Stick Your Neck Out

The word passed into the English language, a four-letter cosh of a word that the hoodlums of East London adopted thinking it was exotic. ‘Thug’ from the North Indian ‘thugee’ or deceiver. The deceivers were men armed with scarves who strangled their victims, supposedly in honour of goddess Kali. Their centuries-old existence was rooted out by William Sleeman in a relentless hunt across central India, which is where Siddhartha Sarma’s book begins.

The first chapter is deceptively quiet following the slow pace of village travel in India, until it erupts into carefully orc­hestrated violence. Sarma does not use the word ‘thug’ until the very end; his deceivers are ‘Phansigars’, men with nooses. This carefully res­earched book straddles fiction and nonfiction, because it deals with the character of a very unu­sual Englishman who res­isted returning to England.

Sarma sets Sleeman’s quest against the background of Calcutta confronted with crown, not company, rule and a new governor general, Bentinck, who has issued a mandate against suttee. Sleeman is digging up bones when we first meet him but presumably those of a dinosaur. However, a chance encounter with an ex-Bengal Army soldier turns him to bone collecting of a different sort. The result is evidence of a chain of serial killings that links men from lonely villages, merchants, nobility and brings Hindus and Muslims together in a grim conspiracy. Sarma follows Sleeman’s loyal hunters, his assistants Reynolds and Moore, through the knotty trail of their detection process.

Occasionally, he holds up the story unaccountably with accounts of Sleeman tackling suttee, attempting to enforce Bentinck’s new law and surrendering in the face of the hopelessness that he encounters in a Brahmin widow. Sleeman’s interests are matched by those of his indomitable French wife, Amelie, who studies the folk songs of Central India and is a feminist at a time of prudishness and patriarchy. The pair is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and humanity in different ways--they take in a wolf child that Kipling would later turn into Mowgli.

Sleeman is painted as an outsider, a man with no children, fluent in Urdu and Hindustani, with no regard for British sensitivities and single-minded in his quest for justice. Ultimately, it is not possible to explore the destruction of the Thugs without an exploration of the nature of the man who tracked them down. A different kind of person may not have been as indomitable a ‘bilha’, or enemy of the Phansigars, as they have it in their Ramasi dialect.

The meat of the story is in the hunt for the Phansigars; the rest comes across as digressions that hold up the intriguing flow, with interesting facts about internal customs systems on riverbanks thrown in for good measure.

Sarma lists the curiosities of their cult, like their argot, which enabled them to identify each other, the rituals of their first murder and the depth of their planning, sometimes a year in advance. While authors like John Masters made much of sinister sacrifices in temples, occasionally sending an Englishman in disguise to infiltrate their ranks, Sarma pits the violence of the cult against stark poverty and sticks to historical accuracy, creating a tradition passed down the generations which cannot be infiltrated. The lower ranks of his deceivers come from the badlands where nothing grows. However, Sarma implies, more than religion, strangling is a way of earning a living and distributing funds in a deadly conspiracy of equality.

Sarma’s language has a controlled violence to it, picking up the pace when required and giving the story a thriller’s edge. The fictionalisation helps--the omniscient eye of the author that allows for details and description which mere research would not. Superstition pitted against crime, the hunter against the hunted, close shaves and the deceivers deceived through smoke and mirrors.  

Those with an interest in history will be able to pick up the threads of the characters’ lives after the book ends and note that Slee­man, mercifully, did not live to see 1857.