Radhika Singha - Thuggee Campaign

'Providential' Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation
Author(s): Radhika Singha

Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Special Issue: How Social, Political and Cultural
Information Is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed (Feb., 1993), pp. 83-146
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Modern Asian Studies 27, i (1993), pp. 83-I46. Printed in Great Britain.
'Providential'
Circumstances:The Thuggee
Campaignof the I83os and Legal Innovation
RADHIKA SINGHA
Universityof Delhi
In his historical defence of the record of the East India Company in

India Kaye headed his chapter on thuggee with the following sum-
mary of contents: 'Thuggee-Increased knowledge of the Habits of
the People--Its Results'.' It was with the flourish of mystery unveiled
and mastered that a group of officers of the Political Department had
lobbied for special operations against this 'murderous fraternity' and
for special laws to deal with it.2
I propose to examine why these officers found such 'providential'
circumstances for the inauguration of the campaign3 and how the
procedures of prosecution trial and sentencing generated by it set up a
context for legal innovation. The developments which the operations
against thuggee introduced to police agency and to the framework of
This article is derived from my Ph.D. dissertation, 'A "despotism of law": British
criminal justice and public authority in North India, 1772-i837', University of
Cambridge, I990. I would like to thank C. A. Bayly, who supervised my dissertation,
and Ravi Vasudevan, who commented on this paper.
I W.
J. Kaye, TheAdministration of theEast India Company: A Historyof IndianProgress
(London, I853), p. 354. The British, he wrote, had first seen the natives as a people
'to be traffickedwith', then 'to be subdued', then as revenue payers, then as a people
to be governed, but only very recently 'to know'. The study of books had preceded the
study of men, though that which was most needed was not set down in books; there
had been little knowledge of the 'corrosive evils' of Indian society. Ibid., pp. 355-6.
Thornton in his popular account of the thugs considered that it was an index of
limited knowledge that the English had not known about thuggee earlier despite an
intercourse of 200 years. E. Thornton, Illustrationsof theHistoryandPracticesof the Thugs
(London, 1837).
2 In Anglo-Indian parlance 'thugs' were believed to constitute a kind of hereditary
criminal fraternity, resting on beliefs and rites which upheld a 'profession' of inveig-
ling and strangling travellers.
3
Sleeman often referred to the circumstances favouring the campaign as 'provi-
dential'. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabularyof thePeculiarLanguageusedby the
Thugs,with an Introduction andAppendix,Descriptiveof theSystemPursuedby thatFraternity
and of the Measures... Adoptedby the SupremeGovernment of Indiafor its Suppression
(Calcutta, i836), pp. 46-7 (hereafter Ramaseeana).
oo26-749X/93/$5.oo + oo ? 1993 Cambridge University Press
83

84 RADHIKA SINGHA
criminal justice were subsequently widened to include operations

against certain dacoit tribes.4
The 'thuggee' Act of 1836 ruled that
I. whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the
passing of this Act, to any gang of Thugs, either within or without the
Territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with imprisonment
for life, with hard labour.
2. And ... every person accused of the offence ... may be tried by any court,
which would have been competent to try him, if his offence had been commit-
ted within the Zillah where that Court sits, any thing to the contrary, in any
Regulation contained, notwithstanding.
3. And ... no Court shall, on a trial of any person accused of the offence ...
require any Futwa from any Law Officer.
Act XXX of 1836 had many novel features: it applied with
retrospective effect and it extended the jurisdiction of the Company's
courts for this offence to territories outside the dominion of the Com-
pany. In addition, the offence could be tried in any court of the
Company irrespective of where it had been committed, and trial
would proceed without the forms of reference to Islamic law.5 But the
strangest feature of this enactment was the use of a cant term 'Thugs'
without explaining what precisely the offence of 'Thuggee' was. That
such a term was acceptable at a time when a penal code upholding
precision and exactness was on the agenda6 is an indication of the
success of a publicist campaign in official circles. Everyone knew what
'thuggee' was, except for a few pettifogging judges.
The conception of communities socialized to criminality, with its
4 In contrast to the thugs who were represented as murdering by stealth, dacoit
'tribes'wereunderstoodto makeattacksby openviolence.The definingline between
thuggee,dacoityand highwayrobberywas neverin factvery clear.For the Badhaks,
cf. W. H. Sleeman,Reporton Budhukalias BagreeDecoitsand OtherGangRobbers by
Hereditary
Profession(Calcutta,i849, hereafterReportonBudhuk Decoits).
5 The criminalcourts of the
Bengal Presidencyoperatedon what came to be
termedan 'Anglo-Muhammadan law': the productof variousBritishregulationsto
modifyor supplementthe Islamiclaw. In the Courtsof Circuitand in the superior
court,the NizamatAdalat,Muslimlaw officersgave afatwa, a formallegal opinion,
on the guiltor otherwiseof the prisonerunderIslamiclaw. The influenceof thefatwa
on the actualsentencepassedby the Britishjudge had been drasticallycurtailedby
the earlynineteenthcenturybut it was still regardedas an essentialprocedureof the
criminaltrial.
6 The law commissioners who framedthe draftpenal code of 1837had criticized
laws which allowed for imprecisionand variabilityin the definitionof crime and
thereforegave too much scope for the exerciseof judicial discretion.Indian law
commissionersto GovernorGeneralin Council (hereafterGG in C), 14 October
Papers(hereafter PP), 1837-38, vol. 41, pp. 466-8.
I837, Parliamentary

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S 85
members plundering or robbing as a 'profession', did not suddenly
emerge in the I83os.7 The theme has a history coterminous with the
very inauguration of the Company's judicial initiatives. In Bengal
Warren Hastings had sought to institutionalize judicial authority, to
centralize dispersed jurisdiction and to separate revenue collection
from the exercise of justice. On the one hand Hastings stressed the
need for uniform procedure, on the other he introduced a special
provision, Article 35 of 1772, which extended punishment for dacoity
from the individual offender to his family and village. This was justi-
fied on the grounds that the dacoits of India were not like other
criminals, they were 'robbers by profession, and even by birth; they
are formed into regular communities . .'.8 Hastings also argued that
conviction under Article 35 should be allowed on the grounds of
'public notoriety' for dacoity; professional crime had to be punished
on different standards of evidence from those applied to the offender
charged with a single crime.9
The theme of'criminal communities' occurred not only in a judicial
context but was also used to justify special executive powers or puni-
tive drives of various sorts. The targets of such measures were sup-
posed to have placed themselves outside the pale of society, thereby
forfeiting their claim to the protection of regular procedure.
In very general terms such drives can be attributed to the wider
process of colonial pacification, to the effort to make the subjects of
empire both taxable and 'policeable'. But there was also a constant
7
Cf. Jonathan Duncan, Resident Banaras, to GG in C, Bengal Revenue Judicial
(hereafter BRJ), 27 February 1792, BRJ P/I27/78, 13 April I792, p. 526, 535, India
Office Library (hereafter IOL); E. Moor reported that in India robbery was, like
begging, a hereditary craft, and not one viewed as great moral turpitude, Hindu
Infanticide(London, 181i ), pp. 153-4; Richard Jenkins, Reporton the Territories of the
Rajahof Nagpoor(Calcutta, 1827), p. 294; J. Shakespear, Acting Superintendent of
Police, Western Provinces (hereafter SP, WP) extract from his report, 30 April i816,
'Observations Regarding Badheks and Th'egs', AsiatickResearchesXIII (Calcutta,
182o);J. Malcolm, A Memoirof CentralIndia.vol. II (London, I823), pp. 182-8.
8 Committee of Circuit to Council at Fort William, 15 August 1772. The family of a
man executed for dacoity were to be made slaves of the state, and the village was to be
fined. General Regulations for the Administration of Justice, August 1772. But it is
uncertain whether this provision ever came into effective operation. Hastings to
Board, Io July 1773, in J. H. Harington, An ElementaryAnalysis of the Laws and
RegulationsEnactedby the Governor Generalin Councilat Fort Williamin Bengalforthe Civil
Government of the British Territoriesin that Presidency(Calcutta, I805-17), vol. I, pp.
300-1.
9 Warren Hastings to Council, Io July 1773, and extract from
progs of the Gov-
ernor and Council, 19 April 1774, J. E. Colebrooke, Supplementto a Digest of the
RegulationsandLaws Enactedby theGovernor
in Council(Calcutta, 1907), pp. I 14-I9, I22
(hereafter, Supplement).

86 RADHIKA SINGHA
reordering of the hierarchy of objectives within colonial 'law and

order', and the institutional strategies varied accordingly. The form of
action, military pacification or arrest, prosecution and trial, police
surveillance or 'reclamation', imposed its own constraints, for the
institutions of colonial order were not infinitely flexible. Such drives
may seem to be imposed by state on society, but in fact the particular
context of interaction between colonial 'order' and social authority,
and the institutional constraints imposed by the choice of strategy,
shaped each such initiative very differently.
The Thuggee Act indicates a degree of conflict between institu-
tional priorities. It was far easier to prosecute a prisoner on a charge
of belonging to some ill-defined criminal collectivity than to establish
individual responsibility for a specific criminal offence. But how far
was this 'dualism' between the 'professional/hereditary' criminal and
the 'casual' offender to be pushed?'?At what point would the formal
consistency of 'rule of law', and the principle of judicial control over
executive action be jeopardized? Arguments for special powers
against thugs or 'professional dacoits' were always countered by these
hesitations. So what were the factors which prevailed in the introduc-
tion of Act XXX of 1836?
I argue that the formation of the new Act cannot be attributed only
to complaints in judicial correspondence about the 'inadequacy' of
existing laws against 'professional' or 'hereditary' criminality.
Magisterial and judicial action had been taken in British territory
against people suspected of being thugs, or of belonging to a dacoit
tribe, well before the acts of 1836 and i843,1 but using legal pro-
visions applicable to all offenders. Nor is it clear that 'special
measures' were required because the crime of thuggee had assumed
'0 Sandria B. Freitag argues that arrangements for dealing with collective crime
grew up as a 'covert' legal structure forming an alternative to the overt legal structure
'ostensibly geared to individuals' which provided the reassuring appearance of 'the
rule of law'. Sandria B. Freitag, 'Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India',
ModernAsian Studies 25, 2 (199I), pp. 227-61, 23I. In contrast, I argue that both these
elements existed in uneasy relationship with the same body of law, and their coexist-
ence explains certain contradictions within it. Even if 'extra-ordinary measures' to
deal with 'criminal communities' took shape in territory outside the Company's
regulations, or within the field of executive discretion, they eventually had to be
integrated into the sphere of 'rule of law'. In this article I attempt to show how the
introduction of laws dealing with ill-defined 'criminal communities' introduced
certain fissures into the ideology of the equal, abstract and universal legal subject.
" Act XXIV of 1843 'for the conviction of professional dacoits, who belong to
certain tribes, systematically carrying on their lawless pursuits in different parts of the
country....'

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s 87
crisis proportions. Official reports stress the 'discovery' of the ramifi-
cations of thuggee rather than its escalation as a reason for sanction-
ing a campaign.12There was no clamour from their Indian subjects
for measures against thuggee: the major complaint of officials was the
difficulty of working through layers of collusion or concealment to
assess the extent of this crime.'3 Thugs did not attack parties which
included Europeans, so it was not a crime which directly affected the
safety of British travellers.
There was a concern to protect Company sepoys of the Bombay
and Madras armies, moving through Central India on their way
home to 'Hindustan'. They represented after all a certain outlay in
terms of training and political attachment.'4 Further, the establish-
ment of a government monopoly in opium in Rajputana and Central
India after the wars of i817-18 and the flow of remittances from
Bombay and Surat to finance this commodity, had increased the
Company's stake in the safety of the traffic in this region.'5
These factors had caused concern over the preceding decade and
British residents and Political Assistants in the princely states had
intervened in the arrest and trial of suspected thugs.16Yet the Com-
pany had been reluctant formally to assume jurisdiction from the
Indian princes and chiefs.'7 Even within its own territories the Com-
12 W. H. Sleeman of the Political Service had warned in general terms of the
increasing magnitude of thuggee, but so had Ochterlony, British resident in Malwa
and Rajputana, some eight years earlier. Cf. Sleeman's letter to the CalcuttaLiterary
Gazette,3 Oct. 1830 in G. Bruce, TheStranglers:The Cultof Thuggeeandits Overthrow in
BritishIndia (London, I968), pp. 8I-3. D. Ochterlony to G. Swinton, Secy, Political
Dept, 30 April 1822, in N. K. Sinha and A. K. Dasgupta (eds), Selectionsfrom
OchterlonyPapers (188-25) in the NAI (University of Calcutta, I964), p. 244.
13 Cf. W. H. Sleeman, Ramblesand Recollections of an Indian Official(i844; revised,
annotated edn, ed. V. A. Smith, i915; repr. Karachi, 1980), pp. 78-9, n. 4.
14 F. C. Smith, Agent to the Governor General, Sagar and Narbada Territories
(hereafter AGG, SNT), to W. H. Macnaghten, 29 May 1832. Selected records of the
Central Provinces Secretariat, 1829-32. Mss Eur Di I88, IOL, p. 132. Also, The Good
Old Days of John Company,compiled by W. H. Carey (Calcutta, 1907), pp. 249-50.
15 Until I830, the Company maintained a monopoly over the sale of opium from
this region. Thereafter it sought to extend its revenues by issuing passes for the transit
of opium through Company territory. In a certain sense the operations against
various species of plunderers in Central India and Rajputana were intertwined with
the Company's efforts to increase its revenues from trade and commerce at the
expense of the revenues of local chiefs and rulers.
16 Cf. Extract Bengal Political Consultations, 20 April 1824, no. 43, Board's Con-
sultations (hereafter, BC), F/4/984, 1828-29, IOL.
17 Ochterlony, resident in Malwa and Rajputana, had recommended the same
measures in 1822 which were to be implemented in the I83os, i.e. that the paramount
power should set up courts for the trial of robbers and murders, 'ceasing to enquire to
what state the Culprit is a Subject, or in whose dominion the Crime was committed'.

88 RADHIKA SINGHA
pany's government had rejected various suggestions made by its own

executive and judicial officers for special powers or special laws
against 'notorious' thugs or members of'dacoit tribes'.18
I suggest that in its initiation the thuggee campaign was woven into
a political elaboration of paramountcy, expounded, not through mili-
tary, fiscal or diplomatic arrangements, but through a rhetoric of
authoritarian reform.'9The thuggee campaign took shape in a period
in which certain 'universal' criteria of humanity were being
established as points of reference for the assertion of paramountcy. In
the reasons Bentinck gave for abolishing sati openly and by proclama-
tion instead of by indirect strategies, he had expressed a concern to
add a normative dimension to paramountcy.20Political officers were
directed to discourage the punishment of mutilation in the Indian
states,21 and the preamble to Bentinck's regulation to abolish corporal
punishment declared that the paramount power ought to present itself
as the reference point for the 'most enlightened legislation'.22
The thuggee campaign appealed to all shades of reform opinion,
both Evangelical and Utilitarian. Grafted as it was onto existing
agencies-the administration of the non-regulation districts and the
Company's political agencies in the princely states-it was not expec-
ted to be a very expensive proposition either.23
The government affirmed that the Company could assume this authority but indi-
cated a reluctance to do so. D. Ochterlony to G. Swinton, Secy, Political Dept, 30
April I822 and Secy, Pol. Dept to D. Ochterlony, 24 May I822, Selectionsfrom
OchterlonyPapers, pp. 244, 249.
18
See below.
19 It was
during Bentinck's governor-generalship, Lee Warner remarks, that a new
conception of political duties was developed 'which, derived from the law of nature or
the requirements of civilisation, affected British relations with every Native state.' Sir
William Lee-Warner, TheNativeStatesof India (ist edn, I9IO, repr., Tulsi Publishing
House, New Delhi, 1979), p. o00.
20 . .. now that we are supreme, my opinion is decidedly in favour of an open
avowed and general prohibition, resting entirely upon the moral goodness of the act,
and our power to enforce it ...'. Minute on sati, 8 Nov. 1829. C. H. Philips, The
of Lord William CavendishBentinck(Oxford University Press, Oxford,
Correspondence
1977), vol. I, p. 337 (hereafter CLWCB).
21 Foreign Dept Political Consultations, I2 Dec. 1833, no.
66-7, National Archives
of India (hereafter NAI) and despatch from Court of Directors, 16 May 1838, Indian
and Bengal despatches, E/4/758, pp. 489-90, IOL.
22
Preamble to Regulation 2, 1834.
23 The Bentinck government, committed to retrenchment, would have discouraged
the assumption of major administrative responsibilities in the princely states. For
instance, when Sleeman, Assistant to the AGG, SNT, suggested that the Company
take over the administration of district Bhilsa from the Gwalior regime and set up an
establishment for the protection of travellers, the proposal was rejected, not only
because the Gwalior darbar would object but also because it would be a heavy

The crime was approached with a different sense of 'mission' now.
Even before I830, wrote Meadows Taylor, large gangs of thugs had
been apprehended, especially in Bundelkhand and Malwa by Major
Borthwick and Captains Wardlow and Henley, 'but without exciting
more than a passing share of public attention. No blow was ever
aimed at the systemif indeed its complete and extensive organisation
was suspected, or, if suspected, believed'.24
This 'systematization' imposed on the crime of thuggee mirrored
the new role outlined for the paramount power. The thugs were
'Citizens of India' and not of any 'particular division'.25Only an all-
India 'counter-system', in the form of the paramount power, could
therefore root out this evil. 'So extensive and long standing a con-
federacy' needed general and comprehensive measures, argued F. C.
Smith, Agent to the Governor General (AGG) in the Sagar and
Narbada Territories. It was no longer enough to expel thugs from the
Company's domains-such a policy of dispersion was of dubious
value. Instead, the paramount power ought to assume responsibility
for eradicating this 'scourge'.26The position of the Sagar and Nar-
bada territory was particularly strategic for the launching of opera-
tions, surrounded as it was by a varying and decentred topography of
Indian states.27These districts had been annexed from the Maratha
rulers in I8I7-I8 and were classed as a 'non-regulation' area,
administered by an Agent to the Governor General who was respon-
sible only to the Supreme Government. Legal procedure was kept
very loose because of the recent acquisition of the area. It was sup-
posed to rest on the 'spirit' of the Bengal regulations but with a due
regard for local usage.28In 1836 F. J. Shore, while criticizing the lack
expense. G. W. Swinton, Chief Secy, to F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, 4 Aug. 1830, Mss.
Eur Di I88, IOL. H. H. Spry, medical officer at Sagar, recalled that booty recovered
from thugs was enough to pay for all incidental charges of the department up to 1834
and also to finance the building of two new prison houses at Sagar. H. H. Spry Moder
India (London, I837), pp. I62-3.
24 Meadows
Taylor, Confessionsof a Thug(i839, new edn, Oxford University Press,
New York, i986), intro. p. 5, emphasis added.
25 F. C. Smith to W. H.
Macnaghten, Secy, 26 June 1833, files for the T&D,
National Archives of India, Home Department (hereafter Home Dept T&D), Cons
B.2, no. 4, p. 295.
26 F. C.
Smith, AGG, SNT, to Chief Secy to Govt, 20 June 1832, CLWCBvol. II,
1977, PP- 836-7.
27 On the south lay Hyderabad and Berar, to the North and West, Bhopal,
Gwalior, Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand.
28 The Agent was assisted by Political Officers drawn from both the civil and
military services of the Company. The 'Politicals' combined the duties of revenue
collector, civil judge and magistrate, and had the same powers to arrest and try

9o RADHIKA SINGHA
of supervision in the Sagar and Narbada territories, noted that this

had made it 'in fact a theatre for the experiments of incipient
legislation'.29
The other feature of the campaign was the way in which all the
'knowledge' of thuggee expounded by officers of the Thuggee Depart-
ment gave legitimacy to the procedures adopted for its prosecution. It
was not in fact the cracking of some 'code' which put these officers in a
position to hunt out thugs.30The main source for compiling lists of
suspects and accumulating evidence for their conviction remained, as
before, the testimony of accomplices who had turned 'approvers'.31
But the extensive recording of thug beliefs, slang, and 'superstition',
seemed to authenticate the difference between the hereditary cult-
oriented criminal and the casual offender; and this won the case for
special procedures.
A certain institutional friction developed between the machinery of
the Thuggee Department and the judicial and executive machinery of
the regulation provinces. Sleeman and others presented this conflict
as a problem of persuading the judicial establishment to 'believe' in
the reality of 'thuggee', but it was as much a problem of keeping
executive discretion under judicial control.
Taking the long perspective on colonial law and policing, the Acts
introduced in the i83os and I84os to deal with 'criminal communities'
highlight the continuous tension within colonial law between the
notion of'due process' and legal equality, and the scope which the law
actually allowed for police and judicial discretion. 'Rule of law' was
crucial to certain ideological and institutional imperatives of colonial
state formation, for instance to the expansion of the claims of the state
at the expense of other jurisdictions of social authority, to the main-
tenance of stable, centralized mechanisms of rule and to an assertion
of the superiority of a 'despotism of law' over that of'arbitrary' native
despotism.32 But the difficulty of aligning colonial police and legal
offenders as the magistrate in the regulation districts. The Agent held biennial ses-
sions in his judicial capacity as Commissioner of this territory.
29 F.
J. Shore, Offg Commr SNT, to Secy, Sadar Board of Revenue, Allahabad, 7
May 1836, Home Misc. vol. 790, IOL, p. 422.
30
Reeves, for instance, accepts this mythicization of the campaign. 'Once his [i.e.,
Sleeman's] officers were armed with a systematic account of the signals it was poss-
ible to identify thugs and thug operations'. P. D. Reeves, introduction to Sleemanin
Oudh.An Abridgement of W. H. Sleeman'sA JourneythroughtheKingdomof Oudhin i849-50
(Cambridge, 197I), p. I2.
31 That is, those prisoners who confessed to their crime and agreed to give evidence
against their accomplices in return for pardon or remission of their own sentence.
32 Cf. Radhika
Singha, 'A "Despotism of Law": British Criminal Justice and
Public Authority in North India, 1772-1837', Ph.D., Cambridge University, I990.

power to indigenous sources of social authority33constantly opened

out new areas of executive discretion within the interstices of 'rule of
law'. Such developments were usually followed by a counter-pull,
however weak, to define this discretionary authority and to reduce its
disruptive potential for stable bureaucratic mechanisms of law and
policing. At one level the 'thuggee' and 'dacoity' Acts were an effort to
clothe crude devices for securing conviction with the semblance of
'due process'. But they were also defended by arguments about the
peculiar characteristics of Indian society or by the 'backward' state of
Indian civilization.
The point of retreat from such 'drives' is as significant a feature of
the political shifts related to the campaign against 'criminal com-
munities' as the point of inauguration. What explains the claim that
the thuggee threat had been 'extirpated'?
Anything less than 'success' is of course an embarrassment for a
highly publicized campaign.34However, such campaigns could prove
disruptive of the general goals of 'law and order', especially in
generating too much resistance from society. As a result a more work-
able or flexible policing strategy could emerge, a criminal 'com-
munity' could be discovered in another incarnation with its particular
'profession' or 'clan' regrouped for another initiative in law and
policing.35
One reason why, from the late i83os, Sleeman began to assert that
33 The committee appointed in I83I to consider improvements in the police of the
Bengal districts remarked, for instance, that 'the urgency of changes arises from its
extreme unpopularity rather than from any increased disposition to crime'. Commit-
tee to F. J. Halliday, Secy, Bengal Govt Judicial Dept I8 Aug. 1838, Committee on the
Improvement of MofussilPolice,Bengal, 1838, p. 2, v/26,/150/I, IOL.
34 Auckland for instance suggested that Sleeman postpone the publication of his
report on 'gang robbery by hereditary profession', till more progress had been made
in putting it down. W. H. Sleeman,JourneythroughtheKingdomof Oudhin 184g-50,vol. I
(London, I858), p. xxvi.
35
As, for instance, the Multanis of central India: they were described by Malcolm
in 1823 as carriers and traders in cattle who also engaged in some cultivation, and
placed among the 'civil classes' of Muslims even though they were armed. Sleeman
described them in 1836 as a class of'ancient thugs', 'said to call themselves Naiks,
and to travel and trade as Brinjaras', and Captain G. Ramsay, in 1850 termed them
'a tribe of Dacoits' who up to the breaking out of war with the British were 'ostensibly
traders in cattle'. Malcolm, Memoir of CentralIndia, vol. II, p. 113, Sleeman,
Ramaseeana,p. I 7, and G. Ramsay, Asst Resident Nagpur, and Genl Supt for the
Suppression ofT&D, to Resident Nagpur, 3' Aug. 1850, H. M. Elliot Papers, Mss
Eur 314, IOL. Bagris, or Bagureeas, described by Malcolm as robbers under their
own chiefs, and soldiers under native princes, were described by Sleeman in
Ramaseeana,1836, as a 'class of thugs who reside chiefly about Soopar in the Gwalior
territories' and in his I849 publication as a class of dacoits by hereditary profession.
Malcolm, Memoirof CentralIndia, vol. II; Ramaseeana,p. 75; Reporton BudhukDecoits,
1849.

