Elizabeth Kolsky

Villanova University | Nova · History

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 w...

This article examines the creation of a legal regime of exception on the northwest frontier of British India. Colonial expansion involved strategic decisions about the extent and nature of legal control in newly conquered territories. British officials viewed India’s northwest frontier as a dangerous place overrun with Muslim “fanatics” determined...

Chandra Mallampalli, Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 286.

According to conventional wisdom, the British empire achieved territorial dominance over the Indian subcontinent with the conquest of Punjab in 1849. However, imperial stability at the northwestern and northeastern boundaries of the empire remained tenuous and tumultuous into the twentieth century. Alternately using the carrots of accommodation and...

Mithi Mukherjee's new book makes a major contribution to the growing historiography on law and legal institutions in colonial India and to the broader scholarship on colonial legal politics and ideologies of empire. Using the lens of law, Mukherjee presents a thoughtful and sustained argument about how India continued to evolve in the "shadows of e...

This article explores the history of intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape in early colonial India. Though at times uneven and unpredictable in their rulings, British judges created a set of evidentiary requirements and a body of legal decisions that were as harsh on rape victims as the precolonial Islamic system was presumed to be. Despite the colon...

The history of rape on trial in colonial India sheds new light on the colonial civilising mission and the claims made by white men about saving brown women from brown men. Through an analysis of almost a century of case law, this article concludes that the modernisation of law and the development of a new medico-legal understanding of rape introduc...

Clare Anderson’s Legible Bodies offers a richly detailed and well-written contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the complex nexus between colonial knowledge and colonial power. The work of Edward Said opened up a whole new way of understanding the scope and nature of imperialism by demonstrating that cultural technologies of rule wer...

On July 10, 1833, an aspiring young English lawyer named Thomas Babing-ton Macaulay stood before the Parliament and presented an impassioned argument about the future role of British governance in India. Whereas in Europe, as Macaulay saw it, "The people are everywhere perfectly com-petent to hold some share, not in every country an equal share, bu...

In his commentary, “The Historiography of Difference,” Kunal Parker hits on two crucial and interrelated themes that form the framework for debates in modern South Asian history: colonialism and subaltern agency. In this short response to Parker's comment, I address both of these issues and also offer some insights about methodological obstacles in...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 455-480). Department: History.