2,446 words
A clay model of Thugs demonstrating their method of murder by strangulation
In the all-consuming culture wars of our era, it is often tempting to look for convenient rhetorical victories. Sometimes, however, these victories can be too convenient. I remember such victories from the 1990s when I first learned of the Thuggees of India. All I knew at the time was that they were a murderous cult, prevalent during the 19th-century British Raj, and that the British (to their credit) had completely stamped them out. This was often brought up by conservatives when defending British colonialism from the charge of racism. If the British were so racist, why did they—and not the Indians themselves—eradicate the Thuggees? It was the Indians who suffered from them, not the British.
James Sleeman brings up variations of this argument in his 1933 volume Thug – Or a Million Murders. His is an idiosyncratic yet highly informative account of the Thuggees and the British Empire’s vigorous efforts to crush them during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. His tone often bristles with indignation at his subject matter, and he is quick to adopt a triumphalist outlook as the Thugs go on their inevitable decline. This of course is natural, given how his grandfather, Major-General William Sleeman, spearheaded their eradication over a century earlier.
Sleeman describes a Thug as “a murderer by hereditary profession, who sincerely believed that he had a divine right to kill.” Thuggee was (or painted itself to be) a secretive, religious cult which took Satanic joy in the systematic murder of travelers. Although plunder was a large part of their enterprise, and sometimes they resorted to violence and bloodshed, the Thugs’ modus operandi was cooperative strangulation, invariably with greatly superior numbers. It was murder for murder’s sake. Indeed, individual Thugs were often prominent, well-respected members of Indian society. They were intelligent, articulate, charming. They could be “Musslemen” or “Hindoos,” as Sleeman calls them, but in most cases they acted as “inveiglers” who would lure unsuspecting travelers into a false sense of security upon India’s notoriously dangerous roads. (Ordinary bandits, unscrupulous native chiefs, hereditary robbers known as Dacoits, and wild animals were other common dangers.) And when the time was right, while distracting their victims with song or conversation, the thugs would pounce and do them in.
Thuggee claimed its origins in antiquity, but Sleeman pinpoints its earliest reference to 1290. He also relays their creation myth, in which the goddess Bhowani (also known as Kali) struggles to slay a demon which reproduces itself whenever its blood is spilled. Bhowani then creates two Thuggees, gives them each a strip of cloth called a ruhmal, and instructs them on the bloodless art of strangulation. After the Thuggees exterminate all the demons, Bhowani further instructs them to throttle all men who are not of their kin in sacrifice to her. By the time of the British Raj, Thugs were seen worshipping Bhowani in shrines. They were also highly superstitious, often not embarking upon murder sprees on the heels of a bad omen.
Depressingly, Sleeman offers almost no chance at all for Thuggee victims. Once the Thugs settled upon a group of travelers, they were as good as dead. It didn’t matter how large the group was, or how well armed or trained they were. If the thugs wanted you, they would get you. Before acting, they would send out scouts, attain numerical superiority, select the murder site, prepare the graves, send out inveiglers, infiltrate the group, and then with a predetermined signal swiftly and efficiently dispatch their victims. They even had ways to fold the corpses at the joints so to reduce burial time and maximize space underground. Sleeman writes of armed sepoys and suspicious travelers all meeting the same fate. Only by sheer luck did a victim ever manage to escape. Once in a while, a Thug gang would spare travelers because they lacked resources or a suitable gravesite. In one case, they spared a small party because they were led by a beautiful woman. Most of the time, however, a smiling Thug asking politely for protection along the treacherous road may as well have been the grim reaper.
In describing the “sixty-soul affair” in which several gangs of Thugs descended upon 60 well-armed travelers in 1801, Sleeman writes:
That the art of killing was carefully studied by the Thugs is shown in this affair, where the first to be murdered were those in the rear, and next those on their immediate front and so on until the head of the column was reached; all done so quietly and skillfully that none of the victims was able to make a sound, and the last of the sixty killed was utterly unconscious of the fate of the first. Treacherous and despicable as the Thugs were, one must give them full credit for the excellence of their organization.
