Thuggee

• 1. Introduction

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  Thuggee entered the British record in April 1809, when ten bodies were pulled from a well in the Etawah district of northern India. James Law, the local magistrate, was told to find the killers. The word describes a phenomenon of highway robbery across the Indian subcontinent. Gangs of men, called thugs, travelled the roads, murdered and robbed travellers, and often used strangling to do it. Within a few decades, British authorities were describing them as a secret brotherhood of ritual killers with ancient roots. The idea would grip Victorian readers and shape stories told for generations. Yet almost everything we know about the thugs comes from the same officials who hunted them. So who were these men? Were they fanatics, ordinary bandits, or something that colonial rule helped to create? And what happens to history when the only witnesses are prisoners bargaining for their lives? The answer starts with a word that meant something different before the British adopted it.

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• 2. A Word and Its Past

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  The Hindustani word thug translates as swindler or deceiver. It descends from the Sanskrit sthaga, which means to cover or to conceal. The earliest generally accepted use of the word dates to 1350. Even in precolonial India it could describe highway robbers who deceived and murdered their victims, though its literal meaning did not necessarily suggest violence.

  In 1820, a British magistrate admitted in his report that in the Western Provinces "the word Thug is a local cant term and consequently little understood in any uniform way". The English word thug comes from the same roots. A second term, phansigar, literally means strangler. It was used interchangeably with thug during the 19th century and was the usual term in the Madras Presidency. Thuggee names both the practice and the crime itself.

  Some writers have gone looking for the thugs in much older sources. In the 7th century, the Chinese monk Hsüen Tsang was attacked by pirates on the Ganges and narrowly escaped being sacrificed to Durga. On another journey, toward Pataliputra, he was told that no foreigner who entered a certain temple ever came out again. The 19th-century archaeologist Alexander Cunningham claimed to have identified that temple and read the story as an early account of thuggee. Kim A. Wagner objects that this logic could tie every ancient tale of banditry and human sacrifice to the thugs.

  The medieval evidence is thinner but more concrete. A 14th-century chronicle by Ziauddin Barani says that Sultan Jalal-ud-Din Khalji deported 1,000 arrested thags from Delhi to Bengal, sometime between 1290 and 1296. The chronicle does not say what they were arrested for. The poet Surdas, writing in the 15th or 16th century, described a thag who lured a pilgrim with sweets and wine, then murdered and robbed him.

  Jean de Thévenot travelled across India in 1666-1667 and wrote in 1684 about the "cunningest robbers in the world" operating around Delhi. He said they strangled victims with a running noose and used attractive women as lures. In 1672, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a farman setting out punishments for stranglers, including those "habituated to the work". In 1675, John Fryer watched the execution of fifteen members of a bandit gang near Surat, who had strangled travellers with a cotton bowstring. Around 1680, an Indian news-writer for the Waqa'i Ajmer mentioned highway robbers known in Hindi as thags in Rajputana. In 1785, James Forbes recounted how an Indian acquaintance had seen men of a tribe called phanseegurs arrested for deceiving and strangling travellers.

  The most striking early document is a tax list from November 1797, prepared for Maharaja Daulat Rao Sindhia and later obtained by a British official. It covers 20 villages across the parganas of Parihara and Sursae and lists 318 houses as belonging to thugs. Those households paid a soldier tax. The colonial administrator William Henry Sleeman would later use this list as the starting point for his genealogies of thug families.

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• 3. The Etawah Killings

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  In July 1809, four strangled native soldiers were found in a jungle inside Law's district. The magistrates of neighbouring Aligarh and Farrukhabad were assigned to help. In November, Law's assistant produced the first officially recorded reference to "Thugs". He described them as "a set of people... who have from time immemorial carried on their abominable and lamentable practices" in secret.

  In December, two more strangled travellers were found and the inquiry grew more thorough. Law now wrote that the killers belonged to "that detestable race of monsters". He claimed they were "so strongly leagued together" that hardly any had ever betrayed another's secrets. More bodies appeared through December and into early 1810, and in the midst of it Law was removed from his post. When an investigation questioned local zamindars in February, they reported that the perpetrators were suspected to be "Thugs".

  Between 1808 and 1809, a total of 67 bodies had been found in wells and along the highways of Etawah. Another 11 turned up in early 1810 between Mainpuri and Agra. Law's replacement, Thomas Perry, offered a large reward of Rs 1,000 for information. In March 1810, eight suspected Thugs were arrested. A young gang member named Ghulam Hussain agreed to testify in return for a pardon. He claimed that some 1,500 Thugs were based in Etawah, and said the gang had adopted him as a child after murdering his father and uncle.

