SINHAS Vol 29 No 2 Catherine Warner

Extraditing Mangal Singh: Violence, Mobility, and Narrative in the Making of the India-Nepal Borderland, 1800–1840

Catherine Warner

Abstract
This article traces the extradition of Mangal Singh from Nepal in the fall of 1840. He was a jamàdàr, or recruiter and entrepreneur of violence, based in the northern Awadh Tarai, who mounted long-distance raiding operations with a disciplined core of men and women. His was the first major surrender following the agreement of 1837 between Nepal and the East India Company (EIC). I argue that this agreement, which mirrored the conceptual framing of the EIC’s Anti-Thuggee campaign, was in fact drafted by interested parties in the Nepal Darbar. In the pursuit of hegemony at court, I suggest that opponents of the Pandes used this legally incongruous agreement to prevent the resurgent faction from solidifying their power via cross-border patronage networks. As both the EIC and Nepal developed greater institutional capacities, they deliberately undermined the power of recruiters like Mangal Singh, severed patronage ties, and created geographical margins in the process. This marginalization of a once powerful political geography, illustrated so evocatively in the archival narrative of banditry, paralleled the decline of the military labor market in Northern South Asia.

Keywords: Military labor market, banditry, óƒku, borderland, extradition, state-making, violence, narrative