Featured Article Summary #289

Thuggee was a form of highway robbery in the Indian subcontinent in which gangs murdered and robbed travellers, often by strangling. During British colonial rule, it was promoted as a secret, pan-Indian fraternity of ritual killers with ancient roots and supposedly fanatical motives. From the 1950s onward, scholars strongly challenged this picture, arguing that religion mattered less than the colonials claimed and that the Thugs were largely ordinary criminals or bandits. Thuggee came to wider attention in the early 1800s as Company power grew, and in the 1830s William Henry Sleeman led a campaign to arrest and prosecute suspected gangs, with official records based on interviews playing a major role in the colonial narrative. Today, historians generally disagree with the colonial-era portrayal, and some suggest the rise of robbery was linked to social disruption and job losses caused by British conquest and the dismantling of local armies. The story also spread through Victorian-era novels and later films, which often turned the Thugs into dramatic, exotic villains. The word “thug” comes from Hindustani ठग/ٹھگ, meaning “cheat” or “swindler,” which traces back to the Sanskrit word meaning “to cover” or “to conceal”; the earliest broadly accepted use is from around 1350. In precolonial India it sometimes referred to highway robbers who deceived and killed victims, though the term could also be used more broadly and was not always linked to violence. The English “thug” is also related, and in the 19th century the term “strangler” (used in places like the Madras Presidency) was used interchangeably with “thug” for both the practice and the crime. Later writers describe earlier stories that were sometimes linked to the 19th-century Thugs. These include accounts from travellers and chroniclers such as Xuanzang, who said pirates tried to kill him, and later reports of strangling highway robbers who lured victims with tricks or attractive women; some sources also describe punishments and recorded groups of “thags” in the 1600s–1700s, which later researchers claimed as possible early evidence of thuggee. British authorities first investigated cases they later called “thuggee” in northern India in 1809, after multiple bodies were found in wells and on highways in Etawah. Magistrate James Law linked the killings to a secret group of “Thugs,” but despite arrests and investigations, trials became unreliable when a key witness gave changing testimony and was found to be perjuring himself. As a result, many suspects were released, and the East India Company’s supreme court criticized the authorities for detaining people without sufficient evidence. In the early 1800s, British authorities began treating Thugs as a separate criminal group, helped by new police powers and courts. However, many convictions were overturned because courts rejected cases based only on Thug confessions, and a 1812 crackdown in Sindouse led to violence and the destruction of Murnae, pushing Thugs into nearby regions. By the 1820s, colonial policy shifted to handing captured Thugs to local rulers so they could be punished outside British legal procedures, especially in places with special “non-regulation” powers. Trials followed, including hangings and long sentences in Saugor (1826) and further convictions in Bombay (1829) for the murders of men carrying valuables.