Thug Behram: Know the Darkest Secret Behind Killing of 900 Men in Name of Human Sacrifice to Goddess
Before the British came to rule over India, thug violence and robberies were extremely prevalent in the giant amalgamation of a country that India is. There were a lot of disappearances of entire convoys and groups of people; some of the darkest and quietest hours of the nights of late 18th century were also the bloodiest nights of the same.
Sacrifices to Goddess:
One of the groups that murdered and looted these travelers was a group that a man called Thug Behram belonged to. It was a group of about 200 thugs that worshipped the Hindu Goddess of Death, Kali. While still a group of thugs, it happened to be a cult for this goddess.
Thug Behram and his companions believed that they must give something as a sacrifice to their goddess to keep her happy and from destroying the world. This is why this group of hundreds of people killed more than 900 people in its prime time. Thug Behram was the leader of this group. The technique that these men used to kill their victims was to divide themselves into groups of three; one man to hold down the feet, another the head and the third to make the actual killing, which was done by tying a rumal (a handkerchief) around the neck of the victim, strangling him to death. The specific ‘him’ here, because the group refrained from killing women and children since this killing was made for their goddess after all.
However, it stopped being for their goddess the second they looted the men that they had killed - it was more to satisfy the greedy lust of Thug Behram than it was for any god or goddess. Thug Behram used the same method to kill, except that he, instead, used his own yellow-colored waist scarf for the same. His scarf had a medallion at its center, which was used to destroy the victim’s Adam’s Apple, making the death of the innocent even more brutal.
He killed about 150 men this way himself, but he watched a lot of other murders take place in front of him. These bodies were then disposed of in wells.
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Thug Behram gave new meanings to words like brutality, thug, and notorious. People all over Central India had heard about the disappearances that had been taking place during the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th.
Investigation by British:
This attracted the attention of the British rulers. They responded to the mysterious affair by sending investigators to check what the matter was. These investigators were, of course, killed by Thug Behram, but not before they found out that such a man known as Thug Behram existed. In turn, the Britishers sent a man who entered the country and completely changed the face of thuggery in India. A practice that is passed down from father to son, thuggery, and killing and looting precious items, that had gone on for so many centuries, one of which included Thug Behram’s Reign of Terror, went down because the Britishers, one, in particular, William Henry Sleeman, were smart about it after the British five died at his hands, or his cummerbund, to be more specific. Immunity was offered to any thug who was willing to be an informant for them. Of course, when people were caught by the authorities and told this, even one of Thug Behram’s closest companions could not resist and ratted him out.
Arrest and Death:
The people of Central India were so relieved at what happened after that they named an entire town in Jabalpur after the man, the town of Sleemanbad in Jabalpur. Thug Behram was arrested in the year 1838 and was hanged to death from a tree in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, the same year. To put it simply, the story of Thug Behram and his people is yet another story of human sacrifice gone perhaps too far, all in the name of religion.
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