William Henry Sleeman

Sir William Henry Sleeman KCB (born August 8, 1788 in Stratton (Cornwall) , England ; † May 12, 1856 on board a ship off Sri Lanka ) was a British administrator and detective who was responsible for the discovery and extermination of the criminal Thugs or Thuggee - Brotherhoods in India succeeded.

William Henry Sleeman (1788-1856)

Life

youth

Sleeman was born the fifth son of Captain Philip Sleeman, a tax collector, and his wife Mary. After his father's death in 1802, the inquisitive young man, who had begun an apprenticeship as a businessman in London, learned the liberal economic ( Thomas Hobbes , David Ricardo , Adam Smith ) and military science literature ( Turenne , Marlborough , Karl XII. Of Sweden ) a basic knowledge in these areas. Since he wanted to join the army of the British East India Company in Bengal , in which one could make a career without buying a job, he learned the Arabic and Devanagari script , the script and language of the locals ( Bengali , Hindi and Hindustani) in self-study / Urdu ) as well as merchants and diplomats ( Persian ).

Service in India

In 1809 Sleeman joined the army of Bengal and was initially stationed in Dinapur , from 1810 in the garrison of Barakpur ( Calcutta ). 1814-1816 he took part in the successful campaign of the British against Nepal and learned Gurkhali , so that the most important national languages ​​in the northeast of the country were available to him. He never fully recovered from the malaria attacks he had for the first time .

Discovery and Control of Thugs

In 1819, in the garrison library, Sleeman came across the report by surgeon Dr. Sherwood from Madras , in which he reported on a well-organized and hitherto almost unknown group of murderers who had been killing and robbing travelers in the south and west of the country for a long time: the Thags (English called Thugs, hindi thag , English thug , actually "deceiver"). The system of these thugs or phansigars (Hindi "loop makers") consisted in making contact with travelers on busy roads and waterways and then killing them individually or in groups, mostly by strangling them and then robbing them. The corpses were thrown into specially dug graves or into wells; the raids were always prepared, the victims had no chance of escape; There were no survivors and thus no witnesses, so the existence of such groups initially went completely unnoticed.

Only when the Indian soldiers of the army of the East India Company, the so-called sepoys , did not return from home leave in large numbers, but desertion seemed ruled out, did the colonial power become aware of the problem and issue first instructions for the troops. But since it was assumed no system behind the killings and did not want to intervene in the affairs of independent states of India, Sleeman encountered in his research not only disbelief but also on the part of fierce opposition from his British counterpart, giving it the nickname thuggee-Sleeman awarded . He made the decision to devote himself entirely to fighting this unknown form of organized crime.

Court and Police Service in Central India

As assistant to the governor general's agent in the newly acquired Sagar and Narmada areas with residence in Jabalpur south of Gwalior / Central India (1820), he was given the opportunity to enforce his ideas of consistent, systematic criminal law in his legal district. In the new districts (non-regulated provinces) a workable legal and administrative system was introduced that went beyond the rigid rules of the old provinces (regulated provinces) , which were still administered according to English and local, i.e. Hindu or Muslim law (Sharia).

As head of the civil administration of Narsinghpur in the Narmada Valley (1822) he made his first practical experience with the Thugs: he learned their slang from an informant and wrote the so-called Ramasi dictionary as a handbook for police and justice (“Ramaseeana”). He also received the suggestion from him to build his own penitentiary for future thugs willing to give evidence as protection against his own accomplices . This and the leniency program , through which a confessed Thug got away with deportation or life imprisonment in a special prison instead of the death penalty (protection of informants), opened up an insight into the hermetically sealed world of this murderous brotherhood. Sleeman's description of the manners, customs and superstitions of the Brotherhood is one of the most fascinating documents in sociology , Indology and criminal history .

In 1831 Sleeman moved to Sagar in central India, where he successfully hunted the gang of Feringhia, a Brahmin Thug leader. In 1832, at his suggestion, the establishment of a special prosecution authority and the development of suitable police methods were tackled, which were extremely successful against nationwide correspondence, mapping of the locations of action, lists of names and police interrogations only through legal means, i.e. without the use of torture the Organized crime operated.

