I have always had a considerable admiration for at least a few distinguished Englishmen who came to this country, particularly in early period of colonialism, because of the sheer magnitude of their enterprise and achievement. My hero in this tradition is without doubt William Jones, knower of 28 languages, who read the 20 volume set in Latin of the great Roman statesman Cicero’s works once every year, often walked six miles between his Garden Reach residence and Supreme Court in Calcutta (and we complain of lack of time) and of course pioneered Indological studies by his act of founding the Asiatic Society. Jones died in 1794 at the age of 47 (my present age) after living for less than a decade in India. I have visited the South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata (which closed for burials after 1858) to look at those who found their final repose there, many at a depressingly young age, but none, to my imagination, more distinguished than Jones.
However, this writing is about another William, separated by him by a quarter of a century, who, if not as intellectually brilliant as his senior namesake – I cannot think of many who could be – was nevertheless, boundless in his energy and achievements during his 45 year stay in this land.
I had first heard of William Henry Sleeman when I was about 11 years old and passed the town, often locally called Saleemanabad (distorted from Sleemanabad) in erstwhile Jabalpur district (now in Katni.) I remember my father telling me that this was named after an Englishman who acquired great name and indeed popularity in this region. From then onwards I have carried Sleeman in a tiny recess in my heart and after passage of several decades I pick a pen to honour his memory.
Early Career
Sleeman was born in 1788 in a Cornish family in the south-western county of Cornwall. In 1809, when he was twenty-one, he sailed to India to join as an Infantry Cadet of the Bengal Army, as the East India Company’s Army was called then. It had regiments over large parts of eastern and northern India and Sleeman was posted at the Danapur Cantonment near Patna. His earlier education had given him a fine grounding in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, and upon reaching India he diligently pursued the studies in Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic.
He was soon promoted to the rank of a Lieutenant in which capacity he participated in the famous Gorkha war of 1814-15 under the leadership of David Ochterlony, in whose honour the Ochterlony Monument (now the ‘Shahèed Meenar’) stands tall in front of the Esplanade in Kolkata. After the war, Sleeman was given the responsibility of inquiring into claim to prize-money arising out the war, a task in which he acquitted himself honourably, giving a fine account of his fairness and abilities.
He spent the next few years in Allahabad and the neighbouring district of Pratapgarh (called by the British as Partabgarh). It was here that his familiarity with the Oudh (Avadh) region developed that would give him great advantage as a senior administrator in his later career.
In Central Provinces and the Suppression of Thuggy
Around 1820, Sleeman was transitioned from the military service to civil administration. For nearly next two decades he was posted in Central India, first in Sagar (then called Saugor) and then in Narsinghpur districts where he carried out his magisterial duties. In 1828, he was relocated to the neighbouring town of Jabalpur. It was during these times that Sleeman tackled a problem that had plagued the region not for years or decades but several centuries.
Right from the medieval times, parts of central and northern India was witness to countless cases of people disappearing which was later accounted for by the presence of dreaded gangs who looted and killed people (with a distinctive technique of suffocating them with a bandana) and burying them in areas one could not locate. But efforts to identify these gangs yielded little result. Many of the members of these gangs, called Thugs, moved among common men and there was hardly anything to identify them. Among themselves they used a code language called Ramseeana and through this two unacquainted Thugs could identify their kinship and establish bonding. This was a closed network into which new members were inducted after elaborate training and orientation.
Sleeman, who had a remarkable penchant of mingling with local villagers, employing the dialects he had already mastered, cultivated his sources of information. He spread his network, travelling in villages, getting his sources on ground, winning the confidence of people. He wrote to the Governor-General of the Company Lord Bentick and a Department of Suppression of Thuggy and Dacoity was constituted of which Sleeman was appointed the Superintendent. It was given some special powers like one could give witness on the spot itself without necessarily being brought to the court.
Sleeman’s prize catch was a prominent Thug leader Feringhea who became the King’s Evidence (official witness), and led Sleeman to a place where hundreds of bodies had been buried. He revealed the names of a large number of active Thugs many of whom were hanged or transported for life. Some others too were made official witnesses and were pardoned or even rehabilitated. In course of a few years more than a thousand Thugs were hanged.
