Sir William Henry Sleeman (8 August 1788 – 10 February 1856) was a British officer and administrator in Company-ruled India, best known for his leading role in the Anti-Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s against what he represented as a pan-Indian fraternity of ritual stranglers. Sleeman served as General Superintendent of the Thuggee Department from 1835 to 1855 and published his main work on thuggee, entitled Ramaseeana, in 1836. His writings served as the foundation for the colonial-era representation of thuggee and formed the basis of Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug.
Sleeman joined the Bengal Army of the East India Company in 1809 and served during the Gorkha War from 1814 to 1816. He joined the Company's political service in 1820 as an assistant to the Agent of the Governor-General in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, remaining in central India for the Anti-Thuggee Campaign. Sleeman's work saw the extension of policing powers over itinerant communities, which later culminated in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act.
Between 1843 and 1849, Sleeman served as the British Resident in Gwalior, and from 1849 to 1854 in Lucknow. He toured the Kingdom of Oudh in 1849–1850, and his subsequent report to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (published in 1858 as A Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude) proved instrumental in justifying its annexation in 1856. Sleeman's health collapsed in 1854 and he died at sea in 1856, en route to London. Sleeman himself strongly argued against the annexation of the native states, cautioning Lord Dalhousie that it could lead the Company's sepoys to mutiny. His correspondence on the matter was published posthumously in The Times in 1857 and together with his 1849–1850 report in 1858.
Sleeman also published works on political economy in which he criticised the Company's high taxes and lack of investment in the local population, viewing the policies as detrimental to British rule. He inadvertently made the first discovery of dinosaur bones on the Indian subcontinent in 1828, proposed in 1877 as Titanosaurus indicus, and his reports on feral children raised by wolves are thought to have inspired the character of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's 1894 novel The Jungle Book.
Early life and education William Henry Sleeman was born on 8 August 1788 in Stratton, into a Cornish gentry family. His parents were Philip Sleeman, who worked at H.M. Excise, and Mary (d. 1818), née Spry. The family moved to Bideford in 1798 for Philip's work but moved back to Cornwall after Sleeman's father died in 1802, leaving the family with financial difficulties.
This prevented Sleeman from becoming an officer in the British Army, which effectively required a sufficient private income, and he instead settled on joining the East India Company. With the help of family connections and the offices of Lord de Dunstanville, Sleeman was accepted into the Bengal Army of the Company as a cadet. In March 1809, he embarked on the Devonshire from Gravesend, arriving in Calcutta in late 1809.
Military career In December, Sleeman began his cadetship in Dinapore and was promoted to the rank of ensign in 1810. He was promoted to lieutenant in December 1814 and served in the Gorkha War from 1814 to 1816. Inbetween the 1814 and 1815 campaigns, the 12thNative Infantry Regiment in which Sleeman served was devastated by an outbreak of malaria. Of the regiment's ten European officers, seven fell ill, with Sleeman among the two that survived. After the war, he was stationed at Allahabad in 1817 and in 1818 at the cantonment of Pratapgarh in the Oudh State. With little prospect of further active service, Sleeman applied to join the Company's political service.
Civil and political service
In 1820, Sleeman assumed the position of junior assistant to the Agent of the Governor-General in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories. In 1822, he was placed in charge of the Narsinghpur District. He was forced to take a period of sick leave in 1826 and was placed in charge of the Jubbulpore district in 1828. On 21 June 1829, Sleeman married Amélie Josephine de Fontenne who was the daughter of Count Blondin de Fontenne, a French nobleman that had escaped the Revolution. In his 1844 book Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, Sleeman recounted his involvement with a case of in the village of Gopalpur in November 1829, in which a recently bereaved widow convinced him that her wish was to burn with her husband's body.
Anti-Thuggee Campaign
Localised efforts (1829–1830) The British colonial authorities became aware of bands of highway robbers they termed Thugs in 1807–1809, and by 1815 thuggee had been accepted by British officials as specialised and organised crime with the Thugs given a caste-like status. In 1830, Sleeman began assigning approvers (the period term for informants) that he had in captivity to accompany armed patrols along exposed roads, capturing 24 Thugs on two occasions and acquiring more approvers in the process. Though the historian Mike Dash notes that Sleeman had been in India in 1810 when a warning was sent out to the Company's sepoys and was likely to have been aware of a thuggee case in Jubbulpore in 1826, he states that there is no evidence to suggest that Sleeman took a great interest in the matter before 1829. Dash surmises that Sleeman became interested in thuggee in 1829, in the context of Captain Borthwick's success in arresting Thugs and his slow career progression by that point after ten years of service. Sleeman submitted his first report on thuggee in May 1830, writing:
Sleeman further asserted that the Thugs could murder freely in Bhilsa and suggested that the district be secured from Scindia rule. Francis Curwen Smith, Sleeman's superior as Agent of the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, suggested him for the position of Agent at Saugor in September. That year, Sleeman was sent 72 Thugs for trial that had been arrested in 1822 by Commissioner C. A. Molony, but which had been forgotten about after Molony had died. Sleeman argued against capital punishment for the Thugs on the basis that they had already been detained for eight years, during which time 33 of them had died. Smith and the Government disagreed, and 26 were sentenced to be hanged.