Successful searches, leniency programs, the special prison in Jabalpur

In 1835 he was appointed superintendent of the agency for the prosecution of the Thugs, based in Jabalpur , where he set up a special penal institution with compulsory labor to protect the key witnesses, and in 1839 he was appointed commissioner for combating the Thug Brotherhood and the so-called Dacoits .

By 1840 there were 3,689 arrests of thugs, of which 466 led to execution (13%), 1,564 to life deportation (43%), 933 to life imprisonment (25%), 81 to temporary sentences (1%), 86 to release subject to conditions (2%). 97 thugs were acquitted as key witnesses (3%), 56 approved as key witnesses (2%), 12 escaped (0.3%), 208 died of natural causes before their trial in custody (6%). In the years 1840-47 there were another 531 arrests and convictions of Thugs, in 1848 120 Thugs were convicted, since then the brotherhood has been considered to be broken. Key witnesses and thugs not convicted of murder were brought to the specially built special prison in Jabalpur, where they did convict work (carpet knotting, road construction, etc.), or to labor camps or penal colonies ( Mauritius , Australia , later Andaman Islands ) for life or temporary sentences .

Sleeman survived several assassinations during this period.

Resignation from the police force

1843–1849 Sleeman was appointed British resident at the court of the Maharaja of Gwalior and Knight Commander of the Bath , the second highest order of English knighthood, and resigned as head of the Thug prosecution agency. 1849-56 he became resident in Lucknow , the capital of the then still semi-independent Kingdom of Oudh , where he advised the British administration against annexing the area. When Governor General Lord Dalhousie nevertheless ordered the connection, this was the trigger for the Indian uprising from 1857 to 1858.

Other services

From a stay in New South Wales ( Australia ), which he had started in 1825 to cure his malaria , Sleeman brought back the sugar cane there , which has been successfully planted in the Jabalpur region since 1826. In 1828 he married the barely English-speaking 19-year-old French woman Amélie Josephine Blandin de Chalain, the daughter of a planter from Mauritius who had stayed in Jabalpur to study cultivation methods ; it introduced the qualitatively superior French sugar cane, with which the modern Indian sugar cultivation began. His wife often accompanied him on his police forays through the country and witnessed numerous interrogations and body finds.

Sleeman's historical interests were expressed in the "Story of the Byza Bae" (1827) published by himself, his archaeological interests in the discovery of the bones of Titanosaurus indica (1828, since 1832 in the Indian Museum in Calcutta ).

When in 1833 the grain became scarce and a famine threatened, Sleeman, as a student of Adam Smith and David Ricardo , braced himself against the popular expropriation of grain dealers, confiscation and official price dictates demanded by the British military; he was able to maintain the trust of the traders and the supply of grain, the higher prices attracted traders from all over central India, and the price speculation ended.

Last years

As a result of overwork and previous illnesses, Sleeman collapsed in health in 1854; after a stay at a health resort (1855) he was retired. On the way back to England he died on May 12, 1856 at the age of 67 on board the ship Monarch off the coast of Ceylon .

Sleeman left a son and five daughters.

criticism

Sleeman was - especially after 1947 - accused of exaggerating, misrepresenting or even making up facts in his actions against the Thuggee; the crimes he ascribed to the Thuggee were regionally and temporally limited, owed to the troubled times and were instrumentalized to enforce English justice, to demoralize the local population and to legitimize white rule.

National sensitivities became visible, which ultimately only came to the detriment of the exclusively Indian victims. The travel writer Fanny Parks had already stated in 1831: "The Thags would never attack a European". The only European killed by Thugs was Lt. Monsell, who fell in battle against them in 1812.

Ever since Gustav Pfirrmann sifted through the 19 volumes of files dealing with the Thuggee in the India Office in London - duplicates of the files are in the Indian archives - Sleeman's presentation has to be considered factually secure.

In recent years, a change in the assessment has emerged: The existence of the Thug crime in colonial India is now neither disputed as a fact nor in its extent, the events of the 1830s are once again assumed as reality. The representations that have appeared since 2002 take Sleeman's report for what it was from the beginning: a police report about the activities of a criminal brotherhood on a large scale and how to fight them. In 2005, an Indian reviewer called Sleeman “rightly a hero of the Raj”. In the Indian police academies, Sleeman's book was required reading, and it is still considered a prime example of successful gang control ( Dacoits , Baghis , Naxalites ).

