Murder a religious rite—Consulting the omens—The sacred pickaxe or “kussee”—The “goor” or consecrated sugar—Certain castes under the protection of the goddess Bhowanee spared—Women seldom killed—Belief of Thugs that the neglect of omens and murder of women were the causes of arrest and downfall—The apprenticeship of a young member to the practices of Thuggee.

When and how Thuggee began may not be definitely known, but it is certain that its votaries always attributed a divine origin to the practice. They esteemed the wholesale taking of life to which they were vowed a pious act, performed under the immediate orders and protection of the Hindu goddess, indifferently called Devee or Durga, Kali or Bhowanee. Murder was in fact a religious rite, the victim being a sacrifice to the deity. The strangler was troubled with no remorse; on the contrary, he gloried in his deed as the pious act of a devout worshipper. He prepared his murders without misgiving, perpetrated them without emotions of pity, and looked back upon them with satisfaction, not regret.

The Thugs gave free vent to some of the worst passions of perverse humanity; they were treacherous, underhanded, pitiless to those they deemed their legitimate prey. But yet they were seldom guilty of wanton cruelty; the pain they inflicted was only that caused by depriving a human being of life. It was a rule with them never to murder women, and they generally spared infant children whom they adopted, bringing them up in their traditions. Even if a woman was doomed to suffer she was most scrupulously preserved from insult beforehand, either by act or word. In private life they were patterns of domestic virtue, affectionate to their own families, fond of their homes; well conducted, law abiding subjects of the state that gave them shelter.

For two centuries at least Thuggee flourished with rank luxuriance in India, a soil exactly suited to its growth, fostered by the bigoted adherence to its tenets and a firm faith in the rewards vouchsafed to close observance of its rites and ceremonies. The Thugs were noted formalists in the performance of their dread business. When they went out to kill, they were governed by the strictest rules of procedure, and steadfastly believed that the breach of any, even the smallest, would entail discomfiture and misfortune. They gave the most unlimited credence to superstitions, followed omens blindly and implicitly, and undertook nothing without consulting their pundits, or wise men versed in precedent and traditionary lore. No Thug, Sleeman tells us, who had been fully initiated in the mysteries, doubted the inspiration of the pickaxe (the sacred emblem in the faith of Thuggee), when consecrated in due form, or doubted that the omens sought and observed were all-sufficient to guide them to their prey or warn them from their danger. They were satisfied that only by the neglect of these and the careless worship rendered to the goddess could the suppression of Thuggee have become possible to the British government.

The most portentous omen was that invited from the deity on the eve of a new expedition for gang-robbery. When about to be undertaken, a chief pundit was asked to name a day for departure and the road to take. On the day suggested the jemadar, or leader of the party, would start out holding in his right hand the lota, a brass pot filled with water suspended by a string from his mouth; in his left hand he carried the sacred pickaxe and a clean white handkerchief in which were several coins. He proceeded a short distance along the road named by the pundit and then paused to pray to the “great goddess and universal mother” to vouchsafe some signal that the proposed expedition met with her approval. The best possible omen was the braying of an ass and if it was heard on the left, followed by a second bray on the right, it was believed that the expedition would be an entire and lasting success even if continued for years. The first, on the left, is called the pilhaoo; the second, on the right, the thibaoo. The terms are applied to the voices of any animals, but by far the most effective is deemed the braying of the ass, whose voice is equal to any hundred birds and superior to that of any other animal.

The initial ceremony, after the omen, proceeded by the leader’s seating himself on the ground with the lota before him. He remained thus seated for seven hours while his followers brought him food and made the necessary preparations for the journey. If the lota should have fallen from his hand terrible disaster might be anticipated and the jemadar would inevitably die during the year. If any one was heard weeping as they left the village, great evil impended; the same threatened if they met a corpse being carried out, or if they met an oil vendor, a carpenter, a potter, a dancing master, a blind or lame man, a fakir with a brown waist band or a jogi with long ragged hair. A corpse from any village but their own was a good omen. The call of a jackal, of which there were three kinds, threatened great evil, and if at work the gang instantly quit the country leaving any victims marked down for slaughter untouched. The call of the lizard was a good omen, that of a wolf or a hare crossing the path, bad, entailing an immediate halt and change of route. If a dog was seen to shake his head operations had to be suspended for three days.

