Abstract
Till fairly late into the twentieth century, the suppression of thagi ranked high among colonial historians as one of the justifications of the positive effects of British colonial rule in India. Typically depicted as an India-wide secret network of bandits, bound together by shared religious beliefs and practices, and even a secret language, thagi as a model seems such a stereotypical colonial trope, that the temptation is to dismiss it entirely as a construct of the colonial administration, and its suppression as part of the general colonial programme of subjugation of the countryside.
Since thagi itself was believed to have been eradicated by the British, there is no straightforward way of reconstructing the truth behind the phenomenon. There is, however, a voluminous archive produced by the administrative apparatus that carried out anti-thagi operations, based largely on interviews of thag approvers. It is this archive that Wagner draws upon, and reads it critically to access the voice of the so-called thags from behind the layers of colonial representation. A major strength of his work is that he concentrates on an era pre-dating the formalisation of the model of thagi by Sleeman. Sleeman’s successful self promotion led to his works gaining a powerfully hegemonic status, and they have long been almost exclusively the basis for reconstructing both the phenomenon of thagi and the measures for its eradication.
The earliest mentions of thagi in British official circles date from the early nineteenth century, much before the advent of Sleeman on the scene in 1829. British officials in newly conquered areas of the Chambal badlands began to hear of thags in 1809, particularly in the area known as Parihara or Sandaus, in the district of Etawa. By local police and revenue functionaries such as daroghas, chowkidars and patwaris, they were told of a type of bandit who preyed on travellers, falling in with them by deceit and then killing them for their possessions. These bandits lived in villages of Parihara, and were patronised by some of the prominent local landlords.
Wagner’s work deals mainly with these thags of Parihara, and the area’s particular social and economic conditions. It was an inhospitable land, not producing enough to feed its population; populated by groups with decidedly martial traditions. Against this background, this type of banditry was seen as a legitimate way of earning a living, as the proceeds provided an income for the bandits and their families, and enriched the patrons who financed the expeditions. The fact that these bandits were frequently described as sipahis, or soldiers, pointed to an overlap with military employment typical of the eighteenth century, when state-building involved the raising of troops for plunder as much as for military contests. The British suppression of the thags in Parihara was closely related to their overall measures for reducing the local landlords to submission and acceptance of the British revenue regime.
The thags of Parihara dispersed in the immediate aftermath of the measures taken against them in the early 1810s, only to settle in neighbouring areas. They soon resumed their activities, until they were brought into the net of anti-thagi operations by Sleeman and others in the 1830s. These measures started in the so-called non-Regulation Provinces, outside the ambit of the legal system in force in the older territories of the East India Company. Their success, evidenced in a high conviction rate, led to the enactment of legislation to extend them to the rest of the Company’s territories. This body of legislation in effect overrode normal provisions of the penal code, particularly by-passing the need to bring home specific crimes to the accused. Individuals could now be sentenced to death or transportation simply on charges of belonging to thag gangs.
The work dwells at some length on the world view of the thags, their beliefs, motivations, self-perceptions and sense of identity, and the organisational structure of thag gangs, their networks and place within a broader itinerant underworld population, comprised of entire groups of people who would later be branded as ‘criminal tribes’. But it is in this area that a few of the problems of the study emerge. Wagner quite rightly points out that many of the supposedly distinctive religious beliefs and superstitions of the thags, such as Devi worship, were in fact common to the society they lived in (p.146), and their so-called secret language, Ramaseeana, was no more than slang that had much in common with similar slang used by a wide variety of criminal and non-criminal groups (pp. 135–37). Yet elsewhere, he talks of thagi as ‘a highly institutionalized type of banditry (with a) common slang, rituals and myths…’ (p. 164). Surely shared beliefs and practices can only be the basis of group identity if they actually set the group apart from the rest of society?
Wagner has concentrated on the thags of Parihara, for good reason, as the earliest details of thagi come from that area, and some of the most detailed accounts that exist are for the thags of that area. Where the issue gets clouded, is when it comes to applying the lessons learnt in Parihara, to thags in general. We never know for sure, but presume that the thags whose beliefs, practices and networks are being discussed (based on information gleaned from the interviews conducted by anti-thagi officials) are exclusively from Parihara. The socio-economic background of the rise of thagi is certainly explained only by the example of this particular region. The author does not say that all thags were Parihara thags, but his very arguments would suggest that the particular factors at work in different regions, would give rise to different socio-economic motivations, rituals and beliefs. If thagi covered large parts of India, it could not be the world view of the Parihara thags that gave all these thags their identity. We are then left not with ‘a highly institutionalized type of banditry’, but with a loosely defined practice of gangs killing and robbing travellers on the high road by deceit.
In fact, the cohesive model of thagi was based on the thags of Sandaus somewhat by accident. Their numerical strength within the region of Parihara was probably greater than that of similar bandits in other regions. It was, however, coincidental that those arrested in the early days of the anti-thagi operations belonged to these particular thag gangs. Since so many of the approvers who were interviewed were in fact from a particular area, it is no surprise that they knew each other and to a large extent shared a world view. One could say therefore that their shared identity was not based on their being thags. In any event the argument cannot be made until we examine the evidence of thags from other areas, and can prove that they independently shared this world view.
Wagner sets out to ‘re-inscribe thuggee in its Indian historical context and not merely consider it as a colonial phantasmagoria’ (p. 6). It perhaps needs to be clarified that the context is rather narrow both in space and time. At most we can say that such and such was true of a certain group of bandits operating in the area of Parihara in the early nineteenth century. Further, that this provided British officials with a model of thagi with which a range of similar criminals (similar to the extent that they too killed and robbed travellers after having inveigled them by deceit) could be conflated.