Interpretations of reality, meaning, and representations of thuggee vary, Kim A. Wagner notes in Stranglers and Bandits. Whereas the conventional representation that crystallized in the 1830s understood thuggee as a controversial cult of highway murderers “discovered” by the British, some scholars have claimed that thuggee was a mere colonial construction invented as a convenient pretext for the expansion of British rule. Some opine that because the primary sources related to thuggee were, with few exceptions, produced by the British, the sources cannot be used to gain insight into any Indian social reality (p. 5). Indeed, the conventional British representation that held sway for more than a century has come under such sustained and diverse scholarly criticism in recent decades that Wagner laments, “The current situation of the historiography of thuggee is thus one of confusion: the interested student of Indian history will encounter wholly incompatible accounts that draw opposite conclusions from the same material” (p. 2). The author's intention, therefore, is that the anthology “bring together a wide range of primary and secondary material, which it is hoped, will open the way for different approaches to the subject and suggest new lines of inquiry into this contentious issue” (p. 3).

In bringing together a lengthy introduction and selected excerpts from a wide range of indigenous sources, popular accounts, and academic assessments on the topic of thuggee, Wagner has sought to ensure that the reader is provided key primary sources from archives that have not been readily accessible and may provide new insights. I think he is successful in this quest. He includes mention, for instance, of D. E. U. Baker, C. A. Bayly, Mark Brown, Amal Chatterjee, Mike Dash, Paul Dundas, Maíre ní Fhlathúin, Sandria B. Freitag, Kathleen Gough, Stewart Gordon, Hiralal Gupta, Wilhelm Halbfass, Cynthia Ann Humes, Robert Johnson, Christopher Kenna, Tom Lloyd, Parama Roy, Radhika Singha, J. A. R. Stevenson, and Martine van Woerkens.

Stipulatively defining thuggee as “the people who engaged in the murder and plunder of travelers, without any implication of a religious practice or cult of hereditary assassins” (pp. 4–5), Wagner contends that while “colonial knowledge of thuggee was informed by different voices and ideas, both British and Indian,” it is possible “to examine the primary sources as more than just textual representations of the ‘other’” (p. 8). Further, while acknowledging the methodological problems inherent in such a task, “it is clear that there was a social reality in terms of Indian banditry, which the British in turn mis-represented. It would be naïve to assume that the sources offer a direct access to the past, but it is equally naïve to assume that they do not in any way reflect the past from which they emerged” (p. 8). While I agree with Tom Lloyd (p. 297) that reconstructive histories such as Wagner's 2007 book, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), can be in danger of pushing “the sources” too far (p. 297), I think at least in Wagner's case, he does not utterly confuse the “reality of the past (how someone thinks it happened)” with the “actuality of the past (what happened)” (p. 301).

Wagner provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic of thuggee, drawing in large part from his aforementioned manuscript. He takes care to note that thuggee was a type of banditry that emerged in a specific socioeconomic and geographic context, and he convincingly shows how a phenomenon that initially was perceived as no more than a type of banditry gradually evolved into a sensationalized cult of religious stranglers. In particular, he credits the misrepresentation endemic in British accounts to the self-serving opportunism of officers such as William “Thuggee” Sleeman, who, in a bid to further his own career, “sexed up” the information to promote a sense of urgency, thereby effectively reinventing thuggee and contributing to the development of the British response to thuggee (p. 23).

While I disagree with Wagner that “most if not all, of the elements of Sleeman's stereotype were derived directly from the approvers that he knew and interviewed” (p. 23), I do agree with most of Wagner's fundamental assertions, and I also think that he has provided here a detailed map laying out the various directions (and fault lines) in the rocky terrain of this contentious subject, and in resurrecting rare resources, he may help the scholarly community to fewer wrong turns on how best to represent the phenomena that we now know as thuggee.

Readers of this work will include modern historiographers, students of Indian and South Asian history in general, and, because of its accessible style and the sheer interest of the material, I would suspect a great number of lay people intrigued by the many titillating accounts of thuggee.