Thug

The myth founder

In the first ages of the world, a gigantic demon infested the ground, destroying humanity progressively its creation. Kâlî then decided to kill it to save the humanity of the destruction. She provides herself with an immense sword, went ahead of of the monster and cut out it of pieces. But at once that blood touched the ground, from each drop was born a new demon, as terrible as the first. While perspiration ran on its body, it realized that all its efforts were vain and that it would be soon too weak to cut down the hordes which rose following each blow of sword.

It thinks then of another method to exterminate the demon, then with its sweat mixed with the ground, it manufactured two men whom it charged with the holy task with delivering the ground of the monsters. To each man, it gave a piece of its clothing then taught to them how to kill without bloodshed. Thanks to the action of the thugs founders, become of the expert throttle valves, the ground was soon delivered race of the demons.

The sect

The thugs trained a well organized brotherhood professional assassins, who, by groups of 10 to 40, more rarely 200 people, traversed India under the costume of honest travellers and obtained the confidence of the travellers of the easiest classes. They avoided sacrificing some their contemporaries whose murder did not satisfy Kâlî. Among those, one found the women, the casualties, leprous disabled person or, the artists such as the dancers, the poets or the musicians, the saints itinerant men like the Sadhu S or the Fakir S (their Moslem equivalent) and the poor people, often of low castes, like the launderers, the sweeping ones, the blacksmiths, the carpenters and the pressers of oil. The Sikh S were also, seems it, Tabou S. the children present in the attacked caravans were to be adopted by the thugs and integrated in their sect.

The beliefs of the thugs were a strange mixture, but it was not the only one in India, of Hindouisme and Islam, and they were recruited among the believers of the two religions. However, that they are Moslem or Hindu, they made a worship enthusiastic and without Islamic influence in Kâlî. The assassination for a profit was, for them, a religious duty and was considered a holy and honourable profession, which no moral consideration came into play.

The fraternity of the thugs used a kind of Argot called Râmasî as well as a whole of signs by which its members recognized themselves, even if they were originating in very distant areas of India. Those with which it age or the infirmities did not make it possible any more to take an active part in the ritual murder continued to take part like observers or spies. However, because of their worked out organization, of the maintained secrecy and assured safety around their operations and the religious pretext in which they wrapped their exactions, they were not identified like criminals and continued during centuries to practice their trade of assassins, without causing investigations on behalf of the Râja S or of the Nawâb S.

Thugs with work

The will of the goddess was communicated to them by a very complex system of Présage S. to obey those, they were often brought to travel of the hundreds of kilometers to join their victim or, in his company, in the search of a place favourable with its execution. The achieved task, of the rites were carried out in the honor of the goddess, and an important part of the profit drawn from the assassinations was intended to him.

When a favorable opportunity arose, the thug strangled its victim by means of a cord or roumal , a kind of handkerchief, plundered it and buried it to dissimulate the body. The assassination was practiced after the execution of the old religious rites, private individuals with the sect. The large troops were divided into smaller groups which took different roads but gave each other appointment to divide the spoils. They were not confined with the isolated travellers, not hesitating to plunder caravans of about fifty people, not letting anybody escape from it. The thugs, with the image of the Indian company divided in varna, were specialized in certain tasks, also some of them, often prepared the tombs by advance on the road of the caravans so that the action is shortest possible.

The captain William James Sleeman, an English officer strongly implied in the fight against the thugs, thus gave a report on a group of 52 men and 7 women simultaneously strangled and thrown in tombs prepared for them the morning-even. Some of these travellers were with horse and well armed, but the thugs, which seemed to have been more than two hundreds had been guarded against any risk of failure.

Sleeman gives an account of certain discussions between thugs captive which allotted their misfortune to be captured with a punishment of Kâlî for the degeneration of their practices, in particular the murder of estropiés, women or children.

According to the Guinness Book of the records, the thugs responsible for would have been died for 2 000 000 people.

End of the thugs

Although no attack of the thugs was never conducted against the Britanniques, those undertook, in the Années 1830, an eradication campaign of the sect, had mainly with the efforts of William Sleeman. A named police force Thuggee and Dacoity Department was installation and until in 1904 remained it, year when it was replaced by the Central Criminal Intelligence Department .

Until 1826, the fight against the thugs is not very energetic, then this same year, the British abruptly seem inhabited determination to finish some with them. From 1826 with 1855, in various the Presidencies of India, 1.562 people are shown to be killers members of the sect. Among those, 328 are hung, 999 off-set, 77 imprisoned with life, 71 locked up for shorter periods, 31 die in prison, before passing in front of the judge, 11 escape and only 21 is discharged. During all the period of eradication , Sleeman carried out some 3.000 arrests.

Demystification and heritage

The history of the thugs was popularized by books such as the novel Confession of Thug of Philip Meadows Taylor (1839), the word thug entering besides to its continuation the English vocabulary like synonym of “gangster”. It is necessary however to keep in mind that it is not a question of a documentary work but of a work of literature to be replaced in its context. If one cannot deny the reality of the thugs and their activity, much of what we let us believe it of them comes from this text, which contains certainly a solid documentation base but which incrit also in the English romantic movement and which is to be brought closer to the Gothic novels Frankenstein or modern Prométhée to Mary Shelley or Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The Indian population, which was the victim, voluntarily took part in the fight against the thugs. A city of the State of the Madhya Pradesh commemorates by its name, Sleemanabad , the memory of Sleeman. However, the contemporary perception of the thugs remains divided enough in India, some see there a connected organization with Robin of Wood and his/her companions, the redistribution with the poor in less, others rather see there an operational structure near of the Mafia. Its disappearance in the middle of the 19th century does not make it possible to slice between these various approaches.

In the novel pseudo-history of OJ Soares the man who killed Getùlio Vargas , a Hindu dwarf, factotum of Mata Hari, is introduced like the last one going down from Thugs, a handle as of his aïeux ones having succeeded in escaping the British and taking refuge with Java…

The two most popular descriptions of the worship thug to the cinema are in the film Gunga DIN of 1939 and in Indiana Jones and the cursed temple of 1984. The two films show the hero fighting against a secret resurgence of the worship. The thugs play also a big role in less known film of Mario Camerini, Kali Yug, goddess of revenge ( Kali Yug, the dea beyond vendetta ).

Thugs: a British misinterpretation?

In its book, the strangled traveller. India of Thugs, colonialism and the imaginary one. (1995), Martine van Woerkens considers that the existence of a “worship” Thug at the 19th century would not be - at least partially - that the product of the phantasm of the colonists, translating at the same time British mistrust with regard to the moved back regions of India and an ignorance of ritual and social practices of its inhabitants. In addition, this sect did not serve the British interests, quite to the contrary, by implicitly justifying the “civilizing” presence of the occupant.

Quotation

“It was on this region that Feringhea, the chief of Thugs, the king of the Throttle valves, exerted his domination. These assassins, plain in an imperceptible association, strangled, in the honor of the goddess of Death, the victims of any age, without never pouring blood, and it was a time when one could not excavate an unspecified place of this ground without finding a corpse there. ”
Jules Verne, the Round the world tour in eighty days

See too

Indiana Jones and the cursed temple

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