Reproducing my article from Quora c.2020
TLDR: Who said fake news is new?
Thag (ठग) in Hindi simply means conman, or swindler - typically non-violent but cunning trickster. From ‘trickster’ to violent ‘psychopathic multiple-murderer’ was entirely a Colonial British invention and likely
- invented to put down the rebellion of - and demonize - a band of guerrillas,
- fictionalized and the numbers over-inflated for someone’s (James Sleeman?) personal self-importance and profit (Colonial British were not above making a quick buck, after all that was their stated reason for the India venture - note stated not actual reason).
- or quite likely, crafted during the impeachment of Warren Hastings for his personal redemption, to claim that he (and the British) were doing ‘good for India’
Summing up the numbers, some of the estimates claim that Thuggees were killing 40000–50000 people a year, or as the per a certain James Sleeman, a Million Murders. Yet, only about 1000 bodies were recovered attributed to ‘thuggee killing’.
The total number of Thuggees arrested by the British Raj? No more than 3000 ‘thugs’ captured, and no more than 400 executed, after having appointed some 500 ‘approvers’ (many of whom would have had their own axes to grind), over a period of some 20 (twenty) years. at the rate of about 20 thugs per year. Very big problem indeed!
All of this was carried out in the name of a couple of dubious laws - Act XXX of 1836 and Act XXIV of 1843.
Most of the charges themselves were anecdotal- for example one of the captured thugs was claimed to have committed and confessed to 900 murders, who however, was never brought to trial.
Reality? I won’t deny that there might certainly have been a band or two (or ten) of dacoits, a’la the Chambal dacoits (a primitive form of organized crime-gang; after all daku is also an established term in Hindi) somewhere, somewhen but it certainly wasn’t what the British Raj Historians made it out to be.
More? Checkout the book!
Excerpts from Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India By Parama Roy
[Emphasis mine]
pp 58:
The lack of independent witnesses, the unavailability in many cases of both bodies and booty—the sheer paucity of positivist evidence, in other words—could only be resolved in one way. The most important criminal conspiracy of the century (of all time, some of the authors claimed) could be adequately engaged only by a new conception of law.
pp 56;
The writings and reports of W. H. Sleeman, which form the core texts around which the tale of thuggee is orchestrated, represent a concerted and monumental effort to illuminate and classify the obscurity of thuggee. Sleeman emerges, in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of thugree, as the hero of his own story. Even those works, like George Bruce's The Stranglers and James Sleeman's Thug, or A Million Murders, that purport to be histories of the thugs rather than biographies, present the account of thuwee as coextensive with the life of Sleeman. Sleeman emerges from these texts (and his own, of course) as an exemplary figure in nineteenth-century criminal and judicial procedures, who undertakes a self-appointed messianic task ofuncovering and reading. Nothing in his story happens by chance.
pp 58 and 59
Act XXX of 1836 directed that any person who was convicted of "having belonged to a gang of Thugs, [was] liable to the penalty of imprisonment for life; and [that] any person, accused of the offence, made punishable by the Act, [was] liable to be tried by any Court, which would have been competent to tly him, if his offence had been committed within the district where that Court sits."
It applied with retrospective effect, and it established special courts for the trial Of thugs—including those captured outside company territory, within the kingdoms of the Indian princes—often with special magistrates appointed by the governor-general. It permitted the arrest of entire families, including women and children, as legitimate means of entrapping active (male) thugs; since thuggee was supposed to be a family affair anyway, transmitted in the genes and passed on from father to son, wives and children were also fit targets for the colonial state's punitive and corrective measures. The act admitted the testimony of approvers in lieu Of the testimony Of independent witnesses [..] a move which created a remarkable mechanics of truth production and conviction.
The definition of thugee as a form of hereditary, corporate, and religiously sanctioned identity allowed for no appeal by a thug convicted under its special decrees; in theory—and in practice—there was no such entity as an innocent thug. All those identified as thugs by approvers' testimony were automatically guilty, even if no specific crimes could be proved against them and even if there was no (other) evidence of their ever having associated with other thugs. Once the thug hunts began, criminal activity was not always necessary for arrest and conviction; even those "thugs" engaged in "honest labour" (a theoretical impossibility, given the terms of the discourse) were rounded up, tried, convicted, and imprisoned since the compelling, hereditary lure of was always latent in the thug. An overwhelmingly high proportion of those arrested were convicted, a fact which validated, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department believed, the thoroughness of its efforts and the justice of its cause.
