Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 Read online

  First published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited in 2018

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  Copyright © Kishwar Desai, 2018

  ISBN: 9789387578746

  The views and opinions expressed in this work are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her, and the publisher is in no way liable for the same.

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  For my grandmother, Leelavati ‘Lily’ Khanna, a young girl in April 1919, who lived at Dhab Khatikan, just a few lanes away from Jallianwala Bagh, close enough to hear the bullets being fired and the cries of the wounded and dying.

  For all those, including my own relations, who were present at the Bagh when General Dyer launched his murderous attack. . .and for the silence they were forced to maintain during that reign of terror.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Introduction

  1 A State of War

  2 A Gift of Fortune

  3 Counting the Corpses

  4 The Fancy Punishments

  5 Fascist, Racist or Both?

  6 ‘You Cannot Kill a Tiger Gently’

  Appendix I Lala Lajpat Rai on ‘Imperialism Run Amuck’

  Appendix II Rabindranath Tagore’s Protest

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Ragon mein daudtey phirney key hum nahin qayal

  Jab ankh hi se na tapka to phir lahu kya hai

  This blood is not meant to just run meaninglessly through our veins

  If it does not drip from the eyes, what kind of blood is it?

  —Ghalib

  Introduction

  Benevolent Imperialism is like a caged lion. However, you may play with it so long as it is caged or under the spell of a master-tamer; the moment it gets out of control it is bound to behave in conformity with its real nature. The atrocities perpetuated at Amritsar have proved that Imperialism run mad is more dangerous, more vindictive, more inhuman, than a frenzied uncontrollable mob.

  —Lala Lajpat Rai, 5 June 19201

  Justice Rankin, cross-examining General Dyer about his shooting an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh: You thought it necessary to take action on the analogy of a state of war?

  Dyer: Quite so. I looked upon these people who had rebelled as enemies of the Crown.

  Sir C.L. Setalvad, cross-examining Dyer: Did it occur to you that you were really doing great disservice by driving discontent?

  Dyer: No. I thought it was my duty to do it. . . and any man, any reasonable being with a sense of justice, would see that I was doing a merciful act, and that they ought to be thankful to me for doing it.

  Setalvad: But did this aspect (that the killings would make the people more ‘rebellious’ and ‘discontented’) of the matter strike you?

  Dyer: Never. I thought it would do a jolly lot of good to the people.

  (Extracts from the Hunter Committee Report on the Punjab Disorders. Evidence recorded on 19 November 1919, Lahore.)

  One hundred years later, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre remains the most heartbreaking episode in the history of the Indian freedom struggle. Brigadier General Dyer deliberately murdered more than one thousand fellow British subjects—all Indians, including little children—and called it a ‘merciful act’.

  Not only did Dyer think the cold-blooded murders would ‘do a jolly lot of good to the people’, he even had widespread support among the British. Instead of condemning him, most of his compatriots commended him for saving the Empire as the massacre was thought essential to prevent another 1857-type mutiny. Prior to the killings at Jallianwala Bagh, there had been signs of increasing unrest in Punjab. These signs were being interpreted as sedition, even though the causes of the unrest were varied. Indeed, it is impossible to understand what happened on 13 April 1919, without an examination of the barbarism unleashed in Punjab under the regime of the then Lieutenant Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer, to suppress the so-called rebellion. The ‘rebellion’ in retrospect was nothing more than the first signs of colonised people demanding equal rights. But it was constantly argued that Indians were incapable of self-rule and needed the British to govern them.

  The scale of oppression in Punjab, and especially Amritsar, just before and after the Jallianwala Bagh killings was extreme. A deeply racist regime was in operation, no matter what kind of garb was put upon it, or the kind of defence made for it.

  The murder of more than a thousand innocents at Jallianwala Bagh was not an isolated event. This was not the knee-jerk reaction of a deranged General. Dyer fired for ten minutes upon a peaceful crowd gathered to protest the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919 (usually referred to simply as the Rowlatt Act) and continued to fire upon them even as they tried to escape. This incident was squarely a part of a systemic failure of governance during which people were exploited and mistreated. When they, tormented beyond endurance, reacted occasionally with violence, they were sadistically suppressed, their rights snatched away by the Raj.

  One wonders why the true events in the Punjab of that time have been given so little prominence in popular historical literature and cinema. The commonly held narrative runs as follows: people gathered at the Bagh on 13 April 1919 for an anti-Rowlatt Act meeting; many amongst them were outsiders who had come to Amritsar for the Baisakhi festival. Dyer decided they had broken the law, gathered his troops and fired upon them. Hundreds died during the firing, and many jumped into a well at the Bagh while trying to escape the bullets. The dead included women and children.

  This basic narrative is correct but there are some fallacies. To begin with, the meeting was attended mainly by residents of Amritsar. Due to the restrictions prevalent at the time, it would have been difficult for large numbers of outsiders to enter the old walled city. Even at the time, it was estimated that no more than 25 per cent were from outside. No one jumped into the well—they fell in by accident while fleeing the shooting, as it did not have a rim around it. And it is very likely that the massacre was a carefully planned one, not spontaneous as has often been made out. In all likelihood, no women were present.

