BRINGING HOME THE EXOTIC:
W.H. Sleeman
The Thugs or Phansigars of India
(1839)
William Henry Sleeman joined the military wing of the British East India Company as soon as he was
old enough and arrived in Calcutta in 1809 at age 21. He chose to join a regiment directly rather than
waste time in the Company's cadet college, showing the serious mind that would characterize him all his
life. While educating himself about the land and its people, Sleeman witnessed blood sacrifices and other
ecstatic rites at a temple to the goddess Kali. He came away with the fundamental idea of his career: a
dangerous cult of Kali controlled the many gangs of bandits roaming the countryside, and no traveler
would be safe until the English government had wiped it out.
Unrest and robbery had been endemic across the continent for most of a century, as the Mughal Empire
declined and the English gradually took over. Where the English government had previously observed
only local disturbances, Sleeman saw a well-organized secret society dedicated primarily to murder.
He called the gangs "Thugs" ("Phansigars" in the south), a corruption of a Hindustani word meaning
"deceivers," because the criminals often befriended parties of travelers before luring them into uninhabited
places and murdering them. Wiping out the cult of "Thuggee" became Sleeman's obsession and life's goal;
he would learn five languages, write several books, and relentlessly work to this end for almost thirty years.
Sleeman's reams of research drew a portrait of a large-scale secret network, involving both Hindus and
Muslims, whose primary drive was to dedicate victims to Kali through highly ritualized sacrifices. The
specially designated killers could strangle anyone in only a few seconds with a strip of yellow or white
silk knotted in one corner with a silver coin consecrated to Kali; other specialized cultists then broke
the corpses' bones for hidden burial while their brethren carted off anything of value. Expeditions were
surrounded with ritual and superstition; hearing the cry of a jackal in the daytime, for instance, indicated
an inauspicious time for killing, so a party of victims might walk away never knowing they had fallen in
with Thugs. Sleeman published his findings in a major book called the Ramaseeana, after the Thugs'
secret dialect, and in the shorter
Thugs or Phansigars of India, aimed at arousing public outrage.
In 1828, Sleeman began to inundate the new Governor-General with information about the evil cult.
Finally, at the end of 1830, Sleeman was created Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs and given
troops and carte blanche to arrest suspects, interrogate witnesses, and hold hostage family members of
suspected Thugs. The heads of villages that may have hosted Thugs were also penalized, allowing the
British unprecendented levels of local control.
Sleeman's main technique was to divide and conquer; he recorded the confessions of hundreds of
"approvers" who were then given partial amnesty for turning in their fellows. "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," he boasted in the Ramaseeana. By 1838 the Superintendent's forces had arrested as many as 3,000
suspected Thugs and had tried and hanged more than 400. A government official praised these extreme
measures, saying, "Like tigers, their taste for blood is indelible, not to be eradicated while life exists."
Even when he married, Sleeman did not allow his personal life to interfere with his mission. His wife
Amélie traveled everywhere with him, unexpectedly giving birth to their first child in a grove previously
sanctified to Thug burials. To Sleeman's satisfaction, his son's arrival also permanently contaminated the
grove for the Thugs.
By 1840, Thuggee had been almost wiped out, and the governor moved the exhausted Sleeman into the
civil service to oversee new campaigns against gang violence in northern India. He was later rewarded
with the coveted post of British Resident at the court of the king of Oude, then an independent kingdom
in the northeast. In January 1856, he departed for England to receive a knighthood, the first holiday he
had had for many years. He suffered a fatal heart attack off the coast of Ceylon.
Contemporary scholars see in the anti-Thug movement less a heroic campaign against a dangerous
secret society than the British Empire's need to whitewash its exploitation of India through moralistic
oppression. W.H. Sleeman's work and writings were dedicated to the elimination of a danger that in large
part his own government had created and conceptualized.
Though the cult and its foe died off, the concept of Thuggee lives on. In 1837 Queen Victoria herself
eagerly read Philip Meadows Taylor's romantic novel The Confessions of a Thug, based on the Ramaseeana,
and Rudyard Kipling's work shows awareness of it. As late as 1984, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
still titillated audiences with a fictional resurgence of the infamous stranglers.
Further Reading:
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