Thuggee

Thuggee re-examines the groups of robbers and killers whom British officials in nineteenth-century India described as members of a hereditary, secret religious fraternity. Kim A. Wagner returns to judicial records, confessions and administrative correspondence to place organised banditry within the economic, social and political conditions of central and northern India rather than accepting either the colonial stereotype of fanatical Kali-worshippers or the claim that thuggee was simply invented by the British.

The book also follows the campaign associated with William Henry Sleeman and the East India Company’s system of informants, surveillance, prosecution and transportation. Wagner shows how the suppression of thuggee depended on both real criminal networks and a growing colonial machinery for classifying populations and producing knowledge, making the subject a case study in crime, state formation and the relationship between violence and imperial authority.