  What I have tried to do in this book is to piece together what actually happened on 13 April 1919 as well as before and after, using mostly the words of the survivors and recorded statements describing those terrifying events. Also, as far as possible, I have used Indian sources and viewpoints because for far too long (with a few exceptions), this narrative has been told by Western historians.

  This book is a homage to the people of Punjab who, one hundred years ago, were humiliated, tortured and killed under the pretext of martial law. The period ranged from two months in some districts to over four months in others.

  During this reign of terror, people were whipped, bombed, incarcerated, forced to crawl, starved, beaten, caged—and even summarily executed. However, the combined atrocities led to a turning point in the freedom struggle; it brought all the anti-British forces together for the first time. Not only were Hindus and Muslims seen together, joining hands against the British, the impact of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre spread through Punjab—from Amritsar to Lahore to Gujranwala—and to other places across India.

  The events before the massacre also demonstrate the emerging importance of Punjab in the freedom struggle. These were still early years and there was no coll
ective effort against the British. In terms of political leadership, this narrative is dominated by a few leaders working in their individual capacities and not as leaders of the Congress Party, which was the dominant party at the time. It was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then not yet a member of the Congress Party, who was responsible for organising the people by deploying the tool of protest he termed ‘satyagraha’, against the Rowlatt Act. The massacre on 19 April was part of a policy of oppression unleashed by O’Dwyer against the frequent ‘hartals’ or the Satyagraha Movement.

  The question is, where did the widely accepted narrative of Jallianwala Bagh originate from, when the reality was so much more complex? How is it possible that so many of us are unaware that aeroplanes were called in to bombard Amritsar and Gujranwala (now in Pakistan) and machine guns were turned on protesters?

  Hundreds of people, including schoolboys, were publicly whipped in Amritsar and Lahore for small transgressions such as walking two abreast on a pavement or not salaaming a British officer. In Kasur (now in Pakistan), people were held in open cages.

  In fact, the civil administration of Punjab had already declared Amritsar a war zone, when the massacre took place at Jallianwala Bagh, and regarded the residents as their enemies. All of this paints the massacre in a completely different light.

  This book begins at the point when Amritsar was declared a war zone around 11 April, because the reader must understand the claustrophobic conditions which the residents of Amritsar were living in at the time. If we obliterate the sacrifice of those who were at the Jallianwala Bagh (by assuming that they were there, accidentally, for the Baisakhi festival), we also continue to disregard the humiliations that the survivors had to endure. Some of those frightful conditions were already in place before the mass murder took place.

  Knowing the context also helps us understand more clearly the heroism and courage of those who gathered that evening at Jallianwala Bagh. They knew that they could be killed at any moment—yet, they had faith that the British would respect their rights as citizens to attend a public meeting. That faith was to be forever lost.

  Has this amnesia been deliberate, and did the people of Punjab simply forget in order to move on (as happened three decades later with the Partition)? Or was the attempt to rewrite history, by focussing on one event and just one individual, i.e. Dyer, a political move?

  To some extent this might appear obvious. The supporters of Dyer (who was later forced to resign from the army) always suspected that he had been made a scapegoat by the British government. The Raj had wanted him to execute a powerful punishment so that the ‘natives’ would not rebel again. However, they subsequently withdrew their support of him, when the horror of his act became a blot on the ‘fair’ and ‘just’ British name. Everyone, from Viceroy Chelmsford, to the Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, would claim that they knew very little of what Dyer actually did. Historians have filled reams of paper psychoanalysing Dyer in order to link some previous misdemeanour or mental disability to the massacre. The entirety of the blame was shifted onto him. A maverick and a black sheep, he became symbolic of the indiscretions of the Raj. By punishing him, the Raj washed its hands of the Punjab ‘disorders’.

  It would have suited the British perfectly to lay the blame at Dyer’s door. They would not have wanted to reveal what is now obvious as I write this book: that the regime of Lieutenant Governor Sir O’Dwyer was racist and cruel, and apparently adept at manipulating ‘Orientals’. Of course, he was no different from many others who were constantly resisting reforms, could not tolerate the induction of Indians into the administration and felt that only the British could rule India—and that, too, with force.

  Ostensibly, the Raj defended the reprisals against Indian subjects between April and August 1919 by claiming that the unrest in Punjab was due to a larger conspiracy to overthrow the government, possibly hatched in Afghanistan, by the enemies of the British. This was not accepted by the Hunter Committee, which was set up to investigate the Punjab Disorders in 1919. I do not examine that hypothesis in the book as the events themselves are enough to prove that the trigger for the unrest lay elsewhere.