In 1839, Lord Auckland, the then Governor-General appointed Sleeman as Commissioner of this department, and he moved to Moradabad and began to crush the Thuggy and dacoity in northern India. Here too he was eminently successful. Thus in a decade or so the dreaded and mysterious killings were almost brought to a halt.
The word ‘Thug’ got exported from India into English during these times. It further caught the fancy of the Anglo-Saxon world when Philip Meadows Taylor (himself a talented man who was in service of Hyderbad’s Nizam) published in 1839 his novel ‘Confessions of a Thug’ which remained a long-time bestseller. It drew very largely upon Sleeman’s various writings on Thuggy – the three prominent ones being – Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the peculiar language used by Thugs, Report on Depredation caused by Thug Gangs in Upper and Central India, and Thugs or Phansigars of India (the word ‘Phansigar’ meaning strangulators, derived from the Indian word Phansi or death by strangulation.)
Some later historians in independent India have problematised the ideas regarding Thuggy. Some are of the opinion that the British judicial approach and practice in the matter were only a beginning of more draconian laws. The history of the practice of Thuggy, as to how it started and the historical and social conditions that sustained it, has always been a highly contested subject and the practice itself, is enmeshed in an intricate web of great myths and complex folklore. Sleeman on his part, was of the opinion that this practice originated as a result of the former minor kings and chieftains, in a more power-centralised India since the Mughal dominance, downsizing or disbanding their troops, leading to huge numbers of unemployed former soldiers who took to Thuggy, which, of course, might be taken to be too simplistic an explanation. It is however, undeniable that the regulatory framework in the colonial state, both under the Company and the Crown, has coloured the social views even till this day. The tribes notified during the colonial times as ‘criminal tribes’, though now denotified, are still stigmatized in general public opinion and instances of their victimisation even in independent India by authorities has not been uncommon.
Dalliance with Palaeontology
Sleeman was also interested in palaeontology and geology and had an eye for interesting stuff he came across through his field explorations. In 1828, around the Lamheta area near Jabalpur (where Lamheta Ghat on Narmada is located) he found some fossilized bones, and intrigued by them sent it to the British Surgeon in Jabalpur named Salisbury, who in turn sent the sample to the eminent Calcutta-based antiquarian James Princep (whose chief claim to fame was to have deciphered the Brahmi script and after whom the beautiful Princep Ghat in Kolkata is named.) It was preserved in the Indian Museum in Calcutta and much later classified as Titanosauras (which though is technically regarded as a dubious genus). But this small act, importance of which Sleeman would have not known then, became crucial in finding a new class of fossils named after ‘Lamheta’ as the ‘Lameta Formations’, also known as ‘Jabalpur Formations’ – subsequent research on which led to the confirmation of dinosaurs species in the Narmada belt belonging to the Late Cretaceous period (with the taxonomic Rajasaurus Narmadensis, meaning ‘King Lizard of Narmada, in Mahisagar district in Gujarat, not far from Narmada.)
Sleeman describes this in his book ‘Ramblings and recollections of an Indian official’ :
“I made the first discovery of the fossils in the Nerbudda valley. I went first to a hill within sight of my house in 1828 and searched exactly within the plateau of basalt that covered it and the stratum immediately below, and there I found small trees with roots, trunks and branches, all entire, and beautifully petrified. They had been only recently uncovered by the washing of the part of a basaltic plateau. I soon after found some fossil bones of animals.”
(Chapter 14, Basaltic Cappings of the Sandstone Hills of Central India)
Some glimpses of his personal life
When posted in Jabalpur Sleeman had married Amelie, a French lady. Dinesh Choudhary, author of a fine book ‘Shaharnama Jabalpur’ mentions that Sleemans had been childless for long years. On advice of a local person he visited a Devi temple in a village outside Jabalpur and prayed for being blessed with parenthood. The Goddess did indeed fulfil the hopes of this couple hailing from a distant land and the Sleemans too expressed their immeasurable gratitude by renovating the temple and arranging for its decoration and upkeep in munificent ways.