  The trial at Mainpuri in November 1810 descended into farce. Hussain demonstrated for the court how the gang strangled its victims, but then repeatedly revised his account of his own involvement. He finally claimed to have joined five expeditions and witnessed 95 murders. The court rejected this for repeated perjury. Perry had to release the suspects, and the Nizamat Adalat, the Company's supreme court, admonished him for holding 162 suspected Thugs without due evidence.

  Regulation VI of 1810 was the first law to name Thugs as a distinct criminal category, alongside Dacoits, Cozauks, and Buddecks. That same year, a Superintendent of Police for the Western Provinces was created to pursue them, especially the Thugs. Many people were sentenced to death by circuit courts in these early efforts. The Nizamat Adalat dismissed every case, because each rested solely on the confessions of suspected Thugs.

  In October 1812, Nathaniel J. Halhed was sent to bring British law and order to the thana of Sindouse, where Thugs were said to be kept by local zamindars. He ordered the surrounding villages to disarm. His party was ambushed by villagers and a British officer was killed, and the village of Murnae was razed the following month. The operation scattered the Thugs into neighbouring Maratha territory. In a December report, Halhed rejected the idea of a "secret society similar to the Illuminati". He wrote that the Thugs were a species of robber who could seldom be convicted for lack of corroborating evidence, because they made confessions freely before a magistrate, since "they themselves attach no idea of dishonour to this their profession".

  In his report for 1815, Superintendent John Shakespeare noted that "much scepticism still prevails regarding the existence of any distinct class of people who are designated T'hegs". He himself had no doubt that they existed. His own list ran to five classes of Thugs, and it included Bairagi and Gosain mendicants who drugged and robbed travellers.

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• 4. Sleeman's Campaign

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  Regulation VIII of 1818 allowed notorious Dacoits to be held indefinitely, and Regulation III of 1819 extended its provisions to Thugs. In the 1820s, the authorities began handing captured Thugs to local rulers and chiefs, so as to convict them by proxy and sidestep the Company's own legal system. The first Thugs were convicted at Saugor in 1826. Two were sentenced to hang and another 29 to transportation for life. That was possible because Saugor and Nerbudda had been made Non-Regulation Territories in 1818, giving the Agent at Saugor virtually unlimited powers.

  Later in 1829, Captain William Borthwick, the Agent at Mahidpur, arrested 74 Thugs for the murder of five travellers. Until then, local authorities had led the fight against thuggee. This case was the first in which the central government stepped in to secure convictions. It also developed a legal argument that treated Thugs like pirates. An October 1829 letter explained that the murders had happened in lands belonging to various Native Chiefs, so no single authority could try the accused. Forty of the Thugs were hanged, 20 were transported for life, and 12 received limited sentences.

  Captain William Henry Sleeman, then assistant to the Agent at Jubbulpore, began assigning approvers in his custody to escort troop detachments along exposed routes. His methods led to the arrest of 24 Thugs in 1830. In October of that year, he wrote an anonymous letter to the Calcutta Literary Gazette titled Thugs, describing the execution of 11 Thugs. He claimed they were fanatical worshippers of a goddess under the names "Davey, Kalee, Doorga, and Bhowanee". He also claimed they were headquartered at Vindhyachal Temple near Mirzapur, where temple priests planned their expeditions. He demanded that the government "put an end in some way or other to this dreadful system of murder, by which thousands of human beings are now annually sacrificed upon every great road throughout India".

  The letter made an impression. The next day, Chief Secretary George Swinton wrote that destroying "this Tribe would... be a blessing conferred on the people of India", comparable to the abolition of sati. Swinton was the government's prime instigator of the campaign. Although the letter's author was unnamed, Sleeman was appointed Agent at Saugor later that month. In November, the Agent for the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, Francis Curwen Smith, submitted a plan he had written with Sleeman. It was the first to portray thuggee as an irredeemable identity rooted in bloodlust. Governor-General Lord William Bentinck declined to create a special office, but he gave Sleeman 50 barkandazes to pursue the gangs.