  Many British and Indian historians may have made Dyer the main protagonist, the villain, of what happened in Amritsar. However, I agree with Mahatma Gandhi’s view that Dyer was only symptomatic of what was happening in Punjab. He was not the only actor, as there were many others like him, who were encouraged by O’Dwyer. One such personage was the officer commanding Lahore, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Johnson, who imposed close to sixty-four bizarre and racist orders of martial law upon the unfortunate people of Lahore. A few instances of these orders are: people had to surrender all means of transport, had to salaam British officers in a particular manner, and school- and college-going children were expelled or forced to march in the hot sun, sometimes several times a day.

  Martial law enabled many punishments, including the incarceration of hundreds of innocent people without charge, and, of course, the infamous ‘crawling order’ imposed by Dyer in Amritsar, in which respectable householders were expected to crawl through a 150 yard lane.

  The orders did not apply to Europeans. These were primarily meant to frighten the population of Punjab and to teach them a lesson, because they had risen, and were guilty of sedition, against the King.

  I also consider what happened in other states, which were similarly affected during the anti-Rowlatt Act protests. Indeed, we barely remember that violence had broken out in Delhi, Ahmedabad and Bombay—yet there was no incident of ‘frightfulness’ as at Jallianwala Bagh. (Churchill had used this word during the debates over Dyer’s fate in the UK Parliament.)

  The British violence in various Indian cities (after Gandhi’s arrest) is referred to by many British authors, but only to justify it as the counter-violence used against protesters (who were largely unarmed). The crowd was unruly, they say, and provoked the police and the army.

  The truth was that the world had changed dramatically by 1919. This was particularly evident in Punjab, where thousands of soldiers had returned after fighting for Britain and its allies’ freedom at a huge personal cost. Instead of finding liberty at home, they faced bullets and repression. It was only natural that some of them should decide to strike back.

  One of the saddest discoveries for me was coming across instance upon instance of how close-knit the Hindu and Muslim communities had become during the satyagraha called by Mahatma Gandhi and how the British made every effort to force them apart. The success of Gandhi’s anti-Rowlatt Act protest was that it was a people’s movement. Anyone could participate in it simply by refusing to work and going on strike or hartal. Gandhi had also encouraged the Khilafat Movement, which had been launched by a group of Indian Muslims to pressurise the British to not abolish the Ottoman Caliphate. This also provided an impetus for the two communities to come together. For the first time Muslims and Hindus drank from the same cup, attended meetings in mosques and temples equally, and showed their enthusiastic support for each other. The British found this unnerving.

  In Lahore, where the Badshahi Mosque was used for joint community meetings, all get-togethers were banned. In Gujranwala, a dead calf was found near a temple and pork in a mosque. These were correctly interpreted as efforts by the police to drive a wedge between the two communities and break their united front. However, ultimately, fraternisation was dented, following large-scale arrests. Efforts were made to get witnesses from each community to indict members of the other. The savagery of martial law, the floggings, incarcerations and humiliations, finally wiped out the spirit of burgeoning bonhomie that Gandhi had awakened.

  Going through the various reports of that period, there is little doubt that as the seeds of the Independence movement were sowed in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, so might the seeds of Partition have been sown during the period of martial law.

  The Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the events thereafter had a major influence on the freedom movement in India. The
anti-Rowlatt Act agitation was one in which Gandhi had taken the lead, and the Congress Party was not really involved, though individual members like Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew took it upon themselves to organise rallies in Amritsar and later call for hartal. It was only once the details of the massacre and other atrocities being inflicted on the people began to be known that leaders of the Congress Party came together and joined the investigation for the truth. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, at first a member of the Imperial Legislative Council, and Pandit Motilal Nehru, a member of the United Provinces Legislative Council, along with Gandhi, C.R. Das, Abbas Tayabji, M.R. Jayakar and K. Santanam (all of whom were barristers-at-law) formed the Punjab Sub-Committee, Indian National Congress (INC), which inquired into the 1919 Punjab Disorders. They interviewed witnesses and survivors in different parts of Punjab and it is their dedication that brings the voices of ordinary people to us across a hundred-year divide.

  Their report also contained photographs, some of which are reproduced in this book. Especially poignant are the pictures of young victims who were wounded during the firing at Jallianwala Bagh, or the bombing at Gujranwala. It is impossible not to be moved when gazing at the photograph of an eleven-year-old who was charged for being an enemy of the King, or another who was shot dead for being present at a meeting. These are forgotten heroes whose lives ended before they had even begun.

  The work of the INC Committee is also crucial because the Disorders Inquiry Committee (formed by the government and widely known as the Hunter Committee) paid little heed to Indian victims and witnesses. Many of the Indian leaders were in jail, and could not be called upon to testify. When they were released, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya sent a telegram stating that they should be interviewed, but the Committee rejected the request. Despite lengthy arguments by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the Hunter Committee was formed with fewer Indian members than British members. They went on to produce what was called the Majority Report and the Minority Report. The Majority Report followed what was the official version, while the conclusions of the Minority Report were at some variance. There was reportedly some strain between the white and non-white members of the committee.