Oriental Prisons. Griffiths Arthur

whose signal services in purging a large part of India of this terrible scourge must ever be gratefully remembered, has conjectured that the first Thugs were to be found among the vagrant tribes of Mohammedans who continued to plunder the country long after its invasion by the Moguls and Tartars. No historical mention is made of Thuggee until the reign of Akbar, when many of its votaries were seized and put to death. From that period until 1810, although known to some of the native princes, who alternately protected and persecuted these criminals, it entirely escaped the observation of the British rulers of India. But attention was finally attracted to it by the strange disappearance of sepoys, or native soldiers in the British service, when moving about the country on furlough. In 1812 a British officer, Lieutenant Monsell, was murdered by Thugs. A punitive expedition was immediately sent against the village where the assassins were known to reside, and the culprits, after some show of resistance, were ultimately dispersed. No doubt the fugitives took with them their traditions and their homicidal principles into new lands where they were probably unknown hitherto. As early as 1816 the veil of secrecy which had concealed the organisation was lifted, and a very complete and accurate account of the ceremonies and practices of the Thugs in southern India was published by Dr. Sherwood in the Literary Journal of Madras. It is supposed that the horrible story told was deemed too monstrous for belief, and it is at least certain that no active measures were undertaken to suppress and root out the offenders.

      At all times many hundreds of predatory castes existed in India, chiefly among the marauding hill and forest people, and some of them are still recorded by name in the census papers. These people lived openly by plunder, and were organised for crime, and for determined gang-robbery and murder. There was no established police in those days equal to coping with these gangs, and the government of the East India Company had recourse to the savage criminal code of the Mohammedan law. When Warren Hastings was governor-general, he decreed that every convicted gang-robber should be publicly executed in full view of his village, and that all of the villagers should be fined. The miscreants retaliated by incendiarism on a large scale. One conflagration in Calcutta in 1780 burned fifteen thousand houses, and some two thousand souls perished in the flames. A special civil department was created to deal with this wholesale crime, the character of which is described in a state paper dated 1772. “The gang-robbers of Bengal,” it says, “are not like the robbers in England, individuals driven to such desperate courses by want or greed. They are robbers by profession and even by birth. They are formed into regular communities, and their families subsist on the supplies they bring home to them. These spoils come from great distances, and peaceful villages three hundred miles up the Ganges are supported by housebreaking in Calcutta.” Special laws were passed to deal with the crime of Dacoity or robbery in gangs to the number of five or more.

      By this time the word “Thuggee” was becoming known and was applied to the practice of “strangling dexterously performed by bands of professional murderers disguised as pilgrims or travelling mendicants.” These hereditary assassins prided themselves on their descent and their evil reputations, which inspired an amount of awe in their fellow countrymen hardly distinguishable from respect. “Yes, I am a strangler,” one of them shamelessly told an English officer. “I and my fathers before me have followed the business for twenty generations.”