on by a web of local concerns and disputes.

The attack that killed Lieutenant Monsal may have had little to do with protecting a gang of thugs and likely had much more to do with some contentious local politics.

Wagner has pointed out that one of the guides used by the British on that fateful night in October was a local lord who had been in a land dispute with the villagers of Mernea.

This lord felt entitled to some farmland that the villagers had fought to keep.

And now it seemed to these villagers like this lord was leading the British to come and attack them and settle that dispute.

Indeed, in one of the depositions, it was recorded that when the armed group of villagers was spotted in the ravine, this guide was sent out ahead to try and get them to clear off.

But when he got within shouting distance and the villagers saw that it was the local Zamindar who wanted their farmland, they yelled at him, quote, you have taken away the land which you gave us to cultivate, and now you bring Mr.

Hellhead upon us?

End quote.

It's Kim Wagner's opinion that these villagers likely believed that they were being attacked as part of this local land dispute.

They thought they were defending themselves.

Meanwhile, Halhead would report that his party had been ambushed after doing nothing to provoke these villagers.

The assumption was that they had to have been thugs or people opposed to the British crackdown on thuggy.

In this particular incident, Wagner sees a tragic confluence of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and mutual mistrust.

If nothing else, the Sindhus incident demonstrates just how complicated the history of India's thugs truly is.

When looking at accounts of that event, it's very unclear exactly who was a thug or if there were any thugs at all involved in the incident.

Was every armed villager a thug?

Were they fighting in connection with a gang of thugs?

Did this violence have anything to do with thuggy?

In the years after Sundus, the British would eventually develop a very specific profile for the typical thug.

The thug was a member of a close-knit criminal fraternity who worshipped the goddess Kali.

He ritualistically strangled his victims, both to enrich his gang and honor his chosen deity.

Further, it was alleged that the thugs were part of a cohesive network that spanned the entirety of India.

Were there thugs around Sindhus in 1812?

Well, there's no denying that people were being robbed and murdered on the roads in the region.

There were certainly people engaged in a life of banditry.

There were also local lords who were getting a cut of what these bandits could rob.

But were these bandits thugs?

If so, were they religiously motivated?

Exactly, how many were there?

Were thugs involved in the attack on Halhead and Monsal?

Or were these simply villagers who thought they were defending their farms?

Could it have been a bit of both?

This is some very tricky history, my friends.

It's very tempting to look at all the inconsistencies in the historical record concerning the so-called thugs and conclude that they probably did not exist.

They were a phantasm cooked up by the British to justify an extension of their power.

The presence of thugs could be used to justify raids into territories that had resisted colonial authority.

These military actions could be explained as necessary for the preservation of law and order.

The colonizers could cast themselves as the saviors of the the Indian everyman who, before their arrival, had been terrorized by thuggy cultists.

It would be very easy to conclude that the British invented thugs to justify the colonial project.

That would be a nice, neat explanation.

But that might just be a little too easy.

You see, it's an undisputed fact that travelers were dying by the hundreds on on the roads of central India in the early 19th century.

Who was committing those murders?

Can we call them thugs?

Let's see if we can pick it all apart today on our fake history.

Episode number 221.

Did India's thugs really exist?

Part 2.

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast that explores historical myths and tries to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

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Fire Antlers has a new album coming out in the next few months, but the first single, Mega Block, is out now.

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Plus, yours truly is one of the guitar players on this track.

So if you are curious, then please stick around to the very end of the show after the shout-outs when I will be debuting the new single from Fire Antler's Mega Block.

This week, we are returning to India to conclude our look at the so-called thuggy cults of the early 19th century.

This is part two in a two-part series on the thugs.

So if you've not heard part one, then I strongly suggest that you go back and give that a listen now.

In the first part, I did my best to explain how the popular perception of India's thugs has been shaped by literature and film.

Starting with 19th century empire writing and eventually finding its most over-the-top expression in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

As we explored, in fiction the thugs have been presented as obsessed cultists devoted to the Hindu goddess Kali.

They are unrepentant murderers who strangle their victims as a way to honor their goddess and preserve the balance between creation and destruction in the universe.

As stock villains, the thugs aren't simply a rabble of thieves and highwaymen, they are an organized clan of murderers with a distinctive modus operandi.

Now, as we saw, this literary image of the thugs was largely based on the writings of the British officials who embarked on a series of campaigns to eradicate thuggy from Central India in the early 19th century.

One of the most widely read books on the thugs was a work of fiction called Confessions of a Thug by the former East India Company official Philip Meadows Taylor.

While the author fictionalized many elements of the story, he insisted that his tale was mostly true, given that many of the details had been taken directly from real depositions made to the British authorities by admitted thugs.

Many of these confessions were collected by authorities operating under the leadership of a man named William Sleeman.

