It’s
an interesting thing how language can veer off into strange wildernesses while
no-one’s paying attention. Words that, at one time, had very specific meanings
can suddenly loosen up in terms of their definitions, blurring out to cover a
range of phenomena – sometimes related and sometimes not – even to the point of
becoming woefully vague and flabby. Take the word ‘thug’. I’ve used this word a
lot lately, mostly in discussions about football players and their acts of
shameless and unrepented criminality, even though I know the term has a very
precise, laser-fine definition. If you’ve never heard of Thugs, here’s where
you’re about to get edumacated…
*****
In
discussing Mythos phenomena, we often talk about what it means to be scared, or
what generates fear in others. After all, when we sit down to a session of “Call of Cthulhu” that’s what we’re
trying to conjure up – fear; in ourselves and others. HPL tried to present a
very specific notion of the fearsome in his stories and the main feature of it
is dispassion; a pervasive indifference to humanity as a unit, or as
individuals. We see it often in various forms of entertainment media: Gene
Hackman’s character in “Unforgiven”
when facing the business end of Clint Eastwood’s Smith & Wesson objects to
being so despatched because he “has a house”; in Elaine Lee and Michael Wm.
Kaluta’s comic series “Starstruck”,
there is a spoof on the concept with the Cloistered Order of the Cosmic Veil of
the Goddess Uncaring. The randomness of an indifferent universe creates outrage
in onlookers and outrage is a major source of fear.
Randomness
is at the very heart of Thuggery. Since the Middle Ages, pilgrims in India,
making annual journeys to sacred locales within the country, faced the
undeniable fact that many of them would not return from such voyages. It was a
commonplace notion that, if you undertook your religious duty to travel the
many pilgrim trails that cover the Sub-continent, you risked not coming home afterwards. This was put down, in part, to the presence of such things as wild
animals, or the actions of bandits – or Dacoits – but there was actually a more
sinister agent in play:
Thugs
– technically-speaking – are members of a cult dedicated to the worship of the
Goddess Kali, an aspect of the consort of Shiva, god of Death. According to
legend, a great giant attacked the country and Kali went to oppose it.
Unfortunately, whenever a drop of its blood landed upon the ground, it
transformed into an exact duplicate of its originator, and soon, Kali was up to
her skull crown in undying, Xerox-ed enemies. Fortunately for her, two wily fellows
were watching these events from the sidelines: taking off their scarves, they
watched where the drops of blood fell and, when the new creature appeared, they
strangled it, killing it without shedding any blood, and helped Kali win the
day. In gratitude, she took them on as followers giving them the right to
strangle other creatures to death as a means of sacrifice to her. Thus, the
cult of Thuggee was born.
Until
annexation by the British, India had little cohesiveness. The country was
divided between religious schisms, regional rulers and an enormous range of
physical environments. The Char Dham
is a pilgrim trail that roams across the country, taking the faithful on a
walking tour of every part of the nation; further there are smaller offshoots
to this trail, including the Chota Char
Dham which wanders through the Himalayas in the footsteps of the sage Ari Shankara.
If someone left on one of these journeys, there was always a tacit acceptance of
the fact that they might well never return. Without national policing, a mail
service, or telegraph network, the life of a pilgrim was simply in the lap of
the gods.
Pilgrims
often travelled between inns and caravanserais,
congregating in groups in order to provide protection against such things as
tigers or wild dogs, and to discourage the depredations of bandits. Since such
groupings were ad hoc and made
without any notice or notification, when a group of pilgrims vanished without
trace, there was little or no follow-up, since one unexpected group of
travellers could hardly be differentiated amongst a constant flow of such
gatherings. This is where the Thugs fed.
The
pilgrim seasons for worshippers of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, or any other Hindu
deity, all occur during the same time of year, when the harvest was over and
when the weather was best for such activity; this was the same time of year
that the Thug pilgrim season took place. However, Thugs don’t have sacred sites
per se; their devotion had nothing to
do with visiting remarkable local features and temples, but in despatching
others bent upon such activity. Literally speaking, when the pilgrims were
going about their religious duty, the Thugs hit the road to prey upon them. And, for centuries, no-one was
aware that they were doing it.
The
standard Thug tactic was to inveigle their way into a group of travelling
pilgrims. They would approach the leaders of the group over several nights of
camping, or stopping at roadside inns, and ask one-by-one under a myriad
different cover stories to be allowed to accompany the group, taking advantage
of their strength in numbers. Once the entire Thug crowd was installed, they
would await a night when the party was camped outdoors and, at a signal from
the leader, they would assault the pilgrims in concert, holding them down and
strangling them to death. This well-rehearsed routine would often only take a
few minutes to accomplish.
The
decision to kill or not was a highly ritualistic one, dependent upon the sighting
of omens and their interpretation by the Thug leaders. If a butterfly – a
creature sacred to Kali - landed on a pilgrim’s head, the party was doomed; if
a cow travelling with the group became recalcitrant, the murder spree would be
called off. There was a litany of visual and other cues that would allow the
Thugs to pounce or not, almost – seemingly – at random.
Afterwards,
the goods and valuables of the dead pilgrims – including very small children sometimes deliberately
kept from death - were divided amongst the Thugs and they
would proceed to cover their tracks. While the murder was being done,
lower-ranked Thugs were preparing a gravesite a short distance from the camp,
usually under a grove of trees, or by a riverside. Shallow graves were dug and
the bodies were carried there to be installed; each body was slashed in a
ritual fashion to allow decompositional gases to escape without revealing the
presence of the burials. The rumal –
or ritual digging pick – used in these preparations became the holy symbol of
Thug worship. Once the deed was done and the spoils divided, there would be a
ceremony of devotion to Kali during which each Thug partook of a small piece of
sacred sugar-crystal called goor;
after this, depending upon how much cash had been acquired, the group would
shadow off to find more prey, or they would head back to their homes, their
religious observations done for that year.
