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A massacre and its consequences
By Mahir Ali
Perhaps it would be even more pertinent to lament the loss of communal harmony that Udham Singh sought to symbolise. —Reuters/File photo
IN evaluating its catalytic worth, at least one modern historian compares the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 with the 1916 Easter Rising that played such a pivotal role in the struggle for Irish independence.
The judgment may not entirely be mistaken, but there are undoubtedly vital differences between the two events, the most obvious of them being that, unlike the Irish rebels, most of the 20,000 Indians who gathered in the Amritsar park on April 13 hardly considered themselves part of a systematic revolt against the British Raj.
In fact, although Punjab at the time was among the more volatile provinces of British India (alongside Bengal), it is believed that quite a few of those who formed part of the gathering weren’t particularly motivated by political considerations: they were simply visiting Amritsar from the surrounding countryside on the occasion of Baisakhi and may well have believed that the swelling crowd represented some sort of a festive gathering, or joined it out of a sense of curiosity. At the same time, plenty of the participants were well aware that the congregation constituted an act of defiance against the colonial authorities, who had lately outlawed such assemblages.
None of them, however, had any inkling of what lay in store. A couple of days earlier, the province’s lieutenant-governor, Michael O’Dwyer, had sent for troop reinforcements amid growing signs of unrest — which was partly a consequence of Mohandas Gandhi’s nationwide call for satyagraha in the wake of the much reviled Rowlatt Act, which was intended to give the authorities a free hand in tackling what were described as revolutionary activities.
The so-called Great War had ended just months earlier: a large number of Indians had participated in it, for the most part with a degree of enthusiasm, and were returning home to a country in the throes of economic depression where even the prospect of home rule — full-fledged independence wasn’t a widespread demand at the time — seemed a far way off. Small groups of politically conscious Indians were enthused by the Bolshevik example in Russia, but it would be an exaggeration to claim that there was revolution in the air. Even Gandhi, recently returned from South Africa, was barely beginning to make a name for himself.
John Keay notes in his India: A History that some Punjabis were ‘reportedly unsure whether Gandhi was a person or a thing’, yet his call for satyagraha ‘was respected even in the Sikhs’ holy city of Amritsar’. Niall Ferguson, the historian responsible for the aforementioned Easter Rising comparison, summarises thus the events that led up to Jallianwala Bagh: ‘On 30 March a crowd of 30,000 gathered in a show of passive resistance. On 6 April there was another hartal. The situation was still peaceful at this stage, but sufficiently tense for two of the local nationalist leaders to be taken into custody and deported. When news of their arrest spread, violence flared. Shots were fired; banks attacked; the telephone lines cut.
‘On 11 April a Church of England missionary named Manuella Sherwood was knocked off her bicycle and beaten insensibly by a mob. At this point the civilians handed over power to the soldiers. That night, Brigadier-General Rex Dyer arrived to take charge.’
Most other historians, including Keay, suggest that martial law wasn’t imposed until after the massacre. No one disputes the fact that Dyer’s actions on April 13 were unprovoked. The amassed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh was unarmed and had offered no indication that it was inclined towards any sort of violence. It also received no warning. Dyer was frustrated by the fact that the main entrance to the park was too small to allow in his armoured cars, mounted with machine-guns. He marched in with his troops — mainly from the Gurkha and Baloch regiments — and ordered them to open fire.
In an unprecedented orgy of violence that lasted about 10 minutes, 1,650 rounds of ammunition were used, with the soldiers blocking the main escape route. Once Dyer was satisfied that enough blood had been shed, he ordered the troops to march out. The question of assisting the wounded never troubled his imagination, nor could he be bothered to count the dead. The day’s toll continues, 90 years on, to be disputed: according to some estimates, the official figure of 379 needs to be multiplied by three to yield a more realistic total.
It is not particularly surprising that Dyer’s mass murder received the stamp of approval not only from O’Dwyer but from many other elements of the Raj, as well as individuals and institutions in the mother country — including the House of Lords. A newspaper called the Morning Post solicited funds on his behalf and managed to accumulated £26,000, a huge sum in those days; the contributors reportedly included Rudyard Kipling. It was feared at the time that the changing national mood in India was leading up to a replay of the 1857 war of independence.
In due course, however, as Ferguson puts it, the self-righteousness gave way to a degree of remorse: ‘Dyer’s undoing began when two Congress-supporting lawyers succeeded in having him summoned before an inquiry to answer for his actions. His unabashed admission that his intention had been to ‘strike terror into the whole of Punjab’ brought the roof down on his head. In Parliament, [Edwin] Montagu angrily asked those who defended Dyer: ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation ... and frightfulness?’’ And Winston Churchill described the massacre as ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’.
Churchill was hardly a blushing violet as far as the empire was concerned, but he was intelligent enough to understand that Dyer had severely undermined the Raj. Although there were some strange reactions — some Sikhs, for instance, made Dyer an honorary Sikh at a ceremony at the Golden Temple — by and large even anglophiles among the Indian elite were revolted by Jallianwala Bagh. Rabindranath Tagore relinquished his knighthood. Congress stalwart Motilal Nehru organised a bonfire of his European furniture and attire, and was thenceforth considerably less critical of his son Jawaharlal’s radicalism. Gandhi, not long afterwards, launched his non-cooperation movement.
Twenty-one years later, when a Jallianwala Bagh survivor, Udham Singh, assassinated O’Dwyer in England, both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru condemned his ‘senseless’ act, although the latter subsequently dubbed him shaheed-i-azam. In his guise as a nationalist avenger, Udham Singh styled himself as Ram Mohammed Singh Azad. It is not uncommon, on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan divide, to lament the loss of life at Jallianwala Bagh. Perhaps it would be even more pertinent to lament the loss of communal harmony that Udham Singh sought to symbolise.
DAWN:Wednesday, 08 Apr, 2009
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