Thugs would certainly murder women and children, although they often tried to adopt boys if they were young enough or marry off girls if they were fetching enough. If not, or if they proved uncooperative, they would meet the same fate as the adults. And in case you were wondering if Thugs ever fell upon other Thugs, Sleeman writes:
In recording this Thuggee expedition, one would much like to be able to add that en route some fell into the hands of other Thugs and were successfully decoyed and ruhmalled. Unfortunately, however, Thuggee was a highly organized trade union, and its followers could always recognize each other by secret word, sign or mode of attire.
On the other hand, Sleeman does happily report an instance of Thugs and Dacoits giving each other their just desserts.
And if the Thugs were so lethal and diabolical, how did they avoid detection and suppression in the centuries preceding the British arrival? Well, of course, they were secretive and careful. They also made sure to target travelers as they moved through sparsely populated areas. Typically, such travelers were not native to the areas through which they were traveling, thus assuring that their disappearance would go unnoticed until after the perpetrators made their getaway. And, as we all know, it’s hard to scream for help when you’re being throttled.
But the biggest reason for Thuggee success was the near-universal corruption and venality of the Indian elites, who tolerated the Thugs as long as they spared their people in their territories and kicked back some of their loot in return for protection. Sleeman even compares the Thugs unfavorably to Chicago gangsters when it comes to the art of bribery. Neither does Sleeman hold back his contempt when describing such utterly cynical behavior.
Sleeman, writing of this time a hundred years ago, says, “No instance can be found of a chief extending his sympathy or his charities to the people of any other territory. They all possess a feeling of strong pride in claiming for their own territory the privilege of a sanctuary for robbers and assassins of all other territories, while the public officers of every description, and land-holders of every degree, converted this privilege when conceding to their chiefs into a source of revenue for themselves. This meant that the traveler encountered by Thugs had small chance of saving his life, for, even if alarmed and frightened it was useless to appeal for protection from the property owners of villagers of the strange country through which he passed.
And so the wretched, unprotected traveler was forced to seek protection by joining other travelers, who so often proved to be Thugs. It is only when the state of India under native government is examined that one is able to appreciate the great benefit of British rule which has brought justice and order to a people who were previously most hideously oppressed.
Ironically, the people weren’t always innocent themselves. Sleeman offers one story in which a gang of Thugs ruhmalled their victims, pocketed their loot, and tossed the bodies down a well (“. . . for men with no regard for life could hardly be expected to show much consideration for hygiene”). Yet one of the victims still lived! After crawling out of the well, he ran to the nearby village, sounding the alarm. However, as Sleeman recounts, the villagers did not react in the way one would think:
Righteous indignation at the murder probably carried less weight than anxiety to share in the plunder, and they pursued the Thugs and captured eleven. The Thugs had 600 rupees of the murdered men in their possession, but managed to throw them away before being seized, with the result that, on being searched, no money was found on them. Years later it transpired that—fortunately for them—this money had been found by a dishonest cultivator, who retained it without telling the police! It is typical of native justice of that time that these Thugs, caught red-handed in murder and with a living witness to accuse them, were kept in confinement for six months only and then liberated.
Much of Thug – Or a Million Murders consists of interviews of the Thugs themselves, and never do they express remorse. Despite how arduous Sleeman makes it seem, his grandfather was greatly aided in his pursuit by the volubility and candor of his incarcerated antagonists. Yes, Major-General Sleeman did stave off three assassination attempts and worked around the clock with no more than 20 British officers at any given time across over two decades and thousands of square miles. But the Thugs didn’t exactly practice Omerta once they were captured. When presented with the option of ratting out their fellow stranglers or swinging in leg irons from a gibbet, they invariably chose the former—thereby ensuring that the Thuggee network would ultimately unravel.
