Thuggee

Thugs, as we call them, killed travellers in India for six hundred years. We can first read about them in a book from 1356. They made travel very, very dangerous even for large groups of people and became infamous for their murders. But it was very difficult to catch them. This is why.

Thugs joined groups of travellers who were going long distances from cities. At first, they did nothing. They made friends with the travellers so that they began to trust the thugs. Sometimes they journeyed hundreds of kilometres with them until they came to a quiet place, far away from a town, and then they killed their new ‘friends’ by strangling them at night while they were sleeping. They carried no knives or guns. The thugs then stole all their money and expensive goods and threw the dead bodies into wells or buried them. Because the murders happened far from the cities where the travellers’ friends lived, people did not go to find them or ask many questions. Nobody knew where the bodies were.

If there was a large group of travellers, the thugs joined them in twos and threes. They pretended not to know the other thugs. When there were enough thugs in the group of travellers and they were in a quiet place, they killed them.

It is difficult to know how many travellers died because of the thugs. One historian believes that they killed fifty thousand people in one hundred and fifty years. Another says they killed two million in six hundred years. We don’t know because we have no idea where the travellers’ bodies are.

It was hard to catch thugs because they were very disciplined. They never killed travellers near towns or cities even if they had a lot of money with them. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that a British man in India, called William Sleeman, could destroy the thuggee. But the word ‘thug’ has, of course, entered the English language.