Quotes

“I first heard of this report a day or two ago and borrowed it. It's full of magic ... Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in what was then the remote and sparsely populated Mississippi Valley ”- around 1850 -“ we kept getting vague reports and rumors about a mysterious organization of professional murderers a land that was practically as far away from us as the constellations that blinked above us in space - from India. ... reports that everyone liked to listen to and that no one believed. It was believed that the stories would have blown up along the way ... the source from which the Thug stories mainly flowed was an official report ... The report was written in 1839 by Major Sleeman of the British Army in India and printed in Calcutta in 1840. It is a clumsy, big, thick, very bad example of the art of printing, but possibly still very good for a government printer in that old time and that remote area. "

- Mark Twain

“A porter said to me, 'You can't drink the water here. Didn't you hear the copper pot down in the well - bump-bump - hit a corpse? '"

- Fanny Parks

supporting documents

1. ↑ http://www.iminologie.uni-hamburg.de/wiki/index.php/Thug
2. ↑ Figures from Tuker, p. 88.
3. ↑ Hiralal Gupta: A Critical Study of the Thugs and their Activities. In: Journal of Indian History (Department of History, University of Kerala) Volume 37, 1959, pp. 167-177; Aparna Roy: The Thags, or the story of a criminal association in colonial India. In: Männerbande - Männerbünde. On the role of man in a cultural comparison. 1990, pp. 185-191; Upamantu Pablo Mukherjee: Crime and Empire. The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime. OUP, Oxford 2003. See also Tom Lloyd: Acting in the “Theater of anarchy”. The 'Anti-Thug-Campaign' and elaborations of colonial rule in early nineteenth-century India. Edinburgh: University, School of Soc. & Pol.Studies, Center for SAS 2006. (Electronic edition); Radhika Singha: A Despotism of Law. Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. OUP, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai u. a. 1998; the quotation from Sherwood: see p. 58; Susan Bayly: Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. CUP, Cambridge 1999. (The New Cambridge History of India. Volume IV, 3).
4. ^ Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenāna. Illustrated with Sketches from Nature. 2 volumes, Richardson, London 1850. Chapter 13, conclusion.
5. ^ Gustav Pfirrmann: Religious character and organization of the Thag brotherhoods. Phil. Diss. Tübingen 1970. Pages V, 40 and 117-137.
6. ↑ Kevin Rushby: Children of Kali. Through India in search of bandits, the thug cult and the British rail. Constable, London 2002; Mike Dash: Thug. The true story of India's murderous cult. Granta, London 2005; Kim A. Wagner: Thuggee. Banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India. Palgrave, Basingstoke Macmillan 2007; Martine van Woerkens: Le voyageur étranglé. L'Inde des Thugs, le colonialisme et l'imaginaire. Michel, Paris 1995. (English edition: The strangled traveler. Colonial imagines and the Thugs of India. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. UP, Chicago 2002.)
7. ^ Krishna Dutta: Thug - the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. The sacred slaughterers. In: The Independent. July 8, 2005.
8. ↑ Francis Tuker: The Yellow Scarf. The story of the life of Thuggee Sleeman, or, Major-General Sir William Henry Sleeman, KCB, 1788-1856, of the Bengal Army and the Indian Political Service. Dent, London 1961; New edition: White Lion, London 1977; Mala Sen : Bandit Queen. The story of the Phoolan Devi . Goldmann, Munich 1993. (English edition: India's Bandit Queen. The True Story of Phoolan Devi. Harper Collins, London 1991). P. 52.
9. ↑ Mark Twain: Following the Equator. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1965. (Original edition: Following the Equator. American Publishing, Hartford 1897. New edition: National Geographic, Washington 2005). Chapter 27, here: p. 241 f., Chapters 46 and 47
10. ↑ Wanderings, Chapter 13 (1830). - The Thugs often threw their victims into the wells in the north of the country. - The travel writer Fanny Parks was an eyewitness to the interrogations as a guest of the Sleemans, witnessed thug trials and executions and visited their Kali temple in Mirzapur.

literature

Works (in chronological order)

