Thuggee

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Thugs, two guards and several poisoner (poisoners) in prison - view from 1857

Thuggee (also called Phansigar ) is a loan word from Sanskrit English and originally means “cheater” or “deceiver”, but is also the name of a historical brotherhood of religiously disguised murderers and muggers. Estimates of the number of their victims vary between 50,000 and more than a million. The fraternity experienced its heyday in pre-colonial India . It was smashed by the British colonial power at the beginning of the 19th century .

Demarcation

The English word thug , which is still in use today, is derived from the Sanskrit term aga sthaga for deceivers and deceivers, but the term should not be confused with the historical criminal brotherhood of the Thuggees. Today it is used more colloquially in the sense of racket or rowdy .

history

William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856), head of the special department for breaking up the Thuggee

The Thugs or Thuggee had their heyday in pre-colonial India, probably their roots go back to the beginning of the 13th century. In Ziau-d din Barnis story of Firoz Shah , built around 1356, a brotherhood of Thugs is mentioned, which was temporarily jailed under the reign of Sultan Firoz Shah around 1290 and deported to the area around Delhi to pacify.

This mention is considered to be the earliest evidence of the Brotherhood's existence. It was smashed in the 1830s and 1840s by the British colonial power , who created a separate department within their administration to master the Thuggee. Particularly worthy arose while the officer William Henry Sleeman , who from 1835 chief was the special department to smash the Thuggee and applied advanced within his department methods, and thus the basis for today's investigative powers, such as case analysis and undercover (Undercover infiltration) increased. Thousands of suspects have been arrested and interrogated across India, with prisoners often faced with the choice of freeing themselves from personal charges through frank testimony, paving the way for the modern leniency program . Convicted Thuggee were hanged or exiled from British India .

From 1870, the Thuggee were considered to be almost destroyed. The special department established by Sleeman existed until 1904. Although rumors of the existence of a modern Thuggee group continue to emerge, this could never be clearly proven.

Casualty numbers

The Thuggee are accused of having committed around a million murders in the course of their centuries-old history, with the Guinness Book of Records giving that number as two million, while British historian Mike Dash puts the number at around 50,000. With a high degree of certainty, the number of murders committed by Thuggee has not yet been matched by any other criminal group. Behram, leader of a Thug unit, stated in his testimony as a key witness that he was involved in or present in a total of 931 murders during his career. He himself admitted to having committed 125 murders. Although Mike Dash in his book generally doubts the number of victims of the Thuggee, he would be the serial killer with the highest known number of victims.

structure

lili rere
Murdan Khan and Companions from Lucknow in Chains (around 1840)
Multhoo Byragee Jogee , 90-year-old Guru from Ajmera, in chains (around 1840)

The Thuggee saw themselves as a brotherhood to differentiate themselves from common robbers and thieves. In many cases membership was passed on from father to son, resulting in true lineages of Thuggee. They saw themselves as outside the Hindu - caste standing, but were recruited primarily from lower castes and the criminal underclass, though Sleeman also reported Brahmin and even higher officials who acted as leader of Thug units. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the leaders of the brotherhood were recruited from the ranks of the traditional Thuggee families. However, new members were also welcome as long as they proved willing to integrate. For the brotherhood, their special kind of organized robbery and murder counted as a craft and profession, no different from that of the soldier within traditional families of soldiers and officers. Allegedly, small children were sometimes spared during the raids in order to raise them to become new members of the brotherhood within Thuggee families. There was also a system of trainers or gurus who introduced new members to the specific requirements of membership. In accordance with its conspiratorial nature, the brotherhood placed particular emphasis on the discipline and confidentiality of its members.

One explanation for why the Thuggee resisted any discovery for a long time is their tight organization and the fact that a Thuggee squad was often composed of men who were related to one another and thus had an additional motivation, very careful about their mutual safety to pay attention. In addition, Thuggee mainly attacked travelers who - usually far from their hometowns - could not expect any help and whose disappearance was only noticed long after the crime. In addition, the Thuggee communicated in a very differentiated jargon , which made it almost impossible for the uninitiated to follow a conversation between them.

religion

Sleeman and his contemporaries saw the Thuggee brotherhood as a religious cult dedicated to Kali or Durga , the Hindu deity of death and destruction. Hence, it was assumed that religious motives also played into the murders of the Thuggee Brotherhood. More recent works, such as The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002) by Martine van Woerkens, however, deny this religious motivation. The British historian Mike Dash relativizes this view in his book Thug (2005). He takes the view that Thuggee performed special rituals and worshiped Kali as their special patron goddess. However, he also denies that they generally pursued religious motives in their murders and robberies. He sees their main motivation rather in the social area, due to the poverty that prevailed in India at the time. He also points out that Muslims and Sikhs were members of the Thuggee Brotherhood, although he considers it unlikely that they would have joined a brotherhood exclusively dedicated to the Hindu goddess Kali.

method

In the heyday of the Thuggee Brotherhood in a time before the establishment of organized police forces and expanded rail and road networks, travel in India was limited to narrow, unsafe roads on which various local robber and criminal gangs were up to mischief. As a result, it was common for travelers to band together in larger groups and armed caravans to seek protection within travel communities. The Thuggee's preferred modus operandi was to mingle with such tour companies in smaller groups, disguised as common travelers, and then conduct a well-coordinated, determined attack from within, usually killing all of the tour company. This approach required a high level of organization, coordination, discipline and manual skills. Some Thuggee squads stayed undetected for days or weeks within a tour company before they reached a suitable area for the purpose of the attack and struck.