92 RADHIKA SINGHA
thuggee as an organized system had been extirpated, may lie in an

embarrassing realization of the fact that 'systematic' murder and
robbery of travellers could not be established against the various
mendicant bands and peripatetic groups who had begun to be swept
up by the Thuggee Assistants. Other more flexible strategies for polic-
ing such elements would have to be explored.
Sleeman also retreated from any expansive programmes of
'reclaiming' criminal communities. He argued that the special laws
and the agency for thugs and professional dacoits should be retained
but the government should not involve itself in extensive projects to
'reform and reclaim' them; the experience of the strength of state
power and its ability to prosecute would be enough to force these
communities to blend with the rest of society. This separated the
principal architect of the thuggee campaign from the enthusiasts of
'reform', evangelical or utilitarian, who argued that the campaign
against criminal communities ought to widen into an effort to separate
them from society and to transform them into productive law-abiding
subjects.36
As a prelude to my discussion of the way in which the thuggee
campaign transformed the legal structures of British authority, I will
first examine British attempts to understand and categorize the dif-
ferent types of criminal community, and the different strategies they
used to deal with them. I then suggest a more complex sense of the
reality of criminal bands, and of the different contexts which
generated such groups. The Company's drives to gain paramount
authority provide a crucial backdrop to these issues.
I. Official Classification and Criminal Reality
I. The 'civil'and the 'predatory'
The Sagar and Narbada territories where the thuggee campaign took
shape bordered the terrain of an earlier initiative against a 'predatory
system', in the form of the Pindari campaign of i817-I8.37
36
This would qualify Stewart Gordon's argument that 'Sleeman's eventual success
in persuading the Government of India is a gauge of the triumph of the Evangelical
crusading philosophy of British Indian administration over the "preservation of
Indian customs".' Cf. Stewart N. Gordon, 'Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and
State-formation in Eighteenth Century Malwa', Indian Economicand Social History
Review(hereafter IESHR), VI, 4 (Dec. 1969), 403-29, for a very perceptive article on
this phenomenon.
37 The
Pindaris, better described as a phenomenon than as a particular com-

The Marquess of Hastings characterized the Pindaris as predators,
even as robbers, to reject any proposal that the Company's govern-
ment should negotiate with them to avoid expenses of war.38 The
invocation of the criminal metaphor continued in the instructions
given to military officers before the campaign: that since the Pindaris
were public robbers, they were to be tried on capture and if found
guilty they were to be summarily executed, but commanders were not
to disturb the cultivators of the soil.39 'In fine', wrote Lt Col. Fitz-
clarence, who was there at the inauguration of the campaign, 'being
viewed ... as public robbers, their extirpation was aimed at and not
their defeat as an enemy entitled to the rights of war.'40 But the
method used in the campaign was entirely that of military attack until
leaders surrendered or were killed, and followers melted away. On 25
November 1818 Hastings reported that their annihilation could be
regarded as complete.4' And yet the Pindaris, said to have been
'extirpated', had at times been rumoured to have swollen to huge
numbers. Malcolm, who followed as an administrator in the wake of
these campaigns in Central India, gives details of many groups from
the 'lower orders' who had joined the Pindaris.42
munity, emerged in central India as bands of military auxiliaries, who served the
various powers in that area, in particular Holkar and Sindhia, and began to acquire a
territorial foothold on the Narbada. Those with a horse had been used by Indian
princes to skirmish with the enemy's army and to pursue it into retreat; among their
numbers were also those who would forage for the army, carry grain to it, and dispose
of their own booty and that of others in the aftermath of a successful campaign.
38 ... the atrocity of their character ... forbad the
degradation of negotiating with
them ... At the same time I saw the intimacy of the connection between the Pindarris
and the Mahrattahs so distinctly, as to be certain that an attempt to destroy the
former must infallibly engage us in war with the whole body of the latter.' Address by
Marquess of Hastings to Court of Directors, 1823, in H. Bevan, ThirtyYearsin India,
vol. I (London, 1839), pp. 187-8. Cf. Lt Col. Fitzclarence, Journalof a Routeacross
India, throughEgyptto Englandin theLatterEnd of the Year1817, and theBeginningof 18I8
(London, I819), p. 41, for his characterization of the Pindaris as 'enemies who were to
be considered in the light of public robbers.' J. Malcolm also refused to accept that
the Pindaris resembled the Marathas at the point of their political emergence.
Malcolm, Memoirof CentralIndia,vol. I, pp. 427-8.
39 Lt Col.
40
Fitzclarence,Journalof a Route,p. 41.
Ibid.
41 Political letter to the court, 25 Nov. I818, para. 23, in B. K. Sinha, ThePindaris
(i798-i818) (Bookland, Calcutta, 1971), p. 74. Pindari leaders and their immediate
followers were given grants of land to 'settle' them in Bhopal and in Gorakhpur, ibid.,
pp- 175-83.
42 Malcolm wrote that many of the Pindaris were from the 'lowest of the
labouring
classes', almost all the Hindus being Ladul, 'a low class whose usual occupation is to
bring grass and firewood to camps.' He also remarked that the dispersion of the
Pindaris had increased the class of Muslim cultivators, artisans and labourers, for

94 RADHIKA SINGHA
At the time it was argued that a clear demonstration of overwhelm-

ing military supremacy, a ban on 'predatory' warfare, and the fixing
of state boundaries would force armed bands to dissolve into the
peaceable sections of the population.43And yet those who had swelled
the ranks of various mercenary bands in Central India could as well
take to the roads to rob travellers. If there was any unease about the
social flux unleashed by 'tranquillity', it was reflected in certain
attempts to set out typologies distinguishing between peaceable and
'predatory' sections of the population.
Malcolm made such an effort in A Memoirof CentralIndia, 1823, but
this categorization was not attended by a call for special laws or for
special jurisdiction in the Indian states. He regarded political
anarchy, not some immutable principles of social organization, as the
generator of 'predatory' communities, and paramountcy as the force
of stabilization.44 However, the interesting point about Malcolm's
attempt to establish this typology is that the distinctions between the
peaceful and the 'predatory' constantly seem to dissolve. He introdu-
ces a further qualification-between those who plundered because of
political anarchy and 'tribes' brought into Central India in a military
capacity who had turned mercenaries.45 The character of the
zamindars and the patels (village head men), he wrote, had 'deterio-
rated' as, finding themselves too weak to resist violence, they had
taken to criminal means of retaliation.
many Hindus of low caste who had joined them had become Muslims. Malcolm,
Memoirof CentralIndia,vol. II, pp. 176, 177. Sita Ram Sepoy, says the Pindaris always
had better information than the British forces, and describes the people of
Bundelkhand as being on their side. James Lunt (ed.), FromSepoyto Subedar,beingthe
Life and Adventures of SubedarSita Ram, a Native Officerof the BengalArmy Writtenand
Related by Himself ( ist edn, I875, London, 1988), pp. 38, 46.
43 The followers of the
Pindaris, wrote Malcolm, 'are lost in that population, from
the dregs of which they originally issued. A minute investigation only can discover
these once formidable disturbers, concealed as they now are amongst the lowest
classes, where they are making some amends for past atrocities, by the benefit which
is derived from their labour in restoring trade and cultivation.' Malcolm, Memoirof
CentralIndia,vol. I, p. 462. Cf. also, Sinha, ThePindaris,p. 176.
44 Malcolm begins the chapter on the population of central India with the state-
ment that he would start with a brief view of the different tribes, and 'conclude by a
classification that will distinguish those who follow peaceable occupations from the
number who still consider arms their sole profession.' Malcolm, Memoirof Central
India, vol. II, p. io6. Elsewhere he uses the distinction 'civil classes' and 'the
predatory and turbulent classes', ibid., p. 224.
45 Ibid., p. I74 for the Mewatis, the Pathans, Arabs etc. With the restoration of
tranquillity, wrote Malcolm, the first class would return to cultivation and the other
sort would have no option but to take up peaceable pursuits, while 'foreign'
mercenaries would be expelled, ibid.

Thieves were not only protected by them, but they encouraged the settlement
under their authority, of men belonging to tribes to whom theft and robbery
are occupationsfromfatherto son, and who, in fact live upon the produceof
the petty warfarewhich they have fromtime immemorialcarriedon against
the community.46
Malcolm also had to recognize that certain 'predatory' associations
did not fit into any distinct social class or tribe. He placed the thugs in
a category of 'associations of men of all tribes ... whose object is to
live upon the community'; but he did not advocate any special
measures against them.47The fluidity of the line between 'civil' and
'predatory' and between military service and 'robbery' is evident at
all levels of Malcolm's typology.
In Meadows Taylor's novel, Confessions of a Thug,the thug 'hero',
a
Ameer Khan, takes service with Pindari chief on the reasoning that
'I was a soldier by inclination if not by profession, and I thought ...
we might make as good a thing on it as if we went out on expeditions
on our own.'48But, as pointed out earlier, the Pindaris and the 'thugs'
tended to be regarded as two distinct groups in official accounts.49
I will now examine these overlaps and cross-overs more closely, to
suggest a perspective on the reality of the thug phenomenon.
2. Criminalcommunities
and 'wayof life' criminality:the 'looseand
floating'layersof society?
In reviewing here the 'reality' of what were believed to be criminal

cultures, I suggest that there was a way of life in which criminality
could form a part, sometimes a regular part, of a range of subsistence
options, but it was not the criminality by 'birth and profession' pro-
jected by the Company's police and legal drives.
46
Ibid., pp. I73-4. 47 Ibid., pp. I85-8.
48 Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug,p. 336.
4 Ramaseeana, pp. 4-5. But cf. Bentinck's 'Minute on the affairs of Rajputana and
Delhi' for a reference to bodies of plunderers, the 'remnants of the Maratha Pindari
evil' who had lost their occupation as a 'legitimate trade' and now had to be put
down. CLWCB, II, p. 787. Ochterlony, resident in Malwa and Rajputana, had also
drawn a connection between the suppression of the Pindaris and the emergence of
thuggee. 'By a Dispatch from Mr. Wellesley of 5th February to your address, His
Lordship in Council will have seen that, out of the Pindari System has arisen another,
not of open violence, but if possible, more sanguinary, as it seems to be almost
universal practice to insure the concealment of the act of Robbery, by perpetrating
the Crime of Murder.' D. Ochterlony, Resident, Malwa and Rajputana to G. Swin-
ton, Secy, Pol. Dept, 30 April 1882, in Selectionsfrom Papers,p. 243.
Ochterlony

96 RADHIKA SINGHA
This section represents a very preliminary attempt to search the

narratives of those arrested for thuggee, or for belonging to a dacoit
'tribe' in the I83os and I84os for points of distinction between the
prisoner's own interpretation of their activities and that imposed by
the concerns of the British examining officers.
The records of the Thuggee Department are promising for their
sheer density. The prisoners' narratives were not just determined by
the Department's need to accumulate evidence and to sustain a case
for special police and legal measures. The examining officers also saw
themselves as recording British 'mastery' over an Indian underworld,
now sorted out into various communities with their rules, 'language',
and social practices.
The approvers who provided much of the 'information' had to
convince the officers of their usefulness by vaunting the range of their
expeditions and attacks. But the reliance which the Thuggee Depart-
ment had to place on the evidence of approvers also gave the latter a
certain bargaining power. The certificate given to the approver stated
that he would 'serve Government and be treated well; and have all
[reasonable?] indulgence.. .'50
Band leaders of especial notoriety sometimes entrenched them-
selves as the 'pets' of a particular officer who would call upon them to
regale European visitors with accounts and demonstrations of their
craft.5' One could argue therefore that the approvers did have a
certain licence for self-expression, and their responses to the examin-
ing officers do display points of dispute and evasion. For instance, the
prisoners would agree that thuggee was their 'business' but they
would also insist that this 'business' be recorded in certain descriptive
terms and not in others-as an activity linked with skill, honour and
adventure, not as theft. Reynolds who took down the depositions in
Hyderabad reported that 'the denomination of thief is one that is
particularly obnoxious to them, and they never refrain from soliciting
the erasure of the term, and the substitution of that ofT'hag whenever
it may appear in a paper regarding them'.52When Sleeman sought to
50 W. H. Sleeman to W. G. Bird, 5 April 1839, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.8, July
I838-Aug. 1839.
51 Cf. Fanny Eden's acidic comments on Captain Paton, who was a 'great Thug
fancier... and makes positive pets of some' and on Europeans who having had much
to do with their examination view them 'in a most romantic light'. J. Dunbar (ed.),
Tigers,DurbarsandKings, FannyEden'sIndianJournals,I837-38 (London, I988), p. 120,
104. Also, Emily Eden, Up theCountry:Lettersfrom India (repr., London, Virago, 1983),
pp. 59-60.
52
Lt Reynolds, 'Notes on the T'hags', Journalof theRoyalAsiaticSociety(hereafter

impress the fact of 'mastery' on some prisoners arrested for thuggee,
arguing that the iqbal, good fortune, grace of the Company had
prevailed over that of their female deity, he received ambivalent
responses. One prisoner argued that in Calcutta even the Company
offered worship to the Goddess Kali.53
However, the main issue is that of coming to terms with the fact
that so many of those swept up for dacoity or thuggee accepted that
robbery was indeed their 'profession' and that they identified other
groups on similar terms.54Can these statements just be dismissed as
the product of colonial stereotyping, or as structured by the process of
prosecution?
'"Real" crime', writes Douglas Hay, 'is shorthand for a large part
of the life of the poor.'55Different skills, means and patronage would
of course mediate access to different sorts of crime.56A pastoralist is in
a particularly favourable position to steal cattle; but putting poison
into the food of a traveller to stupify and to rob him can be done by
almost anyone. To inveigle large parties of travellers, strangle them
and bury the bodies by stealth, requires the organization and
JRAS), IV (I836), 200-13. Perhaps the term 'thief was rejected because it suggested
they might prey on their neighbours' property, or steal goods entrusted to them, thus
jeopardizing their position within their own community. Cf. J. Paton papers, BM
Addl Mss 41300, pp. 24-5.
53 Ramaseeana,pp. 76-7. Cf. also the qualified responses of approvers Nasir and
Sahib Khan when Sleeman quizzed them on the suppression of thuggee in the
Deccan; in F. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (London, I96I), Appendix 2, pp. 192-3. In
general the prisoners tended to blame their own actions, their non-observance of the
rules which brought access to supernatural power, rather than the 'defeat' of the
source of power itself.
54 Of a gang seized in Kotah, Ochterlony had reported that 'tho' very few acknow-
ledge the Commission of any particular Robbery-Yet of the whole number there are
I think four who deny their being Thieves by Profession and associated for the
purposes of Robbery.' D. Ochterlony, Resident in Malwa and Rajputana, to Secy,
Pol. Dept, 30 April 1822, Selectionsfrom Papers,p. 244. Cf also deposition of
Ochterlony
Dhokul Singh, 7 May 1839, arrested as a dacoit of the Baurie tribe. 'The Kunjurs are
all thieves, they cut grass and make choppers ... but always thieve ... The Nutts
dance, beat drum, and amuse people with their tricks, but they are at the same time,
all thieves. Those who go about with snakes, are all thieves ...'. Report on Budhak
Decoits, p. 323, cf. also p. 256, pp. 33, 31.
55 Douglas Hay, 'War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: the Record of
the English Courts', Past and Present 95 (May 1982), I 17-60, i20, 158-9.
56 In criminal proceedings one often comes across a distinction made by the
offender between the sort of crimes he would or would not engage in. For instance, a
Dosadh, a low caste labourer, interrogated for robbing a British lieutenant declared:
'I was not a Camp thief that I should rob the Pultun(regiment) but only thieved for
my own livelihood.' Declaration of Bholah Dosadh, village Pondahpoor, pargana
Ballia, 4 March 1788, Bengal Revenue Consultations, P/5I/25, 3 Oct. I788, p. 735,
IOL.

98 RADHIKA SINGHA
coordination of a larger gang, and the acquisition of dexterity.

However, it is probably inaccurate to exaggerate the degree of 'spe-
cialization' involved.57
Interspersed with the prisoner's statements that robbery was their
'business' are others which indicate that this element was interwoven
with other patterns of subsistence.58 In the official presentations of
criminality 'by profession' these other components are ignored or
regarded as mere disguise. Thugs took up cultivation or entered the
service of Indian rulers as a 'screen' for their activities. Badhaks set
out for a dacoity expedition in the 'guise' of bird catchers.59
The picture which emerges from these accounts is one of a striking
diversity of occupation among those arrested as thugs or dacoit bands,
though many of these had regular links with agricultural communi-
ties. Members of the bands whom Sleeman classified as 'Budhak alias
Bagree decoits' sometimes described themselves as spending 8-io
months in the year in hunting.60Such bands of hunters and fowlers
sought the patronage of princes whether in their shikarexpeditions or
as auxiliary contingents in their armies; but they could also organize
independent raids.
In certain contexts the element of 'predation' could become more
marked as other sources of livelihood contracted. The booming mili-
tary 'market' of eighteenth-century India encouraged a regular out-
57 Cf. A. L. Beier, MasterlessMen, The Vagrancy Problemin England(London, 1985),
ch. 5, for a fascinating exploration of the strategies and resources open for those who
had to take to the road in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, either as a
permanent way of life, or on the thin line between migration and vagrancy.
58 Cf. deposition of Dhokul Singh, cited in fn. 54 above.
59 'Badhaks' was one of the denominations
by which certain bands who live on the
margins of forests were known. Such bands engaged in hunting and fowling, and had
in the past provided irregular levies for the army of the Nawab of Awadh or swelled
the retinues of powerful zamindars. Their skill with bow and spear and their tradition
of association with military raiding allowed some of them to organize lightning raids
on consignments of treasure, often at a great distance from their own residence. Cf.
Resident Banaras to GG in C, 22 May I791, BRJ, P/I27/74, 15 July 179I, p. 603,
IOL for an early reference to such hunting bands.
60 Sleeman,
Reporton BudhukDecoits,p. 130. The Rajah of Kottar is referred to as
keeping bands of Badhaks to supply his table with game, ibid., p. 54. S. Nigam
stresses the peasant origins of thugs and Badhaks which, he argues, was ignored by
official discourse. S. Nigam, 'Disciplining and Policing the "Criminals by Birth",
Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 187I-1900', IESHR XXVII, 3
(July-Sept. 1990), 274-75. I stress instead the diversity of occupation and the process
by which colonial order rested on channeling these various elements into the ranks of
agricultural labour, or later, as Meena Radhakrishna shows, into the ranks of quarry,
factory and mine labour. Meena Radhakrishna, 'The Criminal Tribes Act in the
Madras Presidency: Implication for Itinerant Trading Communities', IESHR XXVI,
3 (July-Sept. I989), 269-95.

flow of mercenary bands, especially from 'Hindustan' into the Deccan
and Central India in search of service. Highway robbery was prob-
ably always an option for such bands as they moved between one
employer and another or to and fro from home. However, the victories
of the Company brought about a contraction in this 'market' which
probably made this flow between 'service' and robbery more one way
and permanent.
In the official interpretation of professional/hereditary criminality
the elements of dissonance and displacement in the prisoners'
account, between their status and activity under a former political
order and that in the present, or the change wrought by famine or
other calamity, were usually ignored. But there is a definite element of
'band lore' too in these depositions, which buttressed the official
presentation of criminal cultures. This 'lore' is organized around the
search for sources of legitimacy for their chakri,their livelihood, which
they linked variously to the sanction of 'antiquity', family tradition,
divine power and political charisma.61Prisoners arrested for thuggee
made a distinction between the norms of social interaction they
observed within their own village and those which determined their
search for 'legitimate' prey.62
The existence of a band 'lore', a common 'slang', and a shared
knowledge of major attacks, does suggest long terms of association, as
does the ability to coordinate action in large gangs. But equally sig-
nificant is the ease with which identities constituted around a particu-
lar form of naukri-chakri, could shift among men who sought 'service'.
This is strikingly illustrated in the thug prisoner Imamee's description
of one 'Hormat Khan alias Mungulea, formerly caste Gururea and a
thug by trade but now a Mussalman and a Sipahi in a Regiment at
Malegaon . . ..63 Malcolm had observed that many Hindus who had
joined the Pindaris became Muslims.64 Campbell noted the connec-
tion between 'service' to the court of Lahore and 'being a Sikh'.65
61 Baz Khan, tried in Jabbalpur in I826, is reported to have stated 'almost vaunt-
ingly that his forefathers for seven preceding generations have been Thugs of the
BadshaheeDuftur,or enrolled as thugs in the Royal records at Dehly'. Administration
ofjustice in the SNT, BengalJudl letter, I2 July 1827, BC F/4/i I59, IOL, p. 48.
62
Nasir, thug approver, said that those who had committed an ordinary murder
would be haunted, but not if the murder was committed in the course of a thug
expedition. Such murders were sanctioned by the Devi. Ramaseeana, pp. 175-6.
63
Deposition of Imamee, 19 Aug. i83 , forwarded by W. H. Sleeman to Resident,
Nagpur, 17 Oct. 183I, in H. N. Sinha (ed.), Selections
from theNagpurResidency Records,
vol. IV, I818--846 (Nagpur, 1954), p. 274.
64 Malcolm, Memoirof CentralIndiavol. II, p. 177.
65
G. Campbell, Memoirsof myIndianCareer,vol. I (London, 1893), p. 66.

