Since its ‘discovery’ by colonial officials in northwestern-central India in the early nineteenth century, thuggee has polarised western audiences into believers and non-believers in the phenomenon's existence. Awed magistrates, posted in the Doab region of the provinces ceded to the East India Company by the Nawab of Awadh, and conquered by it from the Marathas, reported the prevalence of the crime of highway gang-robbery, preceded by murder, usually by strangulation and often involving mutilation of the corpse, with a mixture of repellence and incredulity; such outrages should not happen in Company territory. However, as Wagner demonstrates, eliciting the same tension between executive and judiciary so brilliantly illuminated by Singha (1993, 1998), colonial responses to thuggee were by no means uniform: while district-level reports from the farthest north-western frontier of the Presidency panicked senior administrators in Bengal, judges in the Company's highest criminal court, the Nizamat Adalat, were unconvinced by the evidence of alleged thugs’ crimes. No one was convicted of thuggee until 1826, despite the magistrate of Etawah committing the first suspects for trial in 1810 (pp. 52–9, 197).
In his concise historiographical survey (pp. 5–7), Wagner notes that historians have likewise been polarised by the phenomenon and are similarly eager to interrogate the contexts and contours of knowledge-production that shaped the voluminous colonial documentation of the phenomenon and are now wrought into historical discourse. Roy (1998), Chatterjee (1998) and Marriott (2003) have doubted its existence, reading in what Wagner terms the ‘thuggee archive’ the playing out of colonial anxieties about an invisible, indigenous, itinerant underworld; whereas Gordon (1969), Baker (1993) and C. A. Bayly (1996) have situated thuggee as a bandit phenomenon, an extreme subsistence option, arising from the conjuncture of the Maratha polities’ fragmentation, the Company's entry into the military labour market of northern India, the consequent widespread disarming and demobilizing of the peasant-soldier, and the precariousness of agricultural production in this region of the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century (pp. 15–24). Wagner's attention, though sporadically diverted by awkward yet waspish attempts to reconcile his positivist approach with the conjecture that colonial re-presentations of ‘thuggee’ are amenable to historical analysis (pp. 6–7, 23, 226), is largely focused on this latter attempt to explore thugs as bandits, significantly expanding the speculative thesis advanced by Gordon (1969). Drawing inspiration from certain third-generation Annalistes’ concerns with microhistory—most obviously Le Roy Ladurie and Ginzburg—and trying to revitalize the some-what tired debate on social banditry initiated by Hobsbawm (1969) and animated by Blok (1972, 2001), Wagner's meticulous doctoral research and this direct, well-organized and pacy account of his findings is comfortably the most comprehensive and informed contribution to the exploration of thuggee-as-banditry available. Moreover, it brings novel insight into historical understanding of the phenomenon, being the first publication to give such sustained consideration to the colonial operations against thuggee before the notorious suppression campaign of 1830s. As van Woerkens (1995) and Lloyd (2006) have argued, this campaign, directed by the infamous Captain Sleeman, depoliticized and dislocated thuggee as the ancient, congenital bloodlust of a sect of Kali-worshippers, garnering support for their suppression through an elaboration of British claims for paramountcy in the subcontinent. Wagner agrees (pp. 197–216), though he does rely on the reader's familiarity with the tropes of later colonial imaginings of thuggee to achieve his desired contrast.
Wagner's outstanding achievement is to reconnect thuggee to the parochial political and moral economies of the pargana of Parihara in the early nineteenth-century Doab; ignoring the bombast of the later British accounts, he instead gets among the guts of the first encounters between bearers of indigenous and colonial social authority as refracted through the lens of colonial officials’ responses to what they termed ‘extraordinary’ rural crime. Wagner fluently delineates how this form of banditry provided zamindars with financial and social capital, as the patrons of thug gangs, and ryots with supplementary income, protection for their families and personal prestige. He does so by examining the scattered pre-colonial sources on thuggee (pp. 25–32), but most especially the investigations of an array of police, military and administrative officials (pp. 33–76)—the evident hybridization of these roles on the Doab frontier being an interesting, though unobserved, finding. His boldest proof of these institutionalized rural relations is a Maratha list of thug houses regularly taxed for a proportion of their booty (pp. 94–6); his most compelling investigation of the localized political struggles emanating from thuggee is into the conflicts between rival landowners conducting an internal negotiation of control over thug allegiance and revenues, and simultaneously attempting to define the best strategy for obtaining favourable relations and terms of revenue settlement with a new competitor for rural patronage and dependency, in the form of an encroaching (British, colonial) state power (pp. 182–3).
Wagner's attempts to provide a broader context for the thuggee phenomenon are somewhat brisk: examples of dearth as well as opportunity—the Company's exacting interventions in revenue assessment and collection, ecological crises in the Doab region, the huge expansion of the Malwa opium trade and the colonial recording of several alternative bandit-options manifest among the local population (the Kazaks and the Budheks)—all simultaneously impacting on peasant livelihoods in the early nineteenth-century, are cited as causes of thuggee (pp. 79–99), but not subjected to the sustained consideration necessary to fully realize their explanatory value. Nor is there a serious comparison with analogous judicial and administrative enterprises conducted by the Company in other frontiers of colonial jurisdiction, in similar times and contexts, against other marginalized and economically-vulnerable peasant communities—the Chuars of northern Bengal, for example, or the Bhils of western-central India.
Instead, the remainder of Wagner's monograph enters the politics of thugs’ (albeit unproblematized) identities by probing the fascinating accounts left by a small proportion of the two thousand or so individuals convicted of thuggee during the 1830s and subsequently recruited and retained as informers (or ‘approvers’) by the colonial authorities (pp. 100–163). Here he finds suspected thugs contesting the terms of their ascribed criminality with British officers, constructing a valorous cosmology of thuggee in the Rajput tradition that attended honour-feuds, as explicated by Kasturi (2002). However, his conclusion that, in the approvers, we can hear subalterns speaking (p. 226), provides a starkly reductive answer to Spivak's question, particularly because his exploration is premised upon a literalist methodological examination of the sources that does little to account for the peculiar, dialogic nature of transactions between convicted thugs and British colonial officers.
Indeed, there is an apparent contradiction between Wagner's efforts to inquire into thugs’ outlooks as members of a society apart (as some colonial officials described them) and to situate thuggee as an historically-embedded practice driving rural society in certain locales. However, as gradually becomes clear, and unlike van Woerkens, author of the only other scholarly monograph on thuggee, Wagner is alert to this contradiction. He resolves it by recourse to Blok's rejoinder to Hobsbawm: all banditry is ‘social’, and to that extent ideologically legitimate, but only in the sense that various communal ties of protection, support and collaboration must sustain it (pp. 153, 161). Wagner is insistent and persuasive that such networks provided the sustaining force for thuggee; his most decisive contribution to the historiography of the phenomenon—that thugs were bandits—stands proud.
