Tracing India’s cult of thugs

Children of Kali

Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult, and the British Raj

Kevin Rushby

Walker & Co.: 292 pp., $27

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Who knew that the word “thug” came from India? And who, in 21st century North America, knows that the original thugs, a multigenerational faith-based criminal sect said to have died out in the 1830s, are blamed for strangling more than a million Indian travelers?

Kevin Rushby, a British author whose previous books have taken him pirate-chasing in the Indian Ocean, diamond-trailing in India and drug-hunting in the fields of Ethiopia and Yemen, is eager to tell more of this story and willing to endure perilous jungles, dubious companions and blighted villages to do so.

“The first murderer I ever met was an old man who walked on his hands and feet like a crab,” he begins, and soon we’re off and traveling, from a bookshop in York, England, to the ruins of the rural subcontinent.

“In Arovli,” Rushby writes, “I was blessed by a local deity, and for the price of a banana tree given his protection against bandits; in Bijapur I bought a black doll that warded off the evil eye, and in Old Goa I visited the incomplete cadaver of St. Francis Xavier, incomplete because a previous pilgrim had bitten off the man’s big toe.”

Rushby also cultivates an anonymous source he calls Deep Curry and takes the occasional nip from a bottle of locally purchased Shivas Regal XXX, “certainly the most original and imaginative brand name in all India.”

As he goes, Rushby gives us belly laughs and lyrical pictures of the Indian landscape, he explicates the British Empire’s law enforcement legacy in India and he throws in an intriguing stint on the trail of poacher-smuggler-kidnapper-murderer Veerappan, who remains not only the most wanted man in India but also one of the region’s most romanticized and exploited figures. Veerappan, an accomplished woodsman who is about 60, is blamed for 130 deaths in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and has eluded capture for more than 20 years.

It’s odd that a book so devoted to murder would include so many giggles, but Rushby does offer respect where it is called for. It’s just that his wit wriggles free when he’s assessing a bleak hotel room, for instance, or being guided through a new town by a salesman who sees the world only through its implications for the biscuit trade.

The thug cult is said to date to at least the 14th century. Much of the author’s time is spent sniffing the old trail of the man credited with ending it: Capt. William Henry Sleeman, the British officer who, with his underlings, captured more than 3,000 of these alleged killers in the 1830s and hanged more than 400 of them.

Yes, this often sounds more like a fever dream than real history, but here it is in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which calls the thugs “a well-organized confederacy of professional assassins who traveled in gangs throughout India for several hundred years.... The thugs would insinuate themselves into the confidence of wayfarers and, when a favourable opportunity presented itself, strangle them by throwing a handkerchief or noose around their necks. They then plundered and buried them.” Britannica adds that the killings were committed after religious rites and according to ancient ritual.

The thugs viewed their killings as an aspect of their devotion to Kali, a Hindu goddess associated with violence, sexuality and, in more recent interpretations, feminine empowerment. (Thag, in Hindi, means “thief” or “deceiver.”)

Behind many of these harrowing historical tales, Rushby comes to recognize, there’s more than a little 19th century colonial spin at work. Following him to those discoveries is one payoff of this book. But in Rushby’s hands, the many detours on the way to that destination provide equal pleasure.

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Blue Ridge Music Trails

Finding a Place in the Circle

Fred C. Fussell

University of North Carolina Press: 256 pp., $15.95 paper

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Blue Ridge music strums to life

This isn’t your usual guidebook, and that’s good. Instead of staged stock shots, the photos here, all by Cedric N. Chatterly, capture the traits of a real and rustic territory: lots of guitar and banjo players standing in barns and parking lots, scrutinizing one another’s fingers. The book’s sponsors include nonprofit arts and culture agencies looking to give outsiders a good introduction to a remarkable regional musical culture with one foot in Europe (where the fiddle came from) and one in Africa (where the banjo came from).

The book describes in detail about 160 music venues in Virginia and North Carolina, concentrating on those within 25 miles of the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway. If you’re not much for guitars, fiddles and banjos, forget about it. But if you are, y’all come.

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Rome in Detail

A Guide for the Expert Traveler

In association with the International Herald Tribune

Rizzoli: 296 pp., $24.95 paper

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When in Rome, consider ‘Details’

The pages here are glossy and filled with neighborhood maps and colorful city scenes. This guidebook draws on a variety of contributors to describe walking tours, sketch museums and suggest restaurants, lodgings and shops, all grouped geographically.

It’s a bit bulky for carrying, and it took me a while to sort out the organization. (One set of maps plots churches and other significant buildings; a second set plots places to eat, sleep and shop.)

But the book is rife with historical information. Edited with help from the Italian supplement to the International Herald Tribune, this is part of a new series from Rizzoli; its other 2003 releases are “Florence in Detail” (published in spring) and “Venice in Detail” (due in fall).

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