  In November 1830, Sleeman captured the gang leader Feringheea after holding his relatives captive. Feringheea became his most valuable approver. Troops and approvers went out together to dig up bodies and point out former associates, and the supply of approvers grew with each capture. Between 1832 and 1833, the Saugor and Nerbudda courts hanged 145 Thugs, sentenced 323 to deportation, and gave 41 life in prison. Sleeman played factions against one another, exploiting the differing loyalties of families and castes, such as Hindu and Muslim thugs.

  In 1834, Smith called for a central agency stationing officials in more territories. The Thuggee Department was established in January 1835, and in March Sleeman became 'General Superintendent of the operations for the suppression of Thuggee'. In 1836, 'River-Thugs' working the Ganges were found in Bihar, Orissa, and Bengal. They threw victims overboard, which left almost no circumstantial evidence. Sleeman used this to argue for a new law, and Act XXX of 1836 made simply belonging to a thuggee gang punishable by life imprisonment with hard labour. The word Thug was never defined, so it became a legal umbrella for many crimes, including poisoning by so-called datura-thugs. By then, the original gangs traceable to Sindouse had practically ceased to exist.

  Dacoity was added to Sleeman's duties in 1838, since thuggee had been effectively suppressed. In 1839, he coined the term Megpunnaism for the murder of poor parents in order to sell their children, and he presented it as a new form of thuggee. After the department failed to apply anti-thuggee law to itinerant communities of Thoris and Jogis, Sleeman declared in 1839 that thuggee had been effectively destroyed as an organisation. That marked the end of the campaign. In all, 4,224 people were convicted as Thugs between 1826 and 1847. From around 1826 to 1841, the trials had a conviction rate of 98.9 percent.

  More than 100 Thugs were accepted as approvers by Sleeman and his colleagues. They avoided the death penalty by confessing to specific crimes, and after conditional pardons they gave depositions. Feringheea went back to jail in 1832, but other approvers stayed on the roads with nujeeb escorts, militiamen who acted as pseudo-police detectives, hunting gangs they knew. Mike Dash suggests that a few may have falsely accused innocent men to prolong that freedom, as was suspected at the time. Wagner notes that, for a confession to be accepted, the thug had to fit whatever the interrogator already believed about the case.

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• 5. Methods and Argot

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  Thuggee gangs set out on seasonal expeditions lasting months. They typically left in the month of Kartika, after the autumn harvest, and returned around Asharh, at the start of the monsoon. Among the main victims were sepoys, soldiers of native rulers, merchants, and Hindu and Muslim pilgrims. There were reputedly no European victims.

  The thugs commonly attached themselves to parties of travellers on the promise of mutual protection. They wore many disguises, posing as soldiers looking for work, merchants, mendicants, wealthy people, Brahmins, sepoys, pundits, or simple travellers. They would sometimes kill for modest sums, but they preferred rich victims and watched travellers closely to judge their wealth.

  The classic method used a handkerchief with a knot tied at one end as a sort of handle, while a second man held the victim's hands. Sometimes the thugs strangled victims in the night. Sometimes they woke them, pretending it was nearly dawn, and led them to a secluded spot beside the road. They might give datura seeds to incapacitate a victim first. Swords, knives, and poison were also used, and bodies went into a well or a nullah, or into a hole dug with pickaxes. Thugs were also recorded stabbing victims in the face or belly to prevent recognition or to make sure they were dead.

  The popular image of thugs hardened in the latter half of the 19th century into killers who strangled without shedding blood. Dash notes that thugs had no objection to bloodshed once the victim was dead. He links strangulation to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence favoured in Mughal India. That school held that murder merited capital punishment only if done with a weapon, usually associated with bloodshed. Convicted stranglers were instead flogged, imprisoned, and made to pay blood money to the victim's family.

  Because every member of a travelling party was killed, there were no eyewitnesses. Circumstantial evidence was scarce, since a scarf, cord, or even a knife could be found on any innocent traveller. Wagner calls thuggee "very close to being the 'perfect crime'" and notes that its low cost put it within reach of many people. The 1836 Act was later used against child trafficking and against robbers who poisoned victims without killing them. Act III of 1848 formally defined thuggee to include poisoning and 'child-stealing'.

  The thugs also spoke a criminal argot called Ramasee. Sleeman compiled its vocabulary from interviews with more than a dozen Thugs for his 1836 work Ramaseeana. He saw the "peculiar language" as the key to uncovering thuggee. Thugs used the argot to talk in front of victims, to recognise one another, and to mark identity and status. It worked by giving ordinary words secondary meanings, such as Tumbakoolao, 'bring tobacco', which signalled that the murders should begin. Sherwood had published a list of 57 slang terms from phansigars imprisoned in Madras in 1816, and 20 of them also appeared in Sleeman's list. Wagner argues that Ramasee was not exclusive to thugs, and that traders, jugglers, and peddlers used it as well.

