had arrested 130 men from Laljee’sband, no effort was made to have more than a handful of the Thugs most responsible for Maunsell’s death transferred to British jails, though Halhed and Perry must have known that the rest were unlikely to spend long in a Maratha prison. There was a simple reason for this failing: no one, in 1812, was greatly concerned to discover the fate of the unknown number of travellers who vanished on the roads of the Subcontinent each year. Even after Murnae had been razed to the ground, most of the Thugs who had lived there felt quite safe in their new homes in Bundelcund.
* An Indian term used to describe an administrative district of anywhere between 20 and 200 villages.
* In later life NB Halhed became a long-serving Member of Parliament and, notoriously, the vocal supporter of an eccentric millennial cult.
* European.
* The Thugs themselves firmly believed that these deaths were inflicted by ‘a great Demon that every night visited our prison and killed or tortured some one’. One of their number, Thukoree, recalled: ‘I saw him only once myself. I was awake while all the rest were asleep; he came in at the door, and seemed to swell as he came in till his head touched the roof, and the roof was very high, and his bulk became enormous. I prostrated myself, and told him that “he was our Purmesur [great god] and we poor helpless mortals depended entirely on his will”. This pleased him, and he passed me by; but took such a grasp at the man Mungulee, who slept by my side, that he was seized with spasms all over from the nape of the neck to the sole of his foot … This was his mode of annoying them, and but few survived … This spirit came most often in the cold and rainy weather.’
CHAPTER 5
‘The Infamous System of Thuggee’
‘ tupjana – changing direction’
Even as the Murnae and Sindouse Thugs vanished into the patchwork of independent and semi-independent states that made up Gwalior and Bundelcund, the East India Company was forgetting them. Halhed left Etawah for a better position at a larger station within a few weeks of his return from Sindouse at the end of 1812. Perry, who remained in the town until the early 1820s, concentrated more and more on other work, and though Etawah’s new magistrate, George Stockwell, took up the task of harrying any Thugs bold enough to settle within the Company’s borders, he was very much alone. Few other British officers in India knew or cared about the stranglers.
A scant and scattered body of knowledge concerning the Thugs did exist, had Perry only known it. British officials had first encountered organized bands of stranglers a full quarter of a century before Halhed ventured into Sindouse, and, even before that, there had been indications that such gangs, or something very like them, were roaming India. But the almost total lack of communication between the Company’s three Presidencies – each of which maintained its own administrative system, its own army and its own police – made it difficult for anyone to draw together the few reports that did exist. News of Perry’s activities in Etawah barely penetrated further than the Jumna at first; the proceedings of magistrates in Madras were filed in the archives of that Presidency and forgotten. And so long as Thuggee was perceived as a local problem – with officers expelling criminals from their territorieswithout worrying too much where they would settle next – the situation was unlikely to change.
The first unequivocal description of an Indian strangling gang had been composed nearly a thousand miles from Etawah, in the vicinity of Madras. Writing home in 1785, more than a century after John Fryer had witnessed the execution of what may have been a gang of Thugs outside Surat, a Company administrator by the name of James Forbes reported that
several men were taken up for a most cruel method of robbery and murder, practised on travellers, by a tribe
* An Indian term used to describe an administrative district of anywhere between 20 and 200 villages.
* In later life NB Halhed became a long-serving Member of Parliament and, notoriously, the vocal supporter of an eccentric millennial cult.
* European.
* The Thugs themselves firmly believed that these deaths were inflicted by ‘a great Demon that every night visited our prison and killed or tortured some one’. One of their number, Thukoree, recalled: ‘I saw him only once myself. I was awake while all the rest were asleep; he came in at the door, and seemed to swell as he came in till his head touched the roof, and the roof was very high, and his bulk became enormous. I prostrated myself, and told him that “he was our Purmesur [great god] and we poor helpless mortals depended entirely on his will”. This pleased him, and he passed me by; but took such a grasp at the man Mungulee, who slept by my side, that he was seized with spasms all over from the nape of the neck to the sole of his foot … This was his mode of annoying them, and but few survived … This spirit came most often in the cold and rainy weather.’
CHAPTER 5
‘The Infamous System of Thuggee’
‘ tupjana – changing direction’
Even as the Murnae and Sindouse Thugs vanished into the patchwork of independent and semi-independent states that made up Gwalior and Bundelcund, the East India Company was forgetting them. Halhed left Etawah for a better position at a larger station within a few weeks of his return from Sindouse at the end of 1812. Perry, who remained in the town until the early 1820s, concentrated more and more on other work, and though Etawah’s new magistrate, George Stockwell, took up the task of harrying any Thugs bold enough to settle within the Company’s borders, he was very much alone. Few other British officers in India knew or cared about the stranglers.
A scant and scattered body of knowledge concerning the Thugs did exist, had Perry only known it. British officials had first encountered organized bands of stranglers a full quarter of a century before Halhed ventured into Sindouse, and, even before that, there had been indications that such gangs, or something very like them, were roaming India. But the almost total lack of communication between the Company’s three Presidencies – each of which maintained its own administrative system, its own army and its own police – made it difficult for anyone to draw together the few reports that did exist. News of Perry’s activities in Etawah barely penetrated further than the Jumna at first; the proceedings of magistrates in Madras were filed in the archives of that Presidency and forgotten. And so long as Thuggee was perceived as a local problem – with officers expelling criminals from their territorieswithout worrying too much where they would settle next – the situation was unlikely to change.
The first unequivocal description of an Indian strangling gang had been composed nearly a thousand miles from Etawah, in the vicinity of Madras. Writing home in 1785, more than a century after John Fryer had witnessed the execution of what may have been a gang of Thugs outside Surat, a Company administrator by the name of James Forbes reported that
several men were taken up for a most cruel method of robbery and murder, practised on travellers, by a tribe
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