An English hero who put Indie in the shade

Thug: the True Story of India's Murderous Cult by Mike Dash (Granta, Pounds 20)

SO UTTERLY English-sounding is the word thug that it is hard to believe it only entered the language with the publication of Meadows Taylor's bestselling shocker, Confessions of a Thug, first published in 1837.

Although a work of fiction, Taylor's novel was based on horrific fact: the existence in India of a secret cult based on strangulation, thugee, whose members carried out the most grotesque ritual murders.

Operating in large bands, they roamed the countryside seeking out vulnerable travellers whom they would stalk for several days before infiltrating in small groups in the guise of fellow-travellers.

Having lulled their victims into lowering their defences, they would wait until they had come to one of their many killing grounds and then strike at a prearranged signal.

The killing was bloodless: strangulation by knotted scarf, the strangler approaching from behind with a knee in the back, while assistants held the victim's arms and legs. The dead were then robbed, stripped, stabbed in the eyes and stomach, dismembered and buried in prepared graves.

So disciplined were the thugs, with their own argot and strict codes of behaviour, that none lived to tell the tale. Travellers simply disappeared, and while piles of bodies might occasionally be dug up, they carried few clues that could lead to identification.

The deeper the British penetrated into the Indian interior in the first decades of the 19th century the more disturbing were the reports sent back: of bodies found and persons missing, particularly soldiers who set out on leave with their savings and were never seen again.

Then, as so often happens in fiction but rarely in fact, the right man happened to be in the right place at the right time: a bored young British officer named William Sleeman with time on his hands.

The manner in which Sleeman uncovered thugee in his district and then set to work to destroy it throughout India is one of the great melodramas of the Victorian age.

Over 15 action-packed years he almost single-handedly broke the thugs, building up intelligence through hours of patient questioning and then collating it to identify and hunt down the scores of gangs operating throughout central India.

In the course of his " conversations", Sleeman interviewed hundreds of thugs who, between them, admitted to many thousands of murders and who, in many cases, were simply following in their fathers' footsteps in their chosen careers.

It was a genuinely astonishing story and in Thug, Mike Dash retells it with all the verve and meticulously researched authority that one has come to expect from the author of Tulipomania and Batavia's Graveyard.

In the past decade, a surprising number of revisionist accounts have been written, which have sought to reinterpret the thugee phenomenon as a figment of the British colonial imagination. The most recent and most readable of these was Kevin Rushby's Children of Kali (2002).

Mike Dash has spent three years beavering through the extensive records on thugee to be found in archives in India and Britain and his conclusions are unequivocal: thugee existed and if the British subsequently got it wrong and demonised what the Irish constabulary term "ordinary decent criminals" so, too, have the revisionists in demonising British efforts to get rid of some deeply unpleasant blemishes in Indian society.

Sleeman was no bigoted Victorian witchfinder-general who galloped around India stringing-up innocent Indians. His writings show a man deeply attached to the peasantry and greatly concerned with improving their lot, and the means by which he obtained information without force or torture should be compulsory reading for every intelligence operative now engaged in the war on terror.

Thug sets the record straight with chapter and verse and copious ( perhaps too copious) endnotes. Yet it is strangely incomplete. Dash has little to say on the early history of thugee prior to the arrival of the British, and skates over the religious rituals and hermetic language that set thugee apart as a cult.

He ends his history with Sleeman's death in 1856. But, as films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom remind us, the legacy of the thugs is still very much with us.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.