Oddly, the Thugs were often proud not only of their accomplishments but of their lineage within the Thuggee cult, which Sleeman meticulously tracked. So how do we know the Thugs weren’t exaggerating their exploits in order to enhance their reputation before the great Bhowani in the afterlife? Because Sleeman, completist that he was, ordered his prisoners to lead British forces to the murder sites and disinter the bodies, thus vindicating the Thugs in their guilt.
By the 1860s, all the Thugs in India were either dead or behind bars. Despite this, they nearly missed an opportunity of rebirth during the 1857 Indian mutiny. While British garrisons were being besieged and colonial buildings set on fire, Colonel James Sleeman, the recently-deceased Major-General’s nephew and successor, allowed no Thug to escape from prison during the chaos.
Thugs also gained international infamy during this time. Aside from news items and official reports, the sensationalist novel Confessions of a Thug by Meadows Taylor became a bestseller in 1839, introducing the term “thug” into the English lexicon. Queen Victoria herself couldn’t wait for the publication of its final chapters and ordered pages to be delivered to her before they could be bound. The French author Eugène Sue also included a Thug character in his sprawling 1844 bestseller The Wandering Jew. Most recently, Thugs make an appearance in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where they are misrepresented as practicing elaborate human sacrifices, engaging in child slavery, and wearing warpaint. Yet the filmmakers included a scene in which Indy battles a Thug who attempts to throttle him, perhaps as an oblique hat tip to history.
Sleeman dedicates a chapter to estimating the number of Thuggee victims over the centuries and lowballs it at one million. He starts with 10,000 annual victims in about a third of the Indian subcontinent. This is based on an 1833 report in a newspaper called The Sumachar Durfan, which claimed that Thugs took around 800 lives per month between the Sutlej and Narmada rivers. For those unfamiliar with subcontinental geography, the red arrow below shows what that looks like:
Sleeman rounds it down to a cool 10 grand per annum and extrapolates back one century instead of five. Hence, he feels safe in calling it a million when he could have just as easily claimed three million—and that’s only for the last hundred years.
Thug – Or a Million Murders is not a work of history per se. There is no index or bibliography, it repeats itself often, and mostly sticks to British colonial records for its sources. It also brims with purple prose. For example: “Cold-blooded human beasts with a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life for one-twelfth of the year, and patterns of virtue for the remainder!” At heart, Thug – Or a Million Murders serves as an apologia for the British Raj, written at a time when the legitimacy of the Raj was being threatened on all sides. Mike Dash, who has no such agenda in his 2005 study Thug, estimates that the true number of Thuggee victims falls between 50,000 and 100,000, all told.
So who to believe? I don’t know, but I do know that as a white identitarian it is comforting to read such straightforward praise of 19th-century colonialism, which today is so often maligned. Sleeman quotes one of this grandfather’s contemporaries who claimed that the Thuggee suppression was a “glorious monument to the zeal, energy, and judgment of the civil and military servants of the East India Company.” We should remember that the Thugs never attacked white Europeans, and so Sleeman’s actions were purely selfless. Driven by a rational indignation against the murder, treachery, and lies practiced by this cult, the British wished to impart upon their Indian subjects the same high standards of justice that their English subjects enjoyed back home. Who could possibly oppose that?
This is what I mean by a convenient rhetorical victory. But maybe it’s too convenient.
Perhaps it would have been better for the British had they not suppressed the Thuggee at all? I’m not saying it would have been—I’m just asking what if. For one, such rhetorical attacks have no impact on the anti-white Left. Such people ignore all the good that whites have done throughout history. So Thuggee or no Thuggee, the British would still be viewed as villains. Secondly, Indians today have no grounds for criticizing such a laissez-faire scenario. Why should the British have gone out of their way to stamp out a cult which most of the Indian elites were perfectly willing to tolerate? Finally, what if not suppressing the Thuggees—and thereby resigning untold thousands of souls to their fate—would have ultimately weakened Indian resistance to British rule? What if tacitly allowing such mayhem to continue would have made India more easy to control? Could it be that Major-General Sleeman’s noble Thuggee suppression turned out to be one of the factors which ultimately curtailed the British Empire in India?