As we saw, Sleeman was the British administrator most associated with the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s.

He's even been credited with kicking off a thug panic in colonial India after he anonymously published a letter in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, which described the thugs as an organized society of murderers who made blood sacrifices at a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali.

This letter directly inspired new British campaigns, many directed personally by Sleeman, against those deemed deemed to be thugs.

Over the course of those campaigns, Sleeman turned himself into Britain's recognized authority on the thuggy phenomenon.

He wrote three books on the topic of India's thugs and for many years was considered the only source for information on the topic.

In the last episode, I quoted the historian Martin van Woerken, who as late as 1995 lamented, quote, The only sources available are those written by Sleeman himself and by his collaborators in their struggle against the thugs.

Seemingly, no document in the vernacular enables us to confirm, invalidate, or balance the colonizer's account, end quote.

You see, the issue is that Sleeman had an agenda, and his work on thuggy activity reflects that agenda.

Sleeman presented the thugs as a coherent, organized, religiously motivated criminal society, the type of society that could be identified, targeted, and rooted out by the colonial authorities.

In the last episode, I explained that starting in the 1960s, many experts that study India's colonial history started to argue for a critical reappraisal of Sleeman's work on the thugs.

Many have argued that Sleeman exaggerated the threat posed by the thugs and may have presented the thuggy cult as a more cohesive and religiously coherent organization than it actually was.

Historians like Hiralal Gupta, Stuart Gordon, Christopher Bailey, and Radhika Singha have all argued to varying degrees that the thugs were a useful colonial boogeyman that Sleeman used to justify a crackdown on a part of the subcontinent that had remained resistant to British administration.

Some have even suggested that the thugs did not exist at all and were entirely the invention of the colonizers.

However, as we saw in the last episode, that school of thought has been challenged in recent years.

Historians like Mike Dash have argued that the confessions collected from the alleged thugs speak for themselves and should be trusted as historical sources.

Others, like Kim Wagner, have argued for a more nuanced approach.

Wagner has pointed out that Martine van Verken was not entirely correct when she lamented that every source on the thugs had been filtered through William Sleeman.

More exhaustive research in the archives has demonstrated that there's a body of documents on the thugs starting in 1809 that predate Sleeman's influence.

Interestingly, these pre-Sleeman documents seem to tell a different tale about the thugs than those documents produced after 1830.

We ended off part one by looking at the specific circumstances that got the British authorities concerned about thugs in the first place.

As you heard, variations of the word thug have existed in Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit for centuries.

However, for most of that time, it was a general term used to describe swindlers, cheats, thieves, and villains.

For most of Indian history, the term was not used for a specific criminal fraternity.

Despite the fact that there are a number of myths concerning the historical origins of the thug community, there's no solid documentary evidence of their existence that predates the late 1700s.

For their part, the British don't start writing about the thugs until 1809.

In that year, the British authorities in the town of Itawa were dealing with a rash of unsolved murders.

Itawa was one of the few British bases of power in what were then called the Ceded and Conquered Territories.

These were huge chunks of north and central India that had come under British control at the end of a series of brutal conflicts known as the Maratha Wars.

In the tumultuous aftermath of the wars, famine was rampant in central India and banditry became a way of life for many.

The roads in the ceded and conquered territories became some of the most dangerous in all of India.

In many ways, the town of Itawa was an outpost of the nascent colonial state in a region that was still largely untouched by British authority.

It was in this violent time and place that the British officials first started to write about thugs as a distinct criminal group who they believed were behind many of the region's murders.

And that pretty much brings us up to speed.

So let's head back to central India and continue our look at the early accounts of the thugs to hopefully get a better sense of whether or not they existed at all.

To do this, we need to look at some very tricky primary sources.

These are confessions or depositions given to the authorities by individuals captured on the suspicion of being thugs.

What is the best way to read a source like that?

Well, let's get into it.

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I feel like this is a good time to remind all of you listening that for generations, the existence of thugs in India was not a controversial idea.

It was accepted as a plain fact.

Now, you could argue that this was partially due to an uncritical approach to the colonial sources, but the truth is that there were many people who were arrested by the British who admitted to being thugs.

Some of these admitted thugs gave long depositions to the British authorities describing a whole host of crimes and an elaborate criminal subculture.

If taken at face value, these confessions seem to be evidence that the thug threat was just as serious as the British authorities claimed.

But perhaps we should not take these confessions at face value.

You see, most of the confessions that were gathered by the British starting in 1810 were from accused bandits who had been granted royal pardons in exchange for their cooperation with the authorities.

This cooperation usually meant testifying against other accused thugs at trial.

These people who were given pardons to inform on their former comrades were called approvers in the British legal lingo used in India at the time.

In his book on India's thugs, historian Kim Wagner makes an excellent point about how careful we need to be with the approver confessions.

