Thug

The ghastly history of the Thug stranglers is well told in Mike Dash's thoroughly researched and entertaining (if that's the word) new book.

Travelling on the roads of India was a dangerous business in the nineteeth century (and, indeed, for many years before). If the dacoits didn't rob you, there was always the possibility that you would be strangled by a gang of Thugs - and then robbed.

Dash makes clear just how matter-of-fact and cunning were these men. Travelling in groups, Thugs would inveigle their way into travellers' parties (scouts would be on the lookout for likely victims) and then gain their confidence by stressing that it would be safer for them to travel together. Often, days - and hundreds of miles - would pass. When both the time and the location were deemed suitable, the Thugs would strangle the entire group of travellers, disfigure the bodies, and bury them in prepared pits or throw them down wells. The Thugs would then disperse, taking anything valuable with them back to their villages.

The lack of anything resembling an Indian national police meant that the scale of these crimes was virtually unknown; even it had been, the resources would not have been available to tackle the problem. When the first rumours did begin to emerge, one man, William Sleeman (a political officer in the employ of the East India Company) became determined to eradicate the Thug cult. That he succeeded in fewer than fifty years is testament to his single-minded determination to make the roads of India safe for travellers.

Sleeman collected huge amounts of evidence from captured Thugs, which he then used to track down other stranglers. After being tried, prisoners were either hanged, transported or imprisoned. By cross-referencing the connections between gangs, Slleman was in effect inventing policing methods that are still in use today.

Dash is very good at explaining the motivation behind the stranglers' deeds and setting them in the context of nineteenth-century history: destitution often left Indians with little alternative but to join Thug gangs in order to make money, and there was also a certain hereditary imperative to becoming a strangler. Whatever the reason, however, Dash makes it abundantly clear that Thugs rarely, if ever, showed remorse for the murders they had committed.