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AMRITSAR 1919–2019

Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, 13 April 1919 Inside an open space, surrounded by buildings and a crumbling brick wall, a large Indian crowd of thousands has gathered around a Sikh man, who is addressing his audience from a platform. There is a small dilapidated temple within the square, as well as a few trees, and behind the rooftops the unmistakable onion-domes of a mosque can be discerned. People are mostly dressed in varying shades of white, yet the colourful turbans of the bearded men provide a stark contrast to the drab grey houses behind them. Close around the speaker, the audience is sitting down, while, on the outskirts of the crowd, people are standing or moving about and a vendor is busy peddling his wares carried on a pole across his shoulder. From the balconies of nearby houses people are watching, and a handful of boys are playing in the background. The air is filled with the low murmur of a large crowd, but the earnest words of the speaker resonate with clarity within the square:

England is so powerful – its army and its navy, all its modern weapons – but when a great power like that strikes defenceless people it shows its brutality, its own weakness. That is why the Mahatma begs us to take the course of non-violence.

Elsewhere in the city, an armoured car emerges from a gate, followed by a military vehicle with two British officers in pith helmets and fifty Indian troops with rifles making up the rear. The vehicles and uniforms are all in the

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same khaki colours, and the slouch hats and pointed turbans of the troops reveal them to be Gurkhas and Baluchis. The rumble of the engines merges with the rhythmic sound of the soldiers trotting behind the cars as the column winds its way through the narrow streets of Amritsar. The commanding officer, the broom-moustachioed General Dyer, is sitting motionless in the car, looking straight ahead, as they drive past local residents, who stop what they are doing and stare at the procession. With unerring precision, the column continues further into the city. Outside the park where the meeting is taking place, the armoured car grinds to a halt as the alley is too narrow. With great agility, General Dyer jumps down and orders the car to back away, signalling for the troops to follow him. He marches through the entrance with great determination, his horsewhip under the arm. The speaker is still busy exhorting the crowd: ‘If we riot, if we fight back, we become the vandals and they become the law! If we bear their blows, they are the vandals – God and his law are on our—’ The hoarse yell of orders being given, and the staccato sound of marching feet as the soldiers spill through the entrance and line up on both sides, brings the speaker to a sudden halt. Here and there, people in the crowd turn around to see what this interruption is, more curious than frightened. General Dyer is standing at ease, right in the middle with his troops to the right and left, surveying the crowd before him with a cold, unmoving, expression. More people have noticed the sudden arrival of the soldiers, and some stand up to get a better view. In place of the speech, the open space now echoes with the order to fix bayonets. The murmur of the crowd grows louder as fear grips the thou- sands gathered. As the first row of soldiers assumes a kneeling position, more people are getting up, visibly worried. The speaker, with less certainty than before, continues: ‘We must have the courage to take their anger—’ General Dyer gives an order to the Havildar-Major, and the double-line of troops lift their rifles to take aim with one synchronised movement. By now the crowd is growing more rest- less and a crying baby can be heard amidst the yelling of people and the clattering of the guns. Everyone in the crowd is standing, facing the line of rifles and bayonets trained squarely at them. Dyer’s ADC, sweating and slightly nervous, asks his superior: ‘Should we issue a warning, Sir?’ With a stern sidelong glance at his subaltern, the General replies stiffly: ‘They’ve had their warning. No meetings.’ A ripple of panic spreads among the crowd, no more than a hundred feet away, as people desperately begin to push back. General Dyer barks the order: ‘Fire!’ amritsar 1919–2019 xv

All fifty troops fire at the same time, and the sharp report of the volley reverberates between the walls of the surrounding buildings. Shrill screams can be heard over the report of the rifles, and, as people are hit and tumble over in the dust, the crowd scatter in a chaotic stampede. As those at the front receive the brunt of the firing, and fall by the dozen, the great mass of people surge backwards and to the sides. The erratic firing continues as people run and are felled by shots, including mothers with their babies. As the troops methodically fire and load their Lee-Enfield rifles, the General calmly walks behind his men, his eyes fixed on the slaughter before him. In the chaos of the panicking crowd, the bodies are beginning to pile up. Dyer reminds his men to take their time, and as they repeat the same motions, shooting and loading, over and over, the spent cartridges fall to the ground with a chinking sound. The open ground is now enveloped in a cloud of dust, and amidst the chaos of the dead and the dying, some are trying to carry the wounded to safety. A group of women reach an exit but find it locked by a gate with iron bars and scream in fear as those behind continue pushing. Keeping a sharp lookout, the General notices that some men are trying to scale the wall on the left and he promptly directs the fire towards them, shouting to make himself heard above the din. As the troops swing their rifles towards the wall, people are shot in the back and fall down on top of others. As the firing continues, and with the exits blocked, people are running around aimlessly, some even jumping into a large open well. As Dyer keeps watching, his face devoid of any trace of emotion, more people jump into the well to escape the bullets. Meanwhile the troops keep shooting and loading, shooting and loading, the piles of cartridges growing at their feet. The ground is littered with dead bodies, and a small girl is crying next to the bloodied corpse of her mother.

