Thugs

The word thug comes to us from the Hindi word thuggee, and referred to a particularly infamous band of highwaymen. The thugs operated along the roads and rivers in India, emerging at night to strangle their victims with ceremonial silk scarves (very thoughtful of them to chose silk, I say). The British believed that the Thugs were a cult of Kali, driven to murder to show their devotion. Its hard to overstate the extent to which the rumors of the Thugs captured the British imagination. The Confessions of a Thug (1839), written by Philip Meadows Taylor, became an immediate best-seller. Queen Victoria demanded the publisher giver her a copy before it even went to proof. Other than all that unpleasant strangling business, the Thugs seems like the sort of gang most 10-year-old boys dream of joining. According to the book, Thugs were a shadowy cult who had infiltrated most levels of Indian society without suspicion. They had developed a secret language and set of signs to identify other Thugs. Each member of the group had a particular job, and rose in rank through an apprentice system. Since Indian highways were dangerous, merchants would band together in caravans for protection. Some Thugs would befriend members of a caravan, and then pass the word of the caravans movements to others. When the time was right, others would act as lookouts while the most thuggish Thugs descended and killed off the entire caravan.

British accounts generally focused on the cultish nature of the Thugs and their devotions to the goddess Kali. In reality, the Thugs were well-organized criminals who had adopted tactics to successfully raid caravans that individuals would fail to take down. Like other practitioners of risky occupations, the Thugs tended to be a superstitious bunch. Some Thugs also worshipped Kali, although this did not mark them as different from non-Thugs. The fact that Thugs were Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs casts doubt on the prospect that the killings were in honor of a Hindu goddess. In short, the Thugs seemed to be a plainly brutal set of criminals with effective methods. Another fellow with a notion for effective methods, Major William Sleeman, broke the Thugs. Realizing the group relied on its networks of operatives and coordination, he simply gave incentives for turning in members. Between his informants and the vast expansion in police power, the groups were soon gone and would only reappear in movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.