In all Thug ceremonies the sacred pickaxe or kussee played a great part. It was treated with the utmost respect and was so holy that to be sworn upon it meant an oath more binding than on Ganges water, and perjury on the pickaxe would entail the death of the foresworn within six days. The superstition was that the perjurer would die horribly, with his head turned round, his face toward his back, and writhing in tortures till the end came. The oath on the pickaxe was in use when the Thugs filled the gaols and it was made upon a piece of cloth fashioned in the shape of the kussee. A legend existed that the kussee was the gift of the goddess herself when she had been greatly incensed by the contravention of one of her laws. At first the Thugs did not trouble about the corpses of their victims but blindly left them for Kali’s disposal. One day a slave looked back and saw her throwing them in the air, and in her rage the goddess condemned her votaries to bury their bodies themselves, digging the graves with the consecrated pickaxe. It was to be made by some blacksmith in the presence of the jemadar. The consecration follows a long ceremony, including many washings in water, sour milk and ardent spirits, and the pickaxe is first used to smash a cocoanut, the kernel of which is eaten by the assembled worshippers. The pickaxe was entrusted to the safe keeping of the jemadar.

When on the road it was carried by the most sober and careful man of the party. In camp he buried it in a secure place with its point toward the intended route, but they believed that when unearthed, if another direction was better, the point would be found supernaturally changed. It was at one time the rule to throw the pickaxe down a well at the nightly halt, and many witnesses declared that it used to spring up spontaneously from the water in the morning to come into the hand of its carrier at his call. Several of the Thug prisoners in Jubbulpore gaol assured Sir William Sleeman that this was absolute fact, and went so far as to declare they had seen it happen. The kussee was religiously worshipped every seventh day.

Another important agent in the Thug religion was the goor or consecrated sugar. It was an offering to Bhowanee, made as a sacrifice of tupounee, to celebrate the commission of any murder. An exact amount of coarse sugar was purchased to the worth of 1 rupee, 4 annas. A clean place was selected and the sugar laid out on a sheet or blanket, on which were also put the sacred pickaxe and a piece of silver coin. The leader of the gang having taken his seat on the blanket, surrounded by the most notable stranglers, with the rest outside, made a small hole in the ground for the goor and then dedicated it saying, “Great goddess, who vouchsafed 1 lac and 62,000 rupees to Toora Naig and Koduk Bunwaree in their need, so we pray thee fulfil our desires.” (Toorah Naig was a celebrated jemadar who, single-handed, with his servant, Koduk Bunwaree, killed a man possessed of plunder, and bringing it home, divided it honestly among their assembled comrades as though they had all been present at the murder.) The Thugs fervently repeated the prayer and the goor was distributed, first to those on the blanket, who ate in solemn silence, and when they had finished, it was given to the rest who were entitled by their rank to receive it. No one but a man who had strangled his victim was suffered to partake of the goor, which had a miraculous effect; and the Thugs were persuaded that if any human being tasted it he would take forthwith to the trade. The Thug chief Feringhea told Sir William Sleeman that the goor completely changed a man’s nature, adding,—“It would change the nature of a horse. Let anyone taste it and he will be a Thug, though he know all the trades and have all the wealth in the world. For my own part I was well to do; my relations were rich and I held high office myself in which I was sure of promotion. Yet I was always miserable when absent from my gang. While I was still a mere boy, my father made me taste that fatal sugar, and if I were to live a thousand years I should never be able to follow any other trade.”

There was a hierarchy in the caste of Thuggee. The first grade was the kuboola, or “tyro,” who after initiation was first employed as scout, then as grave-digger, lughae; next in rank was the shumseea, whose duty it was to hold the hands and feet of the victim when being strangled by the bhurtote, who is of the highest grade in the organisation. The initiation was made early; a Thug parent apprenticed his son at thirteen or fourteen years. The candidate having bathed and dressed in new clothes, which had never been bleached, was led by his guru, or spiritual director, into a room where the leaders of the band were assembled seated on a white cloth; the sacred pickaxe was placed in his right hand, and raising his left on high, he repeated a fearful oath dictated to him and sworn on the Koran, after which he ate a small piece of the consecrated goor. He pledged himself to be faithful, brave and secret, to pursue to destruction every human being whom chance or his own ingenuity threw into his power. Only he was forbidden to kill the members of certain castes, such as sweepers, oil-vendors, blacksmiths, carpenters, professional musicians, any maimed or leprous persons, the carriers of Ganges water or any man travelling accompanied by a cow. As a general rule women were spared, and many cases are quoted of the misfortunes that overtook those who disregarded this regulation. Feringhea stated that his gang after killing many women had no luck, and his family fell into great misfortune. Sometimes when they encountered a rich old woman, she was sacrificed, and even youth and beauty did not always escape; but the consequences were always the same. After the murder of the woman Kalee Bebee, who was travelling with a gold chudur for a sacred tomb, the perpetrators were severely punished by fate. One got worms in his body and died barking like a dog; others died miserably in gaol or after crossing the black water (transportation to Penang). The families concerned became extinct. Thugs who had slain women admitted that they deserved the worst evils that could befall them.

