Thug Behram is remembered for a number: 931. In books and reference works on the Thuggee campaign of British India, that is the lifetime total of killings credited to a single man over about forty years. The name appears in English as Behram and as Buhram. Far less is known of the man than of the figure, and the figure rests on testimony gathered by British officials in the 1830s, a body of evidence that modern historians treat with caution.
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained, reproduced on Encyclopedia.com, spells the name Buhram. It describes him as a man who had been a killer for forty years and who held the highest lifetime total among the Thugs, 931. A 1933 book by Colonel James L. Sleeman, Thug, or a Million Murders, uses the same spelling and the same figures, and sets his forty years against the 508 killings in twenty-one years credited to another Thug leader, Futty Khan. A 2018 article by Mayur Mulki for Peepul Tree World, published by Live History India, calls him Behram and places him in the Oudh region.
His date and place of birth, his village, his family and the years in which his activity began and ended are not on record.
The context is the British campaign against the groups they called Thugs. According to the Gale entry, William Sleeman, a former Bengal Army officer who had moved into the civil service, was appointed in 1822 to suppress them. It says he mapped the places where attacks had occurred to predict where more would follow, and that between 1830 and 1841 his police captured at least 3,700 men. Only about 50 of those received a pardon in return for information; the rest were imprisoned for life, and about 500 were executed. The same entry reports that the Thugs were said to have killed upward of 30,000 people in the 1830s.
An introduction to a scholarly study of Thuggee states that Sleeman began unraveling its workings in 1830 and in 1836 published the Ramaseeana, a vocabulary of the Thugs' own dialect. It adds that all later accounts in standard works and works of reference rest on that publication. Sleeman used pardoned Thugs as approvers, informers who gave evidence against others. Later writers on the subject, including Philip Meadows Taylor in the nineteenth century, drew heavily on his material.
The 1933 book describes a scene in which Behram, brought before a court, had turned approver, giving evidence as King's evidence rather than face death himself. It states his total as 931 killings in forty years, which it presents as nearly two a month. It also describes him as sincere in his belief that what he had done was a kind of work. The book is a popular account, written nearly a century after the events.
The Live History India article describes him as a leader in Oudh who claimed 931 deaths in a career of forty years. It adds a qualification that bears directly on the figure: the manuscript of the Thuggee and Dacoity office, it says, records that he had been present at the killings, which is a different statement from having committed them.
Whether he was tried, sentenced or executed is not on record, and no verdict against him is on record.
The scholar Kim A. Wagner, in Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), treats Thuggee as a form of banditry rooted in its time and place, not as a religious cult, and examines the colonial portrayals as material to be analyzed. Jonathan Perris, writing in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2025, summarizes the main points of the revisionist case. Wagner's evidence indicates some organized banditry, but considerably less than the widespread, caste-based, religiously motivated cult the British described. Cynthia Ann Humes has noted that many of those arrested were Muslim and pointed to fate rather than the goddess Kali as their reason, and that Kali was mentioned only in reply to Sleeman's leading questions.
Perris also makes a point that applies directly to a figure like 931. Approvers were usually recruited from gang leaders and long-standing criminals, and since an approver's value to the authorities rose with the seriousness of what he could describe, it was in their interests to represent their crimes as horrifically as possible. A total supplied by one man about his own past, recorded by officials who wanted to show the scale of the problem, cannot be checked against independent evidence.
Attributed only: 931 killings over forty years. The number is credited to Behram in the Gale entry, the 1933 book and the Live History India article. It is not a court finding.
Present at, or committed: the Live History India article reports that the colonial manuscript says he was present at the killings.
Approver: stated in the 1933 book; no trial record or colonial document confirming it is on record.
Name: Behram and Buhram are both used in English.
Dates and fate: the years of his activity, his arrest, his sentence and his death are not on record. A death in 1840, sometimes given for him, is not on record.
1822: William Sleeman is appointed to suppress the Thugs (Gale entry).
1830: Sleeman begins his inquiry into Thuggee.
1830 to 1841: British police capture at least 3,700 men; about 50 are pardoned and about 500 executed (Gale entry).
1836: Sleeman publishes the Ramaseeana.
Dates not on record: Behram's years of activity (about forty), arrest, evidence as an approver, and fate.
2007: Kim A. Wagner's study of Thuggee as banditry is published.
2025: Jonathan Perris's article on the Thuggee archive appears in Victorian Literature and Culture.