Kim Ati Wagner | |
---|---|
Born | Denmark |
Occupation | Historian |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Thesis | Thuggee and the 'construction' of crime in early nineteenth century India. (2004) |
Doctoral advisor | Christopher Bayly |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Historian |
Sub-discipline | South Asian history |
Institutions | Queen Mary University of London |
Notable works |
|
Website | Official website |
Kim Ati Wagner is a Danish-British historian of colonial India and the British Empire at Queen Mary University of London. He has written a number of books on India,starting with Thuggee:Banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India in 2007. He followed that up with a source book on Thuggee and has also written on the uprising of 1857 and the Amritsar massacre. A British citizen,Wagner feels an affinity for India. [1]
Wagner is of Danish origin and has lived in the United Kingdom for over twenty years. He is named after the leading character from Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, set in British India,and was taken to India by his parents when he was a baby. Wagner says he has visited Amritsar many times and feels that India is "in [his] blood". [1]
In 2003,under the supervision of Christopher Bayly,he gained a PhD in South Asian history from the University of Cambridge. He subsequently completed a four-year research fellowship at King's College there,followed by a two-year research associate post at the University of Edinburgh. Wagner then became a lecturer in imperial and World history at the University of Birmingham,before being employed at Queen Mary's in 2012. In 2015 he was granted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship working with historian Dane Kennedy at George Washington University in the United States,which he finished in 2018. [2]
His book on thuggees,titled Thuggee:Banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India ,was published in 2007 and was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008. [3] He followed that up with a source book on thuggees titled Stranglers and Bandits:A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (2009). [4]
In 2014,he was approached by the owners of the Lord Clyde pub in Kent,who wished to dispose of a skull in their possession. An accompanying note revealed the skull to be that of sepoy Alum Bheg of the Bengal Regiment,who,following the Indian Rebellion of 1857,was executed in 1858 by being blown from a cannon in Sialkot. Wagner had the skull examined at the Natural History Museum in London,who confirmed its likely authenticity. Subsequently,with no known descendants of Bheg and with no official documents mentioning him,Wagner pieced together the story of the skull using letters written by the relatives and friends of Bheg's victims,in addition to other primary material in England and India. [5] The Skull of Alum Bheg:The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 was completed and published in 2017. [6] [7] [8] [9] Wagner later expressed a wish for the skull to be repatriated back to India to be "buried in a respectful manner". [5]
His book, Amritsar 1919:An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019),describes how the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre was a result of a British fear of another Indian rebellion of 1857. [10] [11] With the book,Wagner aimed to dispel what he saw as myths about the massacre. The book was highly commended by the journalists Sathnam Sanghera [1] and Trevor Grundy. [12]
Both Grundy and Ferdinand Mount compared Wagner's book on the massacre with The Amritsar Massacre:The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (2011) by Nick Lloyd and with Nigel Collett's The Butcher of Amritsar (2005). While Wagner emphasised that it was "brutality" in general that was the "driving principle of the Raj" rather than the personality of individuals, [13] Mount argued that Wagner had underplayed the personality of General Dyer. [13]
Thuggee is the name given to the alleged practice of thugs, who supposedly were historical organised cults of professional robbers and murderers in India. They were said to have travelled in groups across the Indian subcontinent.
Colonel Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, was a British military officer in the Bengal Army and later the newly constituted British Indian Army. His military career began in the regular British Army, but he soon transferred to the presidency armies of India.
Amritsar, historically also known as Rāmdāspur and colloquially as Ambarsar, is the second-largest city in the Indian state of Punjab, after Ludhiana. Located in the Majha region, it is a major cultural, transportation and economic centre. The city is the administrative headquarters of the Amritsar district. It is situated 217 km (135 mi) north-west of Chandigarh, and 455 km (283 mi) north-west of New Delhi. It is 28 km (17.4 mi) from the India-Pakistan border, and 47 km (29 mi) north-east of Lahore, Pakistan.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east. The rebellion posed a military threat to British power in that region, and was contained only with the rebels' defeat in Gwalior on 20 June 1858. On 1 November 1858, the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, though they did not declare the hostilities to have formally ended until 8 July 1859.