He explains, quote, an approver's basic motivation was to avoid punishment, and he might therefore be induced to say almost anything to save his own life or that of his relatives and so on, which renders such testimony very difficult to use.

One aspect of the confession is precisely that it has to be believable in order to be accepted.

And if the interrogator already has a preconceived notion of the case in question, the confession, in effect, has to comply with this.

End quote.

That is an excellent point.

These approvers were in a situation where they were trying to save their own lives.

It might be too much to say that these confessions were coerced, but they were certainly shaped by the questions asked by the interrogators and the approver's desire to satisfy satisfy those interrogators.

So there's a way of reading the approver confessions that mirrors how historians deal with confessions gathered during witch trials.

In the case of witch trials, you will find dozens, sometimes hundreds of people who will confess to being witches and will tell elaborate tales about cavorting with Satan.

As you might remember from our series on the Salem witch trials, by the end of that crisis, the the jails of Massachusetts were overflowing with confessed witches.

But in that case, much like our thug approvers, the people confessing and naming names were avoiding a death sentence.

As you might remember, in Salem, it was mostly people who insisted on their innocence who were ultimately hung as witches.

So was the thug panic in colonial India the same as the witch panics in Europe and America?

Well, they certainly share some things in common.

The use of approvers to unearth an ever-expanding network of evildoers is characteristic of many witch panics.

In the 1830s, the British official William Sleeman did his best to equate the thuggy threat with the moral and spiritual health of the country.

This too echoes the witch panics of centuries previous, where witches were believed to be corrupting influences on an otherwise godly community.

This comparison can be helpful in understanding how the anti-thug campaigns would eventually pick up momentum in the 1830s.

But I've been convinced by historian Kim Wagner that it would be wrong to completely equate thugs with witches.

Because there's more evidence that suggests the reality of thugs than there is for witches or at least witches with real magical powers.

You see, Kim Wagner makes the case that the later confessions of thug approvers, especially those collected by William Sleeman in his campaigns in the 1830s, should be treated differently than those collected by British officials in the 1810s and 1820s.

He argues that in those earlier periods, the British authorities had not yet settled on a clear stereotype of what a thug should be.

As such, the approvers were not being guided towards a confession that matched with that stereotype.

Wagner has suggested that if we pay attention to the differences between the early confessions and the later confessions, we can see the development of the thug idea.

Things that appear in the later confessions that are completely absent from the earlier ones may be a reflection of how the expectations of the interrogators changed over the years.

Again, I'll quote from Kim Wagner, who tells us, quote,

Unlike Sleeman, the handful of officials engaged in combating thuggy during the early period were not trying to build a coherent argument concerning a pan-Indian murderous society.

Accordingly, the primary sources of the early period do not not exhibit the same prejudice and bias regarding thuggy as the later material.

The early material is not purely objective in any sense, but its discursive context is decidedly different from the material produced during the 1830s.

End quote.

Now, obviously, it is beyond the scope of this humble podcast to go through the entire collection of thug confessions and parse out the fact from the fiction.

But there's one particular particular case that I would like to focus on for a little bit here.

One confession that gets quite a lot of attention from scholars interested in the thuggy phenomenon was one collected by Thomas Perry, a British magistrate working in the village of Itawa in 1810.

As you heard in the last episode, Perry's predecessors in that position had been the first to write about gangs of thugs potentially being behind roadside murders in the region.

As I detailed in the introduction, it was just south of this area where the British magistrate N.J.

Halhead would eventually end up violently clashing with local people, partially over the issue of thug gangs.

But in 1810, Thomas Perry was mostly trying to solve the murders of local people whose bodies had been found along the road.

To this end, Perry offered a reward of 1,000 rupees, a huge sum at the time, for any information about these murders that could lead to an arrest.

Sure enough, within a few weeks, an anonymous informer came forward and eight men were arrested.

Among them was a 16 or perhaps 20 year old young man named Ghulam Hussein.

Now, I say either 16 or 20 years old because Hussein told the authorities different things at different times.

After initially being tight-lipped, the young man eventually agreed to testify against his compatriots in exchange for a royal pardon.

The testimony given by Ghulam Hussein is one of the first places in the primary sources that we see thuggy being described as a profession.

and the thugs as an identifiable criminal subculture.

For instance, Husayn identified himself as a thug.

He claimed that he was but one of many thugs who lived in the area.

In fact, he told the authorities that there may have been as many as 1,500 thugs living in the region around Itawa.

As for Hussein himself, he claimed that he had been adopted by the thugs who had killed his father and his uncle.

Now, interestingly, eventually this would become a bit of a trope in thug fiction.

Authors trying to give their fictional thug an interesting origin story would often borrow from the testimony of Ghulam Hussein.

Fictional thugs were almost always adopted by the murderers who killed their families.

