Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T01:22:32.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

No ‘Signs of Weakness’: Gendered violence and masculine authority on the North-West Frontier of British India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2020

ELIZABETH KOLSKY Open the ORCID record for ELIZABETH KOLSKY [Opens in a new window]
ELIZABETH KOLSKY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Villanova University Email: elizabeth.kolsky@villanova.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

On 14 April 1923, in the dead of night, an English girl was kidnapped from her bedroom in a military bungalow in the Kohat Cantonment on India's North-West Frontier. The kidnapping is a notorious incident that has been told and retold in multiple languages, disciplines, and media for almost a century. From the colonial perspective, the kidnapping was seen as an ‘outrage’ that demonstrated the lawless savagery of the tribes who inhabited this strategically significant Indo-Afghan borderland. From the local perspective, the kidnappers led by Ajab Khan Afridi were valiant heroes who boldly challenged an alien and oppressive regime. This article adopts a gendered lens of historical analysis to argue that the case offers important conceptual insights about the colonial preoccupation with frontier security. In the British empire, the idea of the frontier signified a racial line dividing civilization from savagery. The colonial frontier was also a zone of hyper-masculinity where challenges to state power were met with brutal violence in a muscular performance of masculine authority. In this space where ‘no signs of weakness’ could be shown, the abduction of Molly Ellis represented an assault on the fictive image of white, male invincibility and the race–gender hierarchy that defined the colonial system.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , May 2021 , pp. 902 - 937
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article benefited tremendously from conversations over many years with colleagues and audiences in Philadelphia, New York, Edinburgh, and London. Special thanks go to Hibba Abugideiri, Janaki Bakhle, Sana Haroon, Seth Koven, Paul Steege, and Yaser Turi. I would also like to acknowledge the enduring support provided by my home institution, Villanova University, and the expert assistance offered by staff at the British Library and the National Archives of India.

References

1 See Colonel Bruce's full report dated 19 April 1923, in India Office Records, London (IOR), L/PS/10/1062.

2 Members of the Frontier Constabulary performed ‘watch and ward’ duties along the administrative border, guarding against transborder raids and the escape of outlaws into the semi-independent tribal territory beyond British jurisdiction.

3 Report from Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Bruce, District Commissioner, Kohat, 19 April 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

4 The Times of London, 16 April 1923.

5 The New York Times, 19 April 1923.

6 The New York Times, 23 April 1923.

7 The majority ethnic group on the frontier was the Pukhtuns (also spelled Pashtun, Pushtun, Pakhtun, and Pathan). Hopkins, B. D. traces the history of the colonial discourse about Pushtuns and ‘tribal turbulence’ in The making of modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Caroe, Olaf, The Pathans (London: Macmillan, 1958)Google Scholar; Edwards, David, Heroes of the age: moral fault lines on the Afghan frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glatzer, Bern, ‘Being Pashtun, being Muslim: concepts of person and war in Afghanistan’, in Essays on South Asian society: culture and politics II, (ed.) Glatzer, B. (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998), pp. 83–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haroon, Sana, Frontier of faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan borderland (London: Hurst, 2007)Google Scholar; Spain, James W., The way of the Pathans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Hart, David, Guardians of the Khyber Pass (Lahore: Vanguard, 1985)Google Scholar; Schofield, Victoria, Every rock, every hill: a plain tale of the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan (London: Buchan and Enright, 1984)Google Scholar; Victoria Schofield, Afghan frontier: at the crossroads of conflict; and Swinson, Arthur, Northwest Frontier: people and events, 1839–1947 (New York: Praeger, 1967)Google Scholar.

9 Kilcullen, David, The accidental guerrilla: fighting small wars in the midst of a big one (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Kilcullen was also a major contributor to the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide (United States Department of State, January 2009), available at https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=38828 [accessed 20 June 2019]. Michael Lambert, a Canadian army officer with ‘a strong academic interest in oriental history and politics’, self-published a basic account of the incident with the express purpose of providing ‘lessons for current era soldiers’ in Afghanistan. Lambert's The kidnapping of Mollie Ellis by Afridi tribesmen (Ottowa, 2009, posted online as a pdf on his website and no longer available) features glaring factual errors and does not meet basic standards of historical scholarship.