The Hunter Committee, Lahore, 19 November 1919 General Dyer is sitting under a Union Jack hung on the wall, in a large court- room, facing a panel of Commissioners: Lord Hunter, Mr Justice Rankin, General Barrow, a British civil servant, and an Indian barrister. Behind Dyer, who looks somewhat detached, there is a small audience of British officers. Sitting behind the long table filled with legal documents, Justice Rankin asks the first question: ‘General Dyer, is it correct that you ordered your troops to fire at the thickest part of the crowd?’ xvi amritsar 1919–2019

General Dyer stares woodenly at the panel, confirming with just the slightest nod of his head: ‘That is so.’ Slightly taken aback by the attitude of the man before him, the mild- mannered Rankin rubs his hands and reads out from his notes: ‘One thou- sand five hundred and sixteen casualties with one thousand six hundred and fifty bullets?’ Not missing a beat, General Dyer replies with conviction: ‘My inten- tion was to inflict a lesson that would have an impact throughout all India.’ A small murmur arises from the officers behind the General, who nod in approval. Rankin looks at Dyer with a degree of disbelief, but the General’s expression reveals no emotion whatsoever. The Indian barrister asks the next question: ‘General, had you been able to take in the armoured car, would you have opened fire with the machine gun?’ After a slight pause, Dyer responds, barely moving his mouth as he speaks: ‘I think, probably – yes.’ The barrister stares at the General for a moment, then simply lowers his eyes. For the first time, the presiding judge, Hunter, now addresses Dyer: ‘General, did you realize there were children – and women – in the crowd?’ ‘I did,’ Dyer responds, without a hint of regret. Rankin intercedes: ‘But that was irrelevant to the point you were making?’ Dyer seems almost pleased that someone understood his reasoning: ‘That is correct.’ There is an awkward silence before Rankin picks up the questioning once more: ‘Could I ask you what provisions you made for the wounded?’ Clearly stumped, Dyer replies after a moment: ‘I was ready to help any who applied.’ Baffled by what he was hearing, Rankin asks rhetorically: ‘General . . . how does a child shot with a .303 Lee-Enfield apply for help?’ For the first time, Dyer seems uncertain of himself.

This was how director Richard Attenborough reimagined the Amritsar Massacre and the subsequent Hunter Committee inquiry in the Oscar-winning movie Gandhi from 1982.1 This is also how many people today think of what was arguably the bloodiest massacre in the history of the British Empire. While there is an abundance of visual material informing our understanding of key aspects of the history of British India – the viscerally bleak photographs from amritsar 1919–2019 xvii both 1857 or 1947, for instance – there are no contemporary images of the violence at Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The photographs taken of the Jallianwala Bagh shortly after the massacre show only an empty space.2 It has thus been left largely for Attenborough’s movie to fill in the canvas of the popular imagi- nation and provide the visual repertoire through which today we approach the events of 13 April 1919. The brutality of the massacre is captured on screen by the deft deployment of what have since become iconic motifs: the relentless methodical firing, the empty cartridges piling up at the soldiers’ feet, the fleeing women trapped and crushed against an iron gate, people jumping into the well or a child sitting crying next to its dead parent. Many of these images, it may be noted, were clearly inspired by the famous ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin from 1925.3 Since the release of Gandhi, however, a spate of popular Indian movies, including Shaheed Udham Singh (2000), The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002) and Rang di Basanti (2006), have again drawn from, if not outright copied, these key scenes from Attenborough.4 Most memorable, however, is Edward Fox’s portrayal of General Dyer as a callously brutal and stiff-upper-lipped caricature of the quintessential colonial officer. Presented without any real context in the movie, the Amritsar Massacre functions simply as a grim vignette to illustrate the power of Gandhi’s message of non-violence. The speaker at Jallianwala Bagh is giving voice to the doctrine of Satyagraha, or soul-force, when he is silenced, quite literally, by British bullets. The massacre is thus depicted as the inevitable result of the clash between Gandhi’s righteous struggle and the oppression of colonial rule – or, to use Niall Ferguson’s awkward analogy, the clash between soul-force and fist- force. Yet the violence unleashed on the unarmed men, women and children at Amritsar is entirely embodied by Edward Fox’s Dyer: a man seemingly inca- pable of emotions, who appears as nothing so much as an automaton. Concluding the depiction of the massacre with the scene from the Hunter Committee inquiry, in which Dyer is effectively put on trial, the movie thus presents the massacre as an aberration and one which the British Government ultimately disavowed. The visible discomfort of Justice Rankin, as he questions the irascible General, is also the discomfort of the audience, and is meant to remind us of the essentially benevolent and humane side of British rule in India. Like the members of the Hunter Committee, as depicted in the movie, we as an audience can only listen to Dyer’s response with a mix of shock and disbelief. The General’s clipped answers to the questions of the panel cannot be recognised as providing a reasonable explanation, let alone justification, for xviii amritsar 1919–2019 his actions. What happened at Jallianwala Bagh defies logic and thus eludes attempts to make sense of it. The Amritsar Massacre is reduced to a pure symbol of colonial violence.

