Himalayan Journals, vol 1, J. D. Hooker [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

from Guzerat; who, on being conquered, vowed vengeance on mankind. They speak both Hindostanee and the otherwise extinct Guzerat language; this is guttural in the extreme, and very singular in sound. They are a very remarkable people, found throughout India, and called by various names; their women dress peculiarly, and are utterly devoid of modesty. The man I examined was a short, square, but far from powerful Nepalese, with high arched eyebrows, and no organs of observation. These people are great cowards.

 

The Poisoners all belong to one caste, of Pasie, or dealers in toddy: they go singly or in gangs, haunting the travellers’ resting-places, where they drop half a rupee weight of pounded or whole Datura

seeds into his food, producing a twenty-hours’ intoxication, during which he is robbed, and left to recover or sink under the stupifying effects of the narcotic. He told me that the Datura seed is gathered without ceremony, and at any time, place, or age of the plant. He was a dirty, ill-conditioned looking fellow, with no bumps behind his ears, or prominence of eyebrow region, but a remarkable cerebellum.

 

Though now all but extinct (except in Cuttack), through ten or fifteen years of unceasing vigilance on the part of Government, and incredible activity and acuteness in the officers employed, the Thugs were formerly a wonderfully numerous body, who abstained from their vocation solely in the immediate neighbourhood of their own villages; which, however, were not exempt from the visits of other Thugs; so that, as Major Sleeman says,—“The annually returning tide of murder swept unsparingly over the whole face of India, from the Sutlej to the sea-coast, and from the Himalaya to Cape Comorin. One narrow district alone was free, the Concan, beyond the ghats, whither they never penetrated.” In Bengal, river Thugs replace the travelling practitioner. Candeish and Rohilkund alone harboured no Thugs as residents, but they were nevertheless haunted by the gangs.

 

Their origin is uncertain, but supposed to be very ancient, soon after the Mahommedan conquest. They now claim a divine original, and are supposed to have supernatural powers, and to be the emissaries of the divinity, like the wolf, the tiger, and the bear. It is only lately that they have swarmed so prodigiously,—seven original gangs having migrated from Delhi to the Gangetic provinces about 200 years ago, and from these all the rest have sprung. Many belong to the most amiable, intelligent, and respectable classes of the lower and even middle ranks: they love their profession, regard murder as sport, and are never haunted with dreams, or troubled with pangs of conscience during hours of solitude, or in the last moments of life. The victim is an acceptable sacrifice to the goddess Davee, who by some classes is supposed to eat the lifeless body, and thus save her votaries the necessity of concealing it.

 

They are extremely superstitious, always consulting omens, such as the direction in which a hare or jackall crosses the road; and even far more trivial circumstances will determine the fate of a dozen of people, and perhaps of an immense treasure. All worship the pickaxe, which is symbolical of their profession, and an oath sworn on it binds closer than on the Koran. The consecration of this weapon is a most elaborate ceremony, and takes place only under certain trees.

They rise through various grades: the lowest are scouts; the second, sextons; the third are holders of the victims’ hands; the highest, stranglers.

 

Though all agree in never practising cruelty, or robbing previous to murder, never allowing any but infants to escape (and these are trained to Thuggee), and never leaving a trace of such goods as may be identified, there are several variations in their mode of conducting operations; some tribes spare certain castes, others none: murder of woman is against all rules; but the practice crept into certain gangs, and this it is which led to their discountenance by the goddess Davee, and the consequent downfall of the system.

Davee, they say, allowed the British to punish them, because a certain gang had murdered the mothers to obtain their daughters to be sold to prostitution.

 

Major Sleeman has constructed a map demonstrating the number of “Bails,” or regular stations for committing murder, in the kingdom of Oude alone, which is 170 miles long by 100 broad, and in which are 274, which are regarded by the Thug with as much satisfaction and interest as a game preserve is in England: nor are these “bails” less numerous in other parts of India. Of twenty assassins who were examined, one frankly confessed to having been engaged in 931

murders, and the least guilty of the number to 24. Sometimes 150

persons collected into one gang, and their profits have often been immense, the murder of six persons on one occasion yielding 82,000

rupees; upwards of 8000 pounds.

 

Of the various facilities for keeping up the system, the most prominent are, the practice amongst the natives of travelling before dawn, of travellers mixing freely together, and taking their meals by the way-side instead of in villages; in the very Bails, in fact, to which they are inveigled by the Thug in the shape of a fellow-traveller; money remittances are also usually made by disguised travellers, whose treasure is exposed at the custom-houses, and, worst of all, the bankers will never own to the losses they sustain, which, as a visitation of God, would, if avenged, lead, they think, to future, and perhaps heavier punishment. Had the Thugs destroyed Englishmen, they would quickly have been put down; but the system being invariably practised on a class of people acknowledging the finger of the Deity in its execution, its glaring enormities were long in rousing the attention of the Indian Government.