10 Wilma Heston and Mumtaz Nasir, The bazaar of the storytellers (Islamabad: Lok Virsa Publishing House, 1988). It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the specific local purposes served by vernacular stories about Ajab Khan or to explore connections between these stories and older genres. See Caron, James, ‘Reading the power of printed orality in Afghanistan: popular Pashto literature as historical evidence and public intervention’, The Journal of Social History, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011, pp. 172–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 A collection of papers read at the gathering commemorating the anniversary of Ajabkhan Apridi (Kabul: Khushal Cultural Society, 1991). See also Nasrullah Afridi's master's thesis, ‘Ajab Khan Afridi: a legendary Pukhtoon figure’, Pakistan Study Centre, University of Peshawar (Session 1996–98).

12 A. Q. Khan, ‘Ajab Khan Afridi’, The News, 26 March 2012.

13 Sir Harcourt Butler, Foreign Secretary to the GOI, quoted in Coen, T. C., The Indian political service: a study in indirect rule (London: Chatto, 1937), p. 37Google Scholar.

14 George Roos-Keppel to Lord Hardinge, 20 December 1915, in George Roos-Keppel's Private Papers, IOR, L/PS/11/299.

15 ‘The frontier problem’ printed in ‘Employment of aircraft on the North-West Frontier of India’ (Delhi, 1924), National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI), Foreign and Political/Frontier/1923/File No. 328 (II)-F.

16 R. C. Temple's observations from 1856 quoted in Davies, C. C., The problems of the North-West Frontier, 1890–1908, 2nd and enlarged edn (London: Curzon Press, 1975), p. 37Google Scholar.

17 Letter from George Roos-Keppel to Lord Hardinge, 20 December 1915, in Roos-Keppel's Private Papers, IOR, L/PS/11/299.

18 Kaye, John William, History of the war in Afghanistan: in three volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1857), p. 124Google Scholar.

19 Sir Alfred Lyall, ‘Frontiers and protectorates’, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, vol. 54, no. 4, October 1891, p. 439.

20 Willer, Robb, Rogalin, Christabel L., Conlon, Bridget, and Wojnowicz, Michael T., ‘Overdoing gender: a test of the masculine overcompensation thesis’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 118, no. 4, January 2013, p. 981CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Wagner, Kim A., ‘“Calculated to strike terror”: the Amritsar massacre and the spectacle of colonial violence’, Past & Present, vol. 233, no. 1, November 2016, p. xCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Civil and Military Gazette, 13 November 1923, NAI, Foreign and Political/1923/File No. 630-F.

23 Schwarz, Bill, The white man's world: memories of empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. See also Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th century colonial cultures’, American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 4, 1989, pp. 634–660CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, for example, Kennedy, Dane, Islands of white: settler society and culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press)Google Scholar; and McColluch, Jock, Black peril, white virtue: sexual crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

25 Recent historical studies of imperial-frontier policy include: Beattie, Hugh, Imperial frontier: tribe and state in Waziristan (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Hevia, James, The imperial security state: British colonial knowledge and empire-building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marsh, Brandon, Ramparts of empire: British imperialism and India's Afghan frontier, 1918–1948 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nichols, Robert, Settling the frontier: land, law and society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500–1900 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

26 In using colonial sources as evidence, one invariably confronts the problem of whether or not to use colonial terminology. In this article, I use colonial language (such as ‘tribe’ and ‘the frontier’) even as I recognize that these terms are problematic colonial constructions. For further analysis, see Marsden, Magnus and Hopkins, Benjamin, Fragments of the Afghan frontier (London: Hurst, 2012)Google Scholar.

27 See the general and informative study by Baha, Lal, N.W.F.P. administration under British rule, 1901–1919 (New Delhi: National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research, 1978)Google Scholar.

28 Caroe, The Pathans, p. 347. For historical analysis of the term, see Amin Tarzi, ‘Islam, shari'a and state building under ’Abd al-Rahman Khan’; and Haroon, Sana, ‘Competing views of Pashtun tribalism, Islam and society in the Indo-Afghan borderlands’, in Afghanistan's Islam: from conversion to the Taliban, (ed.) Green, Nile (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 129–162Google Scholar.