Thugs
came from all walks of life and crossed all caste divisions within Hindu
society. They were maharajahs and Untouchables; farmers, warriors and
tradesmen. Outside of the pilgrimage season, they returned to their normal
existences, as if nothing had happened at all. Not having a system of taxation
auditing meant that the unexplained wealth of the Thugs was never questioned
and – due to centuries of planning put in place by the Kali-worshippers – generally
never even noticed.
Still,
over time, outsiders did notice that
certain people within their community went annually on pilgrimages and never
suffered the setbacks of others so doing, even seeming to prosper on such vacations. Eventually, people being people, word
began to get out in a small fashion, and other, non-religiously motivated
individuals began to join up with the Thugs in the practise of Thuggee. By the
early Nineteenth Century, most Thugs in India were in it purely for the money
and any religious overtones became lip-service at best. In fact, by then, most
“Thugs” were actually Moslems.
Things
came undone when a British officer named Sleeman had occasion to sentence a
criminal for a crime in his jurisdiction. That fellow requested a pardon and
reduced sentence if he could prove that there was a greater evil in the
countryside that had wider implications for British sovereignty than the petty
crimes of just one man. Sleeman took a gamble and learnt about Thugs; in fact,
he went underground, disguised as one himself and aided by his prisoner, in
order to get the whole picture. When he emerged at a later stage, he had a
story which deeply shocked the world, not only due to its scope, but also due
to the wilful arbitrariness of the horror.
Sleeman
put the lid back on the box of Thuggee, stifling it once and for all by about
1860. Ringleaders were rounded up and hundreds executed, while thousands were
gaoled for their involvement. From then on – what with national oversight,
railroads, telegraphy and a mail service – this particular form of Kali worship
was finished. As a strange footnote, many large and intricate knotted carpets
in Windsor Palace were made by imprisoned Thugs and presented to Queen Victoria.
*****
From
the mid-1800s, Thugs became a by-word for creeping horror and random death.
The lurid novels of the time became focussed on the actions of Thugs, including
the Fu Manchu novels of “Sax” Rohmer. Sleeman published three books about his
efforts - Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of
the peculiar language used by Thugs; Report
on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India;
and The Thugs or Phansigars of India
– as well as a book about Indian children raised by wolves which heavily
influenced Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book
stories. A book entitled Illustrations of
the History and Practices of the Thugs: And Notices of Some of the Proceedings
of the Government of India, for the Suppression of the Crime of Thuggee was
published in London by Edward Thornton in 1837. At the height of the Thug
revelations, Philip Meadowes-Taylor produced Confessions of a Thug (1839) which was a fictionalised version of
the account produced by the prisoner who led Sleeman to his discovery of
Thuggery.
MEADOWS TAYLOR, Philip
(Introduction by Brian Rawson, ed.; illustrated by Clarke Hutton), Confessions of a Thug, The Folio Society
Ltd., London, 1974.
Octavo;
hardcover, with decorated cloth boards, gilt spine titles on a green label and
endpaper maps; 373pp., top edges dyed green, with a monochrome frontispiece and
14 plates likewise. Minor wear; spine extremities lightly softened. Near fine
in a mildly rubbed slipcase.
Later
still, in the Twentieth Century – amongst all of the weird fiction iterations of
Thug depravity being churned out – Edgar Wallace channelled Thugs in a short
story in 1931 and John Masters published The
Deceivers in 1952, possibly the best work of fiction written about the cult
(and criminally hard to find these days). In films, Hammer Horror released a
movie called “The Stranglers” in
1960, and “The Deceivers” was made
into a fairly decent movie in 1988 starring Pierce Brosnan.
DASH, Mike, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous
Cult, Granta Books/Granta Publications, London, 2005.
Octavo;
hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 356pp., with 8pp. of colour and monochrome
plates. Mild wear; text block and page edges very lightly toned with some
spots; top edge dusted. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed; now professionally protected
by non-adhesive polypropylene wrap. Very good to near fine.
If
you’re really interested in this phenomenon, then you can do no better than
read Mike Dash’s history of the cult entitled Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult. It captures all the
basic elements of the phenomenon and outlines the efforts of Sleeman and others
to eliminate it. Since its release in 2005, revisionists of varying stamps have
tried to cast aspersions upon its contents – claiming, among other things, that
Thuggee was a fiction invented by the British imagination as an excuse to clamp
down on its Imperial holdings – however, if you know anything about Mike Dash
and his work, you know that he’d have written his book about that fiction
rather than the Thug reality if this were really the case.
Either
way, the notion of such deadly cult extremists is a boon to anyone running a “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying adventure
and lends lots of insights into how such an organisation would exist in the
world and how they would confront the players in your game. The Unspeakable Oath Magazine, issue
number 16/17 from 2001, has a good article about Thugs, their weaponry and how
to integrate them into a “Call of Cthulhu”
campaign.
The
next time someone uses the word ‘Thug’ in a conversation, you can stop to
ponder the extent to which the meaning of that word has wandered since Queen Victoria’s
reign. And the next time you see a photograph of Tupac Shakur, you will have a very
different insight as to what that tattoo on his abdomen really means…
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