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Today, the events of 13 April 1919 are known simply as an iconic example of brutality within the British Empire – often mentioned alongside the Irish Famine, the concentration camps of the South African War, the Bengal Famine or the suppression of the Mau Mau. Similarly to Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday, Jallianwala Bagh has thus become a mere byword for colonial violence, usually encapsulated by formulaic reference to the 379 civilians supposedly killed by the 1650 bullets fired by the colonial troops over the duration of 10 minutes.5 Even those who wax lyrically and nostalgically about the Empire will concede that the Amritsar Massacre was an unfortunate tragedy and a stain on the record of British rule in India. They do so, however, only to insist that it was an anomaly which in no way reflected on the character of the Empire as, essen- tially, a force for good in the world. Whether the massacre is regarded as a shameful crime, or as an exception to the rule, it is seen essentially as a discrete event and as little more than an item on the so-called ‘balance-sheet’ of empire. Understanding what happened, and appreciating the structural dynamics of the event itself, thus becomes largely immaterial. In recent decades, much of the debate surrounding the Amritsar Massacre has focused on calls for a formal British apology. When Queen Elizabeth visited the Jallianwala Bagh in 1997, followed by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2013, an actual apology was on both occasions studiously avoided. In December 2017, however, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, urged the British Government to make such a gesture during a visit to Amritsar: ‘I am clear that the Government should now apologise, especially as we reach the centenary of the massacre. This is about properly acknowledging what happened here and giving the people of Amritsar and India the closure they need through a formal apology.’6 What exactly ‘happened here’, however, is again not so clear. The issue has remained in the public limelight, largely due to the tireless efforts of Indian politician and author Shashi Tharoor, whose best-selling book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India seeks to expose the iniquities of the Raj. Tharoor has repeatedly emphasised the signif- icance of the Amritsar Massacre as the linchpin of a British apology, including at this public talk in late December 2017: amritsar 1919–2019 xix

Brigadier-General Reginal Dyer was sent to Punjab. He got to Amritsar and discovered there was a gathering, and he was told that large numbers, thousands of people, [were] in a walled garden, Jallianwala Bagh. He didn’t bother to find out why they were there. They were there to celebrate Baisakhi, the Punjabi spring festival. They were totally unarmed, and for the most part women and children and families, it was almost like a picnic. Yes, some of the people who were addressing them may have been saying anti-British things, but no-one was there to conduct a rebellion or raise weapons or launch violence. As soon as he shows up, Dyer, he doesn’t ask why they are there, he doesn’t order them to disperse. He doesn’t even fire a warning-shot in the air. He just orders his soldiers to take up positions at the only entrance and exit to the Bagh, one gate, and opens fire on the defenceless, screaming, helpless, men, women and children. Later he boasted that not one bullet was wasted. They fired 1650 rounds, every bullet hit someone. About 1300 people were killed, several hundred more were injured, of course many were injured in the stampede as well [. . .] After all of this, of course there is a nation-wide outcry. A commission [of] inquiry is set up that largely whitewashes Dyer, the British House of Commons censures him, the House of Lords exonerates him and passes a resolution praising his decisive action, and the British conduct a collection for Dyer, which amounts to the princely sum of a quarter of a million pound[s] sterling presented to him with a bejewelled sword, and that flatu- lent voice of Victorian imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, hails him as the man who saved India. So the whole thing [. . .] the cruelty of the massacre itself, the racism and indifference to Indian suffering that accompanied and followed it, and then the racist self-castification [sic] at the end, all of this put together, makes Jallianwala Bagh the single worst atrocity of the Raj and thereby fit to be the symbol of everything that was wrong at the worst of British imperialism. So if on that occasion, at least on the centenary of that occasion, a British official could come and apologize, I think it would send a fantastic message that would cleanse Britain of that original sin.7

