Thuggee (UK: /θʌˈɡiː/, US: /ˈθʌɡi/) is the name given to alleged thugs, who, supposedly, were historical organised cults of professional robbers and murderers in India.

[4] For centuries, the authorities of the Indian subcontinent, such as the Khalji dynasty,[5] the Mughal Empire,[1] and the British Raj, attempted to curtail the criminal activities of the Thuggee during their rule.

[25] This was derived from military-style ranks such as jemadar and subedar among Thugs as well as reference to individual members as a "private", suggests that the organisation of their gangs had a military link.

[13] There were numerous traditions about their origin: In the 16th century Surdas, in his allegorical couplet, mentioned robbers called "thags" who would lure victims into their clutches to kill them and steal their property.

Early references to Thugs reported they committed their strangulation murders with nooses of rope or catgut, but later they adopted the use of a length of cloth that could be used as a sash or scarf, and thus more easily concealed.

The Thuggees preferred to use the method of strangulation in order to take advantage of loopholes in civil law which persisted from the times of the Mughal Empire, which ruled most of India from the 1500s.

[48] Thomas Perry, the magistrate of Etawah, assembled some soldiers of the East India Company under the command of Halheld in 1812 to suppress the Thugs.

[51][52] British authorities had occasionally captured and prosecuted Thugs, circulating information about these cases in newsletters or the journal Asiatick Researches of The Asiatic Society.

His first major breakthrough was the capture of "Feringhea" (also known as Syeed Amir Ali, Khuda Buksh, Deahuct Undun and Daviga Persaud[3]), who was persuaded to turn King's evidence.

Feringhea brought Sleeman to a mass grave with a hundred bodies, told him the circumstances of the murders and named the Thugs who had committed them.

Sleeman was made superintendent of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in 1835, an organ of the Indian government first established by the East India Company in 1830.

[54] (Dacoity referred to organised banditry, distinguished from thugs most notably by its open practice and due to the fact that murder was not an intrinsic element of their modus operandi.)

[citation needed] Records were made in which the accused were given prisoner numbers, against which their names, residences, fellow thugs, and the criminal acts for which they were blamed were also noted.

While most suspects were convicted, Dash notes that the courts genuinely seemed interested in finding the truth and rejected a minority of allegations due to mistaken identity or insufficient evidence.

[17] In Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote about an 1839 government report by William Henry Sleeman:[53] There is one very striking thing which I wish to call attention to.

"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.

In 1830 the English found this cancerous organization embedded in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates—big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom.

[64] Like the ancient Hindu texts which distinguished robbery from the murder of Brahmins, women or children as violent crimes, many Thugs considered it taboo to kill people who belonged to such categories.

The "Lodaha" group, mostly concentrated in Bihar, were caravaneers named after the lodha or load they carried and according to a Thuggee from the Doab, originated from the same ancestors of his clan.

A Deccan Thuggee stated that the "Hindu Thugs of Talghat", located around the Krishna River, didn't marry with the Telinganies whom they considered to be descendants of lower classes as a result of their professions.

The Motheea group of Rampur-Purnia region was from a caste of weavers and their name derived from the practice of giving "handful" (muhti) of the spoils to the head.

[72] According to Feringheea, the Brahmins of Tehngoor village of Parihar were taught Thuggee after they accompanied the kings of Meos to Delhi, and later helped in spreading it in the region around Murnae.

A thug hailing from Shikohabad whilst talking of his clan's origin, recounted to Perry a tradition that the Munhars were influenced to take up Thuggee after witnessing the immense plunder acquired by Afghans, Mewatties and the Sheikhs.

McLeod commented, "It is a notable fact that not only amongst the Thugs, but in an especial manner among all lawless fraternities, and to a certain extent throughout the uneducated population of Central India, the Mussulmans vie with the Hindus in a devotion of this sanguinary deity (Devi or Bhavani) far exceeding that they pay to any other.

[4] R. C. Sherwood in Asiatick Researches published in 1820 traces this phenomenon back to the Muslim conquests of India and suggests links to Hindu mythology.

[6] Martine van Woerkens of École Pratique des Hautes Études writes that evidence for a Thuggee group in the 19th century was the product of "colonial imaginings", arising from British fear of the little-known interior of India, as well as limited understanding of the religious and social practices of its inhabitants.

[76] Historian Kim Wagner views the policies of East India Company in relation to the dismissal of armies of the conquered Indian kingdoms as being responsible for the development of Thuggee.

Roaming bands of freelance soldiers had often joined one kingdom or another during the pre-British era, with the main income of many armies coming from plunder.

[81] Sagnik Bhattacharya agrees with the sceptics and claims the thug-phenomenon to be nothing but a manifestation of the fear of the unknown that dawned on the British Raj at the thought of being alone in the wilderness of Central India.

Using literary and legal sources, he has connected the "information panic" of the thug-phenomenon to the limitations of British demographic models that fell short of truly capturing the ethnic diversity of India.