He Who Conceals
Jun. 8th, 2010 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
finncullenIt is interesting that a word that now embodies the concept of brutish violence should have such a different original meaning. To the modern ear the word 'thug' implies coarse and unsophisticated violence, oafish belligerence. Rampaging football hooligans, and drunken pikeys on late night excesses are labelled as thugs by the common press.
The word though derives from the hindi word 'thag' - meaning thief. Specifically it refers to someone who steals by means of deceit or concealment. "One who conceals"
Ah but no sophisticated conmen, these thugs of the Indian subcontinent. Not for them the delights of the melon drop, making change, the advance fee fraud or the Spanish prisoner game. Their deceit, their trick, was gaining the confidence of travellers by posing as travellers themselves.
The thugs would pose as wayfarers and join a larger group of travellers for security. Dangerous times, dangerous places to travel through. After all, bhai, are there not killers around? And is there not safety in numbers? They'd journey together for some time until the main group were relaxed, until the strangers were no longer strange.
And then they would strike. Suddenly and all at once, choosing their first targets well. The weapon of choice was a simple length of material. It was called a rumal which simply means 'scarf' because it was sometimes worn as a scarf, or a turban-cloth, or a sash around the waist. Sometimes it was weighted at one end to allow it to be swung rapidly into place, at other times a bulky knot was tied in the centre of it to press against a very specific spot. It wrapped around the neck you see, and it was pulled tight and twisted. Sometimes in a manner reminiscent of the Coup de Pere Francois employed by the Parisian dacoits the strangler would turn his back, still holding the rumal and bend forward. The victim would be lifted off his feet... the strangulation would be hastened, particularly if that oh-so-clever knot were pressing against the windpipe.
Seven seconds, they estimate, was the average time before the victim was dead, or as good as dead.
Why did they do this? Some say it was in worship of the goddess Kali, who was certainly a venomous enough old bitch to delight in such things. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was simply for the money. "The poor you will always have with you" as Christ said, and the poor rarely see the blessing in that state.
Anyway, in short order the party of travellers would be wiped out, their goods plundered, and their bodies hidden (often in existing cemeteries) and another caravan would simply have vanished. The thugs would then fade again, perhaps to seek another target, perhaps returning home together. For these were no simple bands of robbers - the thugs were a family, a tribe, a class of people, a gang. We have no direct model for what they were. The tricks of the trade were passed from parent to child (and who would suspect a small group of travellers with children among them of mischief), or to privileged outsiders who won the right to join the festivities. And they had a long time to refine their arts. The first mention of thugs - or something splendidly akin to them - is in a 14th century history written by Ziauddin Barani which talks of a thousand being captured and... shipped off to a distant province to trouble other people (Machiavelli was a johnny-come-lately compared to the intricacies of the Indian rulers, neh?).
The British put an end to all the fun in the 19th century by their evil and oppressive methods of imposing the rule of law, training and equipping local police forces, exposing the secrets of the thugs so that travellers would not fall for their tricks and offering individual thugs protection from prosecution for helping bring others to justice. The vicious colonialist swine! 'Reformed' thugs who had assisted the police were retrained in fact and became famous for the quality of the carpets they wove. Queen Victoria had one in fact, and a splendid old rug it was by all accounts.
The campaign to suppress the thugs took about 40 years, coming to an end in 1870 when the threat was declared over. During that period lurid stories spread in the west about the skills of the "evil cult of the strangler goddess kali" which were coloured with racist misconceptions and the usual type of exaggerations. Even scholarly reports were prone to this attributing for example nearly 1000 deaths to a single infamous Thug, when in fact the individual tally was probably nearer a tenth of that (though the individual in question, Behram, may well have witnessed or been present at many more murders given the way they operated en masse). Still, against all that lurid exaggeration we can balance the books with the later pendulum swing which attempts to downplay the original problem, claiming that thuggee was always a racist invention of the British and a reason to oppress the Indians (and to hell with all the pre-British accounts of the thugs, they don't count obviously).
The truth as always is probably somewhere in the centre ground. The Phansigar - the noose operators - as they were also known may not have been the Murder Cultists of the Victorian tabloid, and they may not have been the peace loving misunderstood kitten worshippers that revisionist historians have made them out to be. But if nothing else the name lives on. So the next time you pass a railway journey in reading your paper, and read an account of 'thugs' on the rampage, breaking windows or beating each other up in a city after the bars close, remember where the word comes from, and look around the railway carriage at the innocent faces of your fellow travellers with their scarves, and their belts, and their iPod earplugs with their trailing wires..
The word though derives from the hindi word 'thag' - meaning thief. Specifically it refers to someone who steals by means of deceit or concealment. "One who conceals"
Ah but no sophisticated conmen, these thugs of the Indian subcontinent. Not for them the delights of the melon drop, making change, the advance fee fraud or the Spanish prisoner game. Their deceit, their trick, was gaining the confidence of travellers by posing as travellers themselves.