When he came of age, Hussein tried to live a law-abiding life before being dragged back into the world of thuggy.

He told his interrogators that his thug gang would go on yearly robbing expeditions, usually quite far away from Itawa.

Perhaps most significantly, Hussein laid out the thug modus operandi.

While traveling along the roads of India, the gang would keep an eye out for any travelers who looked like they might be carrying something valuable.

The gang would then befriend the travelers, proposing to travel alongside them so as to ward off potential bandits with the greater numbers.

Once the travelers were lulled into a false sense of security, the robbers would strike.

He told his interrogators, quote, The professed ones strangle with any part of their cloth and afterwards inflict wounds with their knife.

They do not use cords for fear of detection.

Mere novices in the art administer the seeds of deturah, which deprives their object of his senses when they plunder him.

Hussein is our first primary source that describes the thugs first charming their victims, then drugging them, and finally strangling them.

Now, this confession is sometimes presented as clear evidence that as early as 1810, thug gangs existed and had a clear modus operandi.

If we take Hussein at his word, then his gang was killing people by the hundreds in central India.

The popular historian Mike Dash certainly treats the confession of Ghulam Hussein in that way.

In his book, Thug, the True Story of India's Murderous Religion, the testimony provided by Hussein is presented as the first crucial step in the unveiling of this secret society.

Dash very much takes Hussein at his word.

But

Ghulam Hussein may not be a reliable narrator.

In Kim Wagner's book, he details how unreliable Hussein proved to be when it came time for him to testify at trial.

While on the stand, he contradicted the earlier statements he made in his deposition a number of times.

In one early version of his story, he claimed that he had seen the other accused men strangle a traveler from, quote, two fields away.

But then his story changed on four separate occasions.

By the end of his examination, he had admitted that he had personally helped kill as many as 95

people.

At one point in the trial, he and one of the other accused men got into a shouting match, which then inspired Ghulam Hussein to claim under oath that he knew of 14 more murders that the accused men were responsible for.

According to Wagner, quote, the trial turned into a farce as Hussein continued to change his testimony over the course of the five days that the trial lasted, end quote.

Hussein was caught lying so many times while under oath that the judge in the case ruled that his testimony was inadmissible.

He went so far as to throw out Hussein's royal pardon, holding him criminally responsible for the 95 murders he admitted to while on the stand.

Now, Kim Wagner makes the point that it's very interesting that the judge, who was convinced that Hussein was an unreliable liar, still believed everything Hussein had to say concerning his life as a thug and the practice of thuggy in general.

In the final report on the trial, where the judge had ultimately decided to acquit the accused men because of the unreliability of the key witness, he included this note about the testimony.

Goulam's statements were, quote, undoubtedly the most extraordinary which ever came before the Court of Justice.

They contain the avowal of crimes which could never be presumed to have existence in any civilized country, more particularly in one placed under the protection of the British administration.

They afford also abundant proof of the shocking depravity and merciless unfeeling disposition of a great portion of the inhabitants of these provinces.

⁇

I think that passage is very telling.

Now this is just a personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth.

But to me, it suggests that the judge was willing to believe Hussein's tales of the murderous thug life because it confirmed prejudices he had about Indian people.

He literally says that Hussein's testimony is shocking proof that the people of central India are depraved and have a merciless disposition.

This judge had no doubt that there was a gang of murderers running amok

because the people were inherently savage and criminal.

He says this while also declaring that no one can be convicted because everything that was said was entirely unreliable.

How's that for some cognitive dissonance?

The selective skepticism demonstrated by the trial judge in this case seems to have bled into the historical record.

For centuries, the testimony of Ghulam Hussein has been pointed to as an important early source on thug gangs.

Even Mike Dash, in a book that he published in 2005, presented the testimony of Ghulam Hussein as a compelling early source on the thug life in India.

But it needs to be understood that one of our earliest informants on thug gangs was a liar whose testimony was thrown out of court.

But does that mean he was lying about everything?

Well, that is a much harder question to answer.

Ghulam Hussein was not the only person arrested in connection with highway murders around 1810.

There were many other approvers and even convicted murderers who used the term thug in a way that was similar to how Hussein used it.

Many of those arrested admitted that they had been part of roving highway gangs who often murdered by way of strangling.

Many of those arrested people identified themselves as thugs.

Were interrogators feeding them this term?

Potentially, in some cases, but certainly not in all cases.

Thug seems to have been a word that Indian people used to describe a specific type of banditry.

But what's interesting is what these early informants do not say about thuggy.

Neither Ghulam Hussein or any other informant from between 1810 and 1814 mentions a religious dimension to the killings.

There's no talk of the goddess Kali, Bohani, or any other Hindu goddess.

Nor do the thugs seem to be drawn from one particular caste or ethnic group.