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• 6. Goddess and Omens

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  In 1923, the writer Jorge Luis Borges read Confessions of a Thug and asked a question that historians still argue over: "Were the Thugs brigands who sanctified their profession with the cult of the goddess Bhavani, or was it the cult of the Goddess Bhavani that turned them into brigands?"

  The depositions taken in the 1830s describe rituals and ceremonies performed during expeditions. Captain James Paton, a colleague of Sleeman, focused hard on the thugs' religion and asked loaded questions shaped by Christian thought. Sleeman and Paton cared most about goddess-worship, the rules and omens thugs observed, and how customs differed between gangs. Wagner considers it "very likely" that this "extreme interest" shaped how the approvers described themselves.

  The thugs worshipped different forms of Devi, most often Bhavani, within a variety of traditions. The approvers themselves never mention Kali in the sources. The only mentions come from Sleeman's own comments. According to Cynthia Ann Humes, Thug testimony rarely referred to Bhavani, mostly in answer to Sleeman's leading questions, and the Islamic concept of fate came up most often. Some Muslim approvers disowned Bhavani on turning King's evidence, identifying her with Fatima or as an instrument of Allah. In interviews with Paton, Muslim approvers called Bhavani "only for thuggee", and one called her "the chief of that trade". Sleeman estimated that about a third of Thugs were Muslims.

  The thugs held a myth of divine origins drawn from a story in the Devi Mahatmya, in which Kali fights the demon Raktabija with help from goddesses called the Matrikas. In the thugs' version, they took the place of the Matrikas, and the last demons were defeated by strangulation. Sleeman claimed that the myth credited "Kalee Davey" with creating the first thugs. Thugs ate consecrated goor in honour of Devi and made offerings before expeditions. They followed omens closely, and a bad one, such as an owl chirping at the wrong moment, could call off a murder. Testimony from the early 1830s says that gangs sometimes visited Vindhyachal Temple to make offerings. But Feringheea, Sleeman's favourite approver, disputed that thugs had any special bond with Devi's temples and priests, in a conversation published in Ramaseeana in 1836.

  Dr Richard C. Sherwood, who wrote the first scholarly work on thuggee out of the Madras Presidency in 1816, was the first to link it with religion. He described the phansigars as highly superstitious and said they held "Cali or Mariatta" as their tutelary deity. In 1818, Perry's assistant made the earliest known reference in northern India to a religious element. He claimed they "worshipped and sacrificed a kid to obtain the auspicious protection of their deity". By the early 1830s, Sleeman had sensationalised these religious elements and brought them to the front.

  Wagner and Radhika Singha argue that the beliefs and practices of the thugs were common across the wider population. Wagner writes that "robbers, who did not worship a tutelary deity, perform pujas or entertain certain beliefs concerning the moral sanction of their acts would have been truly exceptional in an Indian context". Ordinary dacoits, never assumed to be religious fanatics, also made offerings and held a puja before and after robberies. Wagner compares the colonial fixation to Carlo Ginzburg's study of the benandanti in early modern Italy. Dash likewise concludes that the thugs' beliefs were closer to folklore than to a distinct faith.

  Martine van Woerkens takes the opposite view. She concludes from interviews in which Thugs were asked why they were about to hang despite divine protection that the thugs had once been true shaktas. Their belief system, she argues, collapsed under an "unbounded lust for loot". Wagner says she dismantled the colonial portrait only to rebuild it from Sleeman's own account. Her 2002 book was the first scholarly monograph on thuggee, yet some scholars found it "old-fashioned and inconsistent".

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• 7. Rethinking the Thugs

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  Since the 1950s, historians including Hiralal Gupta, Stewart N. Gordon, Christopher Bayly, Martine van Woerkens, Radhika Singha, Kim A. Wagner, and Mike Dash have tried to correct Sleeman's picture. Most portray the thugs as more or less ordinary criminals, and thuggee as a type of banditry. Tom Lloyd does not reject this, but he warns against assuming that the sources hold a truth waiting to be uncovered. In his view they can only reveal how thuggee was represented. The literary scholar Amal Chatterjee goes further and calls the colonial version "a fiction that served all the interests of British power in India".

