Thuggee was a phenomenon of highway robbery in the Indian subcontinent that saw gangs of Thugs murder and rob travellers, often by strangling. During the British colonial era, thuggee was represented and popularised as a secret pan-Indian fraternity of ritual stranglers with ancient origins, motivated by fanaticism and bloodlust. This portrayal has come under intense scholarly criticism beginning in the 1950s, with historical reinterpretations generally contesting the significance of religion to thuggee and viewing the Thugs as more or less ordinary criminals, or thuggee as a type of banditry. There is a general consensus among contemporary historians against the colonial-era representation.
The thuggee phenomenon came to prominence in the early 19th century, during the expansion of Company rule in India. In the 1830s, colonial administrator William Henry Sleeman led a policing campaign against thuggee, supported by legal developments that facilitated convictions. In 1835, the Thuggee Department was formally established to apprehend and prosecute the gangs. Sleeman authored works on thuggee and, together with his colleagues, recorded interviews with approvers which underpinned the colonial-era representation and constitute the vast majority of sources on the phenomenon. Thuggee was portrayed by the colonial authorities as "hereditary criminality" and the campaign served as a precedent for the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act that criminalised itinerant communities.
Contemporary scholars generally place the Thugs in the context of chaos and disruption amidst the decline of the Mughal Empire that was exacerbated by the expansion of British rule. The historical revisionism has also highlighted the variety of individuals arrested over the course of the campaign. A theory that has gained traction among historians views the phenomenon as resulting from a decline in the military labour market brought about by the British conquest and the East India Company's disbandment of native standing armies. The theory holds that some disbanded soldiers and itinerant mercenary bands turned to highway robbery as the market contracted. Scholars have variously described the 19th-century representation as an invention or distortion of the Company regime that legitimised colonial rule and saw the Company extend its control over its Indian subjects.
Following the publication of the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, thuggee became a Victorian sensation. The Thugs have generally been portrayed in fiction as Orientalist antagonists, featuring in novels such as The Wandering Jew (1844), Emilio Salgari's Sandokan series, and The Deceivers (1952). Notable depictions in film have included Gunga Din (1939), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Thugs of Hindostan (2018).
Etymology and nomenclature (Hindustani: ; ) translates to 'cheat' or 'swindler' and is derived from the Sanskrit word () meaning 'to cover' or 'to conceal'. The earliest generally accepted use of the word dates to 1350. It was sometimes used in precolonial India, in the same sense as the later British usage, to refer to highway robbers that deceived and murdered their victims. This was not the only meaning of the term, with its literal interpretation not necessarily connoting an association with violence. In 1820, a British magistrate stated in his report that in the Western Provinces "the word Thug is a local cant term and consequently little understood in any uniform way".
The English word thug is a loanword from the same roots. The word (; ) literally meaning 'strangler' was used interchangeably with thug during the 19th century and tended to be the term used in the Madras Presidency. refers to the practice of Thugs and the crime itself.
History Possible precolonial accounts In the 7th century, the Chinese monk Xuanzang was attacked by pirates on the Ganges during his travels across India and narrowly escaped being sacrificed to Durga. On another occasion, Xuanzang was told while passing a temple on the way to Pataliputra that no foreigner who entered it ever came out again. The 19th-century archaeologist Alexander Cunningham claimed to have identified the temple and presented this as an early account of thuggee. Kim A. Wagner asserts the view that, by this rationale, every account of banditry and human sacrifice in ancient India could be linked to the Thugs of the 19th century. According to a 14th-century chronicle by Ziauddin Barani, Sultan Jalal-ud-Din Khalji deported 1,000arrested "thags" from Delhi to Bengal in 1290; however the chronicle makes no mention of what they were arrested for. The 15th–16th century poet Surdas wrote of a "thag" luring a pilgrim with sweets and wine and then murdering and robbing them.
Following Jean de Thévenot's travels across India in 1666–1667, he wrote of the "cunningest Robbers in the World" operating in the Delhi area that strangled their victims with a running noose and used attractive women to lure travellers. In 1672, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a setting out a punishment for stranglers, including those that were "habituated to the work" or were notorious for it among the local population. John Fryer wrote of his experience witnessing the execution of fifteen members of a bandit gang in 1675, near Surat, that had strangled and robbed passing travellers using a cotton bowstring. Around 1680, an Indian news-writer for the referred to "highway robbers known in Hindi as thags" in Rajputana. In 1785, James Forbes recounted how an Indian acquaintance had witnessed the arrest of several men that belonged to a tribe he referred to as phanseegurs, describing how they would deceive and strangle travellers. A 1797 Gwalior State tax list lists 318houses as belonging to Thugs, who were subjected to a soldier tax. The list was obtained by a British official and covers 20villages across the of Parihara and Sursae.;
Colonial era Etawah crisis (1809–1811)
The British colonial authorities first encountered what they would come to refer to as thuggee in Southern India in 1807 and in Northern India in 1809. In April 1809, ten bodies were discovered in a well in the Etawah district (newly ceded in 1801), with the Magistrate of Etawah James Law ordered to investigate the killings. The magistrates of the neighbouring Aligarh and Farrukhabad districts were brought in to assist after Law's inquiries proved unsuccessful, and following the discovery of four strangled native soldiers in July. In November, Law's assistant made the first officially recorded reference to "Tugs ", describing them as "a set of people... who have from time immemorial carried on their abominable and lamentable practices" in secret.