• The story of the Byza Bae . Printed by Sleeman himself and ed. Without a place. Without year (Jabalpur 1827). - A photocopy of the copy from the Ames Library, St. Paul, Minnesota is available on microfilm: London: Rank Xerox 196-?
• On taxes, or public revenue; the ultimate incident of their payment, their disbursement and the seats of their ultimate consumption . By an Officer in the military and civil service of the East India Company [i. e. William Henry Sleeman]. London 1829.
• Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix, descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity and of the measures which have been adopted ... for its suppression . 2 volumes, Huttmann, Calcutta 1836.
• A report on the system of Megpunnaism, or the murder of indigent parents for Their Young children ... as it prevails in the Delhie Territories, etc . Serampore 1839.
• The Thags or Phansigars of India. History of the rise and development of an extraordinary guild of murderers. With Captain PA Reynolds' "Notes on the Thags" from 1837 . Complete edition, translated from English and edited by Thomas Kohl. Original title: The Thugs or Phansigars of India: Comprising a history of the rise and progress of that extraordinary fraternity of assassins; and a description of the system which it pursues, and of the measures which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its suppression . Compiled from original and authentic documents published by Captain WH Sleeman, Superintendent of Thug Police. 2 volumes in 1, Carey & Hart, Philadelphia 1839; Gutenberg Buchhandlung, Mainz 2009. Reprint of the English edition by Kessinger Publishing (incomplete), digitized copy of the Harvard College Library (p. 8 missing there) in the Google book search.
• Report on the depredations committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India, from the cold season of 1836-37, down to their gradual suppression ... in the year 1839 . Bengal Military Orphan Press, Calcutta 1840.
• An Account of Wolves nurturing Children in their dens . By an Indian Official [i. e. Sir WH Sleeman]. A reprint of the pamphlet published in 1852, 1888. In: Periodical Publications. London. The Zoologist, Series 3, Volume 12. 1843 (About Wolf Children in Central India)
• Rambles and recollections of an Indian official . Hatchard, London 1844 [Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official.] Mufid-i-am Press, Lahore 1888 [Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official.] 2 volumes 1893. Rambles and recollections of an Indian official . Revised annotated ed. By Vincent A. Smith. Karachi. OUP, London 1973. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official . Revised annotated edition by Vincent A. Smith. With a portrait, bibliography and map. Milford, London 1915.
• Report on Budhuk, alias Bagree Dacoits, and other gang robbers by hereditary profession; and on the measures adopted by the Government of India for their suppression . With a map. Bengal Military Orphan Press, Calcutta 1849.
• Diary of a tour through Oude, in December 1849, & January & February, 1850 . Lucknow 1852.
• Sleeman in Oudh. An abridgement of WH Sleeman's “A journey through the kingdom of Oude in 1849-50”. edited with an introduction and notes by PD Reeves. Cambridge UP, London 1971.
• A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849-1850. ... With private correspondence relative to the annexation of Oude to British India, etc. 2 volumes, London 1858.
• The history of the reigning family of Oude . Rank-Xerox, London [196-?] Photocopy of an unpublished book in the possession of the Ames Library.
• Iconoclastes on the princes and territorial chiefs of India . Cheltenham 1853. Includes bibliographical references.

Edits

• Thug, or A Million Murders, etc . An account of the suppression of thuggee by Sir WH Sleeman. With plates, including a portrait. Sampson Low, London 1933.
• Thug, or a million murders . With a foreword by William TF Horwood. Pilgrims, Delhi 1998.

Secondary literature

• Francis Tuker: The Yellow Scarf. The story of the life of Thuggee Sleeman, or, Major-General Sir William Henry Sleeman, KCB, 1788-1856, of the Bengal Army and the Indian Political Service . Dent, London 1961. New edition: White Lion, London 1977.
• Mike Dash: Thug. The true story of India's murderous cult . Granta, London 2005.
• Krishna Dutta: Thug - the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. The sacred slaughterers . In: The Independent. July 8, 2005.
• Tom Lloyd: Acting in the "Theater of Anarchy". The 'Anti-Thug-Campaign' and elaborations of colonial rule in early nineteenth-century India . Edinburgh: University, School of Soc. & Pol.Studies, Center for SAS 2006. (Electronic edition).

Film adaptations

• Die Täuscher , English The Deceivers (1988), with Pierce Brosnan

Web links

• http://www.thuggee-sleeman.de/index.html