Even the historian Mike Dash, who is a bit more trusting of these slippery primary sources, makes a big point in his his book that, quote, there's no such thing as a typical thug, end quote.

Some of the people accused of thuggy were Hindus.

Others were Muslim.

Still others professed a mishmash of religious beliefs.

The impression given by many of these early depositions was that the term thug was used more like a job description than a religious or ethnic identity.

Thuggy was something you could take up and, in some cases, walk away from.

Kim Wagner has suggested that these early accounts make being a thug sound a lot like being a mercenary soldier or a pirate.

You would sign up, pledge yourself to a group, go on a campaign, and hopefully make some money in the process.

Being a thug was something you did.

It wasn't necessarily who you were.

After the Sindeuce incident that I described in the introduction, there was a general acceptance among the British authorities that gangs of thugs were an issue in central India.

But it was understood that these gangs were more or less independent of one another, sharing only the common habit of murdering the people they robbed.

In 1813, Thomas Perry explained in a report that he believed that in his region there were three classes of thugs that were, quote, entirely unconnected with each other, end quote.

Kim Wagner points out that Perry's assessment was important as his statement, quote, was in glaring contrast to the later notions of a centrally organized, all-Indian conspiracy, end quote.

Perry's take that the thugs were more or less unconnected bands of bandits was the overarching British opinion on the matter for the better part of a decade.

A dispatch from the board of directors of the British East India Company in 1820 read, quote,

The term thug is commonly applied to signify a criminal who first stabs, strangles, or poisons, then strips and plunders his victim and finally throws the body into a well.

But when we read of the existence of villages of thugs consisting of men, women, and children, and when we consider in connection with this that the word thug is a local term and consequently little understood in any uniform way, it is at least manifest that the term is not one of very restricted application.

End quote.

So, as late as 1820, it was agreed that there were bandits on the roads, especially in parts of the ceded and conquered territories where the British had been less present, and that these bandits often operated in large gangs.

People were using the term thug to describe that.

But, as the dispatch suggests, in almost every village there was a different definition of what made someone a thug.

The term was almost too general to be useful.

Now, this doesn't mean that the British simply forgot about thuggy over the next 18 years.

Campaigns against banditry were common.

But there was a clear shift in 1830 when one Captain William Sleeman emerged from relative obscurity as a new expert on thuggy.

You see, in earlier histories it was sometimes stated that William Sleeman discovered thuggy.

Some critical scholars have even said that he invented thuggy.

But I have hopefully already demonstrated that neither is true.

The British had been talking about thuggy for a solid 20 years before William Sleeman emerged as a crusader against the thugs of India.

But there's no doubt that Sleeman changed the conversation about thugs.

As Kim Wagner has said, he transformed them from a, quote, political problem to a moral issue, end quote.

So let's pause here, and when we return, we'll look at how the image of thuggy was transformed in the 1830s and what went down in Sleeman's campaigns.

After N.

J.

Halhead's burning of the village of Mornea, the idea of thug gangs as a social problem in Central India became a a widely accepted fact among the officials of the East India Company.

While that encounter had in reality been a messy and confused affair, the story was eventually simplified as a necessary action against a gang of thugs.

If nothing else, it was believed that by burning a village and making a show of military force in the region, the British had cleared a problematic area of thugs, at least for a little while.

Over the course of the next decade and a half, Central India remained a dangerous place for travelers.

Every year, bodies of murdered people who had been robbed were discovered along the roadside.

Depending on where and when the bodies of victims were discovered, there would be a reaction from the colonial authorities.

If the murders took place within the boundaries of the growing British colonial state, then there were often investigations, arrests, trials, and in some cases, executions.

Between 1812 and 1826, you can find all sorts of records of small-scale campaigns against groups identified as thugs.

But it wasn't until 1829 that the British authorities started to speak about the thugs as though they were one consistent group.

According to historian Kim Wagner, a shift occurred in that year when the Governor General of India took a special interest in a campaign that was being undertaken by one Captain Borthwick, a political agent in Malawa.

In that year, five bodies of murdered people were discovered on a road in his jurisdiction.

Suspicion quickly fell on a large group of travelers who had recently moved through the area.

The group was tracked down and 74 people were arrested in connection with the murders.

When interrogated, many members of this group admitted to being thugs and fantasigars, which was an Indian term used for stranglers.

While these 74 people were being held awaiting trial, the Governor General wrote Borthwick, saying, quote,

The hand of these inhuman monsters being against everyone, and there being no country within the range of their annual excursions in which they have not committed murder, it appears to His Lordship in Council that they may be considered like pirates, to be placed without the pale of social law, and be subjected to condigned punishment by whatever authority they may be seized and convicted.

Now, this was significant because the government was saying that the thugs should be treated like pirates.

