98 



Customs and practices of the Thug. 



[July 



therein. The names of between two and three thousand Thugs, 

 still at large, in various parts of India, have been denounced to us by 

 the informers. 



Unless it be in the Madras provinces and Mysore, Thuggee, on a 

 grand scale, is very generally put a stop to ; but it is still carried on in 

 many parts of India. Although I have been engaged for four years in 

 the Hyderabad country, yet, within the last six months, I have disco- 

 vered numerous murders perpetrated there, and arrested many of the 

 Thugs who assisted at them. One man alone has given depositions of 

 the murders of upwards of nine hundred individuals, men, women and 

 children, that he was engaged in ; and the number of persons, put to 

 death within the last fifteen years, according to the declarations of the 

 informers, would appear incredible, had they not mostly been substan- 

 tiated, by the disinterment of the bodies buried all over India ; often 

 in the most public places ; in the centre of villages ; in native places 

 of worship, and almost within call of the sentries in a military can- 

 tonment. Subjoined is a memorandum of the result of our trials, 

 which will give some idea of the horrid reality. 



Almost all the native governments now co-operate with us, though, until 

 they saw that our government had taken up the matter warmly, they 

 did not bestir themselves to suppress the system. I am not aware that 

 there are any penal enactments against them. In the time of the Emperor 

 Akbar, five hundred of them were executed at Delhi, and they have, at 

 various times, been arrested in all the native states, and punished by 

 death, mutilation of hands, feet, nose and ears, and imprisonment. But 

 this had little effect in putting down the practice ; it only rendered the 

 Thugs more wary. 



I think the crime of Thuggee is not of modern origin. In Burder's 

 oriental customs there is an allusion to the crime as we know it to have 

 been practised, in explanation of a passage of Scripture. I have not 

 the book by me, so I write from recollection.* He mentions the prac- 

 tice of a woman, or a man in woman's clothes, sitting by the road, 

 apparently in great distress, and alluring a traveller by waitings for 

 some pretended loss, and taking advantage of his proximity to throw a 

 noose over the head of the victim and strangle him. He further men- 

 tions, I think, that the cunning woman wore an exceedingly volu- 

 minous petticoat, under which the dead body was concealed ; exactly 

 similar circumstances are detailed by the Thugs who have confessed 

 to us. 



* ec I find move bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands 

 a3 bands. — Ecclesiastes, vii, 2,6". 



"The following insidious mode of robbery gives a very lively comment upon these words 

 of Solomon.—" The most cunning robbers in the world are in this country. They use a 

 c ©rfcam slip with a running noose, which they cast with so much sleight about a man's 

 jse ck when they are within reach of him, that they never fail, so that they strangle him 