I don’t know the answer, but this was one of the many imponderables I grappled with while reading Thug – Or a Million Murders.
27 comments
The parallels between this tale of a religious cult that murdered millions of pilgrims after pretending to be their friends, and a similar modern one that murders entire nations, while pretending to be loyal citizens whose own motives are purely humanitarian and holy, cannot be missed.
You failed to mention the Thuggee in the fantastic 1939 film Gunga Din. Other than that, great article!
That was a great movie! The guy who wrote Princess Bride really liked it. Why don’t more Indians behave like Gunga Din?
It’s one of the greatest action movies ever in my opinion. Steven Spielberg borrowed immensely from it while making Temple Of Doom. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore(the movies, and also the Indians I guess).
Also the snake scene in Raiders owes something to it, if you notice, in an advance sort of way.
Hard to imagine nowadays, but many of the Brits – officers, administrators,… – who went to India and served the Raj were on a civilising mission. It is Kipling’s “white man burden”, and it can be found in many works of fiction – notably those of G Henty – or in the reports of explorers, archaeologists, ethnologists, etc. of the day. They did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, it did not survive long after WW2 and the independence, although one must say that it had become a different world by then.
The Brits have long been do-gooder fools, but at least in the 19th century they were still very tough and unsentimental ones. But Whites should never have colonized heavily populated nonwhite lands; only sparsely populated ones (like N. America, Argentina, South Africa, Australia) that we could make our own. What was the benefit to average Englishmen of having “the jewel in the crown”? India was more trouble than it was worth.
Given the probably forevermore moral inability of Whites to rule nonwhites, our goal must be pure racial separation, at least for ourselves. Once we have Ethnostates, we will heavily arm them and guard their borders, and then within them our descendants will live beautifully. Our only interactions with nonwhites could be cultural exchanges (nothing wrong with selling them our movies), and perhaps some genuinely mutually beneficial free trade. But we must always be prepared not only for defense, but also to make aggressive war, as may yet become environmentally necessary depending on the scale of Third World industrialization’s assault on the biosphere. The Earth can only support finite numbers at Western levels of affluence.
I suppose the Brits took over India so that the Russians or the French could not have it. It was the logic of that epoch of greedy children. As to the benefit to the ordinary Englishman, I suppose it was to have a decent cup of tea.
Their creation myth sounds like the European gypsies’: a corruption of a well-known myth or (in the case of the gypsies’ story) truth. A priest recalled being told a story by the gypsies that they have had divine permission to steal since the days of Christ when one of them stole a nail that had been intended for the heart of the Savior’s then hanging from the cross.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_crucifixion_legend
Likewise, in the original Hindoo myth, Kali saves the world by DRINKING the demon ‘s blood, and needs no assistance in doing so:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raktabija
Given that gypsies originate in India as well, we migit ask: what the hell is it with those bastards and theis self-serving lies! They’re like less brilliant (in a devious way) Jews.
It’s funny, in a kind of sad way, but you do have to laugh. The White man has done everything in his power to exterminate his own race while doing everything in his power to expand and empower non-whites.
The arrogance of the British and other Euro states (the U.S. too) in “civilizing” the world only for their descendants to get to benefit from that generosity in rape, murder, other forms of violence, theft, history demonization/replacement, being crowded out of their own lands.
Well, at least we’re so “kind”, “nice”, “generous”, and all of the other over-hyped, shallow blague that WNs try to pat themselves on the back with. A balm to hide the burn.
Just another bad decision by the Brits and look at them today—they have no homeland. Another book recommended by Revilo p. Oliver is “Thugs and Communists” by Louis Zoul. I haven’t gotten around to reading my copy yet but it is supposed to be good.
