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.
Early life
Wagner is of Danish origin, but 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 blood."
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. He followed that up with a source book on thuggees titled Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee.
Skull of Alum Bheg
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. was completed and published in 2017. Wagner later expressed a wish for the skull to be repatriated back to India to be "buried in a respectful manner".
Amritsar 1919
His book, , describes how the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre was a result of a British fear of another Indian rebellion of 1857. 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 and Trevor Grundy. Both Grundy and Ferdinand Mount compared Wagner's book on the massacre with The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day by Nick Lloyd and with Nigel Collett's The Butcher of Amritsar. While Wagner emphasised that it was "brutality" in general that was the "driving principle of the Raj" rather than the personality of individuals, Mount argued that Wagner had underplayed the personality of General Dyer.