The thing about pirates was that you were allowed to apprehend them absolutely anywhere, jurisdiction or borders be damned.

A pirate could be tracked to international waters or even the waters of a foreign power.

Here, the government was suggesting that the same approach could be taken with thugs.

Now, in the case of Borthwick's gang, this directive didn't make too much of a difference because everyone was already arrested.

But one young British officer in Central India would take notice of this shift in the government perception of thuggy as a crime and would run with it.

This was Captain William Sleeman, the man who by the end of the decade would be recognized as the world authority on thuggy.

In 1829, Sleeman was a mid-ranking British East India Company official who held the fairly unimpressive title of Assistant to the Agent at Jabalpur, Jabalpur being a settlement right in the heart of Central India.

Not long after Borthwick's thug trials, Sleeman started his own campaign against thugs in his region.

Using spies and approvers, he became aware of a number of thug gangs operating not far from Jabalpur.

After making a flurry of arrests, Sleeman started writing reports concerning the threat posed by thug gangs.

In these reports, he lent his support to the idea that the thugs should be treated like pirates and the British authorities should not be constrained by the borders of local independent Indian princedoms when it came to apprehending thugs.

He believed that an effective campaign against thugs meant expanding British power and authority.

In his opinion, the sovereignty of the remaining Indian states was of secondary importance to ridding the world of a group he called, quote, the common enemies of mankind, end quote.

Now, The reports of one mid-level colonial official don't normally get too much attention from historians, but in this case, they presaged what was to come.

As I mentioned in part one, this bubbling discourse among company officials about thuggy was crystallized in 1830 when that anonymous letter titled Thugs was published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette.

It would later be revealed that the author of that letter was none other than Captain William Sleeman.

This letter was incredibly significant because it brought together a number of different stories about thugs that had been collected in interrogations and packaged them in a cohesive and frightening way.

Now, I quoted this article at length in part one, but if you don't remember, The letter described the thugs as a pan-Indian society.

This was a religious group who worshipped the same deity, that being the goddess Kali or Bohani.

They killed to honor their goddess and with the encouragement of temple priests.

Further, one particular temple of Kali was described as the nefarious headquarters of this murderous religion.

This was Sleeman's Temple of Doom.

The killings on the roads of central India were not being carried out by random disconnected gangs.

No, according to Sleeman, this was being done by one identifiable group.

This anonymous letter was incredibly influential.

It struck a nerve with the higher-ups in the East India Company because it told a clear story about a phenomenon that had been frustratingly amorphous.

It also, slyly, served as a justification for the expansion of the colonial state.

As Kim Wagner explains, quote, presenting thuggy as an all-India phenomenon increased the extent of its threat, but was also an implicit argument in favor of further British expansion.

In this deliberate and sensationalist manner, the author of the anonymous article called for the British authorities to increase their exertions and implement more measures to put an end to to thuggy.

And this certainly struck a note with the government.

End quote.

The day after the publication of the article, the Governor General of India called for a strategy to eradicate thuggy.

It was also determined that the author of this article needed to be identified and should be brought in to help with the task.

And so it was that a mere 10 days after he had published his article, Captain Sleeman was promoted to full company agent and was tapped, along with agent F.C.

Smith, to undertake this new centralized campaign against India's thugs.

Sleeman technically worked as the right-hand man of Smith until 1835 when he was promoted yet again to the position of General Superintendent of the Operation for the Suppression of Thuggy.

So, there's a way to view the anti-thuggy campaigns of the 1830s as a calculated bit of careerism on the part of Captain Sleeman.

He was kind of stuck in a middle management position in a fairly obscure part of central India.

He was then able to take one of the real issues affecting his region, that being banditry, and turn it into a country and company-wide concern.

This led directly to his advancement.

So the question you're left asking is, did he do this cynically?

Did he knowingly distort the reality of the thuggy phenomenon to get the attention of his superiors?

Did he invent this threat for the sake of his own career?

Well,

that is hard to know.

There are some who argue that Sleeman was a true believer when it came to the quote-unquote civilizing mission of British colonialism.

According to some of his biographers, he seemed to take a genuine interest in the well-being of Indian people.

According to Mike Dash, quote, Sleeman possessed a passionate interest, most unusual in a British officer of the time, in the lives of the quote-unquote respectable peasants of India, among whom he found, now quoting from Sleeman, quote, some of the best men I have ever known, end quote.

So there's a way of seeing Sleeman as a champion of the Indian little guy.

Sleeman may have truly believed that his campaign was being done for the betterment of these respectable peasants, as he called them.

I think it's possible that multiple things are true here.

Sleeman was a careerist looking for advancement, who seems to have believed that the expansion of British power in India was a generally good thing for average Indians, especially in territories he believed were lacking law and order.

He certainly presented his campaigns as morally righteous and likely believed that he was doing a good thing for India.

