Free Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult by Mike Dash

and I would certainly murder him. Dacoits and robbers are contemptible. I despise a dacoit. Let him come before me!
     
    Thugs had lived in the district around Etawah for at least a hundred years. If the gangs’ own oral traditions are to be believed, their ancestors probably arrived on the banks of the Jumna late in the seventeenth century, some coming from the town of Himmutpore and others from Sursae, to the south of the river. These early immigrants prospered so much in the course of theeighteenth century that by 1797, when the Marathas had established themselves at Gwalior and could levy taxes on the people of the Jumna valley, they recorded no fewer than 440 ‘families of Thugs’ in one small area south of Etawah alone.
    It is difficult, if not impossible, to say how closely these early criminals resembled the men whom Perry interrogated in 1810. The first-hand recollections of the oldest stranglers ever to recount their histories date only to 1760, and contain no hint that these Thugs’ methods and habits were not broadly the same in those days as those encountered in the nineteenth century . Many families, indeed, took great pride in their traditions and lineage, and could recite genealogies tracing their ancestry back through at least seven or eight generations of stranglers – which, if true, would place the Thugs’ origins somewhere in the period 1650–1700. Gholam Hossyn told his interrogator that his fellow Thugs believed that their fraternity had existed since the days of Alexander the Great. A more plausible fragment of tradition, though, takes the story back no more than another century, for many of the men living in the first decades of the 1800s firmly believed that their forebears had lived together in Delhi in the time of the third Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great.
    In those days – Akbar ruled northern India from 1556 until 1605 – there were said to have been seven great Thug families. All of them were Muslim and most had their headquarters in the ancient city, and it was only when one clan incurred the wrath of the Great Mughal himself by murdering one of his favourite slaves that ‘the whole of the Thugs fled from the capital and spread themselves about the country’. Some went no further than Agra, while others scattered hundreds of miles to the south, into the Deccan. A handful – among them several of the families whose descendants finally established themselves near Etawah – crossed the Jumna into Oudh, where they lived for several decades under the protection of the Rajah of Akoopore.
    The reliability of these purely oral histories is difficult to gauge. There seems to have been broad agreement among many Thugs that their ancestors had come from Delhi, but various traditions – not set down until the 1830s – can hardly be entirely true. The supposedly ‘Muslim’ clans of Delhi had Hindu names, for example; and for all the Thugs’ proud boasts that their forebears had defied the Emperor himself, there were hints that their true origin was much more humble. At the weddings of one Thug clan, a grizzled murdererconceded, ‘an old matron will sometimes repeat: “Here’s to the spirits of those who once led bears, and monkeys; to those who drove bullocks, and marked with the godnee , * and those who made baskets for heads”’ – an account suggesting that, far from being aristocratic Muslims, the earliest members of this family were actually khunjurs , wandering tradesmen who roamed through Hindustan with their herds of cattle. Many Thugs hotly disputed this explanation . ‘By no means,’ protested one. ‘Our ancestors, after their captivity at Delhi, were obliged to adopt these disguises to effect their escape. Some pretended to be khunjurs, but they were not really so; they were high-caste Musulmans.’ But even this man admitted that the glorious genealogies he had often heard recited were probably false, and guessed that some early Thugs, at least, had sprung from among