The Racist Origins of the term “Thug”.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

7. So then, it's not quite complete. But clearly the writer was just focusing on how the word came

into the English language through the British colonists and eventually became racially loaded, rather than trying to give a complete history of the Thuggee.

This article goes into a lot more detail on the history of the cult itself, including this:

Accounts of a secret cult of murderers roaming India go back at least as far as the 13th century, but to modern history their story usually begins with the entrance of the British Empire in the early 1800s. For some years, India’s British administrators had been hearing reports of large numbers of travelers disappearing on the country’s roads; but, while disturbing, such incidents were not entirely unusual for the time. It was not until the discovery of a series of eerily similar mass graves across India that the truth began to dawn. Each site was piled with the bodies of individuals ritually murdered and buried in the same meticulous fashion, leading to an inescapable conclusion: these killings were the work of a single, nation-spanning organization. It was known as Thuggee.

It's all new to me, so I don't know how accurate any of these sources are. This one sounds convincing, though.