The rigour of work that Sleeman did throughout his career would have hardly left him with any leisure but in the little spare time at his disposal his took to literature – he adored Shakespeare and Milton, and read with interest, Wordsworth and Walter Scott.
His bungalow in Jabalpur with a fine park that once inhabited deers, had to be razed later when the Railway line (Bombay-Jabalpur-Allahabad-Calcutta) was developed from 1850s onward.
Later Career and Last Years
After Jabalpur, Sleeman was posted as a British Resident at Gwalior between the years 1843 and 1849, and subsequently, at a very crucial time (from 1849 to 1855) at Lucknow.
At behest of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, Sleeman travelled extensively in 1849 to 1850 through Oudh and chronicled his experiences in his book ‘A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude : 1849-50’ that was published in 1852. It dealt not just with sociological details and the state of administration and practical affairs of politics in Oudh region but also gave out some highly interesting information which he might not have expected to run a course of their own in times to come – for instance he mentioned cases of feral children (who were brought up in caves among wolves and lived like them – making similar sounds, eating raw meat, and walking on all fours.) Much later in 1860s, the famous and heart-wrenching case of Dina Sanichar, who was said to be found from a cave in Buland Shahr, and rehabilitated in the Secundara (now Sikandara) Orphanage near Agra. Dina could never pick up human language even many years and passed away at the age of 34 due to tuberculosis caused by severe malnutrition. Sleeman’s reference to feral children and, in particular, the case of Dina Shanichar, attracted the attention of the young Rudyard Kipling who was spending his boyhood in India. Need it be said that this served as his model for Mowgli and the ‘Jungle Book’ which he set in the forests of Pench in Chhindwara and Seoni districts of Madhya Pradesh.
As the Resident at the Court of Lucknow he got the opportunity to watch the affairs at close hand. While he was clearly no admirer of the administration of the artist-ruler, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, he was strongly opposed to any idea of annexation of Oudh. In a letter written around 1854 and made public in 1857, we get a clear view of Sleeman on the Oudh issue :
“Lord Dalhousie and I have different views, I fear. If he wishes anything done which I do not think right and honest, I resign and leave it to be done by others. I desire a strict adherence to solemn engagements made with black faces or white. We have no right to annex or confiscate Oude, but we have a right, under the Treaty of 1837, to take the management of it, but not to appropriate its revenues to ourselves. We can do this with honour to our Government and benefit of the people. To confiscate would be dishonest and dishonourable. To annex would be to give the people a government almost as bad as they have, if we put a screw upon them.”
(Private Correspondence as given in later editions of ‘A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude’)
Sleeman, however, did not live to see either the annexation of Oudh or the great mutiny that followed soon. He was exhausted from his labours and his health had broken down. He had also survived at least three attempts on his life.
William Sleeman wrote voluminously on his experiences in India which were deeply enriched because of his range of interactions from humble folks to the high gentry. Among the colonial administrators the writings of James Todd (on Rajputana) and Sleeman (on Oudh and Central Provinces) had long served as sources of anecdotal information and though not written with the rigour associated with authentic academic works, they certainly presented many cues to later researchers. At any rate they certainly had a popular readership and shaped the imagination of people – both westerners as well as Indians. For instance of Todd’s book on Rajputana, Swami Vivekananda, as recorded by Sister Nivedita, had said that half of the ideas present in Bengal of his time were on account of that book.
Several colonial administrators who came to India at a time got their final repose at places which, Rupert Brook, nearly a century later, in his 1914 poem ‘Soldier’, would call ‘a corner of a foreign field that is forever England’. William Henry Sleeman, however neither got a resting place in India nor in the land of his birth. While visiting England in early 1856 for recuperation from ailments he was suffering from, he passed away on 10th February, on the boat off the coast in Ceylon and was given a burial in the sea. Thus ended a vastly variegated life of a colonial, who dealt with things as diverse as murderous thugs, fossils later leading to trail of dinosaurs, and colonial diplomacy, and most remarkably of someone who at least for that age of highly exploitative colonialism, was known to possess considerable empathy for the land and its people where his destiny had brought him.