I00 RADHIKA SINGHA
This band lore was constituted around the 'profession'; but it did
not necessarily establish a strong fraternal link with other members or
dominate all other social affiliations. As Stewart Gordon in his very
perceptive article on thuggee points out, there was no system of
reprisals against those who betrayed the 'fraternity' by turning
approver.66Sleeman registered the presence of certain caste and reli-
gious animosities between the approvers;67they would generally show
a concern only to shield members of their own family or caste. In fact,
some of the approvers seemed to regard their assistance to thug-
hunting detachments as having put them in 'service' to the Company
and Sleeman encouraged this sentiment.68The approver Bukhtawar
said they were not apprehensive about informing on former accompli-
ces because they had become 'servants of Government'.69Ram Bux,
recounting his services to Government in catching thugs, exclaimed:
'they are all my enemies now!'.70
The approvers swept up in the I83os and 184os cite the antiquity or
long tradition of their 'profession' as one among the other factors
which established the legitimacy of their activity. However, their
accounts of actual attacks do not go further back than the early
nineteenth century.7' Even the thug genealogies which Sleeman con-
structed do not seem to stretch further back than three generations
and include the names of adopted children.72In the official presen-
tation of the 'history' of thuggee, the immediate chronological and
political background was evaluated but there was also an effort to
push its origins into the remote past. To buttress this history chrono-
logical points were gleaned from stray references to predatory gangs
in Persian chronicles or in accounts of European travellers to Mughal
India.73The stress placed by officers on strangling as the distinguish-
66 Gordon, 'Scarf and
sword', p. 413.
67
Cf. Sleeman to F. C. Smith, I I March 1831, in Bruce, TheStranglers,p. 114.
68
'We require to raise them a little in their own esteem, and make them feel a little
exalted as the servants of the state ... The terms Sarkarka Naukarand a decent
appearance have a wonderful effect in making them exert themselves.' W. H. Sleeman
to Major Stewart, resident, Hyderabad, 16 July i832, Home, T&D, Cons G.I, June
I832-May 1833, pp. 66-7. 69 Ramaseeana, p. 186.
70 J. Paton papers, BM Addl Mss 41300, p. 9. Some
approvers suggested that they
could help the police to detect other 'classes' of thieves as well, ibid., pp. i9, 29.
71 The men seized
by Reynolds in the Nizam's territory in the early i83os con-
fessed to having made annual expeditions over the previous 25-30 years. Reynolds,
'Notes on the T'hags', p. 213. Cf. also deposition of Rambux, thug approver, 15 April
1837, Paton papers, BM Addl Mss 41300, p. 8; and Ramaseeana,Appendix I, pp.
72
I101-10. Ramaseeana,Appendix A.
73 Cf. Sleeman's citation of Thievenot's Travels
(1687) for a reference to robbers
who used a noose. Ramaseeana, p. I I. Also V. A. Smith's editorial note in Ramblesand

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S IOI
ing mark of this 'ancient' fraternity also disassociated the method of

murder from issues of convenience and context and gave it cult status.
'The Thugs adopt no other method of killing but strangling', wrote Lt
Reynolds.74 But the prisoners' narratives show that the strategies of
gang robbery had been somewhat different in the early nineteenth
century and especially in the Indian states. Travellers had associated
in large crowds for safety, and bands of armed men in search of service
were a common sight. Men who associated to rob travellers could
travel in larger numbers and even with arms without arousing sus-
picion, could use a greater measure of open violence, and take fewer
precautions about the disposal of bodies.75
The 'lore' which thug gangs constructed around their expeditions
was drawn from belief and ritual familiar to wide sections of Indian
society. The examining officers of the Thuggee and Dacoity Depart-
ment were in fact becoming acquainted with popular religion and
culture but refracted through the prism of criminality.76
Recollections citing the history of Firoz Shah Tughlaq (1351-1388). The following
example illustrates the 'historicization' of 'lore'. An approver, Feringea, had claimed
that all the operations of their trade were to be seen in the sculptures at Ellora. This
claim was abstracted from his other assertions about the caves-that these were the
work of some unknown supernatural agents, and that everyone's trade, however
secret, was described there-and given the status of a historical 'fact' by W. Crooke
who traced thuggee into early Hindu history, stating that in the Ellora temples,
c. A.D. 760, a thug was represented strangling a Brahmin. Cf. Tuker, The YellowScarf,
Appendix 2, pp. 197-8 for Feringea's account, and ibid., p. 63, for Crooke's rendition
in ThingsIndian.
74 Reynolds 'Notes on the T'hags' p. 2oi. Sleeman traced the historical roots of
thuggee through this feature. The Thugs, he writes, were the descendants of the
Sagartii, a pastoral group of Persian descent who put their enemies to death by
throwing a leather noose over them. Some descendants of the Sagartii, Sleeman
supposes, must have accompanied the Muslim invaders of India and settled in the
neighbourhood of Delhi. Ramaseeana, pp. 4, I .
75 Cf.
deposition of Dorga, for an assembly of 200 thugs at a village in Nagpur in
1809 or 810o who had murdered a party of 40, Ramaseeana, Appendix H, p. o10; a
party of about 350 thugs who had killed a party of 60 sent to recruit soldiers from
Hindustan (North India) in 1813, ibid., Appendix I, p. I I0. In I8I0 the magistrate of
Chittoor reported that before accession to the Company the phansigarssheltered by the
petty poligarshad set out in larger gangs, but now gangs were smaller and their plans
less systematic. Thornton, Illustrations, 1837, p. 272. Between I8Io and I8I4 the
magistrates of Aligarh, Etawah and Kanpur tried to drive out suspected thugs from
the Doab districts conquered from the Marathas. Of the thugs in villages contiguous
to Gwalior territory the magistrate of Etawah said they 'committed their thuggees
more like bandittis, openly in large bodies, attacking and plundering bodies of travel-
lers, not taking any care to conceal the crime by hiding the bodies .. .', Magt Etawah
to Actg SP, WP, 7 Aug. 1815, and G. Stockwell,Joint Magistrate Etawah to T. Perry,
Magt Zillah Etawah (nd.) in Thornton, Illustrations,pp. 32I-7.
76 A characteristic
example was the assertion that the Bhawani temple at
Mirzapur, a popular site of pilgrimage, was filled with thugs and subsidized by their

102 RADHIKA SINGHA
At a continuous but diffuse level the official attitude towards the

culture of 'men on the road' --mendicants, peripatetic professions,
bands who frequented forest zones or the fringes of cultivation-had
always been one of unease. Such groups seemed to elude the reach of
taxation and policing; their way of life was considered 'motley' and
suspect.77 Even an ethnographic interest in certain wandering 'volk' of
India, who were believed to resemble the gypsies of Europe, was
tinged with a suspicion of criminality or immorality in their lifestyle.78
The religious mendicant was always an object of official suspicion, but
police measures were reined in because of the religious veneration in
which the population held them.79
Though Sleeman usually avoided any 'essentialist' descriptions of
Indian society, he, too, shared a suspicion of mendicant bands. He
considered the 'monastic orders' analogous with the Pindaris, Thugs
and Dacoits, in being composed 'of persons floating loosely upon
society, without property or character, with the object of acquiring the
offerings. W. H. Sleeman's letter to the CalcuttaLiteraryGazette,30 Oct. 1837, in

Bruce, TheStranglers,pp. 81-2, and Lt Reynolds, 'Note on T'hags', p. 202.
77 Cf. Commr Kumaon to
SP, Delhi, 23 Sept. 1823 for a reference to 'motley
assemblies' of people in the foothills, 'persons of the lower classes engaged in the
cutting and transporting of timber and other Jungle products, together with
Brinjaras, Herdsmen, shikaris, and ca. and ca.' Since the conquest of Kumaon, he
reported, these areas were assuming order. Commissioner's Office Kumaon, Pre-
Mutiny, Judl letters issued, 1822-25, Basta 23, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (here-
after UPSA). Cf. also Sleeman to W. H. Macnaghten, io Sept. 1836, on classes
'known' to practice thuggee though none had as yet been convicted; those who
roamed with bears and monkeys, daturias, poisoners, Bairagis, mendicants, and
Multanis,a class of transporters. Home, T&D, Cons G.4, Sept. I836-March 1838, pp.
23-5.
78 J. A. R. Stevenson of the Madras Civil Service sent in a paper to the Royal
Asiatic society which put an account of 'P'hansigars', stranglers, together with an
account of the 'Shudgarshids' a 'tribe of jugglers and fortune tellers' described as
'notorious for kidnapping children' and for an 'abominable traffic' in the sale of
sinews as charms against evil. 'Some Account of the P'Hansigars, or Gang-robbers
and of the Shudgarshids, or Tribe ofJugglers.' JRAS, I (London, 1836), 280-4.
79 Cf. Judge Magistrate Jaunpur, 15 Aug. 1815, for a complaint about religious
vagrants exacting tribute, and for a reference tofakirs giving poison to pilgrims to rob
them. Home Misc 775, IOL, pp. 620, 628. Shore's suggestions for a 'punitive disci-
pline' of arrest and punishment with hard labour for all such 'idle scamps', and the
registration and surveillance of all stationary fakirs was typical of the official attitude.
J. Shore, NotesonIndianAffairs,II (London, 1837), pp. 411-12. In the I82os and I83os
missionaries attacked the government for associating itself with the collection of
pilgrim tax; and this mingled with utilitarian arguments against the loss of productive
labour and life which pilgrimage was supposed to entail. J. Statham, IndianRecollec-
tions (London, I832), pp. I38, I44, 159; J. Peggs, Pilgrim Tax in India (2nd edn,
enlarged, London, I830), p. 47.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S I03
property of others ....80 Sleeman mistrusted the various peripatetic

professions, such as the bullock-transported pack trade in raw prod-
uce which he regarded as a source of great insecurity to life and
property.81Such bands seemed particularly inaccessible to the control
of the state. The thuggee campaign seemed to confirm the latent
suspicion in official circles about these wandering professions. In his
vocabulary of thug 'language', Ramaseeana,Sleeman listed various
peripatetic communities as 'thug-tribes'.82
There were various patterns, not necessarily those of displacement,
which contributed to the phenomenon of 'men on the road'. Seasonal
movements of labour, famine migration and pilgrimage tended to flow
into each other. There were communities who provided various goods
and services to settled communities -grain transporters,83 cattle
dealers, medicine men, basket weavers, entertainers, and petty
pedlars. There were others who subsisted in a forest ecology on the
margin of cultivated areas-hunters, woodcutters, pastoralists.84
Yet the contribution of paramountcy to the phenomenon of'men on
the road' was scarcely acknowledged in official accounts. The
establishment of paramountcy in 18 8 displaced many who had found
service in a polity of competing states and decentralized configura-
tions of patronage. The idea that certain patterns of crime on the high
road were related to declining opportunities of service to chiefs or
rulers is suggested only in Sherwood's I8 6 report.85Sleeman blamed
vagrancy and highway robbery on the fact that Indian rulers dis-
banded their militias all at once, or discharged the disabled or those
80 Reporton BudhukDecoits,
1849, p. 268. However, he also acknowledged that
religious mendicancy had been the 'great safety valve through which the unquiet
transition spirit has found vent under our strong and settled government.' W. H.
Sleeman, RamblesandRecollections of an IndianOfficial,vol. I (Ist edn, I844, Westmins-
ter, 1894), p. 446.
81
Ibid., p. 83.
82 Cf.
Ramaseeana, pp. 85, 144, 126 for references to Multani,Lodahaand Qulundera
thugs.
83
Capt. J. Briggs, 'Account of the Origin, History and Manners of the Race of
Men called Bunjaras', BombayTransactions, I (i819), 159-83. R. G. Varady, 'North
India Banjaras: Their Evolution as Transporters', SouthAsia, new series, II, I and 2
(March-Sept. 1979), I-I8.
84 Cf. E. Balfour, 'On the Migratory Tribes of Natives in Central India',JRAS I3,
i (1844), 29-47 for a sampling.
85 ... it may be conjectured that many persons, deprived by the declension of the
Mohammedan power of their wonted resources, were tempted to recourse to criminal
courses to get their subsistence'. Sherwood, 'Observations Regarding Badheks and
Th'egs', p. 271.

I04 RADHIKA SINGHA
with an injured horse without making any provision for them.

However, he did not examine the pattern of permanent disbandment
itself.86 The discontent of the dismissed Muslim cavalry man was
given some recognition87but there was little acknowledgement of the
loss of employment, periodic or regular, which a polity of competing
states and dispersed focuses of authority had given to men of humbler
rank: those who joined the infantry, who had swelled the ranks of
army auxiliaries, or, as camp followers to armies, had foraged,
brought supplies, or cut grass for draught cattle and horses. Instead,
the desire to feel in control of this 'floating' population encouraged the
production of official typologies of criminal cults and of criminal
tribes.
The other issue in evaluating the 'reality' of criminal communities,
whether that of thug gang or dacoit tribe, is of how distinct as a social
group they were in the indigenous perception. The beliefs and rituals
which such bands organized around their predatory activities were
familiar to Indian society in other contexts-so it was not this 'lore'
which marked them out as startlingly different in Indian eyes. The
method was what distinguished various sorts of crime in the indi-
genous perception, whether thuggee,'inveigling' or 'deceiving', or phan-
sigiri, strangling, but not particularly their religion or superstitions.88
In a seventeenth-century autobiography of a Jain businessman,
Ardha-Kathanak, when two travellers are charged with being thugs it is
because they are accused of trying to put counterfeit coins into
circulation, not because they belonged to a murderous band.89 The
86 Ramblesand
pp. 443-6.
Recollections,
87 There was a continuous debate about
policy towards the irregular cavalry
contingents of the native rulers whose armies were to be reorganized under the
subsidiary system. Writing in 81 7-I818 Lt Col. Fitzclarence noted that the dismissal
of irregular cavalry from the British army and from the forces of princes who had
entered into subsidiary treaties had been afoot for at least thirty years. Referring to a
complaint made in the Seir Mutaqherinabout the resulting loss of employment he
commented: 'How much more must they now feel it when our empire, or the system
under our influence, that of subsidizing, has extended over about three-fourths of
India.' Lt Col. Fitzclarence,Journalof a Route,p. 266. Cf. Malcolm, Memoirof Central
India, vol. II, p. 107, for the decline in opportunities of service for Muslims of the
military class in the wake of British victories.
88 Stewart Gordon points out that 'thugs' did not enter the folk lore of bandits and
robbers. 'Scarf and Sword', pp. 408-9. Shakespear reported that the word 'thug' was
used in the Western provinces, to describe those who robbed and murdered in the
highways but that the literal meaning was villain, rascal, or knave, 'Observations',
Asiatick Researches(1820), 287-8.
89 Cf. R. C. Sharma,
'Aspects of Public Administration in Northern India in the
First Half of the Seventeenth Century', inJournalof IndianHistoryLIV, I (April 1976),
107-15, II2.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s I05
word phansigar,strangler, is certainly used in indigenous accounts to

refer to people who regularly strangled and robbed travellers,90but
not to suggest a peculiar sect.
It is for this reason that there was considerable uncertainty in
official accounts as to whether Indians knew about this 'system' of
thuggee or whether it was veiled to them too.9' Did thugs deceive
those among whom they lived, or did people simply not care, provided
their own lives and property were safe? If they found acceptance, how
'marginal' were they then within that society? There was a tendency
for Indian society itself to stand condemned; a slippage between the
criminal community and the rest of society which fed into the argu-
ments of those officials who pressed for a swifter pace of 'reform', or
Evangelicals who stressed the need to prepare the way for
conversion.92
However, the case for special measures had in fact rested on the
argument that such communities stood 'outside the pale' of society.
The Pindaris were the 'dregs' of society, the thugs originated from
parties of'vagrant' Muslims, the Badhaks were 'outcaste' Hindus and
Muslims.93 The taint of 'immorality' and 'debauchery' was intro-
90 Cf. Aurangzeb's farman of I672, 'A copy of farman with preface of justice
containing thirty-three sections', ordering punishment for a strangler who was
'habituated to this misdeed ... or is notorious among people for this misdeed and the
Nazim of the Subah knows about it or vestiges of strangulation and property of people
are found with him. .. .' Mirat-i-Ahmadi[A Persian History of Gujerat], Muhammad
Khan, transl. (M. F. Lokhandwala, Oriental Institute, Baroda, i965), p. 249.
91 Meadows Taylor for instance, asserts at one point that the system of
thuggee
was unsuspected by the people of India, but a couple of pages later he says that
landholders and chiefs of villages had had connections with thugs for generations.
Introduction to Confessionsof a Thug,pp. i, 3.
92 C. E. Trevelyan, 'The Thugs or Secret Murderers of India', TheEdinburgh Review
LXIV (1837), 357-95. Cf. alsoJ. Paton, BM, Addnl Ms 4I300, p. 278.
93 Of the Badhaks, Paton, Assistant Resident, Lucknow
argued that 'being from
their mode of promiscuous eating "Sear Khowas" outcastes from the other classes of
Indian society', they could not mingle with them and this bound them to each other
and to robbery. Memo byJ. Paton to Caulfield, Actg Resident, 25 Jan. I840, Foreign
Political, A, 9 March I840, no. I22, NAI. Criteria such as dietary habits and a
wandering way of life were deployed to lump diverse groups into one social category,
as for instance under the term 'Badhak'. Shakespear, Police Superintendent for the
Western provinces, classified as 'tribes ofjackal eaters' the groups known as Badhaks,
Kanjar, Gidia, Bauria, and Harbura, because all 'subsist by robbing and are more or
less attached to a vagrant life, eating the flesh ofjackals, lizards, &c'. The putting of
diverse groups with different traditions under arbitrary categories could, however,
create problems of consistency. For instance: 'The Badheks of Aligarh and the Shigal
Khors of Gorakhpur are outcasts of Muslims and Hindus-however the majority are
Rajputs.' Shakespear, i8i6, 'Observations Regarding Badheks and T'hegs', pp.
282-3.