 

A few examples of the activity exercised by the suppressors may be interesting. They act wholly through the information given by approvers, who are simply king’s evidences. Of 600 Thugs engaged in the murder of 64 people, and the plunder of nearly 20,000 pounds, all except seventy were captured in ten years, though separated into six gangs, and their operations continued from 1826 to 1830: the last party was taken in 1836. And again, between the years 1826

and 1835, 1562 Thugs were seized, of whom 382 were hanged, and 909

transported; so that now it is but seldom these wretches are ever heard of.

 

To show the extent of their operations I shall quote an anecdote from Sleeman’s Reports (to which I am indebted for most of the above information). He states that he was for three years in charge of a district on the Nerbudda, and considered himself acquainted with every circumstance that occurred in the neighbourhood; yet, during that time, 100 people were murdered and buried within less than a quarter of a mile of his own residence!

 

Two hundred and fifty boats full of river Thugs, in crews of fifteen, infested the Ganges between Benares and Calcutta, during five months of every year, under pretence of conveying pilgrims. Travellers along the banks were tracked, and offered a passage, which if refused in the first boat was probably accepted in some other. At a given signal the crews rushed in, doubled up the decoyed victim, broke his back, and threw him into the river, where floating corpses are too numerous to elicit even an exclamation.

 

At Mirzapore I engaged a boat to carry me down the river to Bhagulpore, whence I was to proceed to the Sikkim-Himalaya.

The vessel, which, though slow and very shabby, had the advantage of being cooler and more commodious than the handsomer craft.

Its appearance was not unlike that of a floating haystack, or thatched cottage: its length was forty feet, and breadth fifteen, and it drew a foot and a half of water: the deck, on which a kind of house, neatly framed of matting, was erected, was but a little above the water’s edge. My portion of this floating residence was lined with a kind of reed-work formed of long culms of Saccharum.

The crew and captain consisted of six naked Hindoos, one of whom steered by the huge rudder, sitting on a bamboo-stage astern; the others pulled four oars in the very bows opposite my door, or tracked the boat along the riverbank.

 

In my room (for cabin I cannot call it) stood my palkee, fitted as a bed, with mosquito curtains; a chair and table. On one side were placed all my papers and plants, under arrangement to go home; on the other, my provisions, rice, sugar, curry-powder, a preserved ham, and cheese, etc. Around hung telescope, botanical box, dark lantern, barometer, and thermometer, etc., etc. Our position was often ashore, and, Hindoo-like, on the lee-shore, going bump, bump, bump, so that I could hardly write. I considered myself fortunate in having to take this slow conveyance down, it enabling me to write and arrange all day long.

 

I left on the 15th of March, and in the afternoon of the same day passed Chunar.* [The first station at which Henry Martyn laboured in India.] This is a tabular mass of sandstone, projecting into the river, and the eastern termination of the Kymore range. There is not a rock between this and the Himalaya, and barely a stone all the way down the Ganges, till the granite and gneiss rocks of the Behar range are again met with. The current of the Ganges is here very strong, and its breadth much lessened: the river runs between high banks of alluvium, containing much kunker. At Benares it expands into a broad stream, with a current which during the rains is said to flow eight miles an hour, when the waters rise 43 feet. The fall hence is 300

feet to its junction with the Hooghly, viz., one foot to every mile.

My observations made that from Mirzapore to Benares considerably greater.

 

Benares is the Athens of India. The variety of buildings along the bank is incredible. There are temples of every shape in all stages of completion and dilapidation, and at all angles of inclination; for the banks give way so much that many of these edifices are fearfully out of the perpendicular.

 

The famed mosque, built by Aurungzebe on the site of a Hindoo temple, is remarkable for its two octagonal minarets, 232 feet above the Ganges. The view from it over the town, especially of the European Resident’s quarter, is fine; but the building itself is deficient in beauty or ornament: it commands the muddy river with its thousands of boats, its waters peopled with swimmers and bathers, who spring in from the many temples, water-terraces, and ghats on the city side: opposite is a great sandy plain. The town below looks a mass of poor, square, flat-roofed houses, of which 12,000 are brick, and 16,000 mud and thatch, through the crowd of which, and of small temples, the eye wanders in vain for some attractive feature or evidence of the wealth, the devotion, the science, or the grandeur of a city celebrated throughout the East for all these attributes. Green parrots and pigeons people the air.

 

The general appearance of an oriental town is always more or less ruinous; and here the eye is fatigued with bricks and crumbling edifices, and the ear with prayer-bells. The bright meadows and green trees which adorn the European Resident’s dwelling, some four miles back from the river, alone relieve the monotony of the scene.

The streets are so narrow that it is difficult to ride a horse through them; and the houses are often six stories high, with galleries crossing above from house to house. These tall, gaunt edifices sometimes give place to clumps of cottages, and a mass of dusty ruins, the unsavoury retreats of vermin and filth, where the Calotropis