Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (8 page)

O
N the dirt road west of Mirzapur on the Ganges, perhaps 700 miles from Calcutta, there stood the temple of the goddess Kali at Bindhachal. It was a tumultuous and exotic shrine, especially at the end of the rainy season, when supplicants came from all over India to propitiate the goddess. The air was aromatic then with incense and blossom, dust swirled about the temple walls, the tracks were crowded with bullock-carts, wandering cows, beggars and barefoot pilgrims. Night and day goats were sacrificed, their blood spilling down the temple steps, and sometimes one heard the shrieks of devotees, tranced in ecstasy or bloody themselves with flagellation, invoking the blessings of the divinity—Kali the terrible, Kali the blood-goddess, consort of Shiva the destroyer, naked, black and furious, with her sword, her noose, and her bludgeon stuck all about with human skulls—Kali the dark one, with the protruding tongue and the bloodshot eyes, haunter of the burning ground, in whose heart death and terror festered.

This was the holy place of the Thugs, the hereditary fraternity of stranglers, who had for hundreds of years terrorized the travellers of India. Their secret society had branches and adherents from the Indus to Bengal, and they had their own hierarchy, rituals and traditions, and believed that when they strangled strangers on the road, they were strangling in Kali’s cause—for Kali herself, when she had strangled the demon Rukt Bij-dana in the dawn of the world, had created two men from the sweat of her brow, and ordered them to strangle, and their posterity after them, all men who were not their kindred.

Thuggee enjoyed the secret protection of rajas and rich men, Muslim as well as Hindu, besides the terrified complicity of the
peasantry. It was an ancient secret of India—the mutilated corpse at the bottom of the well, the silent stranger at the door, the unexplained subsidy, the whisper at the cross-roads. At Bindhachal was the priesthood of the cult. There, once a year, the stranglers went to pay their dues to the priests of Kali, and to receive their sacred instructions in return: where they should operate in the following year, what fees they should bring back to the shrine, what rituals they were to perform, if they were to enjoy the protection of the goddess—for if they neglected their obligations, homeless spirits they must become, to linger without hope in the empyrean.

To the British rulers in India, Thuggee had always seemed less than wholesome. ‘To pull down Kali’s temple at Bundachal and hang her priests would no doubt be the wish of every honest Christian’, wrote a contributor to the Calcutta
Literary
Gazette
in 1830. But it was the East India Company’s traditional policy not to interfere with Indian religious customs. A blind eye was turned, and the rumours and legends of Thuggee inspired in the sahibs and their wives little more than a chill frisson, until in the 1830s the evangelical impulse reached the Indian Empire too, and moved the British not merely to conquer, exploit or consort with their subjects there, but actually to reform them.

The gentlemen of the East India Company had not originally intended to govern India, but merely to make money there. This they very effectively did throughout the eighteenth-century, ten years’ service with John Company often sufficing to set a man up for life in the Shires, see him through a convalescent retirement at Caledon, or even lay the foundations of a Sezincote. Over the course of generations merchant venturing led to military conquest. ‘A very old friend of my father’s,’ wrote William Hickey the diarist, who went to India as a company cadet in 1769, ‘presented me with a beautiful cut-and-thrust steel sword, desiring me to cut off a dozen rich fellows’ heads with it, and so return a nabob myself to England.’ The first forts and factories made way for palaces and barrack blocks—the Company developed from a trading agency to a Government—the
British presence moved inland from the ports to establish an ascendancy over the princes and maharajahs of the interior.

At first the Company, even with its new responsibilities, remained a swashbuckling, showy, amoral kind of service. It bred eccentrics and flamboyants, like old Sir David Ochterlony, for example, British Resident at the Court of the King of Delhi, who used to travel about the country in a carriage and four, huddled in furs, shawls and wraps of gold brocade, and attended by platoons of spearmen, troops of horsemen and, so legend said, thirteen wives each on her own elephant. There were few Englishwomen in India then, the sea passage being so long and dangerous, and the climate so dreadful, so that Englishmen were closer to Indian life than their successors were to be—often with Indian mistresses, generally with Indian friends, and cherishing little sense of racial or religious superiority.
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They did not wish to change the sub-continent—it would have seemed a preposterous ambition. They treated the native princes with respect and occasional affection, tolerated the religions of the country (they actually administered several thousand Hindu temples), and did their plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give-and-take. They were for the most part natural conservatives. Often they were men of aesthetic sensibilities too, and responded sensually to all the gaudy seductions of the land.