io6 RADHIKA SINGHA
duced to accentuate this marginality,94though in the case of the thugs

it was often acknowledged that they were model family men or respec-
ted members of their village.
How far was the official suspicion of wandering bands shared by
their Indian subjects? The line between life 'on the road' and in
'settled' occupations was one made porous by diversity in sources of
subsistence, by ecological reversals, political enterprises, and patterns
of trade and pilgrimage. But such a lifestyle was perceived by Indians
as different from that of the agriculturist who had to protect his crops
and property from wandering bands.95 Every region seems to have
had a catch-all label to characterize wandering communities. One
peripatetic band examined by Sleeman as a 'dacoit tribe' said they
called themselves Bhats (usually translated as bards) but were called
Sansias,Kanjars,Mahars,Jats, 'according to the country in which they
happen to be, for they have nowhere any fixed habitations, and the
people among whom they encamp, call them after the wandering or
vagrant tribe, whom they appear most to resemble'.96
One does come across the occasional pejorative inflexion about a
lack of 'discrimination' in the social norms of those associated with a
peripatetic life-style. Most strikingly, the narratives of members of
'suspect' bands, whether termed 'thugs' or 'dacoit tribes' often reveal
an anxiety to defend themselves against the suspicion of social lax-
ity.97 For instance, the members of a dacoit gang would claim that
they refused admittance to Muslims, or to untouchable castes,98even
though it is clear that such bands absorbed new members from
various social strata through marriage, adoption and the drift of men
from other occupations.
94
Plunder obtained by murder was spent on 'debauchery and indulgence' wroteJ.
A. R. Stevenson, 'Some Account of the P'hansigars, or Gang-robbers and of the
Shu'dgarshids', p. 280. Briggs attributed the poverty of the Banjaras to their 'dis-
solute and wandering habits' and their drinking. 'Account of the ... Bunjaras', p.
181.
95 Balfour
reports that Indian rulers used to inflict fines and even death upon the
Bauries, who obtained their living from the forest, if they pilfered from fields and
stacks of grain. Balfour, 'On the Migratory Tribes', p. 35.
96 Sleeman,
ReportonBudhukDecoits,p. 265.
97 Sahib Khan a
thug 'approver' from a Telingana band claimed they were high
caste Muslims, vehemently denying that they were Kanjars,a class of low caste
peripatetic grain traders. Ramaseeana,p. 162. One band referred to another disparag-
ingly as Handeewulssuggesting they ate in old and dirty plates, Ramaseeana,p. 95.
Captain Ramsay noted of the 'Sansi dacoits' that though they were often styled
Kanjars, they would not admit the appellation, stating that the Kanjarswere all
Muslims. Reporton BudhukDecoits,p. 253.
98
Report on Budhuk Decoits, pp. 253, 261, 283.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S IO7
So a certain terminology of low social status, probably derived from

the interaction between British officers and upper sections of Indian
society, could feed into the idiom of 'criminal communities'. Con-
versely, the defence which some prisoners made on behalf of their
'status' could strengthen the official argument about rule-governed
criminal communities.
In conclusion I would argue that the 'thug' gangs seized in various
episodes related to the territorial expansion of the Company from the
late eighteenth century, had taken shape against a background of
intense military activity and its aftermath. In the early nineteenth
century 'thugs' passed themselves off as soldiers in search of service
and attacked other parties of recruits.99However, gang robbery on the
roads was not the preserve of these bands--peripatetic communities
providing services of various sorts or mendicants might also occasion-
ally take to highway robbery.
The 'reality' of thuggee which I am sketching here is an even less
structured phenomenon than that outlined in Stewart Gordon's
analysis of this crime. Gordon breaks down the picture of thuggee as a
cohesive widespread fraternity and relates it instead to the polity of
Malwa at a particular conjuncture. He argues that it was the relative
strength of the local as opposed to the overarching government in
Malwa which gave a unique freedom of operation to plundering
bands. Moreover pressure in the late eighteenth century to find cash
resources for paying mercenary troops led to a development in which
'every level in the power structure tended to link up with and give
protection to some group of part-time marauders, to have a non-local
source of revenue.100
Some political conjunctures and certain ecological zones were prob-
ably more favourable to the systematization of a search for resources
outside the sharanof one's patron and Gordon's article, as also his
other work on Malwa polity, is extremely illuminating on this point.
But his conclusion still tends to present thuggee as too structured,
even though he restricts it to the districts of Malwa. 'Research to
date', he writes, 'thus suggests that what the British saw as "thug"--
"a national fraternity of murderers" consisted of a small core of
families, members of which had been murderers for several
generations.'101
99Cf. Ramaseeana,Appendix I, pp. ioi-io, and Appendix T, pp. 294-5, for a
description of this situation in Central India in the early nineteenth century.
100 Gordon, 'Scarf and Sword', pp.
425, 428.
'10 Ibid., p. 428. Gordon points out that many of the elements of organization which

Io8 RADHIKA SINGHA
I argue that it was not only the strength of local government or the
pressure for cash resources which sent marauders out on the roads,
but also the constriction of 'service' as the system of 'subsidiary
alliance' was extended and various sorts of military retinues were
disbanded. This explains the reports about bands of phansigarsor
thugs which surfaced from other regions in other episodes of British
expansion.
Secondly, Gordon's acceptance of thuggee as a hereditary occupa-
tion has to be qualified. Many depositions, even of thugs from Malwa,
reveal that some individuals had drifted into these bands; some did
not go on an expedition for several years, but cultivated lands in the
interval or took to other occupations.102Though a landed patron
usually hovered in the background, yet some bands also seem to have
taken shape from the bazaar 'riff-raff, those who came to the towns in
search of service.103
I would also qualify Gordon's conclusion that thugs 'took to the
road not just in search of any traveller, but specifically looking for
bankers' agents, treasure rich traders, wealthy mercenary soldiers and
pilgrims.'104The accounts given by confessing thugs of the murders
committed on their wanderings support the conclusion reached by
the British regarded as peculiar to the thugs were in fact common to many criminal
bands. But it can be argued that these could be common to military contingents or
mercenary bands as well.
102 Cf. Ramaseeana,
Appendix X, pp. 288, 397, 41 i, for the depositions of some
prisoners arrested at Dekola in I829. Amanoolah had been connected with the
Phansigarsfor two years, Khaimraj had joined the gang only in the previous year,
Poorun said his father had been a cultivator, and he had joined at the age of thirty but
had not accompanied the gang on every expedition, but cultivated land at intervals.
In his autobiography, Lutfullah, who became a Persian munshi, recounts an incident
in which he encountered a Muslim thug, Juma, on the road to Gohad. Juma invited
him to join his band, 'telling me that he had already found I was no more than a
mercenary like himself, and even, in my young days, had no friend in the world'.
Autobiography of Lutfullah(ist edn, 1857, with an introduction by S. A. I. Tirmizi,
International Writers' Emporium, New Delhi, 1985), p. 75.
103 BC F/774/I824-25, IOL, for the deposition of Heera Ahir, before the Resident
at the court of Holkar, 29 May 8I 9; 'forced by hunger' he had left his village to come
to the town of Gwalior where Ram Din, who had a gang of 20 thugs, had taken him
into service. Cf. Ramaseeana,pp. 34-7 for an account of a linen draper of Hingolee
cantonment who had engaged in thuggee on the roads, and knew other thugs living in
that city; Ramaseeana,Appendix T, for the discovery in 1823 of thugs living in the
bazaar ofJalnah who had been selling items of plunder in the town. Cf. Sahib Khan's
disapproving reference to one Muder Khan, who had built up a gang of fifty thugs
'weavers, braziers, bracelet-makers and all kinds of ragamuffins' in Bruce, The
Stranglers,p. 69.
104Gordon, 'Scarf and Sword', p. 407. Cf. Nigam, 'A Social History of a Colonial
Stereotype', p. 25 for a similar position.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S IO9
British officials, that they were willing to murder even for small pick-
ings;105not, however, because of some ritualistic blood lust,'06 but
because long months on the road could mean literally living from one
murder to another and being able to go home only if richer haul came
their way.'07 Off and on officials were also perplexed by the 'unex-
plained' murders of beggars and attributed it to a category of thugs
who kidnapped the children of the poor for sale. But the poor can prey
off the poor too.
II. The Policing of Thuggee in the Regulation Provinces
i. Legal impediments?
One of the stock arguments of the thuggee campaign was that the
existing legal arrangements in the regulation provinces could not deal
with the phenomenon of the criminal community. From about I8Io,
when reports were made in the North Western provinces of roving
gangs who strangled travellers, officials had sometimes complained
about the difficulty of finding enough evidence to secure conviction for
a specific act of murder. There were no eye-witnesses, for everyone in
the party was murdered. Circumstantial evidence was elusive because
the deed was done by stealth. And, given the hazards of long-distance
'05 '... the most trifling sum is an inducement to commit murder.' Magistrate
Chittoor to SecyJudl Dept, I July 1812, Ramaseeana, Appendix U, p. 309, 'The booty
... is often so trifling-sometimes not exceeding one rupee, or the clothes on the
person's body-that it appears as if the P'hansigars,found a delight and a pastime in
such deeds of blood.' Stevenson, 'Account of the P'hansigars',JRAS, vol. I.
06 This was the explanation given by a grandson of Sleeman, J. L. Sleeman, Thug
ora Million Murders(London, I933), p. 5.
107 Cf. Ramaseeana, Appendix T, pp. 278-82, for a list of articles found with a gang
of thugs operating between Jalna and Aurungabad who were apprehended in I823.
These goods are sometimes the most ordinary articles of daily use, pots and pans and
clothes. Among the victims whom the thugs listed were a Bairagi (a religious mendi-
cant) some mendicant Brahmins, and a barber, whose instruments were found among
the haul. Cf. Ramaseeana, Appendix X, pp. 389-9o, deposition of Amanoolah, for the
murder of a Mullah (a scholar), a Bairagi,and a barber. Ramaseeana, p. 399, deposition
of Khaimraj, for the murder of 4 rasdharis(strolling actors). Paton, examining some
thug approvers at Lucknow, asked if they would murder for a rupee. Allaya denied
this, Dhoosoo said judiciously: 'if we expected a share of 8 annas each we would
murder him', and later again says that they would not murder for a very small sum,
'unless indeed we were hard pressed for subsistence . .' J. Paton, BM, Addl Ms,
41300, pp. 17, I48.

I I0 RADHIKA SINGHA
travel, relatives accepted that the traveller was only too likely to meet
with misfortune.'08
Magistrates therefore built their cases by tapping the same source
which the Thuggee Department used more extensively later: the
evidence of the accomplice who, on the promise of leniency or a
pardon, turned 'approver'.109
Often the failure of a prosecution attributed to a judge's refusal to
'believe' in the existence of thuggee was actually a problem of the
paucity of circumstantial evidence to support the confession of an
accomplice."? In the trial of cases of dacoity in early nineteenth-
century Bengal there had been a somewhat similar controversy about
the use of the evidence of informers, goindas, who operated in the
twilight world between policing and criminality."'
Magistrates also complained that rules of evidence in Islamic law
obstructed prosecution; for instance, that the evidence of an accom-
plice or of a person convicted of a heinous crime was not considered
'worthy of credit'."' But the testimony of accomplices was certainly
admitted in British courts, whatever the ruling of the Muslim Law
officers as to its weight. The provision against accepting the evidence
108 Unless somebody very important had been murdered or substantial sums of
money lost, those connected with the victims usually thought they had no hope of
discovering which particular sort of calamity had overtaken the traveller and had
much to fear from visits to distant courts and constant attendance on the police.
109Cf. Thornton, Illustrations,pp. 275, 286-7, 314-15 for the proceedings of various
magistrates on thuggee cases between 1809 and I814, and the use of pardons to
obtain evidence. The accomplice was to receive a pardon after he had given his
evidence on oath before the Sessions judge. A pardon was not supposed to be
extended to anyone very prominent in the crime or to the leader of a dacoit or thug
gang. Reg. io, 1824, and Reg. i, I829. In 1836 Sleeman suggested that this qualifica-
tion be suspended because the gang leaders were more dependable and had more
information. W. H. Sleeman to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, 27 May 1838, Home Dept,
1838, T&D Cons B.2, no. 13.
110In the rules of evidence in the regulation provinces the accomplice who con-
fessed and pointed out the place of concealment of the body was only held to have
proved his own participation in the act. If his evidence was not supported by other
circumstantial evidence it was considered insufficient to prove the guilt of those he
named as his accomplices.
11 Cf. H. St. George Tucker, for an I815 memorandum criticizing the use of
goindas,stressing the danger of'the licensed freebooter who acts under the sanction of
the law.' Memorialsof IndianGovernment, J. W. Kaye (ed.) (London, I853).
112 Sherwood complained of the difficulties of 'the Mohammedan criminal law;
which admitting not the testimony of accomplices, and rarely the sufficiency of strong
circumstancial evidence unless confirmed by the confession of the culprits, their
adherence to their protestations of innocence has alone, but too frequently, exempted
them from punishment', Ramaseeana,Appendix U, p. 352. It was not very clear
whether the position in Islamic law was that the evidence of accomplices was not
admissible at all or whether it was not to be given any weight by the judge.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s III
of a convicted offender could be circumvented by pardoning the

accomplice who offered to turn approver; in any case approver's
evidence usually had to be negotiated through the promise of pardon.
More importantly, the Islamic law as it was modified and actually
applied in the Company's courts posed no very great obstacle to the
trial of thuggee and dacoity cases. In the course of various efforts in
the early nineteenth century to combat dacoity the influence of the
Muslim Law Officer's fatwa on the trial had been considerably
curtailed. Section 3, Regulation 53, I803 had empowered the judge to
convict the offender if thefatwa ruled that there was strong presump-
tion of guilt.13 Further, thefatwa of the Muslim Law officers could in
any case be overruled by the superior court, the Nizamat Adalat."4
The complaint about working through the 'technicalities' of Islamic
law has to be assessed instead in terms of the feeling in official circles
that the Company should no longer disguise its legislative authority
behind the forms of'indigenous' law. More importantly it provided an
argument for Sleeman, F. C. Smith and other officers of the Thuggee
Department to press for special tribunals for thuggee cases in the
regulation provinces.15 The real apprehension was not about the
'obstacles' of Islamic law but that approvers' evidence would not
carry weight in the regulation courts if circumstantial evidence to
support their statements was too slight or entirely unavailable.
The existing regulation did offer an alternative strategy to the
magistrate who could not establish a specific act of 'murder by thug-
gee': he could demand security for good behaviour on the grounds of
'bad character', 'notoriety' or 'bad livelihood' and the prisoner who
could not provide that security could be kept in confinement.16
13 Cf. also Construction no. 558: a fatwa convicting upon strong presumption
(zun-i-ghalibar-shoobuh-i-cuvee) is afatwa of conviction. F. L. Beaufort, A Digest of
CriminalLaw of thePresidencyof Fort Williamanda Guideto all CriminalAuthoritiesTherein,
pt I (Calcutta, 1857), p. 233. In the first major trial of suspected thugs held in a
sessions court after the inauguration of special operations the Muslim law officers
held that the prisoners were guilty to the extent of akoobut,strong suspicion. By the
terms of Regulation 53, I803, the British judge could now go ahead and award the
death sentence. Cf. Ramaseeana.
114 Regulation 17, Sections 2-4, I817, empowered the Nizamat Adalat to overrule
the fatwas of the law officers in all cases in which it disagreed with them. If the
Sessions Judge disagreed with thefatwa of his law officer, he could send the case to the
Nizamat Adalat, which would consult its own law officers, but had the authority to
make the final decision.
115
Cf. F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, Pol. Dept, 26 June
1833, Home, I833, T&D, Cons B.2, no. 4.
16 In a
charge of dacoity upon 'strong suspicion, though not amounting to convic-
tion, as well as upon proof of notorious bad character, the judge of circuit may direct

112 RADHIKA SINGHA
Although this regulation was formulated as a preventive rather

than punitive provision, the judge could use his powers to determine
the amount of security and the period for which it was demanded so as
to secure long terms of confinement. The magistrate often used this
provision when there was not enough proof to commit the prisoner on
a specific charge. It was also used when the prisoner was acquitted of
a specific charge but the sessions judge was sufficiently convinced of
his 'bad character' or 'notoriety' to make the demand for security."7
Confinement of a prisoner for failure to give security was subject to
periodic judicial review. However, if the reviewing judge concurred,
the term of confinement could continue to be extended indefinitely,
resulting in long terms of imprisonment, perhaps even for life."8
Magistrates had used this procedure against suspected thugs and
'notorious' dacoits where the evidence was inadequate to convict
them of a specific act. It was through information given by such
'suspects', who had spent years in confinement for failure to give
security, that Sleeman built up his lists of thugs and later his lists of
Badhak dacoits. So even before Act XXX of 1836 and Act XXIV of
I843,119 magistrates and judges could use the provision for demanding
security to put a 'suspected thug' or a 'notorious dacoit' into confine-
ment, without having to pass sentence for a specific act of criminality.
However, such prisoners could be released through judicial review
of their cases and this had prompted suggestions for laws permitting a
fixed term of imprisonment on 'suspicion' or 'notoriety' of being a
thug or thug leader. It was argued that this would ensure a greater
certainty of punishment. Judicial correspondence also throws up the
occasional demand that members of a dacoit 'tribe' should be sen-
the magistrate to keep the prisoner in custody till security is given for good behaviour
and for appearance when required.' Reg. 53, s. 2, I803. The amount of security, the
period for which it was required and the period of detention if it could not be given
was not specified in this regulation. It was left to the discretion of the judge. Discre-
tion to apprehend and demand security was also given to the magistrate against the
'vagrant', and the badmaash,paraphrased in proceedings as 'of bad character', 'keep-
ing bad company', suspected of'bad livelihood'. Reg. 22, s. 10, s. 31, s. 33, 1793; Reg.
17, s. 10, s. 29, s. 32, I795; Reg. 14, cl. 7, s. I , I807; Reg. 35, s. 10, s. 15, s. 24, I803;
Reg. 20, s. 20, cl. 2, I817 (Regulation, section, clause).
117 The
magistrate could detain the badmaash for one year on security. If his release
without giving security was still considered dangerous, his case had to be sent up to
the Sessions Judge who could have the prisoner detained for up to three years if
security was not given, Reg. 8, s. 9, i8i8.
118 Reg. 8, s. 4, s. o0, i818, Construction 771, 22 March
1833, and Construction
823, 30 Aug. 1833.
119 Act XXIV of
1843 extended the provisions of the thuggee Act to the offence of
belonging to a dacoit gang.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s II3
tenced to confinement simply for being found in the Company's
domains, or that general police measures ought to be sanctioned
against them without having to commit them on a specific charge. But
the Nizamat Adalat had rejected these suggestions on the grounds
that such provisions would jeopardize precision in charges and the
uniform application of the law. They would also put too much power
in the hands of the police without adequate judicial supervision.120
A similar restraint was placed on the 'Politicals' in the chiefdoms
and princely states. In I824 when some thugs were seized in the
protected states of Bundelkhand, the Assistant Agent, Lt Moodie, had
suggested that 'notorious' thug leaders ought to be confined for life
even if evidence to prove their participation in a particular murder or
robbery was inadequate.121 However, the government ordered the
usual device of confinement until the prisoners gave security for good
behaviour. 122
In the case of the Badhaks, characterized by many magistrates as a
'dacoit tribe', some officials had suggested punitive measures against
the entire community on the grounds of their 'notoriety', arguing that
criminal intention ought to be inferred from their way of life and not
only from proof of a specific act of criminality. In 1816 the thirdjudge
of the Bareilly Court of Circuit suggested a regulation empowering the
magistrate to sentence any Badhak found in the Company's provinces
to work on public projects. This sentence would hold until a zamindar
stood security for his good behaviour and appearance at stated times.
The judge claimed that such measures were justifiable on the grounds
120 For
instance, in 1828 the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces
submitted a draft of an Act to punish vagrants apprehended with poison and other
articles in their possession, 'which may excite suspicion that they are thugs by
profession'. The draft also suggested a fixed term of 7 years for suspicion of being a
thug (i.e. as deduced from the articles in possession). SP, WP to SecyJudl Dept, 19
Feb. 1828, Bengal (Criminal) Judicial Proceedings (hereafter BCJ), P/I39/I3, 6
March 1828, IOL. However, the Nizamat Adalat rejected this proposition, one of its
judges holding that it would introduce 'legalised oppression by the police' and
another arguing that 'thuggee' was not a sufficiently precise term and that it would be
difficult to distinguish which articles were used for criminal purposes. Register,
Nizamat Adalat (hereafter Regr, NA), to Offg Chief Secy Judl Dept, 2 May 1828,
BCJ P/139/15, 22 May 1828, no. 5, IOL.
121 Lt Moodie, Assistant
Agent Bundelkhand, to Secy, Swinton, 3 Feb. 1824, no.
44, PP. 22-39, BC F/4/984, 1828-29, IOL. Forwarding his letter to the government,
the Agent, Majoribanks wrote: 'I apprehend the circumstances of the case as reported
by Lieutenant Moodie under the existing regulations of Government are not such as
would justify a permanent sentence of imprisonment against them.' BC F/4/984,
1828-29, IOL.
122 Ibid.