To be fair, it's hard to root for murderous gangs.

But by the same token, these campaigns expanded colonial power and more deeply entrenched the British.

I think you could also argue that Sleeman is responsible for distorting what would become the historical record.

You see, the big leap that was taken in the anonymous letter that unofficially kicked off the 1830s campaign against the thugs was the characterization of thugs as a consistent religious group who worshipped the goddess Kali.

Did Sleeman just make this up?

Well, not entirely.

Over the years, there had been various thug informers who had mentioned that they practiced a form of goddess worship.

There were even a few notable informers who claimed that they believed that the goddess protected their gang.

But, as I've hopefully already demonstrated, those informers did not speak for every murderous bandit in India.

Many other thugs who made depositions were Muslims or devotees of other various Hindu deities.

It seems like Sleeman seized on a small handful of reports that mentioned goddess worship and then presented thuggy as a coherent murder religion.

Now, after 1830, once Sleeman Sleeman became the key British official in the campaign against thugs, you start to see more and more thug confessions where the person in custody describes a form of goddess worship.

So what's going on there?

Well, after 1830, the British authorities started specifically asking about goddess worship.

Again, I'll turn to Kim Wagner, who's pointed out that the most marked difference between thug confessions collected before and after 1830 is how the confessors describe thug religion.

Before 1830, there is very little evidence that suggests a consistent thug belief system.

After 1830, all of a sudden, the worship of Kali was something every accused thug was expected to speak about.

So,

how did Sleeman's campaigns work?

Well, firstly, they involved the heavy policing of roadways by new regiments of horsemen and Indian auxiliaries known as sepoys.

These new forces also made raids on villages, camps, or anywhere else rumored to be a thug hotbed.

People were arrested en masse.

Significantly, Sleeman relied heavily on approvers, who you might remember were the informers who had been promised government pardons.

Now, obviously, using approvers had been a British tactic for years, but Sleeman's innovation was now he was using the testimony of approvers not just to go after the perpetrators of one specific crime or one specific set of murders.

He was using approvers to track down anyone who was a known thug.

He wanted to bring in entire gangs.

As such, the approvers were expected to name the names of absolutely anyone they knew who might be involved in highway banditry.

Kim Wagner also points out that, quote, Part of Sleeman's success in getting the approvers to denounce their former comrades derived from his strategy of playing different approver factions off against each other.

The factions were constituted primarily of family and caste members, and thus Muslim approvers would gladly denounce Hindu suspects and vice versa.

This tactic is yet more evidence that there was not a consistent thug religion or even thug culture.

Sleeman used that fact to his advantage.

Now, by far the most important approver in the campaigns of the 1830s was a man known as Ferengia.

Ferengia was a gang leader who would later tell the authorities that he had been involved in the thug life since he was 12 years old.

After being apprehended in 1830, he became one of Sleeman's most trusted informers.

And in many ways, Ferengia would become India's most famous thug, as Sleeman took a bit of a shine to him.

You see, this Ferenghia was a very smooth operator.

He claimed to be a high-caste Brahmin, and as such, comported himself with a certain aristocratic charm.

Not only was his testimony particularly helpful in securing convictions, Ferenghia was clearly a gifted storyteller.

His colorful descriptions of his life as a thug were trusted as the best first-hand accounts of the thug phenomenon.

Indeed, when Sleeman ended up writing his books on the culture of the thugs, he cited Ferengia as his main source.

This then influenced fiction writers who used Sleeman's works as the basis for their adventure stories.

Ferengia would turn up as a stock character in a number of 19th-century novels.

Mike Dash sums up his effect on the anti-thuggy campaigns of the early 1830s like this, quote, more than 700 suspected stranglers were arrested in 1831 and 1832 alone, three-quarters of them in the central provinces.

A substantial proportion of these men were either betrayed by Ferenghia himself or convicted as a consequence of depositions he made at their trials.

⁇

But we have to ask, how much should we trust Ferengia?

Well once again we have a source who was trading information for his life and the life of his family.

He was a person who bragged about being smooth, deceptive, and duplicitous.

Ferengia may have been telling Sleeman what he wanted to hear.

But also, he had real knowledge about the location of mass graves and specifics about crimes that he could not have known unless he had been there.

So he clearly wasn't lying about everything.

Ferengia's tales about his adventures as a thug would go on to shape how many people understood the thuggy phenomenon.

But it's important to note that Ferengia's descriptions did not always align with Sleeman's stereotypes about the thugs.

Now, his testimony would certainly help Sleeman make the case that there was a giant network of gangs terrorizing India.

However, Ferengia's testimony also makes it clear that these gangs were mostly independent.

And while Ferengia told many stories about thug rituals, culture, and superstitions, he never said that they had one shared religion.

