Thug
By Mike Dash
Granta
****

By David Gilmour
John Murray
****

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

It is the age of retro-chic and Raj nostalgia is making a come back. Both Mike Dash, with Thug, and David Gilmour, with The Ruling Caste, dive into the era when a small group of British officials administered the vast Indian subcontinent. What each comes up with though is entirely different. Dash provides insights into the shrouded world of a gang of murderers known as the Thugs; Gilmour traces the work and private lives of the Indian Civil Service officers in intimate detail.

For nearly two centuries Thugs haunted the roads of India, slaughtering travellers whom they met along the way by strangling them. The Thugs’ preference for this mode of killing initially baffled the British. Throttling a victim is no easy task; besides requiring considerable strength and coordination, it is also an appallingly intimate method of killing. However, thugs were masters at cultivating intimacy: they often travelled with an unsuspecting party for days, even weeks, eating and sleeping with them until they found the time and place suitable for murder of the whole party. Once the victims were dead, the Thugs looted the corpses, broke their joints, used knives to slice through the sinews in their limbs, forced them into makeshift graves, twisting limbs and crushing them until they were tightly packed. Finally, they made long incisions into the belly of each corpse so that, as it decomposed, gas would not build up inside them, bloating the cadavers and displacing earth until the grave pits were revealed.

Author-historian Dash’s account reads like a thriller as he delves into the modus operandi of the Thugs who probably chose to throttle travellers because of a peculiarity of Islamic Law – murderers who killed by strangulation, therefore without shedding blood, were not liable to death penalty in Mughal India. However, as the disappearances mounted the East India Company decided to investigate. Enter William Sleeman, widely regarded as a Raj hero. With great efficiency he launched his anti-Thug campaign. The Thug Road Book, a manuscript that detailed each reported murder spot, was circulated to other Company officials. Apprehended Thugs were turned into King’s evidence; the approvers thus led to other gangs. Sleeman possibly pioneered the highly successful British policy of Divide & Rule when he divided the approvers into three groups and deliberately turned one against the other for information.

So successful was Sleeman that a village was renamed Sleemanabad, and the Government of India’s intelligence agency, as late as WWII, was popularly known as the thagi daftar: the Thug Office. Dash peppers his fascinating story with anecdotes and pictures that bring it alive: three captured Thugs demonstrating their technique, convicted Thugs with tattoo marks, roadside Gibbets used to display the bodies of executed Thugs.

For an understanding of the milieu in which these officers lived, turn to David Gilmour. When Josef Stalin said it was ‘ridiculous…that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’, he was referring to the men of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), successors of the Company officers. Gilmour paints the intellectual and political forces that shaped them, their motivations for coming to India, their lives from recruitment to retirement as they lived daily from chota hazri to sundown. While revisionist historians have questioned the competence of the ICS, Gilmour, the biographer of Curzon and Kipling, steers clear of the debate by focusing on the individual’s life, coming to the institution through its members, not the other way round.

The new recruits, nicknamed Griffins, had to buy sensible clothes for their years in India; however an outfit appropriate for Madras turned out to be useless in the Punjab. Similarly with language – those who had learnt Urdu found no use for it in Bombay. Managing communal problems, shaking off pesky missionaries, preventing female infanticide, enumerating the population – these were just some of the duties of the officers who were called Ma-Bap (Mother and Father), the traditional appellation used when their Indian subjects addressed them. Gilmour’s account, for which he combed archives for fifteen years, is delightfully lively and impartial as he limns the lives of Memsahibs, the sexual scandals that erupted frequently but seldom damaged careers, the 1200-mile spring migrations from Calcutta to Simla, and the intrigues of Princely states. 

Anecdotes add rich detail to the narrative: Frank St Clair Grimwood was in charge of Manipur. His life was monotonous and lonely but he had his polo. His wife, Ethel, had her pets, her garden and nine Naga malis who shocked her by gardening in the nude. She gave them each a pair of bathing-drawers in an effort to ‘inculcate decency’ but abandoned her programme when she found them using the garments as turbans.

After an eventful life, retirement in England was often a bleak prospect for the ICS officers who grumbled, “when we go home, we are nobody.” So they set up Little Anglo-Indias in their houses: hunting trophies on the walls, brass trays, furniture of teak and rosewood, even using chutney and curry in the kitchen.