Thuggee: Were India's Stranglers Real Killers or a British Colonial Myth?
Updated: 3 days ago
In the 1830s, British officers in central India started doing something very strange. They'd take a captured robber out to a quiet stretch of road, a riverbank or a grove of trees, and ask him to point at the ground. Then they'd dig. According to historian Mike Dash, informers led the British to around 1,100 bodies this way, travellers who'd set out on journeys and simply never arrived.
Those graves are the reason the story of the Thugs still won't go away. For the British, they were proof of a secret brotherhood of stranglers who'd murdered on India's roads for centuries in the name of the goddess Kali. For some modern historians, the Thugs were largely a colonial invention, a convenient monster that helped the East India Company tighten its grip. The truth, as usual, is somewhere messier in between.
Quick Answers
● What was Thuggee? The British name for gangs of highway robbers in India who befriended travellers, strangled them, robbed them and buried the bodies.
● Were the Thugs real? Gangs that killed travellers by strangling them almost certainly existed before the British arrived. The idea of a single, ancient, Kali-worshipping cult is much more doubtful.
● Who stamped it out? William Henry Sleeman, an East India Company officer, ran the campaign from 1830, mostly by turning captured Thugs into informers.
● How many were there? Around 4,500 people were tried as Thugs between 1826 and 1848. Roughly one in nine were hanged and about 3,000 were locked up for life.
● Where does the word thug come from? From the Hindi thag, meaning a thief or swindler. It entered English in the 19th century.
Where the Word Comes From
The word itself is much older than the British. According to Live History India, a version of thag turns up in 10th-century writing by the philosopher Bhasarvajna, Sanskrit texts of the 12th century use it clearly, and the 16th-century poet Surdas mentions thugs in his verses. The root idea is deception. A thag was a cheat or a swindler long before he was a strangler.
The earliest account that sounds like the later Thugs comes from the historian Ziauddin Barani, writing in the 14th century. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica summarises his story of how some thugs were caught in Delhi and one of them gave up about a thousand others. Rather than execute them, the sultan had them shipped downriver to Lakhnauti in Bengal and told never to come back.
The first detailed British account came in 1816, when Dr Robert Sherwood published a piece in the Madras Literary Gazette titled "Of the Murderers called Phansigars", after the Hindi word for a noose. By the 1830s the name that stuck was Thug.
How the Thugs Said They Worked
Almost everything we know about how Thugs operated comes from the confessions of men the British caught, which is worth bearing in mind. But the picture those confessions paint is consistent and chilling.
Gangs would join groups of travellers on the road, sometimes for days, posing as merchants or pilgrims heading the same way. When the moment was right, usually at a camp after dark, each victim would be strangled at the same moment, traditionally with a yellow scarf or rumal. The bodies were stripped of anything valuable and buried, often after being cut open so the corpses wouldn't swell and push up out of the ground, per Live History India. Different men had different jobs. Dash describes scouts, gravediggers, men whose job was to win the travellers' trust, and the stranglers themselves, all led by a jamadar, according to a review of his book in The Daily Star.
The Thugs also had rituals. The 1911 Britannica describes the consecration of the pickaxe used to dig graves and a ceremony in which sugar was shared after a killing. They had their own slang, Ramasee, and secret signs to recognise one another. It was seasonal work, too. According to Live History India, historian Kim Wagner found that Thugs mostly went out on the roads between October or November and the start of the monsoon, and spent the rest of the year at home, often as farmers or village watchmen.
We know a surprising amount about that slang because Sleeman wrote it all down. In 1836 he published Ramaseeana, an 814-page vocabulary of the Thugs' language printed in Calcutta and built largely from interviews with informers. James Hutton's 1857 book Thugs and Dacoits of India, which drew on Sleeman's work, lays out some of the key terms. A traveller was bunij, literally merchandise. The strangler was the bhurtote and the man who pinned the victim's hands was the shumsheea. The jhirnee was "the signal to fall on", the chosen killing spot was the beyl and the gravedigger was the lugha. After a murder came the tapoonee, a ceremony in which the gang shared consecrated goor, a coarse raw sugar. Hutton says the famous rumal was usually just a turban cloth or waist sash, knotted in the right places.
