British attributed Indian crimes to Hinduism

The British invaders of India were an extremely prejudiced lot when it came to India’s culture, religion and people. Consequently, they were not very fond of Hinduism, and wrote highly objectionable stuff on the topic.

When they noticed that Indian criminals were as religious as the common people, they were confused. Not only were thieves, robbers etc. religious, but they also offered prayers to their tools and weapons, and sacrificed their loot to Kali, who was, incidentally, their favourite God. Moreover, the religion itself, the priests and saints, did not reject the criminals or deny them God. Now the British got very confused, as this was very different from their Christianity, which had evolved into a political religion with serious discrimination between people based on personal interpretations of right and wrong.

Hinduism is a religion that can be practised every breathing moment in life, very much unlike the Christianity that the British were accustomed with, which was practised only for a short period on Sundays. Therefore, any reference to religion or God by criminals were thought of as patron deities. And the British conveniently formulated that Kali must be the God for crimes, since most criminals owed allegiance to Her.

Similar was the case with the Thugs – notorious groups of highway robbers that murdered travellers and robbed them after violently disposing of their bodies. Mike Dash writes in his excellent book – Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult, that ‘there had been no hint…that religion was of any special importance to the Thugs, nor that the beliefs they held influenced the manner in which they practised their grim trade. On the contrary, numerous captured stranglers had implied that their motive for committing murder was financial. The few references to religion that do appear in the statements of ordinary Thugs imply that it was simply a part of everyday life.’

The Thugs regarded ‘Devi’ or ‘Bhuvani’ as their guardian deity and worshipped Her before setting out on expeditions. Their ‘legends reassured them that they had enjoyed the goddess’ protection for many years’. They also evolved a practice whereby they offered the murdered victims to Devi as sacrifice.

However, it is extremely wrong to consider this as human sacrifice. This is because, the act itself was not considered sacred, it was not performed as a religious ritual, but was done with the sole motive of robbing the victims. Later, since the bodies were lying idle, the practice evolved that these could be dedicated to God, bhtereby bringing some sprirituality into the dastardly act. For objective Hindus, this would not come as a surprise, becase even in the Gita, Krishna encourages all men to dedicate all their actions to Him.

What is even more interesting is that, all Thugs, Hindu as well as Muslim, worshipped Devi or Bhuvani as their guardian deity.

But the British Captain, William Sleeman, who was instrumental in eradicating Thuggery in India, concluded, “A Thug considers the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the Goddess”, and his habits and actions as being determined by his devotion to Kali.

Mike Dash writes further:

Today, it is generally agreed that the conclusions Sleeman drew from his ‘Conversations with Thugs’ were distorted by the prejudices and misinterpretations so common at the time. In truth, the Thugs’ worship of Kali and their veneration of the sacred pickaxe hardly constituted a religion. The gangs possessed no religious texts, had no agreed forms of worship, and while they certainly shared in the belief that their goddess protected them, they held this in common with thousands of ordinary Indians. Kali was commonly invoked as a protector by all sorts of Hindus; and at this time she was – later anthropologists have noted – especially popular among criminals of all sorts and men of lower caste.

Later, he continues:

Most strikingly of all, the evidence so carefully recorded by Sleeman and his men makes it clear that Indian villagers did not engage in Thuggee because they worshipped Kali. Rather, Kali worship was a facet of life as a Thug – one that could safely be neglected or abandoned by a man no longer practising the trade.

The emphasis placed by Sleeman and – through him – by the Company authorities on the role of religion in Thug life ws thus enormously exaggerated. But in a country like India, in which most Europeans felt barely at home, such exaggerations were accepted without question. To take only one example, references made by the Thugs to the pilgrimages some made to a temple to Kali maintained in the village of Bindachul, just outside Mirzapore, were built up into suggestions that the temple was itself an important headquarters of Thugs, maintained by Thug priests and funded by the proceeds of Thuggee.

Probably this impression of a harsh and murderous cult owed something to Sleeman’s own religious beliefs, for he added: “To pull down [Kali's] temple at Bindachul and hang her priests would no doubt be the wish of every honest Christian.” But the impact of such pronouncements – made, as they were, in the almost total absence of information to the contrary – on British consciousness in India was significant. By 1835 the impression that Thuggee was an alien religion of the most horrible sort was firmly established among the European communities in India. A few years later, with the publication of the sensational novel ‘Confessions of a Thug’, written by Meadows Taylor, Sleeman’s contemporary in Hyderabad, a similar view was introduced to Britain. The consequence was a distinct loss of perspective.

Thus, it can be seen that the European invaders had profound prejudice towards Hinduism which they impressed upon their communities back home. This has done serious damage to Hinduism maligning it in the eyes of the West even to this day. For example, there was a movie made quite some time ago in which Thugs were portrayed as performing human sacrifices to Kali. Why, even in Aamir Khan’s movie, Mangal Pandey – The Rising, an Englishman is shown as protecting a woman from being forcefully burnt as a “suttee”, in spite of satis themselves being extremely rare, and forced ones almost mythical.

It is therefore quite obligatory of Europeans such as Mike Dash to reverse this unfounded malice in the West towards Hinduism. Are you interested in knowing how Jagannath Puri’s annual rath yatra became the Juggernaut massacre of human sacrifices?