Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
Though all agree in never practising cruelty, or robbing previous to
murder, never allowing any but infants to escape (and these are
trained to Thuggee), and never leaving a trace of such goods as may
be identified, there are several variations in their mode of
conducting operations; some tribes spare certain castes, others none:
murder of woman is against all rules; but the practice crept into
certain gangs, and this it is which led to their discountenance by
the goddess Davee, and the consequent downfall of the system.
Davee, they say, allowed the British to punish them, because a
certain gang had murdered the mothers to obtain their daughters to be
sold to prostitution.
Major Sleeman has constructed a map demonstrating the number of
"Bails," or regular stations for committing murder, in the kingdom of
Oude alone, which is 170 miles long by 100 broad, and in which are
274, which are regarded by the Thug with as much satisfaction and
interest as a game preserve is in England: nor are these "bails" less
numerous in other parts of India. Of twenty assassins who were
examined, one frankly confessed to having been engaged in 931
murders, and the least guilty of the number to 24. Sometimes 150
persons collected into one gang, and their profits have often been
immense, the murder of six persons on one occasion yielding 82,000
rupees; upwards of 8000 pounds.
Of the various facilities for keeping up the system, the most
prominent are, the practice amongst the natives of travelling before
dawn, of travellers mixing freely together, and taking their meals by
the way-side instead of in villages; in the very Bails, in fact, to
which they are inveigled by the Thug in the shape of a
fellow-traveller; money remittances are also usually made by
disguised travellers, whose treasure is exposed at the custom-houses,
and, worst of all, the bankers will never own to the losses they
sustain, which, as a visitation of God, would, if avenged, lead, they
think, to future, and perhaps heavier punishment. Had the Thugs
destroyed Englishmen, they would quickly have been put down; but the
system being invariably practised on a class of people acknowledging
the finger of the Deity in its execution, its glaring enormities were
long in rousing the attention of the Indian Government.
A few examples of the activity exercised by the suppressors may be
interesting. They act wholly through the information given by
approvers, who are simply king's evidences. Of 600 Thugs engaged in
the murder of 64 people, and the plunder of nearly 20,000 pounds, all
except seventy were captured in ten years, though separated into six
gangs, and their operations continued from 1826 to 1830:
the last party was taken in 1836. And again, between the years 1826
and 1835, 1562 Thugs were seized, of whom 382 were hanged, and 909
transported; so that now it is but seldom these wretches are ever
heard of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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