One early confession gives a sense of the scale. In 1811, eight Thugs admitted to murdering 95 people in eight years, according to The Daily Star's review of Dash.
Was It Really a Kali Cult?
This is where the story starts to wobble. The British were fascinated by the idea that Thuggee was a religious duty, murder as worship of Kali. It made the Thugs sound exotic and terrifying and it made for great copy.
But the Thugs weren't all Hindus. Dash found that almost one in three were Muslim, and that most Thugs didn't worship Kali in any special way outside of their expeditions, according to The Daily Star. The 1911 Britannica even notes that Thugs themselves traced their origins to seven Muslim tribes. Wagner's research, summarised by the anthropology blog Savage Minds, found no evidence of an organised Kali cult at all. The religious trappings were real enough, but they looked a lot like the rituals of any group of men doing a dangerous job, not a church of murder.
Wagner's conclusion, according to Live History India, is that Thuggee wasn't a caste or a hereditary priesthood. It was a way of making a living.
William Sleeman's War on the Thugs
The man who made the Thugs famous was William Henry Sleeman, an East India Company officer. On 13 October 1830 the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, authorised him to go after them properly, according to Live History India, and in January 1835 he was made General Superintendent of the campaign.
Sleeman's great insight was that the Thugs could be turned against each other. Captured men were offered their lives in exchange for becoming approvers, the Company's name for informers who'd give evidence against their old comrades. They named names, mapped routes and led officers to graves. One of Sleeman's officers even drew up detailed maps of the Thugs' favourite killing grounds, per The Daily Star. As Sleeman himself put it, "Detection was only possible by means of informers," as quoted by Quarterdeck. Informers were in real danger from their old gangs, so he had a special prison built for them at Jabalpur.
In 1836 the Company passed Act XXX, which made it a crime simply to have belonged to a gang of Thugs, punishable by life imprisonment. You didn't need to be convicted of a specific murder. The numbers that followed were enormous. The 1911 Britannica says that by October 1835, 1,562 people had been committed for trial, 382 of whom were hanged and 986 transported or jailed for life. Live History India puts the total for 1826 to 1848 at around 4,500 tried, with roughly one in nine hanged and some 3,000 imprisoned for life. By 1839, Sleeman was claiming the job was done.
Sleeman himself was a more interesting character than the stiff Victorian hero of the legend. Born in Cornwall in 1788, he joined the Bengal Army in 1809, according to Vinayak Lohani. In 1828 he found fossilised bones near Jabalpur that turned out to be some of the first dinosaur remains discovered in India. His accounts of children said to have been raised by wolves in Oudh are often credited with feeding into Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli. As British Resident at Lucknow from 1849 he opposed the annexation of Oudh, calling it "dishonest and dishonourable". He died at sea off Ceylon on 10 February 1856, on his way home after 47 years' service in India, per the Victorian Web. There's still a town near Jabalpur called Sleemanabad.
Behram and the 931 Victims
You can't write about the Thugs without Behram, often described as the most prolific murderer in history. The story is that Behram, a Thug leader from Oudh, confessed to strangling 931 people over 40 years with a rumal that had a medallion sewn into it, according to Live History India. He's usually said to have been hanged in 1840.
It's a great story, but treat that number with care. It comes from his own confession to British officers, relayed through their reports, and there's no way to check it. And in gangs where several men took part in every murder, it's not even clear whether 931 means killings he carried out with his own hands or killings he was part of. The same goes for the claim, repeated all over the internet, that Thugs killed two million people over the centuries. Nobody's ever produced a sound basis for that figure. Part of the problem is how the story was retold. Sleeman's grandson, James L. Sleeman, later wrote a book called Thug, or a Million Murders, which celebrated his grandfather's work and was reprinted as recently as 2002. With a title like that doing the rounds, it's not hard to see how the figures kept growing.