II4 RADHIKA SINGHA
that the Badhaks were not only suspicious characters but were known
to be 'professed dacoits who lived wholly by plunder.'123 However, the
second judge of the court argued that it was not possible that all
members of the tribe were engaged in thieving, that there were other
groups who were reputed to be robbers but were not all so. The
Badhaks were not more famous than any other class of thieves protec-
ted by zamindars and if they were removed some other bandits could
take their place. He argued that the law should also control the Rajas
who sheltered them. He also pointed out that it would be difficult to
define a Badhak and that the criteria for punishment ought only to be
right or wrong: 'where are the confines-there can be none but what
justice and morality have prescribed through ages, the boundaries of
guilt and innocence.'124
In other words, this judge defended the use of laws which addressed
specific acts of criminality and were universally applicable rather than
those defining 'social states' of criminality. If community was made
the basis of criminality, where would the line be drawn? He also
seemed to suggest that such special laws put a whole community
outside the state-subject relationship defined by the 'protection' of
law. 'The Caste of our subjects called Budheks are entitled to our
protection on the footing of other subjects. ... We must deal with
justice to a Budhek if it be only for the preservation of principle and to
give us the right to expect justice from a Budhek.'125
Although no regulation directed against a particular 'tribe' was
123
Ross, third Judge Bareilly, Court of Circuit (hereafter CC), to Judge, Bareilly
CC, 21 April I816, BC F/4/58I, 1819-20, IOL, pp. 39-47. In 1822, called upon to
explain the increase in dacoities in Gorakhpur, the magistrate of Gorakhpur sug-
gested that 'military punishment' such as that carried out against the Pindaris ought
to be carried out against the 'Seah murwahs' (categorized as Badhaks) of the
neighbouring districts of Balrampur and Atroula in Awadh. In addition a regulation
ought to authorize the Magistrates or the Courts of Circuit to sentence any 'Seah
Murwah' found in parties, armed or not, within British boundaries, to a term of
confinement. R. M. Bird, Magt Gorakhpur to H. T. Prinsep, Actg Chief Secy, 1
April I822, Reporton Budhuk Decoits, pp. 13-14.
124 Second Judge Bareilly CC to Regr NA, 27 April I816, BC F/4/58I, 81I9-20,
PP. 24-33, IOL.
125 Ibid. This judge suggested that all dacoits could be deported to special dacoity
villages on wasteland to serve a period of compulsory labour as part of the sentence on
the lines of the punishment of transportation in England. But this was to follow from a
regular trial and a fixed term of sentence, ibid., pp. 33-7. The senior judge opposed
any new measures, arguing that the powers of the magistrate to confine until security
was given were adequate. British administration would make the Badhaks as 'peace-
able and industrious' as other natives, SeniorJudge Bareilly CC, i March I816, ibid.,
pp. 33-7. The Nizamat Adalat concurred with the suggestion that the Raja and
Thakur be made to establish the Badhaks as cultivators.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s I I"5
actually passed, magistrates freely used police powers and provisions

for preventive detention. For instance, the police would 'banish'
'suspicious' vagrants from the magistrate's jurisdiction, even though
this practice had been expressly forbidden by the Nizamat Adalat.126
The same second judge who had opposed a special law against the
Badhaks, criticized the orders given by the Magistrate of Agra for the
banishment beyond theJamuna of a whole tribe of Nats (acrobats); an
act which he described as 'of the same value as would be the order
from a London magistrate to put all Italian Opera Dancers and
foreign singers across the water.'127
Pressure was also occasionally brought on landlords to expel Bad-
haks from their estates on the grounds that they were all dacoits. Such
a pressure is evident in the police statement of 1817 for the Western
Provinces which reported that the Badhaks of Hathras and Moorsan
had left the Company's provinces on the establishment of government
policing there.128Their being of a particular 'tribe' was also cited to
support a charge of 'notoriety' for dacoity when hauled up for a
particular offence.'29
2. Policing
Official proposals for measures against thuggee had rested on extend-

ing police patrols on roads, setting up police posts along the highway
and improving surveillance over travellers. There was a continuous
flow of suggestions about the policing of 'the Stroller, the Vagrant,
and . . . the fugitive from Judicial Process.'130
126
Circular order (hereafter CO), Nizamat Adalat, no. I59, 24 Feb. i8io, J.
Carrau, The CircularOrdersof theNizamatAdalat, i796-i853 (Bengal Military Orphan
Press, Calcutta, 1855); F. Skipwith, The Magistrate'sGuide(Calcutta, I843), p. i8.
This must have been one of the orders most consistently ignored by magistrates.
127
BCJ P/I33/7, 14 Feb. I817, no. 31, paras 49-50, IOL.
128
SP, WP to SecyJudl Dept, 30 June 1817, BCJ P/I33/I4, 19 Aug. 1817, no. 27,
para. 38, IOL.
129 In a case
against 163 Badhaks for an attack on a boat carrying treasure the
charges were framed as 'dacoity with murder' and also as 'being notorious Dacoits of
the cast of Shigalkhors and Budheks ... having ... entered the Company's provinces
with an intention to commit Dacoitee. ...', W. H. Macnaghten, Reportsof Cases
Determined in theNizamutAdawlut,vol. II, 1820-26 (Calcutta, 1827), p. I25.
130 Circular, 19 June 1829, Commr of Circuit, Farukhabad to Secy Judl Dept, 27
June 1829, BCJ P/139/42, no. 9, IOL. The village watchman was to report all
suspicious strangers, the police were to obtain information from thefakir, the prosti-
tute and the village washerman who came into contact with strangers. Thefakir also
came under suspicion of assisting in dacoity and thuggee. Ibid. Cf. SP, WP, to Chief

II6 RADHIKA SINGHA
But the basic problem was that of finding the means to distinguish
the thug from the ordinary traveller. Items like a rumal,scarf, a dhoti,a
wrap, a cord, even a knife or a sword were likely to be found on the
most innocuous travellers, and certain opiates and chemicals which
could be used to poison or drug a fellow traveller were also those in
common use as a medicine, an addiction, or as substances used by
craftsmen.'31Another problem was that of preventing the police, and
the informers or approvers sometimes posted with them, from harass-
ing travellers and extorting money from them on the threat of sending
them up to the magistrate.
The lack of coordination between magistrates in assembling infor-
mation about suspected thugs, 'wandering' tribes, or suspicious
'bands' and in compiling evidence for prosecutions was also cited as a
handicap. There were stray suggestions even before the i83os that
information about thug gangs should be circulated among other
magistrates,'32or coordinated through the Sessions Judges or through
the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces.133The aboli-
tion of this last post in 1829 removed one central office for directing
police operations, a fact which F. C. Smith cited to press his case for
posting a thuggee superintendent to the regulation districts of the
Doab.134
Secy, 31 May 1814, BCJ P/I3I/14, 5 July 1814, no. 32, IOL, for earlier suggestions.
In 182i a regulation was passed for action on suspicious travellers but remained a
dead letter. Reg. 3, s. 7, 1821.
131 In practice, however, the police did occasionally send up travellers to the
magistrate for being in possession of poisonous substances and the magistrate
sometimes demanded security for good behaviour on suspicion of thuggee. Cf.
abstract calendar of persons detained in custody by the magistrate until they
furnished security, whose cases were examined by the Court of Circuit in I828. This
included three cases of persons ordered to give security of 50 rupees or face confine-
ment of one year for having in their possession small quantities of poisonous sub-
stances. All of them were released by the sessions judge with the remark that the
grounds for requiring security were inadequate. They had been kept in confinement
for periods between three to eleven months before this review. Regr NA to Chief Secy
to Govt, i8 April, no. 6, BCJ P/I39/5, 8 May 1828, IOL.
132Cf. G. Stockwell, Magistrate Etawah to J. Waunchope, Magistrate
Bundelkhand 14 Oct., in Thornton, Illustrations,pp. 314-I5.
'33ActgAssistant Magt, Farukhabad, to Magt, Farukhabad, 12 March I8IO, Pre-
Mutiny, Saharanpur collectorate, Judicial letters from government, I8IO-I2, vol.
177, Regional State Archives, Allahabad (hereafter RAA). J. Shakespear, SP, WP to
Magistrates (nd) asking them to take measures to detect murders committed by
'persons calling themselves Byragees who inveigle pilgrims and others and having
administered narcotic drugs plunder and leave them on the high roads.' Basta 4,
series II, no. 28, 1812-17, RAA.
'34 F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, 26 June 1833, Home
Dept, T&D, List I, Cons B.2.

The major reason why there was no sustained effort to coordinate

action was that there was no concern at this point to present thuggee
as an 'all-India system'.135There was also a general impression at the
time that the more regular policing of the Company's territories had
driven thug operations into the native states, or that their bands were
smaller and their operations more limited in the areas under British
rule.136
3. Thuggeeas 'mystery'
Official accounts of thuggee in this earlier period reveal apprehen-

sions about a criminal fraternity sharing a secret code of communica-
tion and certain cult beliefs. 'Though personally unacquainted', wrote
the Marquess of Hastings, 'they had signs and tokens by which each
recognised the other till the utterance of a mystical term or two
announced the favourable moment, and claimed common effort.'137
The members of the criminal bands who were arrested sometimes
agreed with this proposition, either to claim magical powers or as
expressive of an empathy with others engaged in the same 'pro-
fession'. In a deposition taken by the magistrate of Chittoor in 1814,
the prisoner Yeroogaudoo said the Phansigars 'show signs by the
hands and speak Bundoocuttoo Mautaloo,words unknown by others.'338
The use of a common slang suggests a long association between
135
In a report of 7 August 1815 the Magistrate of Etawah had described the thugs
of his district as of three classes, 'entirely unconnected with each other'. Magt Etawah
to Acting SP, WP, 7 Aug. 1815, Thornton, Illustrations,p. 321. In I816 the govern-
ment expressed its satisfaction over the success of the local arrangements made by the
magistrates of Kanpur and Fatehpur in suppressing thuggee. Judl letter from Bengal,
2 Sept. 1817, PP, 1819, vol. 13, p. 754. The novelty of this attempt to co-ordinate
police activity over an extensive area emerges from the fact that Sleeman in the 183os
had to make a special request to the Surveyor-General for a skeleton map of India
with routes, halting posts, ferries, military establishments and jurisdictions, marked
out on it. Bruce, TheStranglers,pp. 87-8.
136 Sherwood, AsiatickResearches,
pp. 271-2. Extract political letter from Bengal,
Pol. Cons, 24July 1819, no. 46, BC F/4/744, 1824-25, IOL. Agent in Bundelkhand to
Secy Swinton, 28 Feb. 1824, extract Bengal Pol. Cons, 20 April 1924, BC F/4/984,
1828-29, IOL. However the insertion of a heading 'murder by thugs' in the police
statements of the Western Provinces from about 18o1 indicates the government's
concern to have a regular estimate of the prevalence of this crime. But this category
was not inserted in the police statements of the Lower Provinces.
137 Ramaseeana, i8. The
p. Marquess of Hastings reported that he had asked Sind-
hia to put down this 'nefarious fraternity', ibid.
138
Deposition of Yerrogaudoo 2 Feb. 1811, sent by Magistrate, Chittoor,
Ramaseeana, Appendix U, p. 325.

II8 RADHIKA SINGHA
individuals, and shared participation in past events. But people who

spent long periods on the road would also have to pick up a language
which would enable them to communicate across various regions.
Urdu owes much as a language to the needs of armies on the march.
Bazeegurs(wandering acrobats) from Bengal were reported to use two
languages, both based on Hindustani, the one for their craft, and the
other for general communication.'39A shorthand in words or signs to
coordinate action without putting travellers on their guard is also an
essential prerequisite for concerted action. Sherwood said the Phan-
sigars used words and phrases not understood by others as a means of
communication, calling it pheraferi-ci-bat,
the language of dispatch or
emergency.1
Thugs did drift from one band into another, and bands who
operated with regularity along a certain stretch of road would come to
recognize each other.'14 But that a term of greeting 'revealed' another
offender even if they had never met before suggests officials could
succumb to an apprehension about unknowable fraternities.
Thuggee was also understood to rest on an attachment to 'heredi-
tary profession' characteristic of Indian society. Officials argued that
its adherents did not recognize the immorality of their life or experi-
ence remorse because they believed they had a religious sanction for
their act of murder.'42This caste-like attachment to hereditary pro-
139 Captain D. Richardson, 'An Account of the

Bazeegurs, a Sect Commonly
Denominated Nuts', AsiatickResearches, vol. VII, Article XIX (Calcutta, i80o), p.
465. These wandering groups, he says, occasionally came under suspicion of criminal
activities, ibid., 471-2.
140Sherwood, AsiatickResearches,p. 265. But he also says it was used to check
whether another traveller was of the same fraternity. The words he lists in his article
suggest a slang rather than a language-there are words or phrases such as anyone
might use in recounting a joke, or an anecdote, as, for instance, the use of the word
shaic'h-jifor a Muslim, or the word nyamet,grace of god, for a promising target.
141 Cf.
deposition of Imamee, 19 Aug. 1831, which suggests that individuals in one
band came to recognize other bands operating on the same stretch of road and could
drift from one band to another. Sleeman to Resident Nagpur, 17 Oct. I830, Selections
from the Nagpur ResidencyRecords,vol. IV, 1818-40 (Nagpur, 1954), pp. 270-4.
Reynolds noted the keen interest taken by one gang in the progress of another gang
and their readiness to supply information about their own movements. 'Note on the
T'hags', p. 212.
142Religious superstition, along with education into crime and habit were the
foundation for the system of Phansigari according to Sherwood. The child was
'instructed to hold his interests as opposed to that of society in general ...'. Sher-
wood, 1816, AsiatickResearches,pp. 260, 268-9. '.. . they can rarely claim the benefit of
even the palliating circumstances of strong pecuniary temptation. .. "Phansigari",
they observed ... "is their business", which, with reference to the tenets of fatalism,
they conceive themselves to have been preordained to follow.' Ibid.

fession was asserted even though it was known that thugs were drawn
from Hindus of different castes and from Muslims. Sherwood tried to
trace their origin along the line of their 'religion' but this caused him
some reflection. Was origin to be traced according to their religious
affiliation (which in south India he believed to be mostly Muslim) or
to their religious practices, their divinities, rites and belief in omens,
which seemed to be 'Hindu'.'43
The method which they used to kill travellers was highlighted to
stress their distinct criminal identity. However, in these earlier
accounts strangling had not taken on the kind of ritualistic import-
ance to the system of thuggee which it did in subsequent
44
description.
These sporadic efforts to ascertain the organizing principles of
thuggee were transfigured into a presentation of certain and definite
knowledge in the I830s. Officials now claimed an ability to move
vigorously against it on the basis of a 'successful' penetration of its
mysteries. The religious-cultist aspects of the 'system', presented with
heightened effect as 'mystery unveiled', caught the imagination of the
British community, and it is this aspect which was presented to the
reader of many a memoir of India.145
III. The Operations for the Suppression of Thuggee

x829-1836
underthePoliticalDepartment
i. Prosecution
A communication from Chief Secretary Swinton of 23 October 1829
was often cited as the official declaration of a new initiative.'46Cap-
143
Ibid., pp. 280-I.
144 Subsequently, officers
gave strangling a ritualistic importance in 'defining'
thuggee. Charles Hervey, 'corrected' Shakespear's early account for his statement
that the thugs could use poison, the cord or the knife. 'It being traditionally forbidden
to Thugs to shed blood ... as certain to bring them to discovery and condign
punishment, with forfeitureof the protection of their tutelary deity Kalee, "the knife",
supposed in the above extract to be habitually used, was religiously shunned.' C.
Hervey, SomeRecordsof Crime,vol. I (London, I892), p. 72. Cf. extract Bengal Political
Consultations, 24July 1819, no. 46, BC F/4/774, 1824-25, IOL, for a description by
the Resident of Indore in I8I9 of the thugs using a noose and a sword to kill their
victims before robbing them.
145 Cf. A. Sattin (ed.), An Englishwoman in India. The Memoirsof HarrietTytler1828-
1858 (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 24-5, also Dunbar (ed.), Tigers,Durbarsand
Kings,p. 28.
146G. Swinton, Chief Secy, to Major Stewart, Offg Resident, Indore, 23 Oct.
1829,
Ramaseeana, Appendix X, pp. 379-84.

I20 RADHIKA SINGHA
tain Borthwick, the political agent at Mahidpur, had submitted the

deposition of one Amanullah and five others of a thug gang he had
seized in I829. Amanullah had confessed and revealed the burial spot
of the murdered travellers; five other prisoners had followed suit on a
promise of pardon. Borthwick argued that no additional proof was
required to pass sentence on the entire gang, and the Indore resident
agreed and said most of them deserved capital punishment. In its
letter of 23 October 1829 Government accepted the adequacy of the
evidence, and the passing of sentence.147
These murders having been perpetrated in territories belonging to various
Native Chiefs, and the perpetrators being inhabitants of various districts
belonging to different authorities, there is no chief in particular to whom we
could deliver them up for punishment, as their Sovereign, or as the Prince of
the territory in which the crime had been committed.
The hands of these inhuman monsters being against everyone, and there
being no country within the range of their annual excursions from
Bundelkhand to Guzerat, in which they have not committed murder, it
appears that they may be considered like Pirates, to be placed without the
pale of social law, and be subjected to condign punishment by whatever
authority they may be seized and convicted.'48
F. C. Smith, the AGG at Sagar, and Sleeman one of his Political
Assistants, hailed this letter as establishing the principle that the
paramount power had assumed a responsibility for the trial of thugs
in the Indian states and that a recognized judicial terrain had opened
up under the aegis of the Political Department.149 In the regulation
provinces such trials would have come under the review of the
Nizamat Adalat. The other implication deduced from this letter was
that in this judicial terrain the evidence of approvers might have
greater weight.'50
147 Borthwick was instructed to call
up each prisoner singly and to take the
evidence of each of the five approvers to his identity and to the degree of his connec-
tion with the gang. If, on comparison, there was any doubt as to the prisoner being a
member of the gang his case was to be reserved for further orders. Capital punish-
ment was prescribed for the leaders and for the actual stranglers, transportation for
life with hard labour for those who had decoyed travellers or helped to remove and
conceal bodies. Holkar's government was to be informed before the passing of sen-
tence, ibid., p. 381.
148 G. Swinton to Resident Indore, 23 Oct. 1829, ibid., pp. 380-I.
149
F. C. Smith to H. Prinsep, Secy to GG in the Pol. Dept, no. i866, 19 Nov. 1830,
Mss Eur DI I88, pp. 78, 87, IOL.
150 In the case of a gang arrested in February I829 by Sleeman, whose murders
had, with one exception, been committed in the Indian states of Bhopal and Gwalior,
the Government again accepted that 'for want of regularjurisdiction' the trials could
not be referred to the Judicial Department but could be conducted by the AGG of the

A gang kept in jail without trial because the evidence was con-
sidered insufficient was now put on trial by F. C. Smith and convicted
on the evidence of eight of them who had turned approver.'51
Sleeman was appointed Superintendent of thuggee operations
under F. C. Smith who, in his judicial capacity as Commissioner,
tried thugs seized from neighbouring Indian states and from British
territory. The residents of Hyderabad,'52 Lucknow,'53 and Indore
began to hold trials, too, as the cases accumulated.
However, some British residents protested against the strain which
the intrusion of thug-hunting detachments put on the relationship
between the Indian state and the paramount power.'54 They also
referred to the unease caused by arrests made at the direction of
approvers, and by the taking of prisoners to trial at a distant court
without giving them any opportunity to offer a preliminary defence.'55
The Thuggee Department defended these measures by pointing out
that Indian princes and chiefs did not refuse their protection, sharan,
even to known plunderers, due to a 'besotted and ignorant point of
honour';'56 that they would often just mulct such gangs and release
them, instead of executing them for their crimes of blood.'57
It is significant that the Court of Directors sanctioned these opera-
tions as necessary only in recently acquired territory or in the 'native
states':
The enormities of the Thugs are mostly committed in our newly acquired
possessions, or in the Territories of the Native Chiefs of Bundelkhand,
Malwa and Rajpootana. The supineness or connivance of those Chiefs,
prevents them from adopting any effectual means of repression, and enables
Sagar and Narbada Territory on the same principle as the trial of the thugs caught by
Borthwick. G. W. Swinton, Chief Secy Pol. Dept to F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, 4 Aug.
1830, Selected Records, CP Secretariat, 1829-32, Mss Eur Di I88, IOL. Cf. also F. C.
Smith to H. Prinsep, Secy Pol. Dept, 19 Nov. I830 arguing along the same lines, ibid.,
PP. 77-8. 151 F. C. Smith to H. Prinsep, 19 Nov. 1830, ibid., pp. 77-85.
152W. H. Macnaghten, Secy to G. Swinton, Chief Secy, 25 June 1832, Mss Eur
Di I88, p. 147, IOL. 153
Ramaseeana, Appendix A, n.
'54 R. Cavendish, Resident Gwalior to W. H. Macnaghten, 17 May 1832, Mss Eur
Di 88, pp. I45, 146, IOL. A. Lockett, AGG, Rajputana Agency to W. H.
Macnaghten, 23 July 1832, ibid.
'55G.T. Lushington, Political agent, Bharatpur, to AGG, SNT, 13 June 1832 and
to Colonel A. Lockett, AGG, Ajmer, June 1832, Mss Eur DI I88, pp. 152-60, IOL.
156 F. C. Smith to Chief
Secy, 20 June I832, CLWCB, II, p. 842. Cf. also W. H.
Sleeman to Captain Benson on the prejudice of Hindus 'common to all natives in a
rude state of society, in surrendering a murderer who has once sought their protec-
tion', 22 Nov. 1832, ibid., p. 948.
157 F. C. Smith to G. Swinton, 5 July I830 in Bruce, The Stranglers,p. 79. F. C.
Smith to W. H. Macnaghten, 29 May 1832, Mss Eur DI I88, p. I33, IOL.

122 RADHIKA SINGHA
the Officersof theseGovernmentsand manyof theirSubordinateJageerdars

to shelterthe Thugs fromwhom they receivea portionof the fruitsof their
crimes. For these reasons and for the sake of greaterpromptitudeit was
necessaryforyou to takethe conductof theseoperationsagainstthesepeople
into your own hands....158
It was only in 1835 that the expenses of the thuggee agency were
included as a 'General charge being incurred for the welfare of the
whole of India' instead of being accounted to the Sagar and Narbada
territories alone;'59 and that Sleeman was given the designation
'General Superintendent' instead of simply 'Superintendent'.160
The grafting of thuggee operations onto the administrative struc-
ture of a non-regulation area and its extension to the princely states
through the British residents inaugurated a web of negotiations under
the Political Department around the arrest and trial of suspected
thugs. The thuggee operations added to a range of other pressures to
reshape the politics of the Indian states in line with the commercial,
fiscal and military imperatives of the Company, even as intervention
in their internal affairs was constantly disavowed. The jurisdiction
claimed by thuggee assistants and British residents also challenged
competing zones of'lordship' within the Indian states because ability
to give sharancarried with it claims over men and over revenue. Even
if some rulers were quite willing to cooperate, the thuggee officers
often found that their drive to arrest suspects pitched them into armed
engagement with turbulent tributaries.6"'
In Rajputana sharanwas organized not only around a patron but
also territorially. Certain villages belonging to the bhatswere regarded
as sanctuaries by those seeking refuge from a revenue collector or from
some powerful chief. In I840 the government began to assert that
such sharanscould become asylums for thugs.'62
158 Letter from the Court of
Directors, 28 Nov. I832, no. i , para. 3, Home Dept
1833, T&D, Cons. B.2, no. 3.
159Agra Progs, 21 Feb. 1834, no. 14, Agra Narrative, Dec. 1834-35, UPSA.
160
W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, Pol. Dept, to F. C. Smith, 7 Feb. 1835, no. 272,
Foreign Pol., 5 March 1835, nos 167-8, NAI.
161 Captain Malcolm, an Assistant in the Nizam's territory, complained that even
though some taluqdars were willing to assist, their authority did not reach to villages
held on military and other rent free tenures. The Patels, headmen, of these villages
would not attend to orders, or would shut the gates of the village against thug-
pursuing parties. Captain Malcolm to Captain Reynolds, Supdt, Deccan, received by
W. H. Sleeman, 23 Nov. I840, in W. H. Sleeman, Reporton theDepredations Committed
by the ThugGangsof Upperand CentralIndia,from the ColdSeasonof 1836-37, downto their
GradualSuppression, undertheOperationsof theMeasuresAdoptedagainstthemby theSupreme
Government in the Yeari839 (Calcutta, 1840), p. xxi.
162
Foreign Political Progs, 23 Nov. I840, nos 21-2, in P. S. Mukharya, The
Administration of LordAucklandin India, i836-42 (Calcutta, 1979) (Bhats,bards).

