An Indian cult which combined robbery and ritual murder (usually by strangling) in the name of Kali (the Hindu goddess of destruction). Under British governor-general Lord Bentinck (18335), and his agent Captain William Sleeman, vigorous steps were taken to eradicate the problem.
Thuggee (or tuggee) (from Hindi thag thief, from Sanskrit sthaga scoundrel, from sthagati to conceal) was an Indian network of secret fraternities who were engaged in murdering and robbing travellers, operating from the 17th century (possibly as early as 13th century) to the 1830s whose members were known as Thugs. This is the origin of the term thug, as many Indian words passed into common English during British Imperial rule of India.
Working method
Thuggee groups practiced large-scale robbery and murder of travellers. When the travellers allowed the thugs to join them, the group of thugs killed them at a suitable place and time before robbing them. Usually two or three thugs were needed to strangle one traveller.
Thuggee groups consisted both of Hindus and Muslims though their patron was the Hindu Goddess Kali whom they often called Bhowanee.
They preferred to kill their victims at certain suitable places, called beles that they knew well. They killed their victims usually in darkness while the thugs made music or noise to escape discovery.
Origin and recruitment
The earliest authenticated mention of the Thugs is found in the following passage of Ziau-d din Barni's History of Firoz Shah (written about 1356):
In the reign of that sultan (about 1290), some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a thousand being captured.
Though they themselves trace their origin to seven Muslim tribes, the Hindu followers only seem to be related during the early periods of Islamic development;
Induction was sometimes passed from father to son and the leaders of the thug groups tended to come from these hereditary thugs. Another way by which people became thugs was that sometimes the thugs did not kill the young children of the travellers and groomed them to become thugs themselves.
Beliefs and practices
The Thugs were a well-organized confederacy of professional assassins who travelled in various guises through India in gangs of 10 to 200, worming themselves into the confidence of wayfarers of the wealthier class.
The will of the goddess by whose command and in whose honor they followed their calling was revealed to them through a very complicated system of omens.
They believed each murder prevented Kali's (their goddess's) arrival for 1000 years.
Number of victims
Estimates of the total number of victims depend heavily on the estimated length of existence of the thugs for which there are no reliable sources.
Yearly figures for the early 19th century are better documented, but even they are inaccurate estimates.
British destruction of the secret society
Thuggee was suppressed by the British rulers of India in the 1830s, due largely to the efforts of William Sleeman, who started an extensive campaign involving profiling, intelligence, and executions.
Previous attempts at prosecuting and eliminating the thugs had been largely unsuccessful due to the lack of evidence for their crimes. Another main reason was the fact that thug groups did not act locally, but all over the Indian subcontinent, including territories that did not belong to British India in combination with the fact that there was then no centralized criminal intelligence agency.
Possible misinterpretation of Thuggee by the British
In her book The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002), Martine van Woerkens suggests that evidence for the existence of a Thuggee 'cult' in the 19th century was in part the product of "colonial imaginings"—British fear of the little-known interior of India and limited understanding of the religious and social practices of its inhabitants.
But Krishna Dutta, in reviewing the book Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult by the British historian Dr. Mike Dash (ISBN 1-86207-604-9, 2005) in The Independent, argues:
"In recent years, the revisionist view that thugee was a British invention, a means to tighten their hold in the country, has been given credence in India, France and the US, but this well-researched book objectively questions that assertion." To prove his point Dash refers to the excavated corpses in graves of which the hidden locations were revealed to Sleeman's team by thug informants. He asserts that the Thugs were highly superstitious and that they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, but that their faith was not very different from their contemporary non-thugs. Instead of the religious motivation, Dash asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for thuggee and that men sometimes became thugs due to extreme poverty.Thuggee in popular culture
The story of Thuggee was popularized by books such as Philip Meadows Taylor's novel Confessions of a Thug, 1839, leading to the word "thug" entering the English language.
The 19th Century American writer Mark Twain discusses the Thuggee fairly extensively in chapters 9 and 10 of "Following the Equator: Volume II", 1897, THE ECCO PRESS, ISBN 0-88001-519-5.
The two most popular depictions of the cult in film are the 1939 film, Gunga Din and the 1984 Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
In the 1956 film Around the World in Eighty Days, starring David Niven, Passepartout rescues a princess captured by the Thugees and sentenced to burn to death in the funeral pyre with her deceased husband.
In 1959 legendary British horror studio Hammer Film Productions released The Stranglers of Bombay. In the film, Guy Rolfe portrays an heroic British officer battling institutional mismanagement by the British East India Company as well as Thuggee infiltration of Indian Society, in an attempt to bring the cultists to justice.
In 1965, Thuggees were portrayed with bumbling malevolence in the Beatles film "Help!".
The 1968 Indian film Sunghursh, based on a story by Jnanpith Award winner Mahasweta Devi, presented the depiction of Thuggees that is considered to be very accurate.
The 1988 film version of The Deceivers, produced by Ismail Merchant and starring Pierce Brosnan, is a fictionalized account of the initial discovery and infiltration of the Thuggee sect by an imperial British administrator.
In an episode of Highlander: The Series, "The Wrath of Kali", Duncan Macleod deals with immortal Kamir (played by Indian actor Kabir Bedi), last of the Thuggee
Christopher Moore's novel, Lamb, describes a Thuggee ritual.
The fifth episode of the short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series featured a plot twist where the Little League World Champions were kidnapped by the Thuggee, where they were forced to chip rock away from walls (much like the Thuggee in the Indiana Jones film).
The Serpent's Shadow by Mercedes Lackey has a Hindu villain, whose minions are Thuggee, almost without exception.
The 2006 television movie Obituary, starring Josie Bissett, features many references to the thuggees and Kali.
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