29 On the imperial ‘buffer’, see Lyall, ‘Frontiers and protectorates’, pp. 433–444. See also Richard Temple, ‘Report showing the relations of the British government with the tribes, independent and dependent, on the North-West Frontier of the Punjab’, Selection from the Records of the Government of India, 1856 (Calcutta: Government of India, n.d.).

30 The Government of India maintained official reports on ‘tribal disturbances’ and other frontier matters in a series of Political and Secret Department Memoranda (1840–1947) located at IOR, L/PS/18. Critics of the allowances dismissed them as a costly and ineffective form of blackmail, which had ballooned to 53 lakh. P. S. Sivaswami Aiyar in Official Report of Legislative Assembly Debates, 21 and 22 September 1921, vol. 2, no. 7, IOR, L/PS/11/202.

31 Recent scholarship on the frontier has sought to nuance our understanding of how colonial power in the region operated. Hugh Beattie, Mark Condos, and Gavin Rand emphasize that not all British strategies relied on force and violence, giving the examples of hostage-taking and material deprivations. A shortcoming of this approach is the narrow understanding of what constitutes ‘violence’. See Beattie, Hugh, ‘Hostages on the Indo-Afghan border in the later nineteenth century’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 43, no. 4, October 2015, pp. 557–569CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Condos, Mark and Rand, Gavin, ‘Coercion and conciliation at the edge of empire: state-building and its limitations in Waziristan, 1849–1914’, The Historical Journal, vol. 61, no. 3, 2018, pp. 695–718CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 On collective responsibility, see Edwardes, Herbert B., Memorials of the life and letters of Major General Sir Herbert B. Edwardes, vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), p. 230Google Scholar.

33 See Caroe, The Pathans, pp. 346–359.

34 See Beattie, Imperial frontier.

35 Callwell, C. E., Small wars: their principles and practice (London: Harrison and Sons, 1896)Google Scholar.

36 Chris Ballard argues that the first consistent use of the term ‘punitive expedition’ is found on India's North-West Frontier. See Ballard, Chris, ‘Swift injustice: the expedition of imperial punishment’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Gavin Rand argues that colonial expeditions on India's North-West Frontier were ‘cultural projects’ informed by the weaponization of colonial knowledge. He observes that they could also be used to gather colonial knowledge and advance colonial interests. See Rand, Gavin, ‘From the Black Mountain to Waziristan: culture and combat on the North-West Frontier’, in Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia, (eds) Roy, Kaushik and Rand, Gavin (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar. By comparison, Lyndall Ryan argues that ‘punitive expedition’ was a euphemism for massacre in Australia. See Ryan, Lyndall, ‘Untangling aboriginal resistance and the settler punitive expedition: the Hawkesbury River Frontier in New South Wales, 1794–1810’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp. 219–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the spectacle of colonial terror in British India, see Wagner, ‘Calculated to strike terror’, pp. 185–225. For a comparative case, see Langfur, Hal, ‘Moved by terror: frontier violence as cultural exchange in late-colonial Brazil’, Ethnohistory, vol. 52, no. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 255–289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Lyall, ‘Frontiers and protectorates’, p. 439.

39 Oliver, Edward E., Across the border or Pathan and Biloch (London: Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1890), p. 230Google Scholar.

40 Imperial Gazetteer of India: North-West Frontier Province (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2002), p. 20.

41 My thoughts about punitive expeditions draw upon and are inspired by an unpublished paper delivered by Chris Ballard at a conference organized by Philip Dwyer on ‘Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern and Contemporary World’ held at The British Academy in London (June 2015). See the ‘Special Issue: Punitive Expeditions’ guest edited by Ballard and Bronwen Douglas in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2017.