The crime of killing women was sometimes aggravated by the murder of their children. In the case of the murder of Bunda Alee, Moonshee of General Doveton commanding at Jhalna, his wife and daughters were strangled. One of the Thugs would have adopted the infant child and was carrying it off, when a comrade pressed him to kill it also lest they should be detected on crossing the Nurbudda. Whereupon the miscreant threw the living child on the heap of dead bodies in the open grave, and the child was buried alive.

The apprenticeship to murder was gradual. The young members saw and heard nothing of the first affair after their initiation; they were ignorant of the exact business, but grew to like the life as they were mounted on ponies and received presents purchased out of their share of the booty. On the second expedition they began to suspect that murder was committed, and on the third they witnessed the actual deed. They accepted the horrible situation, and were seldom much shocked. But in one case told by Feringhea, a lad of fourteen, out for the first time and mounted on a pony, was committed to the charge of a young comrade, who was to keep him in the rear out of sight and hearing of the affair when the signal was given. Unfortunately, the boy broke away and galloped up in time to witness the scene; he heard the screams and saw them all strangled. He fell off his pony and became delirious, screaming and trembling violently if anyone touched him or spoke to him. They sat by him when the gang went on and vainly attempted to pacify him, but he never recovered his senses and died the same night. A somewhat similar case is told by Sleeman of an affair near Shikarpore, where the place selected for the murder was in an extensive jungle by the river side, and a party of travellers were strangled, all but two young boys who were to be saved for adoption. One of them, when the bodies were being thrown into a ditch covered with earth and bushes, began to scream violently, and the Thug who had intended to adopt him, finding it impossible to pacify him, seized him by the legs and dashed his brains out against a stone. The dead boy was left where he lay and his body was found by a fisherman, who gave the alarm which led to the pursuit and arrest of the Thugs.

Colonel Meadows-Taylor in his “Confessions of a Thug” graphically pictures the sufferings of his hero after the first affair he witnessed. “Do what I would,” the Thug confesses, “the murdered father and son appeared before me; the old man’s voice rung in my ears, and the son’s large eyes seemed to be fixed on mine. I felt as though a thousand skitans (devils) sat on my breast, and sleep would not come to my eyes. It appeared so cold-blooded, so unprovoked a deed, that I could not reconcile myself in any way to having become even a silent spectator of it.” Next day his father reasoned with him, making him eat the goor, and explaining that having put his hand to the work he must not turn back. As soon as the kuboola has got over the first feelings of disgust and his courage is equal to the blood-thirsty business, he becomes the disciple of some renowned and experienced member of the gang, and instruction is given in strangling. He is entrusted with the handkerchief, roomal, and taught how to make the knot with a piece of silver inserted. When he has fully learned the process, one of the travellers at the next affair is entrusted to him, and with a shumseea at hand to assist, he regularly graduates as a bhurtote and is eligible to become a leader of a gang of his own.

The stern resolve of the British government to suppress Thuggee, and the energetic assistance of the agents employed were no doubt the true cause of its being stamped out. The neglect of omens, the signs sent by Bhowanee to warn her votaries of threatened dangers, and the murder of women and persons of the protected castes, brought down upon the Thugs, in their own opinion, their deserved retribution. One leader of a gang was arrested with seventeen others because, as they said, he persisted in his purpose when a screaming hare had crossed his path. They pleaded that an omen was an order, and disobedience brought its own punishment. We may accept such explanations for what they are worth, and may assign to a more reasonable cause the activity in the years between 1826 and 1840, when no less than 3,689 Thugs were arrested and tried. Of these a large number were hanged, transported or imprisoned for life. A few were acquitted or died before sentence; a certain number became approvers or informers, and no doubt a fatal blow was struck at these horrid crimes which had been so long fostered and supported by nearly all classes in the community; landowners, native officers of the courts, police and village authorities.