The Case for a Colonial Myth
Since the 1990s, a number of historians started asking awkward questions about the whole thing. The literary scholar Parama Roy and others argued that the British had more or less invented Thuggee as a single, ancient criminal cult. Savage Minds summarises the key objections. Under Act XXX, it was enough to be identified as a Thug, without being convicted of a specific crime. Convictions rested heavily on the testimony of approvers, men with every reason to say whatever would save their own necks. And the Kali cult looks very much like something British officials projected onto what they found.
Back in Britain the story went down a storm. The Illustrated London News in 1843 was full of admiration for the Thugs' skill and cruelty, and hailed books like Confessions of a Thug as valuable history, according to the Victorian Web. The historian Henry Schwarz argues that "the British widened the net considerably to suit their own purposes", turning lots of different kinds of crime into one ancient threat.
There was also a political pay-off. The Company was steadily extending its control over the princely states of central India, and a secret society of stranglers operating under the noses of local rulers was a very useful justification for sending in British officers.
One of the more unsettling pieces of evidence sits in Edinburgh. In a 2010 paper in the History Workshop Journal, Wagner traced seven Indian skulls labelled as Thugs that were presented to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1833. The men they belonged to had been bandit-retainers who were recast as Thugs when the British caught them, and their skulls were then measured to prove they were born criminals. As Wagner puts it, the interrogation of the seven men "was thus continued through their skulls". It's the same colonial race science that shaped projects like Egon von Eickstedt's portraits in Kerala nearly a century later.
The Case for Real Killers
The problem for the pure-myth argument is those bodies. Dash argues that around 1,100 corpses were dug up on the evidence of informers, according to Savage Minds. It's very hard to make that many graves up.
Wagner, one of the leading historians of the subject, lands in the middle. Gangs of highway robbers who used strangling as their trademark method really did exist in India before the British turned up, he argues, and their victims were real. What the British did was take a real, local, messy form of banditry and turn it into a vast, ancient, religious conspiracy that could be used to justify almost anything.
That's probably the fairest verdict. The Thugs weren't invented. But the Thugs most people imagine, a single death cult spanning centuries and sacrificing millions to Kali, owe as much to British officers and British novelists as they do to India.
What Happened to the Thugs
Not every Thug went to the gallows, and the British had to decide what to do with the rest and their families. In Jabalpur they set up an institution known as the Thug School of Industry, where the children of imprisoned Thugs were trained in trades like weaving. By 1867 carpets made at the school were being sent to the Paris Exhibition, according to Google Arts & Culture, which holds a chromolithograph of the school by the Scottish artist William Simpson.
The campaign also left a darker legacy. The idea that whole communities could be born criminals didn't die with Sleeman. It fed directly into later colonial laws that labelled entire groups as criminal tribes, which blighted millions of lives well into the 20th century.
From Thug to thug
The Thugs became a sensation in Britain thanks to a novel. Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug, published in 1839, is narrated by a fictional Thug called Ameer Ali, and it became a bestseller, famously read by Queen Victoria, according to its Project Gutenberg listing. It did more than anything else to put the word thug into everyday English, alongside other borrowings from India like the ones in our piece on Indian words that became everyday English.
Hollywood picked up the story later. Gunga Din (1939) pitted British soldiers against a revived Thug cult, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) gave it a Kali-worshipping high priest who pulled out people's hearts. Neither has much to do with the real history, but between them they've done a lot to keep the image of the Thugs as a death cult alive, much as the legend of the gentleman highwayman did for Dick Turpin.
So, Real or Myth?
Both, in a way. People really were strangled and robbed on India's roads, and gangs really did make a living from it. But the grand story of Thuggee, the ancient cult, the millions of victims and the devotion to Kali, was built by East India Company officers in the same years that the Company, and men like Robert Clive before them, were building an empire. It's worth remembering who was writing the record, and why.