42 Fitzpatrick's ‘Opinion’ of 17 January 1901 is cited in M. Samarth's ‘Minute of Dissent’ in Report of the North West Frontier Enquiry Committee and Minutes of Dissent by T. Rangachariar and N.M. Samarth, NAI, Foreign and Political/1923/File No. 34-F, p. 137. On colonialism's ‘pedagogy of violence’, see Chatterjee, Partha, The black hole of Calcutta: history of a global practice of power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Barton, , India's North-West Frontier (London: John Murray, 1939), p. 59Google Scholar. See also Nevill, H. L., Campaigns on the North-West Frontier (London: J. Murray, 1912)Google Scholar; Wylly, H. C., From the black mountain to Waziristan (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912)Google Scholar. The writings published by military officers on these expeditions are documentary sources that Gavin Rand argues should be critically analysed rather than taken as impartial accounts. Rand, ‘From the Black Mountain to Waziristan’.

44 Official Report of Legislative Assembly Debates, 21 and 22 September 1921, vol. II, no. 7, Political and Secret (Departmental Papers), 1912-30, IOR, L/PS/11/202. For a broader perspective in aerial policing, see Omissi, David, Air power and colonial control: the Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Satia, Priya, ‘The defense of inhumanity: air control in Iraq and the British idea of Arabia’, American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 1, February 2006, pp. 16–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Mason, Philip, The men who ruled India: the guardians (Oxford: Alden Press, 1954), p. 95Google Scholar.

46 W. R. Merk, Commissioner and Superintendent, Peshawar Division to Officiating Chief Secretary, Punjab, 25 January 1898, quoted in ‘Report on The Frontier Crimes Regulation, 1901 (III of 1901)’, Government of India Legislative Proceedings, September 1901. On the ways in which colonial shaped state policy and affected how Pukhtuns came to define themselves and their relationship with the colonial state, see Kolsky, Elizabeth, ‘The colonial rule of law and the legal regime of exception: frontier “fanaticism” and state violence in British India’, The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, October 2015, pp. 1218–1246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 An early attempt to ‘demystify’ the colonial encounter is provided in Akbar Ahmed, ‘Colonial encounter on the North-West Frontier Province: myth and mystification’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 14, no. 51–52, 22 December 1979.

48 Note by Captain W. R. Hay on ‘The blood feud in Waziristan’, 1929, NAI, Foreign and Political/316-F.

49 Dirks argues that, after 1857, anthropology replaced history as the primary modality of colonial knowledge in India. Dirks, Nicholas B., Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 43–60Google Scholar.

50 Davies, The problems of the North-West Frontier, p. 123.

51 Extract of a (Secret) letter from Major A.E.B. Parsons, Member Frontier Enquiry Committee, to E.B. Howell, 30 August 1931, IOR, MSS Eur D 696/7 (Parsons Collection).

52 ‘Note on Sir Bartle Frere's Memorandum’, by E. C. Bayley, 20 June 1876, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1876/149-15.

53 Captain Macdonald, Political Agent, Zhob, to Agent to Governor-General in Baluchistan, 30 November 1900, in a file regarding a ‘Regulation to make better provision for the suppression of murderous outrages in certain frontier tracts’, NAI, Foreign/Frontier (A)/nos. 63-72/August 1901.

54 Temple, Oriental experience: a selection of essays and addresses delivered on various occasions (London: John Murray, 1883), p. 320.

55 Viceroy John Lawrence, 11 October 1866, NAI, Foreign/Judicial (A) Proceedings/March 1867, Nos. 12–14, 17.

56 On the weaponization of culture and colonial techniques of ‘savage warfare’, see Brown, Keith, ‘“All they understand is force”: debating culture in operation Iraqi freedom’, American Anthropologist, vol. 10, no. 4, December 2008, pp. 443–453CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guterson, Hugh, ‘The cultural turn in the war on terror’, in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, (ed.) Kelly, ‘John (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 279–296Google Scholar; Hugh Guterson, ‘The US military's quest to weaponize culture’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20 June 2008; Rand, ‘From the Black Mountain to Waziristan’; and Wagner, Kim A., ‘Savage warfare: violence and the rule of colonial difference in early British counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 8, Spring 2018, pp. 217–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On ‘colonial mimesis’, see Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mukulika Banerjee argues that the British used cultural knowledge about Pukhtun society to wage psychological warfare against anti-colonial nationalists. Banerjee, Mukulika, The Pathan unarmed: opposition and memory in the North West Frontier (London: James Currey, 2000)Google Scholar.