The thugs would pose as wayfarers and join a larger group of travellers for security. Dangerous times, dangerous places to travel through. After all, bhai, are there not killers around? And is there not safety in numbers? They'd journey together for some time until the main group were relaxed, until the strangers were no longer strange.
And then they would strike. Suddenly and all at once, choosing their first targets well. The weapon of choice was a simple length of material. It was called a rumal which simply means 'scarf' because it was sometimes worn as a scarf, or a turban-cloth, or a sash around the waist. Sometimes it was weighted at one end to allow it to be swung rapidly into place, at other times a bulky knot was tied in the centre of it to press against a very specific spot. It wrapped around the neck you see, and it was pulled tight and twisted. Sometimes in a manner reminiscent of the Coup de Pere Francois employed by the Parisian dacoits the strangler would turn his back, still holding the rumal and bend forward. The victim would be lifted off his feet... the strangulation would be hastened, particularly if that oh-so-clever knot were pressing against the windpipe.
Seven seconds, they estimate, was the average time before the victim was dead, or as good as dead.
Why did they do this? Some say it was in worship of the goddess Kali, who was certainly a venomous enough old bitch to delight in such things. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was simply for the money. "The poor you will always have with you" as Christ said, and the poor rarely see the blessing in that state.
Anyway, in short order the party of travellers would be wiped out, their goods plundered, and their bodies hidden (often in existing cemeteries) and another caravan would simply have vanished. The thugs would then fade again, perhaps to seek another target, perhaps returning home together. For these were no simple bands of robbers - the thugs were a family, a tribe, a class of people, a gang. We have no direct model for what they were. The tricks of the trade were passed from parent to child (and who would suspect a small group of travellers with children among them of mischief), or to privileged outsiders who won the right to join the festivities. And they had a long time to refine their arts. The first mention of thugs - or something splendidly akin to them - is in a 14th century history written by Ziauddin Barani which talks of a thousand being captured and... shipped off to a distant province to trouble other people (Machiavelli was a johnny-come-lately compared to the intricacies of the Indian rulers, neh?).
The British put an end to all the fun in the 19th century by their evil and oppressive methods of imposing the rule of law, training and equipping local police forces, exposing the secrets of the thugs so that travellers would not fall for their tricks and offering individual thugs protection from prosecution for helping bring others to justice. The vicious colonialist swine! 'Reformed' thugs who had assisted the police were retrained in fact and became famous for the quality of the carpets they wove. Queen Victoria had one in fact, and a splendid old rug it was by all accounts.
The campaign to suppress the thugs took about 40 years, coming to an end in 1870 when the threat was declared over. During that period lurid stories spread in the west about the skills of the "evil cult of the strangler goddess kali" which were coloured with racist misconceptions and the usual type of exaggerations. Even scholarly reports were prone to this attributing for example nearly 1000 deaths to a single infamous Thug, when in fact the individual tally was probably nearer a tenth of that (though the individual in question, Behram, may well have witnessed or been present at many more murders given the way they operated en masse). Still, against all that lurid exaggeration we can balance the books with the later pendulum swing which attempts to downplay the original problem, claiming that thuggee was always a racist invention of the British and a reason to oppress the Indians (and to hell with all the pre-British accounts of the thugs, they don't count obviously).
The truth as always is probably somewhere in the centre ground. The Phansigar - the noose operators - as they were also known may not have been the Murder Cultists of the Victorian tabloid, and they may not have been the peace loving misunderstood kitten worshippers that revisionist historians have made them out to be. But if nothing else the name lives on. So the next time you pass a railway journey in reading your paper, and read an account of 'thugs' on the rampage, breaking windows or beating each other up in a city after the bars close, remember where the word comes from, and look around the railway carriage at the innocent faces of your fellow travellers with their scarves, and their belts, and their iPod earplugs with their trailing wires..
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 10:24 pm (UTC)I'm glad then, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 09:20 am (UTC)It wasn't my favourite of the Indy movies (the first one was excellent, the third was lifted by the presence of Sean Connery, the second was 'blah' and the fourth was scraped up off the bottom of the same bucket that spawned Jar Jar Binks) but it was nice to see a cartoon version of the Thuggee cult who bore as much resemblance to the real thing as Short Round did to a Pro Basketball player.
The attention to detail was what you'd expect from Hollywood - the same film refers to Indy having been threatened with (implied) castration by the Sultan of Madagascar... Madagascar never had a Sultan, it had kings and queens but only until the 1890s after which it became a French protectorate.
Lazy lazy Hollywood hacks. "Madagascar sounds foreign, must have been somewhere in the Middle East, right? Must have had a Sultan then.. "
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 09:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 09:30 am (UTC)