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

the impoverished camp followers of the Mughal army.
    That, really, is as far as the available evidence can take us. All attempts to trace the history of the seven clans further back than Akbar’s day founder on the difficulty of interpreting earlier sources, for the first incontrovertible use of the word ‘thug’ to refer to murderers, rather than to thieves and swindlers, dates only to the 1600s. It is interesting – given the Thugs’ own insistence that their earliest ancestors were Muslims – to note that ‘stranglers and assassins’ formed one of the five classes of brigands discussed by the Arabic author Uthman al-Khayyat in a work dating to the tenth century AD . ** The seventeenth-century travellers Jean Thévenot and John Fryer, meanwhile, both described gangs of Indian highway robbers whose methods resembled those employed by the Thugs two hundred years later; Thévenot heard of the existence of cunning highwaymen who murdered their victims with ‘a certain slip with a running noose, which they can cast with so much sleight about a man’s neck … that they almost never fail’, while Fryer recalled an encounter with a fifteen-strong gang of robbers captured near Surat, who ‘used to lurk under Hedges and in narrow Lanes’ and possessed ‘a Device of a weight tied to aCotton Bowstring made of guts of some length’ which they threw over the heads of passing travellers. But references in old chronicles and histories to gangs of stranglers may simply demonstrate that the Thugs had no monopoly on this method of killing their victims. Certainly murder by strangulation was common enough in Mughal times for the Emperor Aurangzeb to draw up a farman (law) specifying the punishment to be meted out to those found guilty of the practice. The Thugs, awful as they were, were merely one product, among many, of India’s lawless interior.
    By the early nineteenth century, moreover, Thug gangs were far from the socially exclusive clans described in their early traditions. Most, the surviving evidence suggests, were thoroughly heterogeneous, recruited from men of all backgrounds, classes and castes. Their members were defined by the manner in which they made a living, rather than by their racial or religious identity. There was no such thing as a typical Thug, and the Thugs of the Jumna valley, whom Perry had stumbled across by chance, were far from the only sort of Thug gang.
    There were, indeed, more than a dozen varieties of strangler scattered across much of the length and breadth of India. Almost all were distinguished by their place of residence, a detail that may suggest there was some truth in traditions of a general flight from Delhi. The men of the Doab and Oudh were ‘Jumaldahees’, from their homes along the Jumna river. * In the northern reaches of the Deccan, the Telinganies, Arcottees and Beraries hailed from Telingana, Arcot and Berar respectively. Other Thugs, however, seem to have taken their name from the occupations followed by their principal leaders. The Lodahas, who came mostly from the province of Bihar, were caravan drivers named for the lodh (load) they carried ; the Motheeas were ‘from a class of weavers’; the Moltanees were bullock drivers who strangled their victims with the leather thongs they used for driving their oxen.
    Few outsiders – even the British officers who questioned captured Thugs – ever really penetrated the complex interrelationships that seem to have developed between the various groups. So scanty is the evidence for the mere existence of some classes of Thug that their importance remains largely a matter of guesswork, even today, and some authorities have argued thatmost of the gangs mentioned in early nineteenth-century sources do not deserve to be classed as ‘Thugs’ at all. The captured stranglers questioned by Perry and the Company officers who came after him do seem, nonetheless, to have recognized the existence of a number of different groups of Thugs, and