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE i830s 123
Sometimes the regiments of Indian rulers now being drawn under

British supervision and 'discipline' also displayed a fierce resistance to
such interventions. Colonel Sutherland, the Resident at Gwalior,
reported that one regiment would even refuse to allow officers of
another one to pass through their encampment; he asked Sleeman to
drop his request for the apprehension of thugs sheltering within the
ranks of the Gwalior contingent.'63
If one aspect of the campaign was bound to the reshaping of the
idea of paramountcy, the other significant feature was the procedural
flexibility with which it was conducted. If the thug trials had been
conducted in a sessions court of the Bengal Presidency the proceed-
ings would have come under the scrutiny of a superior court, the
Nizamat Adalat. But the trials conducted by the Agent at Sagar or by
the British residents at Indian courts were only submitted to the
64
Secretary of the Political Department. At one point the government
even permitted the resident at Lucknow and the Agent at Sagar to
carry their sentences into execution without waiting to receive con-
firmation from the government.165
The unstructured nature of this judicial terrain opening out under
the aegis of the Political Department was used to full advantage by the
Thuggee agency. Sleeman later asserted that had the thugs arrested in
1830 been committed before the judges of the regulation courts alone,
the attempt to suppress thuggee would have failed. But because the
first commitments were made before the residents of Hyderabad and
Indore and the Governor General's Agent in the Sagar and Narbada
territories, the trials had succeeded in convincing people of the need to
put the 'system' down.'66
163 W. H. Sleeman to Captain Graham, 8 Feb. 1839, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.8,
July I838-April 1839, letter 2505. Cf. Meadows Taylor, TheStoryof My Life (new edn,
Edinburgh and London, 1882), p. 72 for a similar situation of'indiscipline' within the
Nizam's levies.
164 It was only in 1835 when the Sagar and Narbada territories were merged into
the Presidency of Agra that its revenue and judicial arrangements came under the
supervision of the Board of Revenue and the Sadar Adalat.
165 W. H.
Macnaghten, Secy, to Low Resident, Lucknow, and Macnaghten to F.
C. Smith, AGG, 23 Feb. 1838, J. Paton, BM Addl Mss, 41300, pp. 352-3. Cf. Court of
Directors to Bengal Government, India, Pol. Dept, Misc. 21 Feb. 1838, no. 13, pp.
974-8, expressing an unease that a political officer could inflict capital punishment
without revision or appeal. BC II/4/753, IOL.
166 W. H. Sleeman
toJ. G. Lumsden, Secy,Judl dept, Bombay, Nov. I85o, Home
Dept, T&D, List I, Cons B.2.

I24 RADHIKA SINGHA
2. andprosecution
'Knowledge'
These developments generated an enormous expansion in the volume

of reports and publications, official and popular, about thuggee. The
information assembled was not in fact so very different from that in
earlier accounts of thuggee. What was different, however, was the
confidence with which these publicists proclaimed the penetration of
its 'mysteries'. 'I am satisfied', wrote Sleeman, 'that there is no term,
no rite, no ceremony, no opinion, no omen or usage that they have
intentionally concealed from me.... 167 To the 57 words which Sher-
wood had collected, Sleeman added others and presented ramasi
(slang?) as Ramaseeana, thug 'language'.168 Henry Spry, medical officer
at Sagar sent off seven skulls of thug leaders executed at Sagar to the
phrenological society at Edinburgh to add to the sum of human
knowledge about the influence of caste and religion on the 'lower
feelings' in the human brain.'69
The body of 'knowledge' presented by thuggee officials had a very
significant connection with their presentation of a case for special
procedure. The drawing of the 'history' of thuggee into the distant
past, the recording of details about this 'religion of murder', its omens,
rites and prohibitions, heightened the impression of an entrenched
'system' which only the most rigorous measures could combat.
What was being reiterated in various ways was the proposition
'once a thug, always a thug'. A thug could not be treated in the same
way as a 'casual' or one-time offender. A 'known' thug could not be
released back into society, even if his participation in a specific act of
murder had not been conclusively proved.170
In the regulation provinces the testimony alone of a confessing
prisoner or prisoners was not supposed to constitute sufficient ground
for issuing a warrant of arrest for the person named as accomplice.17'
167
Ramaseeana, Intro., p. 3.
168 In Sleeman's subsequent publication, Reporton BudhuckDecoits, Malchand, a
'Sansee dacoit', refers to ramasias slang, p. 271.
169 H. H.
Spry, 'Some account of the gang-murderers of Central India commonly
called thugs', ThePhrenologicalJournal andMiscellany,VIII (Dec. I832-June I834), pp.
511-30. Cf. M. Adas, Machinesas the Meausreof Men: Science,Technology and Ideas of
WesternDominance (Cornell University Press, I990), pp. 292-6, for the influence of
phrenology in the first half of the nineteenth century in confirming beliefs about
innate differences between racial groups.
170 F. C. Smith to
ChiefSecy to Govt, 20June 1832, CLWCB,II, p. 844.
171 The
magistrate was not to commit for trial before the Court of Circuit or hold to
security any person solely because of the accusation of confessing prisoners that they

However, the Thuggee Department issued warrants on the basis of

lists compiled from the depositions of approvers. Officials defended
this practice by claiming that they took adequate precautions to
prevent collusion between the approvers and to cross-check their
depositions. At the most, argued Sleeman, the innocent would suffer
the inconvenience of temporary imprisonment, a possibility which
could be accepted, given the extent of the evil they were contending
with.172
Sometimes the thug-hunting detachments were even given a
general warrant to arrest any person pointed out by the approvers,
even if they were not specifically listed on a warrant.'73Critics of these
procedures charged that they gave the arresting party opportunities
for extortion and too much power to the approver to accuse one party
or to conceal another.'74In one case Dharam Khan, a police official of
Mainpuri, sent out with a general warrant to arrest thugs, set up a
gang of thugs himself!175
Officials used the assertion that thuggee was a 'hereditary system'
to defend the practice of arresting the wife and children of a thug
'leader' to induce him to surrender. As thugs were 'generally heredi-
tary', there was no injustice in this, explained F. C. Smith.176The
were their accomplices, though he could order further enquiry. CO, NA, 20 Nov.
1815, P. 54. 'Such rules', commented Sleeman, were better suited to a 'more advanced
and more rational system of society.' Ramaseeana, p. 54.
172 Ramaseeana, p. 52. Sleeman argued that a change was needed in the rules 'that
the testimony of any number of confessing prisoners shall not be considered a suf-
ficient ground to authorise the detention of their associates.' Ramaseeana,pp. 5 -6.
173 F. C. Smith defended the use of
general warrants with the argument that 'the
liberty of the subject must bend to a temporary suspension as the lesser evil of the two
and therefore though the use of spies and general Warrants, will doubtless, occasion-
ally create great evils ... it must be submitted to, as the least of the evils attending
such a depraved state of society as at present obtains in these provinces, and in
general throughout the whole continent of India.' F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, to G.
Swinton, Chief Secy, no. 908, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur DI I88, IOL, p. 71.
174 Cf. Extract letter from Court of Directors, 28 Nov. 1832, no. I , List I, Cons
B.2, NAI and letter from the Court of Directors, Pol. Dept, 15 July 1840, no. 26,
expressing doubts about the practice of issuing general warrants; India and Bengal
despatches, E/4/763, Io Jan. I840-30 Sept. 1840, IOL; cf. Commr Patna to Offg
Magt, Patna, I I July 1834, complaining of the extortion of a party sent out to arrest
thugs with a general warrant. Home Dept, T&D, Cons B.2, no. 5.
'75 F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, to Secy, Pol. Dept, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur DI i88,
IOL. In some cases, approvers sent out with certificates identifying them and
exempting them from the death penalty and transportation were found to be loaning
them out to their friends for 'bad purposes'. W. H. Sleeman, circular 31 Aug. 1838,
Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.8, July i838-April i939.
176 F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, to Prinsep, Secy, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur DI i88,
p. 90,
IOL.

I26 RADHIKA SINGHA
rationale of heredity also justified warrants for those suspected of

being related to known thugs. Such ties were cited as part of the
'evidence' against them in the trial.'77The idea that male children
were contaminated by the cult underwrote the practice of detaining
those seized with the gang, or those who joined their approver fathers
at Lucknow or Jabbalpur, even though there was no evidence that
they had actually participated in a murder.'78
The government had sent instructions that all those caught with the
gang seized by Borthwick in 1829 were to be punished even if they had
not taken part in the murders. This meant that followers engaged in
menial duties, such as syces,grass cutters, and boys under 14 were to
be confined for such period as the Resident thought necessary.179
Apprehensions about such 'contamination' also made the government
reluctant to release pardoned approvers. His Lordship in Council felt
'extremely reluctant to let them again loose upon society without
security for their future good behaviour.'180
Punishment now began to be awarded on the principle that anyone
linked to a thug gang was to be kept in perpetual confinement. The
principle that punishment should be scaled to the prisoner's involve-
ment in the specific act of murder began to blur.
In government's orders on F. C. Smith's trial of 74 thugs in Novem-
ber 1830 the punishment for those present at a murder was increased
from imprisonment to transportation for life, even if they had not
'77 Cf. F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, to G. Swinton, ChiefSecy, Pol. Dept, no. I158, 26
May i832, regarding the arrest of two artillery men in the service of the Rajah of
Bejanur. He recommended that they should not be released for a long time, if ever,
because their father was a convicted thug, and their uncle a notorious one whose two
sons had been punished for thuggee. Mss Eur DI i88, IOL. Low, resident at Lucknow
said he sought information of the family and marriage relationships of thugs as part of
the collateral evidence which could be presented against a prisoner. J. Low to
W. H. Macnaghten, I Nov. 1838, J. Paton, BM, Addl Mss 41300, p. 348. W. H.
Macnaghten to Resident, Hyderabad, i8 Aug. 1833, Home Dept, T&D, 1833, Cons
D.I, no. 3, p. 264.
178F. C. Smith stressed the impossibility of reclaiming boys who were sons of
thugs. F. C. Smith to Prinsep, Secy, Judl Dept, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur DI I88, pp.
91-2, IOL. Some boys apprehended with a gang were kept in confinement for
inability to provide 'security for good behaviour'. Others were kept in confinement
with their fathers who had turned approver and a thug 'colony' grew up around
Jabbalpur and Lucknow.
179Swinton, ChiefSecy, to Resident Indore, 23 Oct. 1829, Ramaseeana, p. 381.
180 Ibid., pp. 381-3. It was argued that thug approvers should not be pardoned on
the same terms as other accomplices who turned 'king's evidence'. Instead they
should be drawn into service to detect thugs, and be kept under surveillance. F. C.
Smith to Prinsep, Secy, Judl Dept, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur Di i88, pp. 91-2, IOL.

personally assisted in the act.'18 Suspects 'proved to be thugs' were

given prison sentences even if their presence at a specific 'murder' had
not been established. 'There are several prisoners', reported F. C.
Smith of the fourth set of thug trials he had held at Sagar, 'upon
whom I have passed sentences of imprisonment for life, or for such
period as it may be deemed unsafe to release them on security. They
are either youths orpersonsprovedto be thugs,butnotto havebeenpresentat
anyparticularmurders.'82
In the Regulation provinces if a suspected thug could not be convic-
ted for a specific act of murder, the only provision a judge could use
against him was to demand security and order confinement for failure
to provide this. However, in these trials conducted by the Agent at
Sagar and by British Residents, prisoners deemed thugs 'by pro-
fession' were being directly sentenced to confinement, either for life or
'till they could be released without danger to the community'.'83 In
the 'Amurpatan case', tried in the I832-33 sessions at Sagar, all those
present at a murder were sentenced to 'transportation for life with
branding'. The sentences were passed without specification as to the
degree of each prisoner's participation in the murder, but on such
charges as 'proved to have followed the profession of Thuggee from
his youth', 'proved to be a Jemadar of Thugs and a hereditary
thug'.184'To release on security a thug' wrote F. C. Smith, was 'folly
and ignorance', an application of English notions to a country to
which they were unsuitable.'85
In the opening phase of the campaign the Thuggee Department
also favoured the unhesitating use of capital punishment to dramatize
both the special heinousness of the crime and the Company's
181G. Swinton, Chief Secy, to F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, 2 April I832, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons D.I, no. I, 1831. Three prisoners whom F. C. Smith had sentenced to 14
years in fetters with stripes and hard labour and three to whom he had given 7 years,
on the grounds that they were proved to be notorious thugs and present at murders
though not proved to be principals, were now given transportation for life. Ibid.
182 F. C. Smith to G. Swinton, No. 888, 8 May I832, Mss Eur DI I88, IOL, p. I27
(emphasis added).
183However, no mention was made of fixing a period for judicial review. Cf. G.
Swinton, Chief Secy, to Major Low, Resident Gwalior, on the trial proceedings held
by Captain Dyke. Government concurred that there was ample evidence to conclude
that Drigpal and Ramchund were 'professional thugs of such dangerous character
that it would be dangerous to release them.' They were to be confined until govern-
ment was satisfied that they could be released without danger to the community. Mss
Eur DI i88, IOL, p. 14.
184 W. H. Macnaghten, Secy to Govt, to F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT, i Nov. 1833,
Home Dept, T&D, Cons D.I, no. 4, 1833.
185 F. C. Smith to
ChiefSecy, 20June 1832, CLWCB,II, p. 844.

128 RADHIKA SINGHA
determination to extirpate it. The thugs, wrote F. C. Smith, had to be

met in their own way, 'by a rigid adherence to the law of
[vengeance] -blood for blood'.186One of his arguments for keeping
thug trials out of the jurisdiction of the Nizamat Adalat was its
'nervous dread of the responsibility of punishing capitally in cases of
numerous criminals . . . 187
The executions of thugs in group hangings at Jabbalpur and Sagar
in 1830-32188provided an unusual spectacle. In the official debates on
criminal justice in the i83os there was no pressure for the general
escalation of capital sentences.'89 The orders on executions sought
instead to regulate their performance more closely and to curtail
certain exchanges between the condemned man and the spectators
which inducted an element of tamasha,free-wheeling spectacle, into
the ceremony, or which endowed the prisoner with certain magical
powers in the eyes of the crowd.'90The thug hangings at Sagar show
how the actions of the condemned men and of the spectators could
leave the government with a sense of uncertainty about the 'message'
of the scaffold.9"'The men condemned as thugs chose to go to their
death with a raffish bravado and the Indian spectators expressed a
sense of unease about the return of their restless spirits.'92
186F. C. Smith to Chief Secy, 20 June 1832, CLWCB, II, p. 845. Cf. also F. C.
Smith to Prinsep. Secy, 19 Nov. 1830, Mss Eur Di I88, IOL, pp. 77-85. The govern-
ment's eagerness to highlight both the evil of the crime and its mastery over it is
illustrated by another penal provision. The punishment of branding had been
abolished for prisoners sentenced to temporary imprisonment. However thug-
prisoners sentenced to limited terms were to have the words 'convicted thug' tattoed
on their faces, a deviation, commented Chief Secretary Swinton, which was 'fully
warranted by the enormity of the crime of Thuggee which justly placed those who
practised it beyond the pale of the Social Law.' G. W. Swinton, Chief Secy to F. C.
Smith, 4 Aug. I830, Mss. Eur Di i88, IOL.
187F. C. Smith to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, 26 June 1833, Home Dept, 1833,
T&D Cons B.2, no. 4.
188 Between 1830 and 8 July I832 there were 146 executions of thugs at Jabbalpur
and Sagar. H. H. Spry, ModernIndia,vol. I (London, I837), p. I68.
189The figures of capital punishment in the Company's dominions were cited to
the Select Committee in 183 to illustrate the 'mild' nature of criminaljustice in India
as compared with the harsher code of England. PP I831-32, vol. 12, pp. 208-9.
190 Cf.
Singha, 'A "Despotism of Law" ', pp. 193-9.
191 Cf. T. W.
Laquer for a brilliant examination of the public execution as a theatre
of fluidity, and a critique of a view of the execution as 'semiotically stable and
relatively closed'. T. W. Laquer, 'Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Execu-
tions, 1604-I868', in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine andJ. M. Rosenheim (eds), TheFirst
ModernSociety;Essaysin EnglishHistoryin Honourof LawrenceStone(Cambridge, 1989),
pp. 305-6.
192 H. H.
Spry, the medical officer at Sagar gave a vivid description of 'a gang of
condemned thugs who passed their last night in displays of coarse and disgusting

In addition the government also received some reports which hin-

ted that in comparison with the penal practices of Indian rulers in
similar cases, the paramount power seemed to be undertaking its
mission of 'benevolence' in far too bloody a fashion. D. F. Mcleod, a
thuggee assistant, reported that Indian rulers seldom passed the
death sentence on thugs, even when the bodies of the victims were
pointed out, unless the relatives were there to demand retribution.193
There was also some hesitation at Calcutta about the legal pro-
priety of sentencing a prisoner to death when proof of his participation
in a murder rested on the evidence of approvers. On i8 August i833
the government issued instructions that if approvers' depositions were
the only evidence for an individual's participation in a specific crime,
the sentence was to be restricted to imprisonment for life and brand-
ing on the forehead. The instructions also noted that the disinterring
of bodies in the places indicated by the approvers was strong evidence
of their own guilt, but not of the others' except as corroborative of the
general accuracy of the approvers' testimony.'94 Life imprisonment
therefore emerged as a sort of median punishment for a prisoner
deemed to be a thug 'by profession'.
levity' and chose to test their own ropes and swing themselves off. ModernIndia,vol. I,
pp. I65-6. Sleeman allowed an incision to be made behind the ankles of the executed
men at the request of Indian spectators who wanted to prevent the return of their
spirits. W. H. Sleeman to F. C. Smith, 1832, Home Dept, T&D, List i, Cons G.I.
193D. F. Mcleod to F. C. Smith, IO Oct. 1834, Foreign Dept, Pol. Cons, i May
1835, no. 78, para. 36, NAI. He argued against sentencing thugs to capital punish-
ment on the grounds that it went against the 'sense' of the community, ibid. The
Resident of Lucknow also advocated transportation rather than capital punishment
because the Awadh government, he said, very rarely inflicted capital punishment. J.
Low, Resident, Lucknow to Secy, Govt, i Nov.,J. Paton Addl Ms 41300, pp. 338-5I,
BM. There is also some indication that such exhibitions were making the approvers
rather too nervous about their own fate.
194 W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, to Lt Col. Stewart, Resident Hyderabad, 18 Aug.
1833, Home Dept, T&D, Cons D.i, no. 3, 1833, pp. 204-68. Prisoners No. 3 of trial I,
No. 2 of trial 2, No. 45 of trial 3, and No. 28 of trial 7 had been sentenced to hanging.
The Governor General in Council held that there was strong circumstantial evidence
of each being a 'thug by profession', but as there was 'no direct evidence beyond that
of the approvers of his having participated in any of the murders' the sentence was to
be commuted to life imprisonment with branding as a thug on the forehead. 'It will be
observed', wrote the Secretary, 'that all the individuals convicted have been sen-
tenced to the same punishment namely imprisonment for life in the Company's
territorieswith branding and hard labour, the only ground for making a distinction in
the sentences being a more or less active part taken by them in the Commission of
murders, but the means of discriminating as to their degree of guilt in this particular
depends solely on the evidence, not always consistent, of approvers.' Ibid. The Court
of Directors approved the scaling down of the death sentence in the 1833 trials at
Sagar. Letter from Court of Directors, i6 April 1834, no. 8, Home Dept, 1833, T&D,
Cons B.2, no. 6.

