Sundarban Mini-trip

[Rishi]

(01-01-2018, 09:25 AM)Wolverine Wrote: There is a legend that Sundarban was a last stronghold of the Thuggees - a religious sect of assasins, strangulating their victims also described in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom".

"The camps basically consists of a watch-tower and a elevated, fenced approach to it."
Why the approach is fenced?

I was on the verge of visiting Sundarbans in 1993 but unfortunately arrived in Calcutta when the monsoon rains were already started...

Happy New Year @Rishi , I guess your next trip is to Jaldapara National Park...

That Indiana Jones film was so pathetic it's banned in India. I torrented it...

Anyway the word thagi literally means "cheater". In pre-1850 India when population was thin, they had villages along traveling & trade routes. At evening wary travelers approached them for shelter for the night & they obliged. Later that night.....
The Mughals tried to deal with the problem by building inns along the road. They simply switched tactics & would join parties as fellow travellers to gain their confidence. And later strangle them in their sleep, with a handkerchief or noose. 

They were more of a sect of common highway robbers, than a murderous secret cult. They drifted away from the mainstream to protect secrecy & intermarried only amongst themselves, thus turning into a social group.

There were others like them such as the thyangare, meaning "lynchers". The name is pretty much explains their modus operandi. They'd pounce upon travellers with cane/bamboo sticks & beat them to death.

Even today every now and then hundreds of years old skulls are found from tilling paddy fields or digging construction sites.

PS: I doubt i'll be able to leave the city anyone soon. There maybe a father's office picnic at the East Kolkata Wetlands in February though. Reply