Most of the time, Thuggee preferred remote locations, far from human settlement. Along busy streets there were so-called vouchers , the preferred attack sites for the Thuggee. The robberies were very familiar with the terrain and the circumstances and made good use of this advantage. Most of the time they attacked at night or early in the morning in order to ensure the element of surprise.

A Thuggee group was clearly structured hierarchically, each member was well prepared for their special role within an action. Some Thug were then selected and trained to entertain their later victims at the rest area with musical performances and thus to lull them to safety. After the crime had taken place, the victims of a robbery were buried in mass graves on the roadside, camouflaged with leaves and certain herbs, the smell of which was supposed to prevent wandering wolves, jackals and dogs from digging up the bodies. Fireplaces were often used for this purpose, as these were used again and again by new tour groups and aroused the least suspicion. The Thuggee's preferred murder weapon was a silk cloth, which was quickly rolled up and wrapped around the neck of the victims, to strangle them with precise movements before they could call for help. However, knives, sabers and, in rare exceptional cases, certain poisons were also used.

reception

Fiction

  • Philip Meadows Taylor: Confessions of a Thug . 1839
  • Karl May : The Jewel Island . Serialized novel. In: For all of the world. Göltz & Rühling, Stuttgart, 1880 ff.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle : The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy's Household . London 1887
  • Maximilian Kern : In the labyrinth of the corridor . Union, Stuttgart 1908
  • John Masters : The Deceivers . 1952 (filmed in 1988)

Movies

See also

literature

  • George Bruce: The stranglers: the cult of Thuggee and its overthrow in British India. Longmans, London 1968
  • William Henry Sleeman : The Thags or Phansigars of India. History of the rise and development of an extraordinary guild of murderers. Including Captain PA Reynolds' "Notes on the Thags" from 1837. Complete edition. From the English ex. u. hgb. by Thomas Kohl. Mainz: Gutenberg bookstore 2009.
  • Mike Dash : Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult . Granta Books, London 2005, ISBN 1-86207-604-9
  • Tom Lloyd: Acting in the Theater of Anarchy: 'The Anti-Thug Campaign' and Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early-Nineteenth Century India. Edinburgh Papers In South Asian Studies No. 19 (2006), PDF
  • Parama Roy: Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. University of California Press, Berkeley et al. a. 1998, Chapter 2, online
  • Kevin Rushby: Children of Kali. Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult, and the British Raj . Constable, London 2002, ISBN 1-84119-393-3
  • Martine van Woerkens: The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Chicago 2002, ISBN 0-226-85085-4
  • AJ Wightman: No friend for travelers , London, Robert Hale Limited, 1959.
  • John Masters: The Deceivers , (fiction), London, Michael Joseph, 1952.
  • Michael Peinkofer The Indian Conspiracy , ISBN 978-3-8000-5243-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books 2005 page 281 ISBN 1-86207-846-7
  2. ↑ Sleeman Thug or A Million Murders Delhi 1998, pp. 5-9, p. 218
  3. ↑ Sleeman Thug or A Million Murders Delhi 1998, p. 19
  4. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug. London 2005, page 191 ff
  5. ↑ K. Rushby: Children Of Kali. London 2002, page 7
  6. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders . Delhi 1998 page: 170 ff
  7. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, 281
  8. ^ William Henry Sleeman Report on the depredations committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India, from the cold season of 1836-37 . Bengal Military Orphan Press, Calcutta 1840, p. 24
  9. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, 289
  10. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders . Delhi 1998, p. 55
  11. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, page: 283 ff
  12. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, pp. 32-38
  13. ↑ Sleeman Thug or A Million Murders Delhi 1998 page: 44
  14. ^ William Henry Sleeman Report on Budhuk, alias Bagree Decoits, 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.
  15. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murder. Delhi 1998, p. 106
  16. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, 204
  17. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, page 85 ff
  18. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005 p. 38
  19. ↑ K. Rushby: Children Of Kali . London 2002 page 7 ff
  20. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders. Delhi 1998, p. 46
  21. ↑ K. Rushby: Children Of Kali . London 2002 page 9
  22. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murder . Delhi 1998, p. 44
  23. ↑ William Henry Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix 2 volumes, Huttmann, Calcutta 1836th
  24. ^ K. Rushby: Children of Kali . London 2002 page 39
  25. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murder . Delhi 1998, pp. 10-14
  26. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, page 224 ff
  27. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders. Delhi 1998, page 30 ff
  28. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders . Delhi 1998, 77
  29. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders. Delhi 1998, page 73 ff
  30. ↑ Mike Dash: Thug, the true Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, London 2005, pp. 77-78
  31. ↑ Sleeman: Thug or A Million Murders. Delhi 1998, 73