  Wagner describes the events of the 1830s as a moral panic tangled up with the need to legitimise a growing colonial state. Bayly proposed an "information panic", in which the young administration feared how little it knew of the people it ruled. Sanjay Subrahmanyam observes that the Company was under attack at home from figures such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, and that thuggee helped it build a claim to moral superiority. Parama Roy notes that the colonial writing on thuggee quoted itself, that differences between approver accounts were smoothed over, and that approvers were pushed to confirm the official story. According to Wagner, some officials clearly exploited the Government's worry to gain authority, and Sleeman's opportunism was part of a wider trend that he refined.

  Wagner nevertheless argues that the colonial account was not invented from nothing. Alexander Lyon Macfie agrees that the so-called thuggee archive is partly an Orientalist construction but broadly accurate on most facts. Wagner and Dash point to consistencies among the first reports, which they judge were written without knowledge of one another. Dash adds that the British kept approvers isolated from each other and that bodies were actually dug up. Van Woerkens says the recorded argot of Ramasee anchors the thugs in a "concrete reality". Wagner stresses the huge volume of information British officials gathered that had no bearing on any trial.

  The theory that has won the most support was first put forward by Gupta in 1959. British expansion and its subsidiary alliances meant the disbandment of native standing armies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, shrinking a once-lively military labour market. That left armed men and itinerant mercenaries without work, and some turned to thuggee. Wagner suggests the former soldiers, often paid in loot, simply carried on a predatory way of life. Singha thinks highway robbery was probably practised by mercenary bands moving between employers, and may have become permanent as the market shrank. Wagner sides with Halhed, calling the thugs a species of robber best understood as bandits rather than "some vague notion of a religious sect or caste-like entity". What set them apart, he says, was the mix of secrecy, deception, and murder.

  Dash denies that thuggee was organised crime in the modern sense, since the thugs had no central organisation or complex hierarchy. He calls them "merely one product, among many, of India's lawless interior" and says they invariably murdered before robbing. He puts the number making some living from thuggee at as many as three thousand. He thinks it likely peaked in the 1820s, after the break-up of the Pindari bands and the disbandment of the Maratha armies. He ties this to famine and to the harsh rents the Company levied to recover the cost of the Pindari and Maratha wars. He also notes that, deficient as the trials were, thousands of men at the time were convicted of murder in India, Europe, and the United States on far less evidence.

  The records show how thuggee fitted into village life. The daroga of Sindouse said in 1810 that locals farmed for eight months of the year and spent the rest horse trading or committing thuggee. A patwari from Parihara said in 1812 that the thugs had lived there for generations, never cultivated, and brought back valuables from expeditions. Local zamindars looked after their families while they were away and earned interest on loans to them. The thugs called themselves and each other sepoys, and used jemadar for a gang leader and subedar when several bands joined. Wagner concludes they were armed retainers under the patronage of zamindars, part of a loose-knit "itinerant underworld" rather than a counter-society cut off from settled life. Laljee, the head zamindar of Sindouse, had protected the gangs and advanced them money. He was arrested in December 1812 under a Rs 5,000 reward and sentenced to life in prison with hard labour.

  Thugs often spared the children of their victims, and many were adopted. Girls were married to the sons or relatives of their adopters, which avoided a dowry. Boys tended to go to childless couples, in a time of high infant mortality. Only well-off thugs with a secure home base usually adopted. Long-term thugs such as Buhram saw themselves as above common thieves. Wagner says the thugs wanted to be seen as "warrior-gentlemen" with a code like that of the Kshatriya, inspired by local Rajput landowners. Their customs forbade killing women or members of certain lower castes, although Dash says this was not scrupulously observed.

  The idea that thugs were hereditary criminals served British officials who wanted special procedures. In an 1834 report, Donald Friell McLeod recorded a legend that all thugs descended from a group that settled around Delhi 15 generations earlier under a Mughal emperor. After they murdered one of their associates and fled, the story went, they split into seven nomadic Muslim clans. Sleeman's genealogies, however, rarely reached back more than three generations and included the names of adopted children. He still argued that the Sagartii of the 5th century BCE were ancestors of the stranglers Thévenot described. Wagner and Dash see both "hereditary thugs" rooted in a village and "occasional thugs" who drifted in and out. Singha notes that the colonial authorities often dismissed the thugs' other jobs as disguises. She argues that the mass of paper on the hereditary nature of Thugs and Dacoits really concealed the regime's failure to build a system that could link a specific offence to a specific offender. Wagner adds that the surviving sources do not allow any discussion of thuggee before the 17th century.