Their style was urbane. They drank tremendously and lived luxuriously. Prints of the period show the Governor-General bowling through his capital, Calcutta, in a high-wheeled gilded barouche, with foot-grooms running beside and behind, a stately coachman high on his seat, and a dashing escort of cavalrymen kicking up the dust behind. The Bengalis pause to see him pass, with their water-jugs upon their heads, or their burdens laid upon the unpaved street. An ox-wagon awaits his passing. An Indian sentry presents arms. High overhead the kites soar, and perched along the balustrade of Government House, meditatively upon the lion and sphinxes of its triumphal entrance, the adjutant cranes stand statuesque against the sun. An impression of pagan but cultivated ease is given by such a
scene. The Governor-General, though clearly immensely grand, does not seem cut off from his subjects: the relationship looks organic, like that between peasants and gentry in contemporary England, each side knowing each others’ faults, and making allowances.

But just as in England social relationships began to shift, so in India too, as the new century advanced, the nature of the British Raj changed. In 1813 the Company’s trade monopoly with India was abolished, and for the first time English public opinion began to have some direct effect upon British administration in India. ‘John Company’ was no longer self-sufficient and all-powerful: the British Government held a watching brief, the Crown appointed a Governor-General, and Parliament at Westminster was the ultimate authority of the Raj.

Now the vocabulary of the evangelicals, so familiar already in Africa and the Caribbean, found its way into Anglo-Indian commentaries too. We read of natives awaiting redemption, of Christianity’s guiding beacon, of providential guidance and the Supreme Disposer. The Indian territories were allotted by providence to Great Britain, wrote Charles Grant, the evangelical chairman of the Company’s Court of Directors, ‘not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice and misery, the light and benign influence of the truth, the blessings of well-regulated society, the improvements and comforts of active industry….’ James Stephen wrote of the ‘barbarous and obscene rites of Hindoo superstition’, and Wilberforce declared the Christian mission in India to be the greatest of all causes. ‘Let us endeavour to strike our roots into their soil,’ he wrote, ‘by the gradual introduction and establishment of our own principles and opinions; of our laws, institutions and manners; above all, as the source of every other improvement, of our religion, and consequently of our morals.’

Our
own
principles
and
opinions
. Now it became axiomatic that things English were superior to things Indian Britons no longer habitually went out to India in their teens, fresh and receptive: nowadays
they generally went in their twenties, and they saw things differently. The old Indian ruling class, which had once worked or fought in equality with the British, was reduced in their eyes to comical or despicable ineptitude, or at most to glittering impotence (for the English always loved a prince, even a heathen one). The eighteenth-century sahibs had respected the Moghul culture, and viewed its decline with a reverent melancholy: their successors mocked and caricatured it—the last of the Moghul Emperors, Bahadur Shah, was left to rot within the walls of the Red Fort at Delhi like a quaint souvenir of the past.

With the first steamers from England there arrived, too, a new generation of Englishwomen, no longer a worldly, amused and tolerant few, but ladies of a more earnest kind, determined to keep their menfolk healthy and orthodox in mind as in flesh. Now a man could spend a family lifetime in India, with municipal responsibilities perhaps, and a prominent customary position in the evening parade through the Maidan. Now there arose a respectable Anglo-Indian community of administrators, merchants and planters, living with their families in genteel circumstances, and decorously attending church on Sundays. The Company had hitherto forbidden the entrance of Christian missionaries to India: now, ‘by Government order, the ban was lifted, and godly apostles swarmed through the Indian possessions. Bishop Heber himself, the author of
From
Green
land’s
Icy
Mountains
, assumed the Anglican see of Calcutta, with archdeaconries throughout British India (and one in New South Wales).