57 For a comparative perspective, see the Special Issue on ‘Hostile Populations’ in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 43, no. 4, October 2015.

58 Julia Stephens traces the workings of an imagined threat of Muslim conspiracy in India post 1857 in ‘The phantom Wahhabi: liberalism and the Muslim fanatic in mid-Victorian India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, January 2013, pp. 22–52. An alternative view is expressed in Mallampalli, Chandra, A Muslim conspiracy in British India: politics and paranoia in the early nineteenth-century Deccan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Caroe, The Pathans, p. 353.

60 Official Report of Legislative Assembly Debates, 21 and 22 September 1921, vol. II, no. 7, Political and Secret (Departmental Papers), 1912–30, IOR, L/PS/11/202.

61 Taking a cue from the work of Giorgio Agamben, there is a developed scholarly literature on the colonial ‘state of exception’. See, for example, Agamben, Giorgio, Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Agamben, Giorgio, State of exception, (trans.) Attel, Kevin, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Condos, Mark, ‘“Fanaticism” and the politics of resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3, July 2016, pp. 717–745CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hussain, Nasser, The jurisprudence of emergency: colonialism and the rule of law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolsky, ‘The colonial rule of law’; and Rifkin, Mark, ‘The frontier as (movable) space of exception’, Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 176–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 James Fitzjames Stephen's keepwith dated 23 February 1871 in NAI, Foreign/Political (A)/March 1871/21–25. See Kolsky, Elizabeth, ‘Codification and the rule of colonial difference: criminal procedure in British India’, Law and History Review, vol. 23, no. 3, Fall 2005, pp. 631–683CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 See Condos, Mark, ‘License to kill: the Murderous Outrages Act and the rule of law in colonial India, 1867–1925’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, March 2016, pp. 479–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kolsky, ‘The colonial rule of law’. The other ‘special’ law was the Frontier Crimes Regulation (1872). See Hopkins, Benjamin D., ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and frontier governmentality’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, May 2015, pp. 369–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 Kolsky, ‘The colonial rule of law’.

65 Lord Winterton quoted in The Times, 17 April 1923, p. 15.

66 Condos, ‘License to kill’.

67 ‘The kidnapping of Miss Ellis: efforts for her release’, The Times, 20 April 1923, p. 14.

68 Denys Bray, Official Report of the Legislative Assembly Debates (Delhi: Government of India, 9 July 1923), p. 4383.

69 NAI, Foreign and Political/File No. 68-F/1923.

70 Rs 15,000 of the Rs 19,000 fine recovered from Tirah Jowakis was given to Foulkes's daughter.

71 Quoted from Colonel Bruce's report dated Kohat, 19 April 1923, in IOR, L/PS/10/1062, emphasis . See also Maffey's Telegram No. 154-L. dated (and received) 15 April 1923, in the same file.

72 See ‘Principle regarding the payment of blood money to heirs of Government officials murdered on frontier discussed in relation to claim for blood money by Finnis’ heirs’, NAI, Foreign and Political/File No. 265-F/1924.

73 Keppel, Arnold, Gun-running and the Indian North-West Frontier (London: Murray, 1911)Google Scholar. See also the Report of the North West Frontier Arms Trade (Tucker) Committee, IOR, L/PS/7/114.

74 Report of the North West Frontier Enquiry (Bray) Committee, IOR, V/26/247/2, p. 3.

75 Incidentally, Handyside was shot dead in Peshawar three years later on 11 April 1923. A memorial gate erected in his honour at the Kohat Pass has a plaque commemorating his ‘many daring encounters with tribal raiders and outlaws’.

76 Reports on the Administration of the Border of the NWFP, 1922–23, 5–6, IOR, V/10/390.

77 Maffey's Telegram No. 71-X. dated (and received) 21 April 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

78 Maffey's Telegram P., No. 342-P. dated (and received) 18 April 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

79 Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry describe the ‘racial frontier’ in Drawing the global colour line: white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comparative perspective, see Lester, Alen, ‘“Otherness” and the frontiers of empire: the Eastern Cape Colony, 1806–c. 1850’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 24, no. 1, January 1998, pp. 2–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 See Hogg, R., Men and manliness on the frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in mid-nineteenth century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. J. A. Mangan emphasizes the cultivation of martial masculinity and the figure of the self-sacrificing imperial warrior in his essay, ‘Duty unto death: English masculinity and militarism in the age of the new imperialism’, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995, pp. 10–38.

