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

were insistent that each saw itself as ‘distinct’. ‘The Hindu Thugs of Talghat,’ for example, ‘were admired by all,’ one Deccan man explained. ‘They are extraordinary men. They have three painted lines on their foreheads extending up from a central point at the nose … They always wear them. They and the Arcot Thugs associate and act together; but they will never mix with us of Telingana … They will never intermarry with our families, saying that we once drove bullocks and were itinerant tradesmen, and consequently of lower caste.’ The Lodahas, meanwhile, had left their original homes in Oudh around the year 1700 and lived, in Perry’s time, along the border with Nepal, restricting their activities to the provinces of Bihar and Bengal. ‘They are,’ a Doab Thug recounted, ‘descended from the same common stock as ourselves … Their dialect and usages are all the same as ours, but they rarely make Thugs of any men but the members of their own families. They marry into other families who do not know them to be Thugs, but their wives never know their secrets, and can therefore never divulge them.’
    The various bands of Thugs seem, in any case, to have mixed relatively freely amongst themselves. Most gangs were lead by stranglers of long experience who had become acquainted with the principals of other groups and knew a number of their followers. The sheer range and mobility of many Thugs – who thought nothing of walking hundreds of miles in the course of a single expedition – may help to explain how such relationships developed. In the course of a long career, a strangler could expect to fall in with gangs from all over India. Men from Etawah often knew Thugs from Oudh, Bengal and the Deccan, who could be recognized by ‘certain signs’ that many of the gangs had in common, in much the same way that groups of vagabonds passed information to each other on the roads of rural England. Special phrases, or the particular shape of a purse or a campfire, were among the signals that identified a Thug. * This system, informal though it undoubtedlywas, seems to have worked surprisingly well. A captured strangler named Morlee recounted how
    I was one day walking with some of our party near Jypore by an encampment of wealthy merchants from the westward, who wore very high turbans. I observed to my friends as we passed, ‘What enormous turbans these men wear!’ using our mystic term aghassee . The most respectable among them came up immediately and invited us to sit down with them, saying: ‘My good friends, we are of your fraternity, though our aghassees are not the same.’ They told us that they were now opulent merchants, and independent of Thuggee, the trade by which they had chiefly acquired their wealth, though they still did a little occasionally when they found in a suitable place a bunjj [merchandise] worth taking; but that they were now beyond speculating in trifles! We were kindly entertained, and much pleased with our new friends, but left them the same day, and I have never met any men of the same kind since.
     
    Relationships of this sort were eminently practical. Experienced stranglers knew full well that they could expect little help from any but fellow Thugs once on the roads. They were glad to share the knowledge of each other’s crimes, and took pride in the exploits of other gangs. Informal ties were strengthened when Thug gangs cooperated in inveigling and murdering large parties of travellers, and it was not uncommon for stranglers from one part of India to serve with those from another for a while, occasionally out of sheer curiosity as to the customs and methods of their hosts. Even more revealingly, the depositions made by captured Thugs often feature striking instances of gangs sharing the proceeds of their murders equally with others, even in cases in which one group of Thugs had done far more of the work than had their companions. The cooperation and the selflessness displayed