In all that, the history of thug goes back not just to the hip-hop scene of the 1990s—to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, to Tupac Shakur and the “Thug Life” tattoo that stretched, arc-like, across his abdomen—but back, also, to India. To the India, specifically, of the 1350s. Thug comes from the Hindi thuggee or tuggee (pronounced toog-gee or toog); it is derived from the word ठग, or ṭhag, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.” The Thugs, in India, were a gang of professional thieves and assassins who operated from the 14th century and into the 19th. They worked, in general, by joining travelers, gaining their trust … and then murdering them—strangulation was their preferred method—and stealing their valuables.

The group, per one estimate, was ultimately responsible for the deaths of 2 million travelers. Mark Twain, reporting on the Thugs in his book Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, called the collective a “bloody terror” and a “desolating scourge”:

In 1830 the English found this cancerous organization embedded in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates—big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom.

The Thugs, indeed, ran rampant in India until the British colonial period, when the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, heard of them and made a concerted effort to prevent them from operating along India’s roadways. According to this fantastic overview of Thuggee history from NPR’s Code Switch blog, “nearly 4,000 thugs were discovered and, of those, about 2,000 were convicted; the remaining were either sentenced to death or transported within the next six years.” The British overlords had successfully eradicated the network; as William Sleeman, Bentinck’s deputy in charge of the effort, proudly declared: “The system is destroyed, never again to be associated into a great corporate body. The craft and mystery of Thuggee will not be handed down from father to son.”

The Western fascination with the criminal collective, however, was only beginning. Through Twain’s writings about them, and through 1837’s vaguely anthropological Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thug, and through Philip Meadows Taylor’s 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, thug entered the English language and the British and American consciousness. It came, through the authors’ portrayals of systematized violence, to take on the connotation of “gangster”—a sense of the word that would get another moment of life in the popular culture through 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which finds its hero rescuing a group of children who have been abducted by the Thugs.