On 3 October, Sleeman contributed an anonymous letter to the Calcutta Literary Gazette that recounted the execution of 11 Thugs and asserted that all the Thugs in India congregated at Vindhyachal Temple in Mirzapur, where their expeditions were planned by the temple priests. Sleeman's letter further provided details of ceremonies performed by the Thugs and described Thuggee as:
Centralised campaign (1830–1839) Sleeman's anonymous letter resonated with the Government, prompting Chief Secretary to the Government George Swinton to commission a report from Smith and Sleeman on the feasibility of a wider campaign against thuggee. Swinton appointed Sleeman Agent at Saugor on 13 October and Smith submitted the plan on 19 November, which argued for the establishment of a Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs that would try Thugs in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories. Smith argued that Sleeman should be appointed to the office based on his "extensive acquaintance with the habits, haunts, and customs of the Thugs and Phansigars". Governor-General Lord William Bentinck declined to establish a specific office for thuggee, though provided Sleeman with 50 barkandazes (mercenaries) to pursue and apprehend the gangs. Sleeman was appointed Superintendent of the operations, while Smith oversaw the trials, whereby approvers were sent out with troop detachments to disinter the bodies and point out their former associates. Accounts and depositions from Thugs captured around this time would form the basis of Sleeman's writings on thuggee, with the gang leader Feringheea captured by a nujeeb patrol escorted by approvers in November. Sleeman organised a system of investigation, prosecution, and punishment and institutionalised the use of approvers. To secure approver testimony, he played different factions within the gangs off of one another. Thugs were thereafter convicted based on circumstantial evidence and approver testimony in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, which had been established in 1818 outside the scope of the Company's usual regulations.
On 5 March 1835, Sleeman was made General Superintendent of the newly established Thuggee Department after Smith declined the post. Sleeman's worsening health forced him to take a period of sick leave in 1835, departing for the Himalayas. He later published his writings made during the November 1835–early 1836 journey in 1844 as Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. Sleeman published his main work on thuggee in 1836 entitled Ramaseeana, named after the Thugs' criminal argot 'Ramasee' that he perceived to be the key to uncovering the secrets of thuggee. In it he compiled a vocabulary of Ramasee from conversations with more than a dozen approvers, also printing some of them alongside approver testimony, and published genealogical trees derived from a 1797 Gwalior State tax list of Thugs. During these interviews, Sleeman and his colleague Captain James Paton were predominantly interested in the goddess-worship of the Thugs, their observance of rules and omens, and the variance between different gangs' customs. In the opening lines to Ramaseeana, Sleeman stated: "I am satisfied that there is no term, no rite, no ceremony, no opinion, no omen or usage that they have intentionally concealed from me".
Upon discovering 'river-thugs' operating on the Ganges whose modus operandi left very little circumstantial evidence, Sleeman successfully lobbied for the passage of Act III of 1836 that made simply belonging to a thuggee gang a crime punishable by life imprisonment with hard labour. In March, he recommended that a manufactory be established or found to accommodate the approvers, whereafter the Jubbulpore School of Industry was founded later that year. In a February 1838 letter to his friend Charles Fraser, who had replaced Smith as magistrate of Jubbulpore, Sleeman described their duties as paramount to the interests of humanity and declared: "Believe me Fraser, I would not exchange the share I have had in this work for the most splendid military service that man ever performed in India. I glory in it and ever shall do." Dacoity was added to Sleeman's responsibilities that same year as thuggee activity had been effectively suppressed and in 1839 he coined the term Megpunnaism to refer to the murder of impoverished parents to attain their children for sale, portraying it as a new form of thuggee.
Sleeman initially welcomed his assistants' work in early 1838 arresting bands of religious mendicants, asserting in February that he now had full proof that Gosains and Bairagis were "assassins by profession". However, Sleeman halted the proceedings a couple of months later after the failure of trials against bands of Thoris and Jogis, remarking that had a further case against Jogis gone ahead the evidence was such that "it would have created a feeling of distrust in all that we do which nothing could ever have removed". Sleeman reminded his officers in April 1838 that if they were morally satisfied that the prisoner had belonged to a gang of Thugs but there was not enough evidence to convict them, then it was their duty to detain them indefinitely under Regulation VIII of 1818. In 1839, Sleeman declared that thuggee had been effectively destroyed as an organisation, marking the end of the campaign.