  Colonial material alludes to some 40 different classes of Thugs. The River Thugs of the Ganges numbered around 300, tricked passengers onto their boats, and were largely suppressed by 1840. The Megpunna Thugs, according to Dash, began in 1826 and never exceeded 200 men and women. The Telingana Thugs were shunned by other gangs, who considered them descended from cattle herders and itinerant tradesmen, and so of lower caste. Thimble-riggers known as Tashma-baz, found on the edge of Cawnpore in 1848, were legally classified as Thugs after murdering and robbing a few travellers they met on the roads.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  By the late 1830s, 56 approvers had been returned to Jubbulpore Central Jail, where they were held in a lockup outside the prison gates, away from other inmates. The authorities believed these men could not be reformed. Even so, in 1837 they opened the Jubbulpore School of Industry, a manufactory where approvers and their families learnt trades. The approvers lived in a small walled village, while their families were kept under strict surveillance in an adjacent village. They could usually meet at mealtimes, and the approvers' allowances went to their families after food and clothing were deducted. The first products were bricks, and the School became self-sustaining by selling into Central Provinces markets, where importing from elsewhere cost too much.

  The workers were later taught to make tents and carpets. By 1847, they were producing 130 tents and 3,300 yards of carpet a year. A carpet made by the Thugs was shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851. They later wove a 40 by 80 foot carpet for Queen Victoria, which, as of 2005, was still on display in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Their work also went to the 1862 International Exhibition in London and the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1870, the institution held 158 Thugs, 202 Dacoits, and over 1,500 wives and children. Sleeman visited three times between 1843 and 1848 and found that the Thugs, once keen to talk about their careers, had grown ashamed of their past. As the workers aged, output fell, and by 1888 the School no longer made a profit. By the start of the 20th century it had become a reformatory school for juvenile offenders.

  The cultural afterlife of thuggee began early. William Browne Hockley's 1826 novel Pandurang Hari, or Memoirs of a Hindoo is effectively the first English novel to depict it. The great hit came in 1839, when Philip Meadows Taylor published Confessions of a Thug, drawing heavily on Sleeman's writings. Presented as a discovered manuscript, it follows Ameer Ali, a supposedly real thug turned approver. A man named Sayyid Ameer Ali did give a deposition to Sleeman at Saugor in 1832, but Wagner says it bears only a "very slight resemblance" to Taylor's account. Queen Victoria herself asked for the book's pre-publication proofs. Eugène Sue put a fictionalised Feringheea at the head of the Thugs in his 1844 serial Le Juif errant. Mark Twain wrote about thuggee in Following the Equator in 1897. In Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 story "Uncle Jeremy's Household", an Anglo-Indian governess turns out to be a thuggee princess. Bram Stoker's 1890 story "Gibbet Hill" has thuggee-like children attacking a traveller in England.

  Film kept the legend going. The 1939 film Gunga Din pits three British soldiers and a waterbearer against a resurgent Thuggee sect. The 1959 film The Stranglers of Bombay ends with a quote attributed to Sleeman: "If we have done nothing else for India, we have done this good thing." The Beatles met a cult worshipping "Kahili" in the 1965 film Help!, which parodied earlier portrayals of thuggee. In the 1984 Steven Spielberg film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a Kali priest named Mola Ram leads a cult in a subterranean temple. Its members aim to "massacre the British imperialists, crush the Muslims, and then cause the god of the Christians to crumble into dust". The 2018 Hindi-language film Thugs of Hindostan stars Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, and Katrina Kaif as a band of Thugs resisting Company rule.

  The Thuggee and Dacoity Department turned in the 1840s toward communities of "hereditary dacoits", and Act XXIV of 1843 extended the 1836 provisions to "professional Dacoits". From the 1860s its work was limited to cross-border crime. Its campaigns criminalised communities tied to raiding and protection, which had served as a form of indigenous police. Its archives were repeatedly cited as proof of 'criminal tribes', and the effort led to the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which the department helped enforce for a time. In 1904, the Department of Criminal Intelligence replaced it. As late as the 1940s, rickshaw wallahs still called the Intelligence Bureau in Shimla the 'Thagi Daftar', the 'Thuggee Office'. The Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1949, and in 1952 the tribes were officially "denotified" under the Habitual Offenders Act.

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