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Kim Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth Century India, Primus, Delhi, 2014, 261 pages, including maps, photos and illustrations, Rs 995
Thuggee has been viewed in colonial historiography as a sacrificial cult of blood-thirsty stranglers who looted and murdered innocent travellers in the highways of nineteenth century India through deceit. It may need no reminder that the lore of thuggee has been so inscribed in popular memory through a variety of images and representations, that in everyday parlance, a thug has become synonymous to a cheat.The British imperial power symbolised the practice of thuggee as a signifier of native disorder and lawlessness. The Thuggee campaigns of 1830s which supposedly eradicated the practice and were championed by William Sleeman ,who documented their practice extensively and claimed to decipher their secret language in his book, Ramaseeana, has been memorialised in colonial hagiography as an act of civilised benevolence. Post-colonial interventions have contended against such a colonial representation of thuggee and it has been argued by a range of scholars such as Parama Roy (1998) and Amal Chatterjee (1998) that the identification of practice of thuggee was a figment of colonial imagination and a pretext for imperial expansion.
Kim Wagner's comprehensive monograph on thuggee contends against these two polar arguments posited and counter-posited by colonial and post-colonial scholars through meticulous archival research. He argues against the colonialist representation of thuggee as a ritualistic cult of hereditary criminals and challenges the post-colonial contention of thuggee as a colonial phantasmagoria. In his historiographical review on thuggee, Wagner raises methodological questions over the issue of representation and the historians' quest for truth which, he argues, cannot be reduced to discursive constitution of knowledge. However, Wagner's exploration of the indigenous perception of the practice of thuggee is positivist in approach and is based on a literalist reading of sources such as the approvers' testimony which were recorded in judicial proceedings. His assertion in...