81 Schwarz, The white man's world, p. 115.

82 Curzon's budget speech of 27 March 1901 printed in Raleigh, T. (ed.), Lord Curzon in India, 1898–1905 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), p. 416Google Scholar.

83 Curzon's speech at the Quetta Durbar on 12 April 1900 in Curzon, George Nathaniel, Lord Curzon in India: being a selection from his speeches as viceroy and governor-general of India 1898–1905 (London: Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1906), p. 411Google Scholar.

84 Recent historical scholarship has emphasized official anxiety and insecurity in British India, particularly after 1857. See Condos, Mark, The insecurity state: Punjab and the making of colonial power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer-Tiné, Harald (ed.), Anxieties, fear and panic in colonial settings: empires on the verge of a nervous breakdown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Price, Richard N., ‘The psychology of colonial violence’, in Violence, colonialism and empire in the modern world, (eds) Dwyer, P. and Nettelbeck, A. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 25–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wagner, Kim A., ‘“Treading upon fires”: the “Mutiny”-motif and colonial anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1, February 2013, pp. 159–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Ibbetson, D. C. J., Report on the census of Punjab, 1881, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Government of India, 1883)Google Scholar.

86 George Roos-Keppel to Lord Hardinge, 20 December 1915, in Roos-Keppel's Private Papers, IOR, L/PS/11/299.

87 See Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Streets, Heather, Martial races: the military, race and Masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

88 Lord Roberts's speech in the House of Lords, dated 7 March 1898, reprinted in Bruce, Richard Isaac, The forward policy and its results (New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), p. 326Google Scholar.

89 Report of the Frontier Regulations Enquiry Committee and Minutes of Dissent by Mr. T. Rangachariar and Mr. N.M. Samarth (Delhi: Government of India, 1923).

90 Banerjee, The Pathan unarmed, p. 42.

91 Denzil Ibbetson keepwith dated 16 July 1904, NAI, Foreign/Secret (F)/August 1904/83–87.

92 Dispatch from George Roos-Keppel to Secretary, Government of India, dated 29 January 1915, Political and Secret (Departmental Papers), 1902–31, in Roos-Keppel Private Papers, IOR, L/PS/11/299.

93 Comparable details are not available for the pre-1901 period before the formation of the new province. See Maffey's dispatch to Secretary to GOI, Foreign and Political Department, 12 March 1921, in Report on the administration of criminal justice in the NWFP during the year 1920 (Peshawar: G. Press, 1921).

94 See Report on the administration of criminal justice in the NWFP during the year 1919 (Peshawar: G. Press, 1920). See also ‘Annexure C: some important causes of increase of crime’, in the Government of India, Report of the North West Frontier Enquiry Committee and Minutes of Dissent by T. Rangachariar and N.M. Samarth, NAI, Foreign and Political/1923/File No. 34-F.

95 Denys Bray in response to Dr Nand Lal's query as to whether the government had taken action ‘in cases in which Indian girls and Indian women were kidnapped or abducted’, printed in ‘Extract from Official Report of the Legislative Assembly Debates’, 9 July 1923, pp. 4383–4387, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

96 The murder had far-reaching repercussions on Britain's relations with Afghanistan, as the alleged murderers escaped to Afghanistan. See IOR, L/PS/10/1062 and NAI, Foreign and Political/File No. 517-F/1923.

97 Dispatch from H. C. Finnis, Khyber Political Agent, 10 April 1923, NAI, Foreign and Political/1923/517-F. See Zou, David Vumlallian, ‘Raiding the dreaded past: representations of headhunting and human sacrifice in north-east India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 39, no. 1, 2005, pp. 75–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 A. M. S. Elsmie's remarks dated 1 January 1924 in File 12, ‘N.W. Frontier Raids, Defence of Frontier Stations, Safety of European Ladies’, IOR, L/PS/10/1064.