Specialized criminal and mendicant castes have not disappeared in the Indian subcontinent. On the contrary, they are flourishing. In fact, they are whole special ethnic groups that have crime or other parasitic behaviour as a way of making a living and as the basis of their culture. European Gypsies are just one such caste that has migrated to Europe. In India, for example, there is a widespread caste of pickpockets who are characterised by the most bizarre stratagems. For example, they train themselves from early childhood to use their bodily orifices to hide stolen goods. Their rectum can be stretched to incredible proportions to form a kind of “wallet”. Similarly, they are able to swallow kilograms of metal or drugs and smuggle them out. In their mouths they carry a perfectly sharp blade in the form of a miniature sickle, which they carry around their molars without cutting themselves. They then use this tool to cut open the luggage of people on the train and steal their money. But similar castes are found also in China and among other coloured nations.
Is there a way to estimate the number of hereditary Thuggees in India during their heyday?
1. Population of British Raj in early 19th century: ca. 100-150 million
2. Thuggee murders: about 1,000 per year or somewhat more
3. Hereditary Thugs engaging in this activity for 1 month per year
4. Large numerical superiority when strangling their victims
If there were 5 Thugs per murder each year, only adult males of their community participated and every Thug had to participate every year, the overall number of the community would have stood at around 20,000-30,000. Under these assumptions, about 1 in 5,000 Indians was a member of a murder cult.
(The number of Thugs per murder and the question how often each adult male member participated in this activity are the main sources of uncertainty here)
I think the above calculation shows that Sleeman’s numbers are not unrealistic. If a “continent” full of different castes has such a caste as well, and the Natives don’t really see a problem with it in principle, then 1 in 5,000 is a realistic proportion and hence the absolute number of 1,000 murders per year a realistic value.
Who knew that the Thugs were so much more prolific than the Assassins? Talking about Asian and African history can be very pro-European. That’s why the mainstream media usually restrict themselves to ancient Egypt.
I find it very typical that the villagers did not help the victims. Altruism beyond one’s own kin group is incomprehensible to Indians and most non-whites. It is a very white characteristic. It is little known that the famous famine in Bengal in 1943 was caused primarily by Indian hawkers who bought up grain and hid it in secret warehouses. They then made huge profits from it. The British were too busy with the Second World War to intervene against them in time. Thousands of Indians were starving to death on the streets, but the rich Indians didn’t care. They were said to be eating, drinking and feasting quite publicly and mocking the poor people who were starving to death outside.
Yes. NEVER forget that it is the White man’s innate moral superiority that is, ironically, the final moral justification for our taking whatever measures shall be necessary to realize the 14 words. Whites are simply the best race. That is enough justification for everything we must do to endure.
100%
Closely related to the lack of altruism is the inability of non-whites to experience guilt. Yellow Asians are afraid of shame and loss of face, but they don’t have an inner sense of guilt that is independent of the evaluation of others. For example, if a Chinese person does something wrong but no one finds out about it, there is no need to experience any remorse. Arabs, Indians, blacks and mestizzos are generally incapable of remorse. Muslim culture is a culture of blaming others. It is utterly unthinkable to admit one’s own guilt, or even part of it. It is equally unthinkable to admit that your relatives might have done something wrong. This can be seen very clearly in cases of Asian crime such as the Pakistani grooming gangs in England. The accused in such cases always blame the victims or white racism, the British state or whoever, but never admit their own wrongdoing. This is typical of brown kids and black pickaninnies already.