130 RADHIKA SINGHA
The striking feature about these trials held under the aegis of the
Political Department was that there was no such offence of 'being a
thug by profession' in the Bengal regulations. More broadly the pro-
cedures of arrest in the non-regulation provinces were characterized
by a cutting of corners; and in the trials a greater weight was conceded
to the evidence of approvers.195
A letter from the Court of Directors, of 28 November 1832, shows
they had been left far behind the pace of developments. They instruc-
ted that no person should be convicted on the mere evidence of
accomplices unless confirmed by circumstantial evidence; and also
that no person should be convicted 'merely for being reputed a thug or
being in the company of thugs, without satisfactory evidence bringing
home ... individually, a participation in some specific offence.'196In
fact the dynamics of thuggee operations generated in the non-regula-
tion provinces were now to leave their impress on the regulation areas
as well.
IV. Legal Restructuring in the Regulation Provinces
As thug-hunting detachments began to cross into the Doab, the fric-

tion between the Thuggee Department and the executive and judicial
establishment of the Bengal province began to increase. In part this
was due to the tension between the 'Politicals' and the 'Covenanted
Service' over administrative posts. In an era of peace and military
retrenchment Sleeman and other military men in the Political Service
may well have sought to extend the range and influence of the offices
they could command.'97But the judicial terrain opening up under the
Political Department also posed a disruptive potential for the regula-
tions and procedures of the courts supervised by the Judicial Depart-
195 On the
'Amurpatan' trials at Sagar government commented that it would have
rejected the uncorroborated evidence of approvers but for the precautions taken to
give value to their testimony: keeping approvers apart, cross checking the information
they gave before the apprehension of an accomplice with what was ascertained
thereafter. W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, to AGG, SNT, 7 Nov. 1833, paras 38-42, Home
Dept, T&D i833, Cons D.I, no. 4.
196 Extract letter from Court of
Directors, 28 Nov. 1832, no. I i, Home Dept, T & D),
List i, Cons B.2,S1. no. 3, 1833. They also asked that the measure of confining wives
and children of persons known or suspected to be thugs should be very sparingly
used. Ibid.
197Cf.
J. Beames, Memoirsof a BengalCivilian(Chatto and Windus, I96I), pp. 125-
6 for bitter complaints against 'military interlopers' who stopped promotions. I owe
the suggestion about possibilities of bureaucratic aggrandisement influencing the
thuggee campaign to Dr Sumit Guha.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830s I3I
ment. The Thuggee Department wanted to keep thug trials out of the
jurisdiction of the Nizamat Adalat-but ultimately the government
preferred to introduce certain legal changes to the regulation prov-
inces rather than to institute a judicial 'dualism' of this order.
Tension arose over arrests made by thuggee detachments in areas
under the jurisdiction of the district magistrate. The other contentious
issue was whether the prisoners were to be taken to Sagar for trial or
whether the session court for the area in which the crime was commit-
ted should try the case.
F. C. Smith and Sleeman pressed their case for special jurisdiction
by arguing that thugs must not be allowed to find refuge in the 'land
of rules and regulations' and that thuggee was in fact as prevalent
within British territory as outside it.'98 Secondly, they cited certain
weaknesses of policing in the regulation districts-the local nature of
the magistrate's jurisdiction, with coordination further impaired by
abolition in 1829 of the post of Superintendent of Police for the
Western provinces.'99
Their central argument was that the existing tribunals, and the
regulations by which they functioned, were fundamentally unsuitable
for the trial of thuggee cases. Special tribunals were needed, wrote
F. C. Smith, because:
The Thugs ... are Citizensof India and not of any particulardivision... no
Courtconstitutedaccordingto the regulations,can eitherclaim a sufficient
Jurisdictionto try themfortheirentirecrimesin expeditionsof so extensivea
range,norobtainevidencesufficientto satisfyJusticecrippledby the techni-
cality of law and that law the Koran.200
He argued that the principle expressed in Swinton's letter of 23
October 1829, that thugs should be tried by whatever authority seized
them, should be applied to the regulation provinces as well. Either a
special court presided over by one judge and responsible solely to
government should be constituted or the Sagar authorities should try
all thugs arrested by them.20'
Stockwell, the Commissioner of Allahabad division and a
198 W. H. Sleeman to Captain Benson, 22 Nov. 1832, CLWCB, II, p. 947. F. C.
Smith to Chief Secy, 20 June 1832, ibid., p. 839.
199 F. C. Smith to W. H.
Macnaghten, Secy, 26 June 1833, Home Dept, 1833,
T&D, Cons B.2.
200
F. C. Smith, AGG, SNT to W. H. Macnaghten, 26 June 1833, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons B.2, no. 4.
201 Ibid. Sleeman
suggested a special Commissioner of police in the Western Prov-
inces with 'paramount authority over all magistrates and other judicial authorities in
what may properly be termed international police', to be vested with authority to try

I32 RADHIKA SINGHA
'sympathiser'202was appointed Special Commissioner to try the first

set of thug cases held in the Doab after the inauguration of the
campaign. His sentences were submitted directly to the government
instead of to the review of the Nizamat Adalat.203
The government eventually decided that special courts in the
regulation districts outside the supervision of the Nizamat Adalat
would be institutionally too disruptive. The Court of Directors' anx-
iety about the lack of supervision over the courts set up under the
Political Department may also have influenced this decision.204
However, judges were specially appointed to try thuggee cases even in
the regulation provinces,205thus sustaining its unique status as a
crime. Moreover, thuggee Superintendents retained considerable
flexibility in choosing the court of trial. Trials for offences committed
exclusivelyin the regulation provinces were to be held in the sessions
courts. But thug prisoners accused of participating in crimes both
inside and outside the regulation territory could be committed for trial
before the Agent to the Governor General at Sagar.206
To integrate the thuggee trials as they had been conducted into
the existing framework of criminal justice, the concept of the
'professional/hereditary' criminal had to find expression in substan-
all the thugs seized here and in the territory of the native princes, and answerable
only to the Governor-General in the discharge of his duties. W. H. Sleeman to
Captain Benson, 22 Nov. 1832, CLWCB, II, pp. 949-50. Sleeman was suggesting a
unification of executive and judicial powers as in the administrative structure of the
non-regulation provinces. F. J. Shore, another commissioner of the Sagar and Nar-
bada territory, also recommended the special appointment of officers to hold thug
trials directly under the review of Government, instead of under the review of the
Nizamat Adalat.
202 F. C. Smith to W. H. Macnaghten, 26 June 1833, para. 7, Home
Dept, i833,
T&D, Cons B.2, no. 4.
203 Ramaseeana, Appendix A, Cf. also W. H. Sleeman to J. G. Lumsden, Secy, Judl
Dept, Bombay, r Nov. 1850, Home Dept, T&D, Cons. B.2, pp. 8-9.
204 It is worth noting the careful phrasing of Auckland's assurance to the court of
Directors that the proceedings of the magistrates, whether of the Civil Service or not,
'in our districts'were 'properly reconcilable to the principles of Criminal justice'.
Minute by Governor-General Auckland, 7 Dec. 1840, General Dept, Minute Book,
vol. V, BM Addl Ms 37, 712 (emphasis added).
205
Cf. CO, NA, no. i , i5 June 1838, p. 224.
206
Assistant General Superintendents (hereafter Asst GS) for the suppression of
thuggee were given powers ofjoint magistrate over the regulation districts under their
survey so that they could commit prisoners to trial. Act XIX of 1837 gave further
flexibility by enacting that 'any person charged with murder by Thuggee, or with the
offence of having belonged to a gang of thugs, made punishable by Act XXX of 1836,
may be committed by any Magistrate orJoint Magistrate within the Territories of the
East India Company, for trial before any Criminal Court, competent to try such
person on such charge.'

tive law. Act XXX of 1836 rested on the proposition that criminal
intention could be assessed not only from a specific criminal act but
from the characteristics of a collectivity. These characteristics were
believed to spring from a rooted 'way of life' criminality which,
however, was not defined by the Act.
To what extent had the legal structure of the regulation provinces
been responsive to this attitude before the formulation of Act XXX of
I836? The issue of assessing criminal intention had been of crucial
importance in the various modifications the Company government
had made to the Islamic law; through it the government executed a
shift in the modes of legal resolution from 'private' restitution to
punishment on behalf of 'public' justice.207 In their drives to alter the
terms on which judgement and punishment would take place, the
regulations also deduced criminal intention from 'attempt' to commit
a particular crime. A party arrested in circumstances which suggested
an intention to commit theft or dacoity could be punished under a
specific clause.208
The attribution of repeated or 'professional' criminality afforded a
space for enhanced penalties under the existing law. In 1803, a regula-
tion was formulated outlining an enhanced penalty for the repetition
of the offence of dacoity.209 In addition, certain criminal 'professions'
such as 'forgery' and 'receiving of stolen property' were classified as
'heinous crimes' in police returns and judges sometimes made a dis-
tinction between 'professional' and 'casual' receivers of stolen prop-
erty in their sentencing.210
207
Cf. Singha, 'A "despotism of law" ', pp. 38-9, 77-83.
208 Cf. Reg. 53, s. 4, cl 4, 1803 in which persons convicted of going forth with a gang
of robbers to commit dacoity but apprehended before they had committed it could be
sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour for a period of up to 7 years. Reg. i, s. 6,
181I, laid down that a person found with a seendkatee(an iron instrument) used for
nuccubzunnee (digging holes in the walls of houses to effect entry) on his person was to
be detained by the magistrate and put to work on the public roads till he gave security
for future good conduct or until the Court of Circuit discharged him on a mochulka,
undertaking.
209 The punishment for a
single offence of dacoity unaccompanied by homicide,
personal injury or other aggravating circumstances was fourteen years' imprisonment
with hard labour, but if convicted of a repetition of such offence the sentence was
imprisonment for life, or transportation for life, Reg. 53, s. 4, cl. 4, I803.
210 The
outlining of such professions in criminal justice is a fascinating index of
certain preoccupations and features of colonial rule, such as the policing of particular
professions, the greater importance of documents in the proof of certain claims, and
the control of coinage. Cf. J. Styles, 'Our Traitorous Money-makers: The Yorkshire
Coiners and the Law, 1760-83', in J. Brewer and J. Styles, An Ungovernable People:The
English and their Law in the Seventeenth and EighteenthCenturies(London, 1980), for
innovative work on similar themes.

I34 RADHIKA SINGHA
These regulations continued to keep the specific act of criminality

in focus. However, the concept of criminality 'by profession' encour-
aged the conclusion that the offender was 'irreclaimable', and this
influenced the severity of sentencing. It was such a proposition which
was given more space in Act XXX of 1836.
Regulation 8 of I818 gave magistrates and judges powers to
demand security for good behaviour and to sentence the prisoner to
terms of confinement for failure to provide it. Officers had regularly
used this provision against prisoners they suspected of being profes-
sional/hereditary criminals, though it had not been specifically form-
ulated for this purpose. The thuggee campaign strengthened the
contention of some officers that this provision was inadequate for the
'professional hereditary' criminal. The thug's religious and supersti-
tious beliefs and his supposed attachment to a 'hereditary profession'
stamped him as an 'irreclaimable' offender;to protect society the thug
had to be put away for ever. The punishment prescribed by Act XXX
of 1836 for 'belonging' to a gang of thugs was therefore confinement
for life. The general charge of belonging to a thug gang was certainly
easier to establish than the specific charge of murder. A case of
'belonging to a thug gang' could be built up on the depositions of
various approvers, provided the judge could be reassured that pre-
cautions had been taken to prevent collusion.
Act XXX of I836 also defined a category of criminal who could be
punished by the paramount power irrespective of whether he was a
subject of the Company or of some Indian state and of where the
crime had been committed.211Legally this smoothed the way for the
Thuggee Department to arrange for the trial at whichever court was
most convenient for the prosecution, whether for reasons of gathering
evidence or on other grounds.212
Despite the blurred definition of the offence, or perhaps precisely
because of it, Act XXX of 1836 and Act XXIV of I843-which
extended the provisions of the thuggee act to 'professional dacoits'--
expanded the powers of the prosecution. These acts afforded a
'security' net to convict the prisoner who escaped conviction on a
211
By Act XVIII of I843 the Company also assumed the right to take over
'persons sentenced to imprisonment or transportation for the offences of Thuggee,
Dacoity, or the offences of belonging to any gang of Thugs, or Dacoits, within the
Territories of any Native Prince or State in alliance with the said Company.' The Act
justified this measure on the ground that these gangs committed offences in British
territory as well as outside, and that this provision would ensure custody for such
criminals.
212 See footnote 206.

specific charge of 'murder by thuggee', or act of gang robbery.213

Suspected thugs were usually committed on both counts of offence.
Moreover, as Sleeman reminded his officers, Regulation 8, I818 was
still at hand. If the officer was 'morally' satisfied that the prisoner
belonged to a gang of thugs but there was not enough evidence to
commit him on this charge then it was his 'duty' to sentence him to
confinement by demanding security.214
If thuggee was not defined in Act XXX of 1836, the target of Act
XXIV of I843, the 'professional dacoit', was even more opaque. The
preamble explained that the act was intended to provide more strin-
gent measures for the conviction of professional dacoits, those who
belonged 'to certain tribes, systematically employed in carrying out
their lawless pursuits in different parts of the country.' But the actual
offence was defined more restrictively and without reference to the
term 'tribe'; it covered those 'proved to have belonged, ... to any
gang of Dacoits.' A few years later the legislation on criminal com-
munities was extended further. Act XI of I848 laid down a punish-
ment of 7 years for the offence of belonging 'to any wandering gang of
persons, associated for the purposes of theft or robbery, not being a
gang of thugs or Dacoits'.
The imprecise definitions of the criminal community, and the
increasing range of such targeted collectivities -thug gang, dacoit
tribe/gang, wandering gang-meant the generation of an expanding
and fluid space for prosecutorial licence right within the legal frame-
work. Such features of the legislation also reflect the difficulty of
setting up mechanisms of policing and prosecution which could bring
the specific offence home to the individual offender. In a sense all the
'knowledge' generated so voluminously by the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department about thugs and 'hereditary' dacoits actually disguised
this failure.
Conviction under these new acts ultimately depended on a negotia-
tion between the prosecution and the judge about where the line
between the casual offender and the 'professional hereditary' criminal
213
Sleeman conceded that to prove that a prisoner belonged to a gang of thugs or
dacoits it was necessary to show that the gang to which he belonged actually commit-
ted a dacoity or thuggee, 'but it has not been deemed necessary to prove, excepting by
the evidence of accomplices, that he took any prominent part or any part at all in the
particular Dacoitee or Thuggee so proved to have been committed by the Gang.' W.
H. Sleeman to J. G. Lumsden, Secy, Judl Dept, Bombay, i Nov. 1850, Home Dept,
T&D, List i, Cons B.2, p. 10.
214 W. H. Sleeman to LtJ. Sleeman, 19 April 1838, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.5,
Sept. i836-Feb. 1839.

136 RADHIKA SINGHA
was to be drawn. A judge who was unwilling to convict a prisoner on

the capital charge of'murder by thuggee' on evidence provided solely
by approvers' depositions might be more amenable to sentencing him
on the general charge of belonging to a thug gang.
The definition of this new substantive offence therefore smoothed
the path for the prosecution. But the government also made an effort
to maintain the formal coherence of 'rule of law'. It did not accept
various suggestions from officials that the crime of thuggee required
dual standards of evidence in the regulation courts. Instead,
Macaulay made one of his brilliant legislative interventions in the
form of Act XIX of 1837; at one stroke the Act sorted out the many
legal problems arising in the trial of thuggee cases while making the
point that a dual standard of evidence would not be introduced in the
criminal law.
The background to this Act lay in the vestiges of the Islamic law of
evidence which refused to consider the evidence of persons convicted
of a heinous crime as 'worthy of credit'. In thuggee cases the law could
negotiate this 'impediment' by offering a pardon to the accomplice
who would turn approver. But the thuggee campaign's rhetoric about
the 'irreclaimable' character of the thug put such a pardon in an
anomalous light. The approver was crucial to the operations of the
Thuggee Department, to the arrest and trial of thugs. But could such
an 'irreclaimable' criminal be let loose on society again? One solution
had been to take the approver into service and to keep him under
surveillance. The other was to keep him under confinement by requir-
ing him to provide security for good behaviour. However, there was a
sense of legal irregularity about keeping the approver as 'prisoner at
large', and working in the service of the Thuggee Department, but
without actually passing sentence on him. It was this anomaly which
provided the context for Act XIX of I837.
H. Shakespear, Law Commission member, outlined the aims of the
proposed Act:
The object of the Act, is to get the benefit of the approver's information and
evidence without holding out to him a full pardon according to the usual
practice in such cases, and to secure the custody of his person if not for life at
all events until he be set at large with safety to society.215
Macaulay's opinion was that it was better to formulate this as a

215
Note by H. Shakespear, 20 April 1837, on draft of an Act submitted by the
Madras Government on the trial and evidence of thugs. Law Progs, Fort William, 9
June 1837, May-June 1837, p. 370, IOL.

universal law which stated that a convicted man was not incompetent
to be a witness:
I am unwilling to pass a law which would seem to imply that we are disposed
to put up with worse evidence in cases of thuggee than we think necessary in
other cases. I am not sure that we have not gone a little too far in this
direction already.216
Act XIX of 1837
laid down that no person shall, by reason of any conviction for any offence
whatever, be incompetent to be a witness in any stage of any cause, Civil or
Criminal, before any Court, in the Territories of the East India Company.
A dual standard of evidence would have made it very difficult to
integrate the changes generated by the thuggee campaign into the
legal framework of the regulation provinces. Act XIX of 1837 only
made the evidence of a convicted offender admissible in a court of law.
It did not commit the judge to finding the evidence of the approver of
sufficient credibility or weight to convict the accused. Therefore in
cases tried in the Sessions courts it was up to the Thuggee Depart-
ment or other committing authority to marshal evidence in such a
way as to convince the judge of the sufficiency of proof. Throughout
its career, therefore, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department had to
sustain a rhetoric about the reliability of its system for checking the
evidence of approvers and for preventing collusion between them.
This sometimes provoked wrangles between the Department and
judges who were accused of mistrusting the evidence of approvers.217
216
Minute by Hon. T. B. Macaulay, 5 June 1837, Law Progs, Fort William, 19
Jan. I837, May-June 1837, pp. 374-5, NAI. Government reiterated this principle in
rejecting a request to dispense with the summoning of witnesses from distant places to
be cross-examined before prisoners on certain statements of fact. It had been sug-
gested that a deposition sworn before the local magistrate could be accepted. F. C.
Ravenshaw, Sessions Judge (hereafter SJ), Patna, to Regr, NA, I6 May 1837 and A.
Lowis, Asst GS, to Ravenshaw, SJ, 6 May I837, Legislative Dept Progs, 19 June
1837, Nos 1-I2, Law Progs, May-June I837, NAI. However, Government held that
it was up to the Nizamat Adalat to define what evidence was sufficient to convict an
individual of the offence. 'It would be obviously objectionable to adopt the principle
that evidence which would be deemed insufficient for any other Offenders should be
deemed sufficient for the conviction of Thugs.' W. H. Macnaghten, Secy to Govt, to
R. D. Mangles, Secy to Govt of Bengal, I9June 1837, Legislative Dept, I9June 1837,
no. i8, Law Progs, May-June I837, NAI.
217 For instance, there was a
controversy in I850 between the thuggee department
and the Judges of the Bombay Presidency for their alleged distrust of approver's
testimony. The Sessions Judge of Dharwar pointed out that the Judge had to exercise
the same caution in such cases where the evidence was only the statement of convic-
ted approvers as he would in an 'ordinary' case of gang robbery. The protection of
forms of procedure had to be maintained in all cases. Cf. Home Dept, i850, T&D,

138 RADHIKA SINGHA
Act XIX of 1837 also strengthened the prosecution's hands in its

negotiations with the approver. In instructions accompanying the Act
the government stressed that thug approver was not to be promised
an entire pardon, but only exemption from capital punishment and
transportation, and the provision of some indulgences in confinement.
His Lordship in Council has before him such strong proofs that offenders of
this class are irreclaimable that he cannot consent to let any of them loose on
Society, however long the period of their confinement ... however unexcep-
tionable their demeanour ... whatever the value of the information. .. .218
The thug approver was to be told that if he stood trial on the 'minor'
(!) offence of belonging to a thug gang (Act XXX of 1836) and
pleaded guilty he would not be put on trial for any capital crime he
might have committed as a thug. 'His conviction will under such
circumstances be a matter of course. It will leave him a competent
witness. And he will be detained for life in confinement under an
authority which can never be questioned and in a strictly regular
manner.'219
Given the high rate of convictions in cases prosecuted by the thug-
gee agency the prisoner might well prefer to turn approver by plead-
ing guilty to the charge of belonging to a thug gang rather than risk a
trial without negotiation.220 In 1838 a general offer of pardon to all the
thugs above the river Narbada was proclaimed on the same terms-
that those who surrendered would only be committed on the general
charge of belonging to a thug gang.221 So the legal path to turning
approver and negotiating surrender underlined again the presentation
of thuggee as a criminal 'system'.
Cons B.2, no. 24, and A. Remington, SJ, Dharwar, to Regr, Sadar Faujdari Adalat,
Bombay, 15 May 1851, Home Dept, I854, T&D, Cons B.I, no. 6. Cf. also Home
Dept, I859, T&D, Cons B.2, no. 27, for a long controversy between Hume, Magt
Etawah, and Major C. Hervey, Offg Genl Supdt, on the reliability of the approver's
evidence presented by the T&D Department.
218 Instructions with reference to Acts XVIII and XIX of 1837 by the GG in C,
Legislative Dept, 19 June I837, no. I6, Law progs, May-June I837, NAI. 'Nothing
short of a sentence pronounced by a Court ofJustice and recorded on the Proceedings
of that Court can be sufficient ground for detaining any person in perpetual imprison-
ment.' Ibid.
219 Ibid.
220
Cf. Ramaseeana, pp. 38-9, table showing number of acquittals to commitments.
Also figures of acquittals to commitments given by J. Hutton, A PopularAccountof the
ThugandDacoit (1857), in J. L. Sleeman, Thugor a Million Murders,p. 238.
221 W. H. Sleeman, to H. Torrins, Dept, Secy, 20 Dec. 1838, letter No. 2259, Home
Dept, T&D, Cons G.9, July I838-April i839.