99 Maffey quoted in Samarth's ‘Minute of Dissent’, p. 121.

100 Quoted in Schofield, Every rock, every hill, pp. 135–136.

101 Starr, Lilian, Tales of Tirah and Lesser Tibet (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), p. 167Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

102 Mrs Starr's first-hand account was published in The Pioneer on 23 April 1923.

103 The story is published as part of her longer book, Tales of Tirah.

104 McClintock, Anne, Imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

105 Starr, Tales of Tirah, p. 183.

106 Ibid., p. 39.

107 Ibid., p. 217.

108 Ibid., p. 176.

109 Ibid., pp. 227–228.

110 See ‘Extract from Official Report of the Council of State Debates’, 9 July 1923, pp. 4383–4387, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

111 Mrs Starr in The Pioneer on 23 April 1923.

112 Lord Hardinge of Penhurst Collection, Photo 592/5.

113 See Frye, Northrup, Anatomy of criticism: four essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Dawson, Graham, Soldier heroes: British adventure, empire and the imagining of masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; Horsley, Lee, Fictions of power in English literature, 1900–1950 (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, The white man's world.

115 Sir Harcourt Butler, Foreign Secretary to the GOI, quoted in Coen, The Indian political service, p. 37.

116 Starr, Tales of Tirah, p. 239.

117 Procida, Mary, Married to the empire: gender, politics and imperialism in India: 1883–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 6Google Scholar.

118 Starr, Tales of Tirah, p. 18.

119 Lilian Starr recounts her observations and experiences in Frontier folk of the Afghan border and beyond (London: Church Missionary Society, 1920) and Tales of Tirah (1924).

120 The term ‘maternal imperialism’ was formulated by Barbara Ramusack in her essay, ‘Cultural missionaries, maternal imperialists, feminist allies: British women activists in India, 1865–1945’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 309–321. See also Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Sen, Indrani, Gendered transactions: the white woman in colonial India, c. 1820–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Starr, Tales of Tirah, pp. 11–12.

122 J. L. Maffey's Foreword to Starr, Tales of Tirah, pp. 161–162.

123 From her Obituary in The Times, 8 January 1977, p. 14.

124 The Times, 23 April 1923, p. 12.

125 Telegram from the Secretary of State for India to the Viceroy quoted in The Times, 28 April 1923, p. 9.

126 Starr, Tales of Tirah, p. 172.

127 ‘Summary of Events in North-West Frontier Tribal Territory, 1 January–31 December 1923’, in General Staff Branch NWF and Baluchistan Review of Events, 1922–32, IOR, L/PS/12/3170.

128 Maffey's Telegram P., No. 1360-R. dated (and received) 15 May 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

129 Maffey's Telegram P., No. 1262-R. dated (and received) 7 May 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

130 IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

131 The telegram dated 14 May 1923 is reprinted in ‘Extract from Official Report of the Legislative Assembly Debates’, 9 July 1923, pp. 4383–4387, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

132 In a private email to the author, Mahabat Khan Bangash wrote: ‘Thick groves belonging to our family existed alongside the limits of the Kohat Cantonment. The bungalow from where Miss Molly Ellis was kidnapped stood third from these groves, which still exist. Through these thick orchards, Ajab Khan adopted the route that remained abandoned during the night time. Subsequently, after the incident in 1923, our family was deprived of this prime land and the groves by the British authorities, who acquired them to make the garrison safer.’ Email dated 26 April 2012. See also Rand, ‘From the Black Mountain to Waziristan’.

133 The Pioneer, 26 May 1923.

134 The letters were sent on his behalf by the Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i Kaaba (the society of servants of the Ka'aba), an organization founded in 1913 to protect Muslim holy sites from non-Muslim aggression. For an analysis of how this moment represented the ‘valorization’ of Ajab Khan, see Haroon, Frontier of faith, pp. 131–137.

135 Jagannath Khosla, ‘Provincial autonomy in the N.W.F.P.’, The Indian Journal of Political Science, vol. 1, no. 3, January–March 1940, pp. 324–332.

