The Thugs of India

In the early nineteenth century, travel in central and northern India was slow and risky. Merchants, soldiers going home on leave, pilgrims and messengers moved along roads that crossed forests and the patchwork of territories left by the decline of the Mughal Empire and the wars between the Marathas and the British East India Company. Disbanded soldiers and impoverished men sometimes turned to robbery. Among the dangers, British officers began to hear of gangs that joined travellers on the road, won their trust over several days, and then strangled them and took their goods.

The word they used for these men was ‘Thug’, from the Hindi thag, a term for a cheat or swindler. It was not new: the fourteenth-century historian Ziauddin Barani tells of a large band of thugs captured near Delhi around 1290 and sent away to Bengal. But until the 1820s the British paid little systematic attention to the problem. The bodies of travellers were often hidden, and their disappearance could be put down to illness, wild animals or desertion.

The man most associated with the campaign against the Thugs is William Henry Sleeman, an officer of the East India Company posted in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories in central India. From about 1829 he gathered information, arrested suspects and persuaded some of them to become ‘approvers’, informers who were spared in exchange for describing their comrades and leading officers to burial sites. In 1835 a dedicated Thuggee Department was set up under his direction. Its officers followed approvers across several states, opened graves to confirm their accounts, and brought hundreds of prisoners to special trials at Jabalpur and other centres.

From the approvers’ testimony, Sleeman and his colleagues built a remarkable portrait. The Thugs, they wrote, were not ordinary robbers but members of an ancient, hereditary fraternity spread across India. Sons were trained by fathers. Members recognised one another by secret signs and spoke a private slang, which Sleeman recorded in his book Ramaseeana in 1836. They were said to read omens before each expedition and to kill without shedding blood, using a cloth or scarf.

Above all, officials described thuggee as a religious duty. According to some approvers, the gangs honoured the goddess Bhavani, a form of Kali, and believed that the victims were given to them by her. They consecrated a pickaxe used to dig graves and offered sugar in a ceremony after a killing. These details gave the British a story of a secret cult of murderers worshipping a fearsome deity, which fitted ideas already common among European writers about Hinduism and ‘Oriental’ religion. It also served a purpose. A secret, pan-Indian conspiracy justified extraordinary powers for the Company’s officers, including operations inside the territories of Indian rulers, and presented British rule as the protector of ordinary travellers.

The story spread fast. Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel Confessions of a Thug (1839), based on approver testimony, became a bestseller in Britain. Later the image passed into adventure fiction and film, most famously in Gunga Din (1939) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), where the Thugs appear as a Kali-worshipping death cult. In these versions the Thugs became a symbol of an alien and dangerous India.

Since the late twentieth century, historians have re-examined the sources. Almost everything known about the Thugs comes from British records, and most of that comes from approvers, men whose lives depended on giving officials the information they wanted. Questions were often leading, and testimonies were collected and arranged to fit the officers’ theory. Scholars such as Martine van Woerkens and Parama Roy have shown how the idea of thuggee was shaped by colonial anxieties and by the Company’s wish to justify expanding its control over Indian states.

The most detailed study, by Kim Wagner, takes a middle position. Wagner argues that gangs who robbed and killed travellers were real and that the violence was serious. But he finds that these were loose local groups of robbers, often linked to particular regions and protected by local landholders, rather than a single ancient cult. Religious practices among them, including veneration of the goddess, were similar to those of many other communities of the time, and were not the cause of the killings. The victims, too, deserve to be remembered: they were mostly ordinary people, such as merchants, sepoys on leave and their servants, whose names survive only in scattered records. Among those convicted were many Muslims, which itself sits uneasily with the idea of a Hindu cult.

The legal methods of the campaign also raise concern. Act XXX of 1836 made it a crime simply to belong to a Thug gang, so that men could be convicted on the word of approvers without proof of any particular murder. According to official figures, around 1,560 people were committed for trial in the decade from 1826 to 1835; roughly 380 were hanged and nearly 1,000 transported or imprisoned for life.

By the 1840s, British officials declared thuggee largely suppressed, and the department turned to other forms of organised robbery. The department’s methods, including networks of informers and central registers of suspects, influenced later policing in British India. Its most lasting legacy was an idea: that crime in India could be hereditary and bound up with particular castes or communities. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 applied this idea to whole groups, who were registered, restricted in their movements and watched by police. Independent India repealed the act in 1949 and ‘denotified’ the affected communities in 1952, though many say they still face stigma.

The word ‘thug’ entered English and is now used for any violent criminal, its origin largely forgotten. Historians today stress that the true story is not one of a demonic cult but of real violence on India’s roads, of the men who were killed and the families who lost them, and of a colonial state that turned this violence into a powerful, and partly invented, myth about Indian religion.