Mystery of Thug Behram

2020-07-26 13:11:44 Written by Nimra Noor

Thug

Derived from the original Sanskrit word "saga". It means hidden or invisible. In Urdu, it is used as a noun in its original meaning. It was used in 1672 in the "Diwan" of Abdullah Qutb Shah.

 

 Today, the word thug is used for everything from the cunning and mean man to a deceitful criminal. But the real Indian thugs did not reveal their identities or intentions to their victims.

 

 These people very cleverly robbed the passengers. If a thug failed, he would sell his prey to another area thug. Their main weapon was a handkerchief or a snare, With which they used to strangle their victims.

 These people were worshipers of Kali Devi. They thought that it was Kali Devi who made them commit these crimes and protected them. Millions of people died at their hands. These thugs spread their fear and terror in India for three hundred years. If the British had not come to India, these thugs might never have disappeared.

 

 One of the social achievements that the British proudly recount during their occupation of India is to defeat the organized gangs of thugs, who ruled India for three hundred years from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. 

 Their incidents escalated to such an extent that the East India Company formed a special force headed by William Henry Sleeman to control them. The details of the force's investigation and proceedings caused such a sensation in England that many people, including Rudyard Kipling, wrote stories of thugs and added the word thug to the English language permanently. The thrill can be further gauged by the fact that Queen Victoria of the time enthusiastically read a novel on the same subject, "Confession of a Thug", in which the confession of a thug named Syed Amir Ali, real royal witness, was based.

Confessions of a Thug is an English novel written by Philip Meadows Taylor in 1839 based on the Thuggee cult in British India. It was a best-seller in 19th-century Britain.

 

 In the time of William Henry Sleeman

 

  According to the investigation of (1830-1840), thugs were a group of superstitious murderers who were priests of a goddess named Bhavani. They were associated with thugs from generation to generation and they firmly believed that only they had the divine right to do so. No other criminal group has the right to operate under this name.

Thug Behram

 

King of these Thugs was Thug Behram. Thug Bahram was born in Jabalpur, India in 1765. 

He was quite a shy child but when he became a friend to one of the Leader of Thugs, Syed Ameer Ali, he became a notorious criminal. Syed Ameer Ali introduced him to the World of Thuggee.

He started killing people by the age of just 10 and he started robbing at the age of 25. Sources also confirmed that Behram always used to keep a yellow handkerchief with himself in which he used to put a coin in order to calmly strangle his victims to death; so that he could loot them all.

Behram had a group of 200 Thugs, The Central Government of India was afraid of them. According to some reports, the British Govt sent a team of 5 investigators for his investigation but Behram killed all those.

In 1822, Williams Henry Sleeman took control of the area. He moved one city to another for information about Behram but he couldn't get a single clue about King of Thugs. He had got an intimation about Syed Ameer Ali. They finally arrested Ameer Ali's family.

In 1832, after a lot of inquiries, Syed Ameer Ali gave clear information about Behram to the Britishers, thereafter, he surrendered for the sake of his family, and finally, in 1838, Behram was also arrested.

After the arrest, Behram revealed that he, along with his group members, had killed nearly 931 victims with the help of yellow handkerchiefs and coins, of which, 150 well killed by Behram himself. After narrating the stories of his crimes, the other members of his group were also arrested by the Britishers.

Behram and his gang were executed by hanging with a tree. His name is recorded in the book of Guinness World Records for killing 931 victims.