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I830S '39
V. The 'Extirpation' of Thuggee and the Issue of

'Reclamation'
Sleeman had always known how to buttress his demands for addi-
tional posts and police detachments with claims to past success and
promises of swift success to follow.222In 1838 dacoity operations were
added to the Thuggee Department and by 1839 Sleeman was claiming
that the 'old' thug gangs had dispersed and that thuggee 'as an
organised system' had been destroyed.223
However, Sleeman's claims to 'success' may also have sprung from
his evaluation of future strategies for policing suspect communities.
Two issues engendered reflection on the future course of action. In the
first place the prosecution and trial of various mendicant bands and
peripatetic communities on the charge of practising thuggee was prov-
ing very difficult and causing serious embarrassment to the Depart-
ment. Sleeman began to consider a range of other, more flexible
strategies for policing such communities. The second issue was that of
the extent to which the government was to commit itself to isolating
'criminal communities' and 'reclaiming' them for a 'settled' way of
life.
The success with which the Thuggee Department had used
approver's evidence to convict bands operating in Central India had
encouraged thuggee assistants to sweep up various bands of religious
mendicants in the belief that they, too, would be found guilty of
systematic highway murder. Reports were sent in about the 'dis-
covery' of Tin Nami thugs,224Gosainand Bairagi thugs,225Jogi, Kan
Phuttieand Thoriethugs226and PandaBrahmin thugs of Cuttack.227
222
Cf. W. H. Sleeman to W. H. Macnaghten, 8 Sept. 1836, promising thuggee
could be suppressed in every part of India in three years, if the regulations were
altered, extra police sanctioned and efficient European officers appointed. Home
Dept, T&D, G.4 Sept. I836-March 1838, pp. 30-I.
223 W. H. Sleeman to H. Torrins,
Dept, Secy, 20 Dec. i838, Home, T&D, Cons
G.g, July i838-April 1839, NAI. Also W. H. Sleeman, Reporton the Depredations
Committedby the Thug Gangs, I840, intro., p. XIX. In July I840 the government
informed the Court of Directors that as organized associations thug bands had been
broken up.
224
Reynolds, Offg GS to T. H. Baber, Pol. Agent, Dharwar, 31 Dec. 1836, Home
Dept, T&D, Dec. I836-May 1837.
225 W. H. Sleeman to Lt
Birch, 27 Dec. 1837, Home Dept, T&D, G.4 Sept. 1836-
March 1838, and W. H. Sleeman to Lt Burrows, Asst GS, Dharwar, 27 March 1838,
Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.5, Sept. I836-Feb. I839.
226 W. H. Sleeman to Lt Burrows,
17 Dec. I837, Home Dept, T&D, G.4, Sept.
1836-March
227
1838, p. 83.
Capt. J. Vallancy to W. H. Sleeman, 14 Oct. 1839, W. H. Sleeman to T. H.

I40 RADHIKA SINGHA
Sleeman responded enthusiastically. 'I had begun to despair', he

wrote, 'of ever being able to lift the veil from their crimes.'228Now, in
February 1838, he reported confidently that he had 'full proof that
Gosainsand Bairagisand other religious mendicants were 'assassins by
profession'.229
A couple of months later, however, he had to retreat from this
position, after his assistants failed to substantiate charges of thuggee
against certain parties of religious mendicants, Thorisand Jogis, whom
they had apprehended. In one case the local population clashed with
the arresting party and rescued some Jogis.230 Sleeman quickly cau-
tioned Captain Malcolm from proceding against the Bairagis in the
Hyderabad territory, saying they did not clearly come within the
jurisdiction of the department and 'if so included they will multiply
our difficulties to a fearful extent'.231Reynolds was advised to release
the Jogis arrested at Dharwar; here the approver's evidence was so
suspect, wrote Sleeman, that had the papers been sent to Government
'it would have created a feeling of distrust in all that we do which
nothing could ever have removed'.232Although Jogis and other reli-
gious mendicants, he maintained, did occasionally murder people to
rob them, there was little chance of getting judicial proof of their guilt
upon a scale that would justify their arrest in large numbers.233Birch
at Bombay was advised to confine his enquiries 'more exclusively to
the old and well-known thug fraternities';234Jogis should be left to the
local courts.235
Maddock, Secy, Pol. Dept, 26 November 1839, Foreign Pol., 22 Jan. 1840, no. 78, pp.
408-Io, NAI.
228
W. H. Sleeman to W. H. Macnaghten, Secy, Govt of India, 3 Feb. 1838, Home
Dept, T&D, Cons G.5, Sept. i836-Feb. 1839, PIo7. 229 Ibid.
230 For details of this fiasco cf. W. H. Sleeman to Lt Burrows, Asst GS, 27 March
1838, W. H. Sleeman to Capt. P. A. Reynolds, 6 April 1838, Home Dept, T&D, Cons
G.5, Sept. i836-Feb. I839; W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Reynolds i8 July 1838, letter
1186, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.8, July I838-April I839; W. H. Sleeman to Lt
Lumley, 30 July 1838, letter I242, ibid.
231 W. H. Sleeman to
Capt. Malcolm, Extra Asst GS, 31 March 1838, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons G.5, Sept. I836-Feb. I839.
232
W. H. Sleeman to Capt. P. A. Reynolds, 6 April 1838, ibid., pp. I2-14.
233
W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Malcolm, 22 Aug. 1838, letter 1432, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons G.8,July I838-April 1839. Comparing the approvers from these gangs to
those from the 'old hereditary Thug associations in the Dukhun and Hindustan',
Sleeman said that they had failed to give convincing evidence, ibid.
234 W. H. Sleeman to Lt W. G. Birch, Asst GS,
Bombay, 5 July 1838, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons G.5, Sept. i836-Feb. 1839, p. 216. Also W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Bur-
rows, i8Jan. 1839, ibid., p. 337.
235
W. H. Sleeman to Lt Birch, 4 April 1839, letter 2747, Home Dept, T&D, Cons

THE THUGGEE CAMPAIGN OF THE I83os I4I
Sleeman continued to press for the more stringent policing of reli-

gious mendicants and other peripatetic bands, insisting that some of
them did engage in thuggee, and that measures should be taken to
make the population aware of the 'atrocious characters' ofJogis236and
other such bands. Among the measures he suggested was the posting
of police among large bodies of Banjaras,237the compulsory registra-
tion of all religious disciples and a stringent Vagrancy Act.238Thuggee
officers now restricted themselves to the contention that some of the
members of these bands engaged in thuggee in a 'casual' way, even if all
were not thugs by profession.
But the problem was that in their prosecution strategy the idea of
'casual' thuggee had been denied by officers of the thuggee agency.239
If the existence of 'casual' thuggee was accepted, then that aggressive
shortening of procedure by which a man was convicted for being a
member of a thug gang instead of on a specific offence was hard to
justify.240The failure of the effort to establish thuggee against religious
mendicants and certain peripatetic communities may have encoura-
G.8, July 1838-April I839. Similarly, in the case of the wandering Banjaras Sleeman
said that though they occasionally murdered travellers, only those should be appre-
hended who were implicated in a particular crime. W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Reynolds,
21 Jan. I839, ibid. Cf. also W. H. Sleeman to Offg Secy, Govt of India, 30 Sept. I840,
saying that it was better to leave Jogi vagrants and gangs of poisoners to the local
Magistrate. Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.I i, April i84o-March I841.
236 Captain Malcolm was urged to take any opportunity to convict some of the
Jogis who had been arrested in the local courts so that people would become aware of
their 'atrocious characters'. W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Malcolm, 22 Aug. i838, Home
Dept, T&D, G.8, July I838-April 1839.
237 If a few Banjaras could be convicted for thuggee, he wrote, then the Magistrates
could be persuaded to this. W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Reynolds, 21 Jan. 1839, ibid.
238 Rambles and Recollections,pp. 592-3, n. 2.
239
Sleeman had pressed for an alteration in the regulations on the argument that
an initiated thug would always return to his trade. Therefore a prisoner shown to be a
thug 'by profession' ought to be imprisoned for life. W. H. Sleeman to W. H.
Macnaghten, 8 Sept. 1836, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.4, Sept. I836-March 1838,
pp. 15-20. 'It must be borne in mind', wrote F. C. Smith, 'that a Thug cannot
possibly be guilty of a Solitary crime, but of numbers, because Thuggee is a profession
for life and not a casual mode [of] obtaining a livelihood'. F. C. Smith, nd, Legislative
Dept, I9June 1837, no. o1, Law Progs, May-June 1837, NAI.
240In 1839, when asked what was to be done with prisoners who had perhaps
engaged in thuggee only on a single occasion, the Officiating General Superintendent,
Reynolds, was 'rather sceptical on the subject of casual Thuggee on the part of
hereditary members of this class of criminals'. Reynolds to Lt W. T. Briggs, 20 Dec.
1836, Letter I423, Home Dept, T&D, Cons G.6, Dec. x836-May 1837. And yet a few
days later he was writing that bird catchers and bear and monkey entertainers 'are in
the habit of practising Thuggee on a small scale.' Reynolds to T. H. Baber, Pol. Agent
Dharwar, 31 Dec. 1836, Letter 1490, ibid.

I42 RADHIKA SINGHA
ged Sleeman to preserve the reputation of the department by claiming

that thuggee 'as a system' had been extirpated.241
However, the thuggee Act still provided a useful short-cut in tack-
ling other crimes which seemed to be the preserve of organized gangs.
It was used to deal with the traffic in children, a phenomenon which
had swollen in the wake of the drought which ravaged the Upper
Doab, Delhi region and Rajputana in the late i83os;242 and parties of
gamblers who operated on thoroughfares also came under its
purview.243Whether one species of crime, that of poisoning travellers
to rob them, should be prosecuted under the thuggee Act continued
to provoke debate. The set-back which the Department had received
in prosecuting various 'suspicious' bands on charges of thuggee led
Sleeman to suggest that poisoning be left to the local Magistrate.244
But in the course of the pacification drives engaged in by the Thuggee
and Dacoity Department in the border areas of Awadh the Act was
applied to prosecute the Pasis, armed watchmen, who were believed to
be a class of 'poisoners by profession'.245
Such controversies about the applications of the thuggee Act made
it necessary to spell out what thuggee was through Act III of I848.246
The definition admitted the possibility that poisoning could be a
241
W. H. Sleeman to H. Torrins, Dept Secy, 20 Dec. I838, Home Dept, T&D,
Cons G.9, July I838-April 1939. Writing to Paton on 26Jan. 184o, Sleeman claimed
that though many of theJumaldhee Thugs were at large, they did not anywhere carry
on their trade of murder;ReportonBudhukDecoits,p. 202. Also, Reporton theDepredations
Committed by ThugGangs,1840, p. xix.
242Sleeman coined a phrase for a 'new' type of thuggee, 'Megpunnaism'- the
murder of indigent parents for their children. The government had turned down
Sleeman's suggestion for trying 'Megpunnaism' in the Upper Doab, under a special
judge. It held that the crime differed from ordinary thuggee only in the species of
gain. Offg Secy, Govt of India, to W. H. Sleeman, 17 Jan. I839, Home Dept, i839,
T&D, Cons B.2, no. I6.
243 Cf. Sleeman, Thugor a Million Murders,pp. I94-6. The thuggee provision was
also used to deal with the law and order problems created by mercenaries displaced
by the annexation of Punjab. Cf. G. Campbell, ModernIndia: A Sketchof theSystemof
Civil Government(London, 1852), pp. 517-I9.
244 Sleeman argued that because poisoners operated in smaller bands, it was
difficult to compare the evidence of approvers, or to induce prisoners to turn approver
on the promise of that limited pardon which was held out to thug approvers. Cf. W.
H. Sleeman to Offg Secy to Govt of India, 30 Sept I840, Home Dept, T&D, Cons
G. I I, April i84o-March 184 . Also RamblesandRecollections, 1844.
245 W. H. Sleeman to H. M. Elliot, Secy, Govt of India,
Foreign Dept, no. 24, 24
June I847, NAI. But the term 'thug' had to be redefined in order to make the term
applicable to the case. Cf. Act III of I848.
246 The preamble to Act III of 1848 stated that doubts had arisen as to the
meaning of the words 'Thug', 'Thuggee' and 'Murder by Thuggee' when used in the
Acts of the Council of India.

species of thuggee even if it did not always lead to death,247and also

the crime of murder for 'child-stealing'. But whether poisoning was
always a 'professional' crime, and therefore one over which the Thug-
gee Department could exercisejurisdiction and admit approvers, con-
tinued to be controversial.248
Act XXX of 1836 had therefore eat a very important precedent for
the formulation of legal provisions ed try 'criminal communities'. But
its application to a particular group was determined by a variety of
factors, and had to be weighed against the advantage of using other
forms of 'policing'. In the case of religious mendicants, the swoop on
such bands had aroused a measure of resistance from society and
prompted a re-evaluation of strategy. It is for such reasons that a
community classified under one form of criminal 'profession' could, in
a different political and institutional context, be placed under another
category.249The penal regime envisaged for 'criminal communities'
also shifted with changing economic and political preoccupations. In
the I770s Warren Hastings had proposed that dacoit families be
enslaved; in the I83os and I84os there was an interest in colonizing
wasteland, and applying industrial principles to penal regimes; and
from the late nineteenth century punishment was linked to finding
labour for mines, quarries and factories.250
The form of'policing', and whether it was to extend to the 'reform'
and reclamation of criminal communities, offers another facet to Slee-
man's effort to mark the conclusion of a certain phase of the
campaign. It also allows a re-examination of the view that the thuggee
campaign was a victory for the 'Anglicist' policy of intervention as
against the school which favoured the 'preservation of Indian
customs'.251 The thuggee campaign certainly used the rhetoric of
authoritarian reform which characterized the I83os. But, there had
been little, if any, apprehension among officials that the drive against
thuggee would be interpreted as an intervention in the religion and
247 The means used were defined
by Act III of I848 as those intended or known to
be likely to cause death. Cf. Sleeman, Reporton BudhukDecoits,p. 3.
248 Cf. Col. C.
Hervey, Reporton the Crimeof Thuggeeby Means of Poisonin British
Territoryin the Years1864, I865 andr866 (Delhi, General Superintendent's Press, 1868),
p. 3 and SomeRecordsof Crime,pp. 22-3, where he presses for cognizance of'Thuggee
by means of poison'.
249 See above, fn. 35.
250
Cf. Radhakrishna, 'The Criminal Tribes Act in Madras Presidency', pp. 283-7,
for the latter.
251
Gordon, 'Scarf and sword', p. 4Io; Bruce, TheStranglers,p. 3, 27, 42; B. Hjejle,
'The Social Policy of the East India Company with Regard to Sati, Slavery, Thagi
and Infanticide, I772-I858'. D.Phil., Oxford, I958.

I44 RADHIKA SINGHA
customs of the Indian people.252 The point of concern in official cor-

respondence was about enmeshing the Company in the internal
affairs of the Indian states and about putting too much power in the
hands of their own police.
However, the 'revelations' about thuggee were drawn into the
debate about the extent to which the government ought to intervene
to change social norms. For Evangelicals like Trevelyan, thuggee
provided damning evidence against Hinduism and illustrated the
moral depravity of a society which could 'tolerate' such a crime. The
'application of force', he concluded, 'can only be a temporary and
partial remedy for Thuggee ... .'.253What was needed, he stressed, was
regeneration through education.254 But the significant point here is
that Sleeman, held to be the architect of the campaign, did in fact
think that policing and prosecution under special laws and the main-
tenance of the Thuggee Department was sufficient to force such com-
munities to disperse and to turn to other means of livelihood.
There are indications that by 1839 Sleeman wanted to call a halt to
the accumulation of thug families around Jabbalpur. Earlier the
Thuggee Department had argued that male children arrested with
parties of thugs or those who came to join their approver fathers at
Lucknow and Jabbalpur ought to be kept in confinement because they
were 'contaminated'. Now Sleeman used a different tone, advising the
Officiating General Superintendent, Reynolds, that there was no need
to give the thug prisoners money in addition to rations.
To give them more would tend to bring around the Jail all their women and
children who might otherwise establish themselves with men who would
bring them up with honest industry. Now the gangs have been so much
252
Some of the prisoners swept up for thuggee boasted of their access to magical
power to discourage retributive action from rulers and chiefs. Cf. Ramaseeana, p. I55.
'A vulgar idea prevails', reported a magistrate in I810, 'that the Thugs have recourse
to sorcery to assist them in encompassing their hellish purposes'. Actg Asst Magt
Farukhabad, 12 March 81o, Saharanpur Collectorate, Judl letters from Govt, 181o-
12, vol. I77, RAA. But even James Paton, a thuggee officer of ardent Evangelical
views had to acknowledge that there were no 'direct or express' religious or supersti-
tious motives for the toleration which Indians seemed to extend to known thugs in
their midst. J. Paton, BM Addl Mss 41300, pp. I73-4.
253 C. E. Trevelyan, 'The Thugs or Secret Murderers of India', The Edinburgh
Review,vol. LXIX (Edinburgh, I837), pp. 357-95.
254 Ibid.
James Paton, a thuggee assistant, also suggested that the children of thugs
be drawn from their villages so as to 'engraft' upon them 'the delightful fruits' of
Christian instruction and virtue'. J. Paton to W. H. Sleeman, 5 Jan. 1838, Home
Dept, T&D, Cons B.2, no. I0.

brokenup I do not think there is any dangerof the young boys taking to
Thuggeeif left to shift for themselves.255
This suggests that Sleeman was not very keen to expand the num-
ber of thug families at Jabbalpur. These had been put to work with
thug approvers to manufacture tents, carpets and other goods on a
profit-sharing basis, a venture which was being hailed as a unique
experiment in reform and reclamation.256Sleeman's argument was
that as the 'system' had been destroyed and the Department would
prevent its re-emergence, members of thug families could be cast back
into society without fear that they would spread the 'contagion'.257
This retreat from an undertaking to isolate entire 'criminal com-
munities' from society and to 'reclaim' them is even more marked in
Sleeman's position on 'dacoit tribes'. He wanted the provisions of the
thuggee act to be extended to the dacoit tribes, i.e. the facility of
convicting them on a general charge of 'belonging' to a dacoit tribe,
but arrests were to be restricted to the leaders of dacoit gangs. He
argued that this would be enough to break them up.258The one
exception he made was in the case of the Badhaks,259probably
because the campaign against them was tied to the Company's politi-
cal and fiscal relationship with Awadh.260
In the case of the Badhaks Sleeman again opposed the programme
advocated by James Paton, Assistant Resident, Lucknow, and some
other officials, of settling them on wasteland as agriculturalists. He
wanted to restrict intervention to the policy of arresting and prosecut-
ing those suspected of belonging to a dacoit gang, arguing that this of
itself would force them to blend with law-abiding society.26'
255
W. H. Sleeman to Capt. Reynolds, 22 Feb. 1839, letter 2569, Home Dept,
T&D, Cons G.8, July I838-April I839. Cf. also W. H. Sleeman to Mills, 23 Feb.
1839, letter 2574, ibid, advocating a similar policy.
256 Sleeman's attitude contrasts with that of Mcleod, another officer of the depart-
ment, who wanted the Jabbalpur experiment to be expanded. 'It may be argued that
it is only the Peculiarity of the System followed for the Suppression of Thuggee which
has brought their families within our Controls. But the same controls may be
extended to every class of persons matured in crime.' Extract from McLeod's police
report on the SNT, paras 32-3, April I84I, Foreign Dept, Pol. (A), 1841, 26 July
1841, no. 74, NAI.
257 Under pressure of
pursuit, wrote Sleeman in his 1840 report, the sons of thugs
would take to honest industry. ReportontheDepredations Committed
by ThugGangs,p. xi.
258 W. H. Sleeman to L. H. Maddock,
Secy, 26 Feb. 1839, Home Dept, T&D, Cons
G.8, July I838-April 1839.
259
W. H. Sleeman to L. H. Maddock, Secy, 13 March 1839, ibid.
260 Cf.
261
Nigam, 'A Social History of a Colonial Stereotype'.
W. H. Sleeman to Hamilton, Secy, Govt of NWP, 29 April 1843, COG, Basta

I46 RADHIKA SINGHA
In institutional terms thuggee and dacoity operations anticipated

the 'reform'model for a centralized police bureaucracy, though it took
the convulsions of the 1857 rebellion really to reorganize civilian
policing. However, the small number of 'Superintendents' and the
limited police resources they were allowed made this a very limited
venture into an all-India framework of policing and surveillance. But
even this fact was assimilated to the mythic account of the campaign.
'A few Englishmen,' wrote J. W. Kaye in awe,'. . . have purged India
of this great pollution.'262The obsession and the resolution, the
account of the battle and the 'victory' were always outstandingly
inflated in comparison to the actual agency at the disposal of the
Thuggee Department.
I8, vol. 13I, Gorakhpur, Judl, RAA. W. H. Sleeman, Commr for suppression of
Dacoity to H. E. Tucker, Offg Magt, Gorakhpur, 27 May I845, Gorakhpur Collector-
ate, Pre-Mutiny, letters received from the GS, T&D, I844-56, Basta I3, vol. 97,
RAA. Cf. J. Paton, Asst Resident, Lucknow for an argument in favour of locating
them on wasteland. J. Paton, Addl Ms 41300, p. 408, pp. 417-20. Memo byJ. Paton,
for Colonel Caulfield, Actg Resident, Lucknow, 25 Jan. I840, Foreign Dept, Pol. (A),
9 March I840, no. 122, NAI.
262
of theEast India Company,
Kaye, Administration p. 376.


Radhika Singha - Thuggee Campaign

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'Providential' Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation

Author(s): Radhika Singha

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In his historical defence of the record of the East India Company in

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criminal justice were subsequently widened to include operations

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reordering of the hierarchy of objectives within colonial 'law and

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pany's government had rejected various suggestions made by its own

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of supervision in the Sagar and Narbada territories, noted that this

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power to indigenous sources of social authority33constantly opened

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thuggee as an organized system had been extirpated, may lie in an

I. Official Classification and Criminal Reality

I. The 'civil'and the 'predatory'

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At the time it was argued that a clear demonstration of overwhelm-

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In reviewing here the 'reality' of what were believed to be criminal

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This section represents a very preliminary attempt to search the

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coordination of a larger gang, and the acquisition of dexterity.

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ing mark of this 'ancient' fraternity also disassociated the method of

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At a continuous but diffuse level the official attitude towards the

offerings. W. H. Sleeman's letter to the CalcuttaLiteraryGazette,30 Oct. 1837, in

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property of others ....80 Sleeman mistrusted the various peripatetic

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with an injured horse without making any provision for them.

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word phansigar,strangler, is certainly used in indigenous accounts to

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duced to accentuate this marginality,94though in the case of the thugs

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So a certain terminology of low social status, probably derived from

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II. The Policing of Thuggee in the Regulation Provinces

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of a convicted offender could be circumvented by pardoning the

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Although this regulation was formulated as a preventive rather

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actually passed, magistrates freely used police powers and provisions

Official proposals for measures against thuggee had rested on extend-

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