Thuggee : Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India

Contents: Preface. Introduction.  Part I: 1. Engaging the colonial ‘Archives of Repression’. 2. Thuggee in pre-colonial India. 3. The discovery of Thuggee, Etawah 1809.  4. Thomas Perry and the first arrests. 5. N.J. Halhed in Sindouse, October 1812. Part II: 6. Sindouse. 7. The practice of Thuggee. 8. The itinerant underworld. 9. The world of the Thugs.  Part III: 10. Halhed in Sindouse-a second look. 11. Sindouse-the aftermath. 12. Continued measures against Thugs. 13. The operations commence. 14. The Thuggee campaign. 15. From Sindouse to Sagar. Epilogue. Select bibliography. Index.

From the jacket: Often described merely as a colonial construction, the phenomenon of Thuggee remains one of the more contentious and controversial subjects of nineteenth-century South Asian history. Based largely on new material, this book constitutes the first indepth examination of Thuggee as a type of banditry, which emerged in a specific socioeconomic and geographic context. Thuggee did not constitute a caste-like identity, and was a means of obtaining a livelihood reverted to by all strata of Indian society in certain areas. As such it constituted a livelihood reverted to by all strata  of Indian society in certain areas. As such it constituted a highly institutionalised social practice related to issues of patronage and retainership, identity and legitimacy, and it was defined by the appropriation of high status rituals and the martial ethos. A history of Thuggee cannot be written independently of the history of British rule in India, yet by reading colonial records against the grain, and relying on the broadest range of sources available, it is nevertheless possible to overcome some of the difficulties associated with the study of crime in a colonial context. The history of Thugs need no longer be limited to the study of their representations and in this book, Wagner seeks to reconstruct and historicize Thuggee as a social phenomenon-as less than the sacrificial cult constructed by the British, yet more than the colonial phantasmagoria counter-posited by post-colonial scholars.