Following the discovery of two strangled travellers in December and the initiation of a more thorough investigation, Law wrote: "It is presumed that the murdered persons were travellers and fell victims to that detestable race of monsters called T,ugs ... they are so strongly leagued together, that scarcely an instance has ever been known of their having betrayed each others secrets." More bodies were discovered throughout December and early 1810, in the midst of which Law was removed from his post. When questioned by an investigation in February, local reported that the perpetrators were suspected to be "Thugs".
Between 1808 and 1809, a total of 67bodies were discovered in wells and along the highways of Etawah, with a further 11 discovered in early 1810 between Mainpuri and Agra. Law's replacement, Thomas Perry, offered a large reward of ₨1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators. After eight suspected Thugs were arrested in March 1810, a young member of the gang, Ghulam Hussain, agreed to testify in return for a pardon and claimed that there were some 1,500Thugs based in Etawah. Hussain stated that he had been adopted by the gang as a child after they had murdered his father and uncle. The remaining prisoners initially admitted to murdering travellers over many years. At the trial in Mainpuri in November, he demonstrated for the court how the gang strangled their victims, though the trial descended into a farce as Hussain repeatedly revised his testimony regarding the extent of his involvement with the gang. He ultimately claimed to have been on five expeditions, witnessing 95murders. However, the court rejected his testimony due to repeated perjury and it was later deemed inadmissible to try him for the murders he had confessed to participating in. Perry was forced to release the suspects and was later admonished by the Nizamat Adalat (the East India Company's supreme court) for holding 162suspected Thugs without due evidence.
1810s and 1820s Regulation VI of 1810 first referred to Thugs as a distinct criminal category, alongside Dacoits, Cozauks, and Buddecks. That same year, the Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces was established to apprehend Dacoits, Cozauks, and, especially, Thugs. Though many individuals were convicted and sentenced to death by the circuit courts, the Nizamat Adalat ultimately dismissed all such cases because they relied solely on the confessions of suspected Thugs. In July 1812, Nathaniel J. Halhed was tasked with introducing British law and order into the of Sindouse (located in the of Parihara, southernmost Etawah), an area where local were allegedly protecting Thugs. Halhed visited the area with a military escort in October and, after ordering the surrounding villages to disarm, his party was ambushed by the villagers, in the course of which a British officer was killed. In response, the village of Murnae was razed the following month. The operation caused the Thugs to disperse into neighbouring Maratha territory. In a December report, Halhed rejected portrayals of the Thugs as a "secret society similar to the Illuminati", asserting that they were "no more than a species of robber" who murdered their victims and felt no dishonour in their profession.
Following the 1812 operation, successive Superintendents of Police for the Western Provinces claimed in their reports that thuggee activity had decreased in Etawah, Aligarh, and Cawnpore in the central Doab and simultaneously increased in Allahabad and Bundelkhand, migrating southwards and eastwards. In his yearly report for 1815, Superintendent John Shakespeare remarked that "much scepticism still prevails regarding the existence of any distinct class of people who are designated T'hegs ", though he himself held no doubt that there were "regular societies" of Thugs, who he characterised as robbers. In his five classes of Thugs, Shakespeare included Bairagi and Gosain mendicants that drugged and robbed travellers.
Regulation VIII of 1818 effectively allowed notorious Dacoits to be held indefinitely, with Regulation III of 1819 extending its provisions to also apply to Thugs. In the 1820s, the colonial authorities began handing captured Thugs over to local rulers and chiefs to circumvent the British colonial legal system and convict them by proxy. The first Thugs were convicted in Saugor in 1826, whereby two were sentenced to be hanged and a further 29 sentenced to transportation for life. This was possible because Saugor and Nerbudda had been designated as Non-Regulation Territories in 1818, meaning that the Agent at Saugor could operate outside the usual Company regulations with virtually unlimited powers. In 1829 in the Bombay Presidency, two Thugs were sentenced to hanging, six to transportation, and one to life imprisonment for the murder of six men carrying ₨100,000 of valuables in February.
Centralised campaign (1829–1839)