Interesting. Are you saying then that Churchill requisitioning grain from India to feed the British Army had nothing to do with the famine? Even Wiki throws some shade at Churchill over this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
The British army did buy grain in Bengal, but they bought it from corrupt Indian suppliers. These indigenous “agents” abused their position massively, forcing Indian peasants to sell all their rice for a pittance under the false threat that it would be confiscated anyway. These Indian hucksters then sold this grain to the British Army at much higher prices. Much of the grain was hidden away to be later sold for extortionate sums. The Indian swindlers thus directly caused the famine and speculated on it. The British were mainly to blame for not introducing a rationing system and leaving everything to supply and demand until the last moment when the famine assumed disastrous proportions. This was at a time, however, when the British Raj in India was already collapsing and the British administration was essentially out of control. The Indian hucksters had grown immensely rich in the midst of general dying. British officials later recalled how the brown moneyed men held banquets with gramophones, jazz and dancing in American style, where the choicest dishes were wasted on purpose and the most expensive whiskey flowed. Brown hucksters drove their families around in expensive American cars among the corpses of famine victims.
Thanks. Would love to write an essay on this. Could you provide sources? Thanks.
I’ve read about this repeatedly in various old books. Any White who was in India at the time and left a memoir or diary confirms it. The details I give here come from a book published in Czech by Milada Ganguli, a Czech woman married to an Indian Brahmin (Milada Ganguliová: Pictures from Bengal, Prague: Orbis, 1963, p. 34-39.). She describes how Indian speculators deliberately put rice tainted with mould and worms on the market and sold even this for exorbitant sums.
I quote her description of the situation in Calcutta on p. 37: ” Once, while distributing rice, I noticed a young mother with a bone-thin child on her lap. While the woman eagerly swallowed large mouthfuls, the child died. But the woman did not stop eating, It was only when she scraped out the last of the porridge with her skinny fingers that she rose and quietly left with the dead child.” And elsewhere: “Down on the dirty pavement lay rows of emaciated brown bodies, covered with dirty rags. Starving people lay there day and night, exposed to the torrid heat, rain and disease. Some of them were already dead, their unmoving eyes staring into the sun. Others waited in resignation for their inevitable death. The putrid smell of decomposing bodies permeated the entire city. ‘ The same author describes the immense cruelty of ethnic cleansing and mutual extermination and displacement in the partition of India and Pakistan.
The affected region had at least 65 million inhabitants (42 in modern-day Bangladesh, 23 in West Bengal etc), so the British Army’s requirements (1 million soldiers in the Burma campaign 1944-1945) couldn’t/shouldn’t have been the decisive factor anyway, except in exacerbating mismanagement as commenter Guest said.
Some Anticolonialist spin on wiki probably.
I think the problem with British India was that it was a project of the British wealthy elite and selected professionals rather than the English nation. Neither the East India Company nor the British government was interested in more ordinary white colonists occupying India. Perhaps even today British high society imagines recreating an Indian Raj in the British Isles, with the majority of the commoners being brown people from Pakistan or Negroes. Poor Whites are shunned by the London elite, just as they once were in India, where the directive was that a poor, destitute white man should be kicked back to Europe or sent to Australia as soon as possible.
I have visited all the countries of the Indian subcontinent, including Ceylon and the Maldives. India is, of course, huge and full of the usual quirks. But I would say that much worse than India is Bungla-desh. Pakhistan is also a very dangerous, chaotic and poor country, full of backward brown riff-raff. Fanatical Islam really doesn’t help. It really is a wonder how stupid the Brits are to have taken immigrants mainly from Pakhistan in the last half century.
Indian society is full of poverty, selfishness, cruelty and superstition. The most inhuman acts are common there and no one thinks twice about them. Hundreds of millions live in huts made of rusty corrugated iron where they are born and live amidst garbage. The white man cannot conceive the depth of moral and physical squalor in which much of the subcontinent is languishing. Even the somewhat wealthier Hindoos in the cities live in horrible dark stuffy tenements, full of insects, where a family of ten is crowded into two small rooms with no furniture. The toilet is the only one shared by the whole house. But such a life is still a sheer luxury compared to the miserable trudge of the utter wretches who live in the mud and die like beasts of burden, stretched out on the dunghill. Of course, in such a brutal world, altruism doesn’t exactly flourish.
Two movies about the Thuggees I didn’t know existed till now:
The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and The Deceivers (1988). The latter features Pierce Brosnan.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.