Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 4.djvu/120

SANSEEAS. as a cloak to other entorprizes, and as a pretence of an honest calling. The men are clever at assuming disguises; and being often intelligent and even polite in their demeanour, can become religious devotees, travelling merchants, or whatever they need to further their ends. They are perfectly unscrupulous, and very daring in their proceedings. As Thugs, many of the leaders of their gangs were the most destructive on record; as Dacoits, they were the most merciless and the most desperate. They have not the slightest compunction in committing murder, but they do not commit it from motives of revenge, only in the exercise of their hereditary calling, by which they and their forefathers have supported themselves from time immemorial, and of which the legends live among them. Any one could become a Thug or Dacoit, and the societies had as many Mahomedans as Hindoo professors; but to be a Sanseea Thug or Dacoit was impossible to any one but a Sanseea, and the mysteries of these callings have been thus preserved throughout generations.

The Sanseeas are not only Thugs and Dacoits, but kidnappers of children, and in particular of female children, who are readily sold, even at very tender ages, to be brought up as household slaves, or to be educated by professional classes for the purpose of prostitution. These crimes are the peculiar office of the women. Nor are they all. The kidnapping of children, when they have any ornaments on them—and it is almost an universal practice in India, for those who possess them, to load their children with gold and silver articles of jewellery—leads in most cases to then- immediate murder. For this purpose the Sanseea women are said to carry about on their persons a thin cord, for the purpose of strangulation; and the name of the tribe is stated to be derived from the Hindi words, Sans-lena, "to take away breath," which has been contracted into Sanseea. Members of the tribe, generally a few families in company, wander over the whole of Northern India, but are found also in the Deccan, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in association with Khunjurs, or a class of Dacoits called Mooltanes, who have perpetrated some of the most daring gang robberies on record. In travelling, the Sanseeas often assume the disguise of Hindoo pilgrims to celebrated shrines, carrying with them baskets containing pretended Ganges water, to sell to ignorant people, or on pretence of offering it at the shrine to which they assert they are proceeding. In the Deccan and Malwah they are known under the designation of Bluvts, or Bards, a profession to which they have no pretension, and under which the worst dacoities are committed.

The daring boldness with which such deeds used to be perpetrated, was worthy of a better cause. In one affair on record, and in which a banker in a military cantonment was robbed of a large amount of money, the gang, as transpired from the confession of its leader, afterwards apprehended, first reconnoitred the locality, then, under pretence of changing money, ascertained