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

Abstract

AbstractOn 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.