This account of the Amritsar Massacre, it may be noted, is completely inac- curate and so it seems that, even for those to whom it matters deeply, the historicity of the event remains elusive, if not outright irrelevant. This is more than just an academic quibble: when the facts cease to matter, the very grounds upon which historical claims are made, or restitution demanded, are critically undermined. xx amritsar 1919–2019

This ahistorical conceptualisation of the massacre is by no means restricted to the public sphere or popular debates. For instance, in one of the recent scholarly interventions in global history, A World Connecting, Charles S. Maier simply lists the massacre among the litany of European colonial conflicts of the early twentieth century, describing how ‘General Reginald Dyer famously emptied his machine guns against assembled Indians at Amritsar in 1919.’8 The fact that Dyer used neither machine guns nor all his ammunition is yet again an indication of the extent to which the Amritsar Massacre is referenced – not because of what happened, but rather because of what the event is taken to represent in the most abstract sense. While the Amritsar Massacre may be one of the best-known items on the imperial butcher’s bill, it remains poorly understood. The invocation of the massacre, merely as short-hand for colonial brutality, brings to mind Jordanna Bailkin’s poignant observation that ‘there is nothing more banal about colonial projects than their violence’. Making sense of colonial violence, however, is a different matter and in this book I seek to understand its forms and functions ‘rather than’, to use Bailkin’s words, ‘simply taking it for granted’.9

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Credited as the event that galvanised the first major anti-colonial nationalist movement, and inexorably set Indian nationalists, including Gandhi, on the path towards independence, the Amritsar Massacre is usually understood in an exclusively teleological fashion.10 As indicated by the title of Alfred Draper’s popular account, The Massacre That Ended the Raj, the events at Jallianwala Bagh are commonly seen to mark the beginning of the historical process that came to its conclusion with Indian independence in 1947.11 Assumed to have been the direct result of the global changes brought about by the First World War, the massacre thus provides the starting point in studies of decolonisation that focus exclusively on the twentieth century and privilege change over continuity. In his renowned work on the ‘Wilsonian Moment’, for instance, Erez Manela includes a chapter titled ‘From Paris to Amritsar’, implying a more or less direct link between the 1919 Peace Conference and the events at Jallianwala Bagh – a connection that is never substantiated, and which is in fact unsustainable.12 In such accounts, the causes behind the massacre are iden- tified exclusively in terms of short-term factors unique to the post-1918 world as a particular historical moment and shaped largely by events outside British India and therefore, ultimately, external to the dynamics of colonial rule.13 amritsar 1919–2019 xxi

The nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, however, was not simply a function of, nor coterminous with, imperial decline after 1918 as Britain and other European powers sought to hold on to their empires by all means possible. Rather than being the beginning of the end, I suggest that the violence of the Amritsar Massacre might better be understood as the final stage of a much longer process. It was in fact the enduring memories of the ‘Mutiny’ that shaped the British understanding of and response to Indian nationalist protests at the beginning of the twentieth century. The story of Jallianwala Bagh is accordingly also the story of a particular colonial mindset haunted by the spectre of the ‘Mutiny’. In this book I have sought to show the interplay between a colonial mentality rooted in the nineteenth century and the contin- gencies of the unrest in 1919 – an awareness of, and attention to, the varying temporalities at play within a single event that I have elsewhere referred to as ‘thick periodization’.14 The approach I have taken in this book might perhaps be described as a microhistory of a global event. I have set out to write a history that does not assume that Indian independence would take place two decades later or that, a century on, it would still be remembered with bitterness as a lasting symbol of British oppression. Whereas most studies of the Amritsar Massacre focus on its aftermath – its political impact and the public debates and legal issues it raised, that is, the massacre as a historical watershed – I focus narrowly, and unapolo- getically, on how events unfolded at Amritsar during April 1919. In doing so I have sought to uncover the local dynamics of escalation, which reached their violent climax at Jallianwala Bagh, through the different experiences of a range of individuals, British and Indian, men and women. Drawing on a range of material from diaries, letters and court testimonies to produce an intimate account of colonial crisis, my aim has been to shed new light on a well-known story from multiple perspectives. I have furthermore sought to foreground the urban setting and sense of space within which the dramatic events took place, and the book is to some extent also a portrait of the city of Amritsar in 1919. One of the methodological obstacles of writing about the Amritsar Massacre is that so much of the primary material was written after the event, and after the event had become a contentious issue. The reports and evidence produced in 1919–20 by the Disorders Inquiry Committee (Hunter Committee) and the parallel investigation conducted by the Congress Punjab Inquiry still remain the key sources. Although I have made extensive use of this well-known material, I have tried to avoid simply replicating the line of questioning, and political concerns at the time, which shaped so much of the testimony. The xxii amritsar 1919–2019