When Sleeman was officially given the title of superintendent in 1835, his campaign against the thugs had already resulted in an enormous number of arrests.

And this number would only increase in the next year when the government passed the 1836 Suppression of Thuggy Act.

The first article of this 1836 Act stated, quote,

It is hereby enacted that whoever shall be proved to have belonged either before or after the passing of this Act to any gang of thugs, either within or without the territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with imprisonment for life with hard labor, end quote.

This meant that that now it was a crime just to be a thug.

No longer did the authorities need to prove that you had been involved in a specific murder.

If you were shown to be affiliated with a thug gang, you could be imprisoned for life.

Sleeman's depiction of thugs as a distinct subculture was now enshrined in law.

But what it meant to be a thug remained vague, at least when it came to the letter of the law, which meant that this law was used against all sorts of people who may or may not have considered themselves to be thugs.

This ended up setting a dangerous precedent.

If you flash forward a few decades to the 1870s, colonial India would eventually pass a series of laws designating what it called criminal tribes.

That meant that anyone born in a particular ethnic or tribal group would be considered inherently criminal, even the children.

This has gone down as one of the most oppressive pieces of colonial legislation ever enacted in India.

Entire groups of people written off as criminals by virtue of their birth.

This legislation had its roots in the thuggy campaigns of the 1830s.

By the time the 1836 Act was passed, Sleeman's campaigns were already starting to wind down.

Still, hundreds more accused thugs would be arrested, tried, and sentenced over the next three years.

Now, the numbers are debated, but the high estimate, according to Mike Dash, is that as many as 4,000 people were ultimately found guilty of crimes associated with thuggy.

Kim Wagner places that number considerably lower.

In fact, in his book, he doesn't even comment on the number of arrests after 1835.

Still, the campaign was ferocious enough that in 1839, Sleeman declared that thuggy had been eradicated from India.

At least, for a little while.

So, did Sleeman actually rid India of a murder religion?

Were the thugs he was fighting a real group or a mere phantom conjured up to help him win promotions and expand British power?

In other words, did the thugs really exist?

Well, the answer to that question seems to be both yes and no.

Kim Wagner's examination of the thuggy phenomenon has convinced me that there were real thugs.

A close examination of the records from before 1830 demonstrate that gangs of robbers and murderers that used the term thug to refer to themselves existed in central India.

These were groups of bandits largely made up of men whose lives had been disrupted by the Maratha wars.

Many of the thugs were once soldiers who had fought either for the British or for the Maratha states.

After the wars, they were willing to take to banditry in order to survive.

These groups were usually aligned with local lords or Zamindars who were sometimes able to protect these gangs and often used them as muscle.

Many people were robbed and killed by these groups in central India in the early 19th century.

Many of these groups chose to strangle their victims, but not always.

The modus operande would change depending on the place and the circumstances.

Strangulation was not done for any ritual purpose.

So, if by thug you are referring generally to murderous bandits from central India in the early 19th century, then yes, there were real thugs.

But there was not a centrally organized murder cult that was terrorizing the entirety of the Indian subcontinent.

That idea was created and exploited by Captain William Sleeman.

There was no thuggy religion.

Some thugs worshipped the goddess Kali, but many did not.

There was no group of priests who were directing the actions of these thug gangs.

There was no temple of doom.

The gangs had loose affiliations at best and did not seem to have a common culture.

Banditry was certainly a problem in Central India, but the suggestion that the country was being held hostage by a murder cult is a myth.

The thugs were made to seem more cohesive, coherent, and frightening than they actually were so that a violent campaign could be more easily justified.

Were there thugs?

Yes.

Did those thugs fit the stereotype promoted by the British?

No.

In the end, the story of India's thugs has made me think deeply about the balance we try to strike in our societies between law and order and freedom.

I can understand how easy it would be to get behind a campaign promising to rid the roads of murderers.

After all, these were unrepentant stranglers who wouldn't want a crackdown.

But how far should we go for safety?

How long before anyone can be designated a thug or a member of a criminal tribe?

How long before we start believing that someone can be born a criminal?

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will look at an all-new historical myth.

I just want to remind you that if you stick around to the end of the show today, I will be playing the new song Mega Block by Fire Antlers.

But before we do that, I need to give some very special shout outs.

Big ups to Brian Ditton, to Harvey Jones, to

Erwin Jalokiewetscha.

I hope I said that correctly.

To Eric Neal,

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All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

Except for the song you're about to hear, which was written by Fire Antlers with me featured on guitar.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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Sympathize because you're way too far

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So you say

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Keep the garden to grow

with you wherever you go.

It'll help the cold, the gas, the hair, to far I know.

Hold tighter,

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Close circles and close nail vanity

Loose fricks

bright colors

plastic stacked up taller than me.

Well, keep a god zip road

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