Thuggery...

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…

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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.

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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…