The non-cooperation movement was a political campaign launched on 4 September 1920 by Mahatma Gandhi to have Indians revoke their cooperation from the British government, with the aim of persuading them to grant self-governance.
Jallianwala Bagh is a historic garden and memorial of national importance close to the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, Punjab, India, preserved in the memory of those wounded and killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre that took place on the site on the festival of Baisakhi Day, 13 April 1919. The 7-acre (28,000 m2) site houses a museum, gallery and several memorial structures. It is managed by the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust, and was renovated between 2019 and 2021.
Udham Singh was an Indian revolutionary belonging to Ghadar Party and HSRA, best known for assassinating Michael O'Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab in India, on 13 March 1940. The assassination was done in revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, for which O'Dwyer was responsible and of which Singh himself was a survivor. Singh was subsequently tried and convicted of murder and hanged in July 1940. While in custody, he used the name 'Ram Mohammad Singh Azad', which represents the three major religions in India and his anti-colonial sentiment.
Saifuddin Kitchlew was an Indian independence activist, barrister, politician and later a leader of the peace movement. A member of Indian National Congress, he first became Punjab Provincial Congress Committee head and later the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee in 1924. He is most remembered for the protests in Punjab after the implementation of Rowlatt Act in March 1919, after which on 10 April, he and another leader Satyapal, were secretly sent to Dharamsala. A public protest rally against their arrest and that of Gandhi, on 13 April 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, led to the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He was also a founding member of Jamia Millia Islamia. He was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.
Sir Michael Francis O'Dwyer was an Irish colonial officer in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and later the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, British India, between 1913 and 1919. In his tenure Jallianwala Bagh massacre occurred in which more than 1500 peaceful protesters were killed
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919. A large crowd had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, British India, during the annual Baishakhi fair to protest against the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of pro-Indian independence activists Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal. In response to the public gathering, the temporary brigadier general R. E. H. Dyer surrounded the people with his Gurkha and Sikh infantry regiments of the British Indian Army. The Jallianwala Bagh could only be exited on one side, as its other three sides were enclosed by buildings. After blocking the exit with his troops, Dyer ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protestors tried to flee. The troops kept on firing until their ammunition was low and they were ordered to stop. Estimates of those killed vary from 379 to 1,500 or more people; over 1,200 others were injured, of whom 192 sustained serious injuries.
Blowing from a gun is a method of execution in which the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which is then fired, resulting in death. George Carter Stent described the process as follows:
The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen.
Nick Lloyd FRHS, is Professor of Modern Warfare at King's College London. He has written several books on the First World War.
Satyapal was a physician and political leader in Punjab, British India, who was arrested along with Saifuddin Kitchlew on 10 April 1919, three days before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Hans Raj was an Indian youth, in Amritsar, British India, who in June 1919 became an approver for the British government when he gave evidence for the Crown at the Amritsar Conspiracy Case Trial in which he identified his fellow Indian revolutionaries, buying his own freedom in return.
The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857, is a book by Kim A. Wagner, a lecturer on colonial India and the British Empire. It was published in 2017 by C. Hurst & Co., and is based on the life of Havildar Alum Bheg, a sepoy of the 46th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, who following the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and being said to have killed a British missionary family in Punjab, was executed by the British by being blown from a cannon.
Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019), is a book by Kim A. Wagner and published by Yale University Press, that aims to dispel myths surrounding the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that took place in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919.
Thuggee: Banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India (2007), is a book authored by Kim A. Wagner and published by Palgrave Macmillan, which was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008.
The Patient Assassin, A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj is a 2019 book based on the life of Indian revolutionary Udham Singh. Authored by Anita Anand, it was published by Simon & Schuster UK in April 2019 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre in Amritsar, India.
Vishwa Nath Datta was a distinguished Indian writer, historian and professor emeritus at Kurukshetra University.
Located in Purkazi Nagar Panchayat of Muzaffarnagar District, Suliwala Bagh or Sooliwala Bagh is a popular historical site in Uttar Pradesh, India. Its connection with the history of India dates back to 1857 when the first war of independence or Sepoy Mutiny broke out between the Indian freedom fighters and the British Empire. At present, people regard this crucifixation garden as a symbol of sacrifice and resistance.