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...

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