strength, and has put two pieces of cannon on it; and has a thousand followers at command. He has never paid any regard to his Chief’s order and always takes a fourth from the booty the Thugs bring home with them from their expeditions, and this prevents his giving them up.
The Company’s officers in Etawah remained quite ignorant of the fate of these fleeing Thugs. They had little knowledge of events in the Native States of central India, and their concern, in any case, was not so much to catch and try the stranglers themselves as to ensure that Sindouse was pacified and the pargana’s rents and taxes paid on time. The dispersal of the Thugs and bandits living in the district had been necessary to achieve this aim. But while Halhed’s actions did secure the disputed revenues, and deter the Chambel valley Thugs themselves from operating in British territory, it must be doubted whether they saved many lives. The destruction of Murnae did not even prevent the district from becoming a Thug headquarters again, for by the end of 1813 the village had already been rebuilt. Several prominent families of stranglers soon settled back into the ravine country, and in no more than a year or two the parganas south of Sindouse were once again notorious for harbouring all manner of Thugs, dacoits and rebels. The Marathas tolerated their presence while they paid for protection, and the British took little interest in their activities while they confined themselves tothe districts south of the Jumna. No attempt was made to capture them or drive them out again.
The Thugs themselves did curtail their operations in the Company’s territories as a result of Perry’s efforts. But this did not mean that there were fewer stranglers on the roads, nor that the number of Thug murders actually decreased, even in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Murnae itself. Most gangs were content to direct their attentions southwards, into the central provinces of India and away from Company lands. These provinces were then made up entirely of small, poorly resourced native states, where policing was often inadequate and the Thugs went largely unmolested. During the cold season of 1813, several new or enlarged Thug bands had taken to the roads of southern Hindustan with considerable success. In the course of the cold season several parties of Thugs united to seize 27,000 rupees from one group of travellers outside the town of Rewah, and another 13,500 rupees from a gang of 27 dacoits who were tracked and slaughtered close to Lucknadown. This made the year 1813–14 one of the most successful ever known by the Thugs.
In later years, the Company would come to see the destruction of Murnae as a mistake. ‘It is, to me, extremely doubtful whether by this dispersion of the Thug headquarters we performed any real benefit to India,’ one senior judge observed two decades later. Yet this was scarcely Halhed’s fault. There were, in 1812, already many precedents for expelling undesirables from British territory into the Native States; it was a cheap and simple – if scarcely effective – solution to the problem of tackling crime, and it was still almost unheard of for large gangs to be smashed by the mass arrest and trial of their members. Had the Etawah magistrates wanted to tackle the Sindouse Thugs in this way, there was no prospect of them mustering the resources required to arrest, try and imprison the hundreds of bandits and rebels living in the ravines.
For Company officials such as Halhed and Perry, cast more or less adrift in Etawah, the activities of the Thugs – and indeed criminal justice in general – were little more than unwelcome distractions from more pressing tasks. The idea of pursuing highly mobile gangs of stranglers through central India was certainly impractical. Even the cost of imprisoning the Thugs who were in custody was such that the Company was glad to let others bear it. When news reached Etawah that Maharajah Sindhia
The Company’s officers in Etawah remained quite ignorant of the fate of these fleeing Thugs. They had little knowledge of events in the Native States of central India, and their concern, in any case, was not so much to catch and try the stranglers themselves as to ensure that Sindouse was pacified and the pargana’s rents and taxes paid on time. The dispersal of the Thugs and bandits living in the district had been necessary to achieve this aim. But while Halhed’s actions did secure the disputed revenues, and deter the Chambel valley Thugs themselves from operating in British territory, it must be doubted whether they saved many lives. The destruction of Murnae did not even prevent the district from becoming a Thug headquarters again, for by the end of 1813 the village had already been rebuilt. Several prominent families of stranglers soon settled back into the ravine country, and in no more than a year or two the parganas south of Sindouse were once again notorious for harbouring all manner of Thugs, dacoits and rebels. The Marathas tolerated their presence while they paid for protection, and the British took little interest in their activities while they confined themselves tothe districts south of the Jumna. No attempt was made to capture them or drive them out again.
The Thugs themselves did curtail their operations in the Company’s territories as a result of Perry’s efforts. But this did not mean that there were fewer stranglers on the roads, nor that the number of Thug murders actually decreased, even in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Murnae itself. Most gangs were content to direct their attentions southwards, into the central provinces of India and away from Company lands. These provinces were then made up entirely of small, poorly resourced native states, where policing was often inadequate and the Thugs went largely unmolested. During the cold season of 1813, several new or enlarged Thug bands had taken to the roads of southern Hindustan with considerable success. In the course of the cold season several parties of Thugs united to seize 27,000 rupees from one group of travellers outside the town of Rewah, and another 13,500 rupees from a gang of 27 dacoits who were tracked and slaughtered close to Lucknadown. This made the year 1813–14 one of the most successful ever known by the Thugs.
In later years, the Company would come to see the destruction of Murnae as a mistake. ‘It is, to me, extremely doubtful whether by this dispersion of the Thug headquarters we performed any real benefit to India,’ one senior judge observed two decades later. Yet this was scarcely Halhed’s fault. There were, in 1812, already many precedents for expelling undesirables from British territory into the Native States; it was a cheap and simple – if scarcely effective – solution to the problem of tackling crime, and it was still almost unheard of for large gangs to be smashed by the mass arrest and trial of their members. Had the Etawah magistrates wanted to tackle the Sindouse Thugs in this way, there was no prospect of them mustering the resources required to arrest, try and imprison the hundreds of bandits and rebels living in the ravines.
For Company officials such as Halhed and Perry, cast more or less adrift in Etawah, the activities of the Thugs – and indeed criminal justice in general – were little more than unwelcome distractions from more pressing tasks. The idea of pursuing highly mobile gangs of stranglers through central India was certainly impractical. Even the cost of imprisoning the Thugs who were in custody was such that the Company was glad to let others bear it. When news reached Etawah that Maharajah Sindhia
Similar Books
