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Updated: June 1, 2025
The brave man and the coward, the erect spirit fighting to the last, and the poor creature that despairs from the first, all are confounded in one undistinguishing end by sudden strangulation. This was the original defect of the plan. The sudden surprise, and the scientific noosing as with a Chilian lasso, constituted in fact a main feature of Thuggee.
One day during our stay in Bombay there was a criminal trial of a most interesting sort, a terribly realistic chapter out of the "Arabian Nights," a strange mixture of simplicities and pieties and murderous practicalities, which brought back the forgotten days of Thuggee and made them live again; in fact, even made them believable.
They are kindly people, the natives. The face and the bearing that indicate a surly spirit and a bad heart seemed to me to be so rare among Indians so nearly non-existent, in fact that I sometimes wondered if Thuggee wasn't a dream, and not a reality. The bad hearts are there, but I believe that they are in a small, poor minority.
These three men are the three Thuggee chiefs, who, obliged to fly from the continent of India, have taken refuge in Java, under the guidance of Mahal the Smuggler. "The Malay does not return," said the half-blood, named Faringhea, the most redoubtable chief of this homicidal sect: "in executing our orders, he has perhaps been killed by Djalma."
The wreck broke in upon the monotony of Brandon's island life and changed the current of his thoughts. The revelations contained in Despard's manuscript came with perfect novelty to his mind. Potts, his enemy, now stood before him in darker colors, the foulest of miscreants, one who had descended to an association with Thuggee, one who bore on his arm the dread mark of Bowhani.
The basis of the Thuggee Society is a religious belief the worship of Bowanee, a gloomy divinity, who is only pleased with carnage, and detests above all things the human race.
We do not know who he was; he flits across the page of this rusty old book and disappears in the obscurity beyond; but he is an impressive figure, moving through that valley of death serene and unafraid, clothed in the might of the English name. We have now followed the big official book through, and we understand what Thuggee was, what a bloody terror it was, what a desolating scourge it was.
All things evolve with the passage of time, and in the twentieth century even the rite of strangulation has undergone changes. From the main sect of Thuggee, other branches of a new and unlooked-for type have sprung. These, instead of strangling their neighbours, prefer to poison them, the virtue being the same and the method easier and more expeditious.
The body was found in the same place where it was deposited by Tookaram." The criminal side of the native has always been picturesque, always readable. The Thuggee and one or two other particularly outrageous features of it have been suppressed by the English, but there is enough of it left to keep it darkly interesting. One finds evidence of these survivals in the newspapers.
The astonished government now took hold of Thuggee, and for ten years made systematic and relentless war upon it, and finally destroyed it. Gang after gang was captured, tried, and punished. The Thugs were harried and hunted from one end of India to the other.
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