Hunter Committee only ever heard testimony from British officials or Indians who held offices in the colonial administration, or who were otherwise allied to the Government. Anyone looking for recognition or even acknowledge- ment of the Indian experience and suffering in the thousands of pages produced by the Hunter Committee will look in vain. The Congress Punjab Inquiry report and evidence, on the other hand, was based exclusively on interviews with local residents and ordinary Indians, none of whom held official posi- tions. The result is, accordingly, two incompatible accounts of what could, to all intents and purposes, be completely different events. I have as a result relied on the testimonies and statements rather than the judgements of these the two reports – the findings of both the Hunter Committee and the Congress Punjab Inquiry were historical artefacts in their own right, rather than objec- tive assessments upon which the historian can rely. I have furthermore made use of the much less-known trial records produced under martial law during the aftermath of the massacre, which obviously have to be used with great care and the usual caveats concerning issues of translation and the power dynamics inherent to the colonial archive must be kept in mind.15 I have tried to be as sensitive as possible in representing Indian voices, and not merely to replicate colonial stereotypes, yet it should be obvious that we are always confined by the evidence that has survived.

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Though factually accurate, the conventional account of the massacre, power- fully depicted in Attenborough’s film, is in fact analytically misleading and gives no clue as to the motivation behind Dyer’s actions beyond a vague impression of the colonial mindset or the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone- faced general. Colonial violence is in this view, as I have suggested, simply taken for granted and as such requires no explanation. Yet we cannot locate the causes of violence simply in the circumstances of its enactment, and merely describing the sequence of events leaves the erroneous impression that the Amritsar Massacre was simply a response to the threat posed by Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement. In George Orwell’s short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the colonial officer narrator at one point makes the poignant observation that ‘A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t fright- ened.’16 When called upon to explain his actions at Jallianwala Bagh, General Dyer invoked a similar concern of losing face and explicitly stated that he was amritsar 1919–2019 xxiii afraid of being outnumbered and overrun. From the distance of a century, it is virtually impossible to reconcile the violent spectacle of the Amritsar Massacre with claims of British fears and anxieties. And yet I find Dyer’s admission to be crucially important if we are to understand how violence worked, or was thought to work, at Amritsar and within a colonial context more broadly. The real challenge facing historians is, accordingly, to navigate the dichotomy between what Michael G. Vann has described as the contradiction of ‘white power and white vulnerability’.17 In seeking to avoid what Marshall Sahlins refers to as ‘the ethnographic cardinal sin of ignoring what the people found important’, we must therefore follow Ann Stoler’s example and read the Amritsar Massacre ‘along the archival grain’.18 This entails trying to reconstruct events not simply as they happened objectively, but as they were experienced at the time – and as they were expe- rienced differently by different people. This does not mean that we validate their worldview or justify their actions: it is, I insist, possible to both describe, analyse and make sense of historical occurrences of violence without either condoning or condemning them. ‘It is so easy to denounce,’ the eminent histo- rian Marc Bloch noted. ‘We are never sufficiently understanding.’19 It is indeed easy to simply disavow acts of horrific violence and brand their perpetrators as evil, yet we cannot confine ourselves to explaining only that which we recog- nise as rational or with which we might sympathise. It is the things that we cannot easily understand that need to be understood the most – however discomforting. This applies to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh as much as it does to the brutal attacks on Europeans by Indian rioters a few days before. To explain is not to justify and I do not believe that we can afford to be squea- mish if we truly want to address the enduring legacies of the Empire and of imperialism that are still with us today. My particular take on the events of the Amritsar Massacre will not appeal to everyone, and for those who prefer their Raj nostalgia or Indian nationalist mythology to go unchallenged there are literally dozens of books that will provide reassuring and politically edifying narratives. This book is not that.