136 Translation of a letter without date from Ajab Khan to K. B. Mohammad Kuli Khan, A.P.A. Kurram, IOR, L/PS/10/1049.

137 Letter No. 3 from Khuddam-i-Ka'ba of Yaghistan, to British Government of India, dated 20th Safar 1342 [2 October 1923], IOR, L/PS/10/1049.

138 Letter No. 2 from The Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i-Ka'ba, Yaghistan, to The Kingdom of Great Britain, dated 20th Safar 1342 [2 October 1923], IOR, L/PS/10/1049.

139 Translation of a letter without date from Ajab Khan to K. B. Mohammad Kuli Khan, A.P.A. Kurram, IOR, L/PS/10/1049.

140 Letter No. 2 from The Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i-Ka'ba, Yaghistan, to The Kingdom of Great Britain, dated 20th Safar 1342 [2 October 1923], IOR, L/PS/10/1049. According to Sana Haroon, the Pashtun ‘way of life’ is governed by Pashtunwali, a pre-Islamic (and once unwritten) ethical code that upholds the protection of honour (particularly in cases involving women—nang) and the exacting of revenge (badal) as primary social principles. Haroon, Frontier of faith, pp. 131–137.

141 Muhammad Ibrahim Athaee, ‘The story of the nation injured by self-inflicted pain and ravaged by time’, A Collection of Papers. My thanks to my Pashto teacher Yaser Turi for the translation.

142 See the Pushto version starring Asif Khan, Yasmeen Khan, Hamayun Qureshi, and Saleem Nasir on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3II9I9HlVE.

143 See, for example, Ali, Muhammad, ‘Ajab Khan: amazing outlaw’, in And then the Pathan murders, (ed.) Ali, Muhammad (Peshawar: University Book Agency, 1966)Google Scholar; Karkar, Akbar, ‘Ajab Khan as an ambassador of Pushtun Group and Pushtun Values’, in A collection of papers read at the gathering commemorating the anniversary of Ajabkhan Apridi (Kabul: Khulsa Cultural Society, 1991)Google Scholar.

144 Heston and Nasir, The bazaar of the storytellers.

145 Ibid.

146 Maffey's Telegram P., No. 340-P. dated (and received) 16 April 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1062.

147 ‘Employment of aircraft on the North-West Frontier of India’, in NAI, Foreign and Political/Frontier/1923/File No. 328 (II)-F.

148 Schneier, Bruce, Beyond fear: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world (New York: Springer, 2003)Google Scholar.

149 Starr, Tales of Tirah, p. 245.

150 The British Minister to Kabul astutely noted that a murder could not be termed ‘fanatical’ if it was motivated by revenge. Frances Humphrys, British Minister to Kabul, to Government of India, 18 May 1923, L/PS/10/1062.

151 File 12, ‘N.W. Frontier Raids, Defence of Frontier Stations, Safety of European Ladies’, IOR, L/PS/10/1064.

152 Reference to former NWFP Chief Commissioner George Roos-Keppel's permanent standing order in IOR, L/PS/10/1064, File 10.

153 Denys Bray's remarks dated 23 April 1923 in ‘Policy in Waziristan, Waziristan Series, Part IV’, NAI, Foreign and Political/1923/412-F.

154 Daily Express, 12 December 23, in L/PS/10/1064.

155 File 12, ‘N.W. Frontier Raids, Defence of Frontier Stations, Safety of European Ladies’, IOR, L/PS/10/1064.

156 A. M. S. Elsmie's remarks dated 1 January 1924 in File 12, ‘N.W. Frontier Raids, Defence of Frontier Stations, Safety of European Ladies’, IOR, L/PS/10/1064.

157 Extract from Secret Despatch No. 3 to GOI, 9 August 1923, IOR, L/PS/10/1064. Lord Peel, the Secretary of State for India, flatly denied this theory. Session of 3 May 1923, quoted in The Times, 4 May 1923, p. 7.

158 Humphrys to Muhammad Wali Khan, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Kabul, 14 December 1923, File P. 1685/13, IOR, L/PS/10/1065.

159 ‘Summary of Events in North-West Frontier Tribal Territory, 1 January–31 December 1927’, in General Staff Branch NWF and Baluchistan Review of Events, 1922–32, IOR, L/PS/12/3170.