A tax list from 1797
Before the British discovered thuggee, Indian states had been taxing it.
A Gwalior State revenue list drawn up in 1797 records 318 houses belonging to Thugs across twenty villages. Not a rumour, not a confession extracted later — an administrative document, counting households for the purpose of collecting from them. Whatever those households were, the state knew where they were and had them on a list.
That list sits at one end of a long pre-colonial record. A fourteenth-century chronicle by Ziauddin Barani describes Sultan Jalal-ud-Din Khalji arresting a thousand thags in Delhi around 1290 and deporting them to Bengal rather than executing them. In 1672 the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a farman prescribing punishment for stranglers. In 1675 the English traveller John Fryer watched fifteen bandits executed near Surat, and recorded that they had killed using a cotton bowstring.
None of this fits the story the British later told about themselves, which was that they had uncovered a hidden civilisation of murderers no previous Indian regime had been able to see. It also does not fit the strongest modern counter-claim, which is that thuggee was essentially invented in Calcutta and Saugor in the 1830s. Something was there. The argument is about what it was, and about what the British did to it once they had a department and a statute.
The word
Thug comes from the Sanskrit sthaga, to cover or to conceal, and the earliest generally accepted use of it dates to about 1350. For most of its life in Indian languages it meant a cheat, a swindler, a man who concealed his intentions — closer to confidence trickster than to strangler.
The narrowing is the colonial contribution. By the 1840s a word that had meant deceiver meant specifically a hereditary ritual murderer who killed with a cloth in the service of a goddess. The English word kept the new meaning and lost the connection to India entirely, which is why it is now possible to call someone a thug without knowing that the term was once an administrative category in a British Indian statute.
Sleeman's department
Thugs entered British Indian law before they entered British Indian imagination: Regulation VI of 1810 already referred to them as a distinct criminal category.
What changed in the 1830s was institutional. William Henry Sleeman, serving as an assistant to the Agent at Jubbulpore, began working with captured thugs as informants in 1830. He was made Agent at Saugor in October of that year. The Thuggee Department was established in January 1835, and Sleeman became General Superintendent of its operations that March. Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, gave him fifty barkandazes — armed retainers — to make arrests with.
The method was the approver: a captured gang member who gave evidence against his associates in exchange for his life. Over a hundred men were taken on as approvers, and their testimony and interviews became the principal source for everything the British believed they knew about thuggee. The archive the department produced is enormous, and it is almost entirely made of the words of men who were being kept alive on condition that they kept naming others.
Feringheea, and what he said about the goddess
Sleeman took Feringheea, a gang leader, in December 1830, by holding his relatives captive until he came in. He became the most valuable approver in the department, and he confessed to 233 murders committed between 1827 and 1830 by the gangs under his command.
That figure is worth pausing on, because its precision is the problem rather than the proof. It was produced by a man whose family had been seized, in a system that could hang him, by interviewers who already knew the shape of the answer they wanted. It may be accurate. It is not independent.
And then there is what Feringheea said when he was not confirming the story. In Ramaseeana — the vocabulary of thug argot Sleeman published in 1836, the single book that did most to establish thuggee as a religious fraternity — Sleeman's own best witness plainly disputed that thugs had any special relationship with the temples and priests of Devi.
It is in the book. The document assembled to prove the murder cult contains, in the words of the prosecution's star informant, a denial of the cult's central feature. Nobody suppressed it; the religious reading simply travelled faster than the qualification inside its own founding text.
A statute where belonging was the offence
Act XXX of 1836 made membership of a thuggee gang punishable by transportation or imprisonment for life with hard labour. Not a killing, not a robbery — association.
This is the hinge of the whole episode. Once the offence is belonging to a category, the category does the convicting, and the only evidence needed is somebody willing to say a man belongs. The powers widened from there: Act XXIV of 1843 extended the 1836 provisions to professional dacoits, and Act III of 1848 stretched the definition to cover poisoning and child-stealing.
The numbers that machinery produced are on record. Some 1,368 people were convicted between 1826 and 1835, and 4,224 between 1826 and 1847. Across roughly 1826 to 1841 the conviction rate ran at about 98.9 per cent.
One acquittal in ninety. No court anywhere has ever been that right about anything. A rate like that does not describe a judiciary weighing evidence; it describes a system in which the verdict was settled by the accusation, and in which the men producing the accusations were the ones whose survival depended on producing more.
Convicted thugs and approvers were not simply imprisoned. Sleeman set up Schools of Industry at Jubbulpore, where approvers and their families were held and put to agrarian and craft labour — a self-contained settlement for a population the state had defined into existence and then had to keep somewhere. Feringheea was confined there from 1837.
The handkerchief
The one image that survived all of this is the rumal, a cloth with a knot worked into one end, used to strangle without spilling blood.
Thugs did strangle. They also used swords, knives and poison, which is awkward for the version in which the method is a sacrament rather than a technique. The emphasis on bloodless killing hardened in the second half of the nineteenth century, by which point the thug was a stock figure in British writing rather than a man in a courtroom, and a ritual strangler makes a better villain than a robber who uses whatever is to hand.
How it reached everyone else
In 1839 Philip Meadows Taylor published Confessions of a Thug, a novel drawn substantially from Sleeman's material and narrated by a thug recounting his own career. Queen Victoria asked for the proofs before publication. It was the literary sensation of its year and stayed in print for a century.
This is the step that matters for how the theory spread. The administrative category became a first-person voice, and a reader in London who would never see a revenue list from Gwalior met the thug as a character who explained himself — his initiation, his omens, his goddess. Fiction supplied exactly the interior coherence the files could not, and it supplied it in the thug's own borrowed voice, which made it feel like evidence.
Three readings of the same archive
Historians have moved through three positions on this, and the useful thing is that each one is answering a real difficulty in the one before it.
The colonial reading held that thuggee was a pan-Indian hereditary religious fraternity, invisible to earlier regimes, and broken by British intelligence and British law.
A revisionist turn — Martine van Woerkens, Radhika Singha, Parama Roy among others — argued that this was substantially a construction: a loose and varied spectrum of banditry pressed into a single legible enemy by a state that needed one, with the legal machinery and the confession archive manufacturing the coherence they claimed to discover.
The post-revisionist position, argued most fully in Kim Wagner's Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (2007), accepts most of that critique and then declines the last step. Thuggee, on Wagner's account, was real collective banditry with a real history, but it was never an essence or a caste — it was a way of making a living that people from across the social order in certain regions turned to under certain conditions, principally the contraction of the military labour market as the Mughal order declined and the British conquered. Men who had been paid to carry weapons stopped being paid, and some of them went on using them. Tom Lloyd's survey of the field in History Compass in 2007 sets out how the argument got to that point.
The pre-colonial documents are what make the pure-invention reading hard to hold. The conviction rate is what makes the colonial reading hard to hold.
What the record supports
Gangs of robbers who murdered travellers, including by strangulation, existed in parts of India across several centuries, and Indian states before the British recorded them, taxed them, deported them and hanged them.
What has never been produced is evidence for the thing the theory is actually famous for: a single coordinated hereditary order, covering the subcontinent, bound by a shared devotion to Kali, operating as a shadow authority against the state. The nearest thing to a witness on that point said the opposite, in Sleeman's own book.
What is documented instead is a department, a statute under which belonging was the crime, a hundred informants kept alive to name others, four thousand convictions, an acquittal rate near zero, and a novel the Queen read in proof — which between them turned an uneven and local kind of violence into one of the most durable criminal conspiracies ever described, and left its name in the English language.