The more enlightened the British in India became, the more dreadful India looked. Its ignorance! Its savagery! Its hideous customs of widow-burning, infanticide, religious extortion! Its ludicrous learning and its nonsensical laws! It seemed that God’s mysterious ways had denied the Indians, perfectly intelligent though many of them were, the benefits of any true civilization of their own. The old habits of easy-going complicity, suitable enough to a commercial concern, no longer seemed proper to the British of the Raj. Was it not horrible to consider that in Calcutta, only thirty years before, the British had celebrated the Treaty of Amiens by parading with military bands to the temple of Kali herself? Or that in Ceylon,
even at the end of the 1830s, they were still shamelessly appropriating to themselves the revenues of the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy? Now, thanks to the illumination of the reformed religion, the way was clearer: India must be Anglicized.

The historian Macaulay, who spent some years in India, argued that this could best be achieved by higher education in the English manner, and in the English language, for ‘the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which 300 years ago was extant in all the languages of the earth put together’. Others went further, and in their new-found sense of mission, diligently tried to alter the nature of Indian life. The immense structure of Indian society, which was based upon dizzy complications of caste, religion and land-ownership, was beyond their powers. Nor did they try to abolish the main body of Indian custom, social or legal, which was inextricably enmeshed in Hindu and Muslim belief They did, however, boldly set out to stifle the most offensive of native customs, however ancient, popular or divinely rooted. They forbade human sacrifice and infanticide. They put down
suttee
, the practice of burning widows, and henceforth, in their treaties with independent princes, insisted on its abolition as a condition of their protection—though the custom was so fundamental to the Hindu moral order that its very name meant, in the Sanskrit, chaste or virtuous.
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And in a model campaign of evangelical imperialism, combining high moral fervour with advanced organizational skill, they turned their attention to that abomination of Bindhachal, the secret society of stranglers.

Their agent of wrath was Captain William Sleeman, who had gone to India in 1809 as a cadet in the Company’s Bengal Army. He was a soldier’s son, and a figure of Cromwellian integrity—auburn-haired, blue-eyed, with a stubby farmer’s face and a fine high forehead. He spoke Arabic, Persian and Urdu, he excelled at the tougher sports, he did not smoke and hardly drank, he read the rationalist philosophers like Locke and Hobbes, and he stayed generally aloof from the womanizing and high jinks that characterized the lives of most young Company officers. In his thirties, Sleeman was seconded to the civil administration, and it was as a magistrate and district officer in central India that he first became interested in the ghastly mystery of the Thugs. Patiently and methodically he learnt all he could about the sect, and so horrified was he by his discoveries that by the 1820s it had become his prime purpose in life to destroy Thuggee, in the practice as in the principle—not merely to prevent its murders and punish its practitioners, but to discredit its tenets too.

The Thugs worked in absolute secrecy according to strictly-enforced rituals. They were highway murderers. Finding a likely group of travellers upon the road, preferably of their own caste, they would infiltrate themselves into their company with ingratiating talk, join them on their journey for a day or two, and then, when the moment seemed ripe, the place suitable and the omens auspicious, fall upon their companions with a well-tried technique of noose-work, knee and grapple, and strangle them from behind with a silken noose. They cut the bodies about with ritual gashes, buried them or threw them down wells, burnt any belongings of no value and ran off with the rest, sometimes taking with them also an especially attractive child or two. Not a trace, of Thug or traveller, was left upon the scene.

By western criminal standards these were motiveless crimes. Any victims would do, and they simply disappeared without trace or apparent cause. If evidence of Thuggee ever came to light, most Indian peasants were far too frightened to reveal it, and in the
ordinary courts of law Thugs were nearly always acquitted; for the stranglers were migratory and all-knowing, might take their revenge anywhere, and were the servants of Kali herself, who lived on blood. The Thugs were active all over India between November and May, the travelling season, and were at their most murderous in Bhopal and Bhilsa, in central India, where Sleeman estimated that the odds against a citizen’s safe passage in the months of Thuggee were almost two to one. In 1812 it was reckoned that 40,000 people were killed by the Thugs each year; in three months of 1831 one gang murdered 108 people; many individual practitioners had strangled, during a lifetime in the guild, a thousand victims with their own hands.