by Kim Wagner
Dyer’s column went at a slow pace through the city.106 The men of the 54th and 59th were in the front, followed immediately by the Gurkhas. The four vehicles made up the rear: first the car in which Dyer, Briggs and Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan were riding, as well as Dyer’s two bodyguards from the 25th London, Sergeants Anderson and Spizzey. This was followed by the first armoured car, and then Rehill and Plomer, the only two civilians with the party, in a car by themselves, with the second armoured car making up the rear.107 The column wound its way past the Town Hall, further into the city and down a narrow road known as Queen’s Bazaar, which was lined by low brick houses with open shops at street-level. They were now approaching their destination. As Briggs described:
The party was led to Jallianwalah Bagh by a guide, and arrived at a small alley just about broad enough for two men walking abreast. This necessitated leaving the two armoured cars behind.
The General Officer Commanding [Dyer], Colonel Morgan, Mr Rehill and myself got out of the motor and advanced up the alley, the troops following us. Coming to the end of the alley we saw an immense crowd of men packed in a square, listening to a man on a platform who was speaking and gesticulating with his hands. It was very hard to estimate the size of the crowd. The General asked me what I thought the numbers were, and I said about 5,000.108
Captain Briggs later claimed that, should they come upon an illegal meeting, Dyer had intended to address the crowd from the top of one of the armoured cars, but this was no longer possible due to the narrow entrance.109 Instead Dyer, who had never been to Jallianwala Bagh before, was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the gathering that he had walked in on. All he could see was a ‘dense crowd’ of thousands gathered within the enclosure of the Bagh, mere yards from himself and his small force. Just inside the Bagh, along the northern line of buildings where the entrance was, the ground fell away to the low-lying patch of land where people were gathered. It was here, along the bank of earth, that the troops were deployed, the twenty-five Gurkhas on the left, and the twenty-five men of the 54th/59th on the right.110 Dyer himself described the thoughts that went through his mind the moment he faced the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh, with his small force in position, rifles at the ready:
With the foregoing considerations before me and the daily reports and sights of Amritsar itself, I had no doubt that I was dealing with no mere local disturbance but a rebellion, which, whatever its origin, was aiming at something wide reaching and vastly more serious even than local riots and looting. The isolation of centres and the holding up of the movement of military reserve by destroying communications were essential features of the conspiracy.
I was conscious of a great offensive movement gathering against me, and knew that to sit still and await its complete mobilization would be fatal. When, therefore, the express challenge by this movement in the shape of the assembly in the Jallianwallah Bagh came to me, I knew a military crisis had come, and that to view the assembly as a mere political gathering, requiring simply to be induced to go away because it was there in breach of an order, was wholly remote from the facts and the necessities of the case.
Amritsar was in fact the storm centre of a rebellion. The whole Punjaub had its eyes on Amritsar, and the assembly of the crowd that afternoon was for all practical purposes a declaration of war by leaders whose hope and belief was that I should fail to take up the challenge.111
Durga Das, editor of the local Waqt newspaper, was at that very moment proposing the third resolution from the platform:
3. This grand meeting gives expression to its heartfelt and sincere sym--pathy with the families of the philanthropic and patriotic personages, Dr. Saif ud Din Kitchlew and Dr. Satya Pal, on their deportation by the Government, which is being naturally and inevitably felt by the members of those families.112
Girdhari Lal had arrived just before Dyer’s column and he rushed up on the roof of a friend’s house, which overlooked the Bagh. There were people gathered on the rooftops of the surrounding houses, and Lal borrowed a pair of binoculars:
I saw Pandit Durga Das, and was just mentioning this fact to Mr. Sita Ram, when I saw Gurkhas, with rifles in their hands, rushing into the garden from the Queen’s Statue side, and form into two lines to the left, as they entered on the Hansli – a raised ground in the Jallianwala Bagh covering the canal that feeds the Golden Temple tanks. They were 40 to 50 in all as far as I could judge from a distance.113
The arrival of the soldiers caused a murmur of fear among the thousands of people gathered around the platform, but Hans Raj and the other speakers tried to prevent people from panicking, as one of the men sitting in the crowd described: ‘I heard the cry, “Look, there are soldiers.” Then Hans Raj cried out to people not to be afraid of anything. I saw some Gurkhas and Europeans standing with rifles in their hands, near the main entrance.’114 As had been the case on 10 April, there was a general sense of disbelief that the British would actually shoot, and that, in the words of Hans Raj, ‘it was only the Government Dhamki [threat], that Government was not such a Bewakoof [i.e. so foolish] as to fire bullets on such an occasion’.115 He and the other speakers at Jallianwala Bagh did not perceive themselves as rebels, and they did not think they were doing anything to provoke a violent reaction from the authorities. These sentiments also had echoes of Gandhi’s most recent speech, given just the week before, in which he reminded his followers: ‘When we have reached the necessary standard of knowledge and discipline, we shall find that machine-guns and all other weapons, even the plague of aeroplanes, will cease to afflict us.’116
1. A street in the old city of Amritsar, early twentieth century.
2. The Golden Temple, Amritsar, 1870s.
3. Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, one of the principal leaders of the Satyagraha movement in Amritsar, who, along with Dr Satyapal, was deported from Amritsar on 10 April 1919.
4. Dr Satyapal.
5. Ratto (Mahasha Rattan Chand), a local power-broker who, along with Bugga, mobilised crowds during the protests in April 1919.
6. Bugga (Chaudhri Bugga Mal).
7. Melicent Wathen, who wrote in great detail of her experiences at Amritsar.
8. Gerard Wathen, the Principal of Khalsa College, who prevented British reprisals from escalating.
9. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab.
10. General Reginald Dyer at the time of the Hunter Committee inquiry, November 1919.
11. Hall Bridge, seen from the Civil Lines, where Beckett and the picket were pushed back on 10 April. Hall Gate and the city of Amritsar are to the right.
12. The scene of the first panicked shots fired by Beckett’s fleeing picket on the Civil Lines side. The footbridge is to the right, the sloping road leading to Hall Bridge is in the middle, and Madan’s shop and the road leading into the Civil Lines are to the left.
13. Hall Gate and the road leading into the city along Hall Bazaar.
14. Hall Bazaar leading into the city in the direction of the Town Hall, seen from the top of Hall Gate.
15. The entrance to Jallianwala Bagh through which Dyer and his troops entered. The photograph shows the southern end of the Bagh, and the small shrine with its onion dome is visible on the left, while the part of the wall to the right is still to be seen at the memorial.
16. A crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh during Motilal Nehru and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya’s visit in the late summer of 1919. The meeting is taking place at the same spot as the platform was located on 13 April.
17. The north-eastern side of the Bagh, with the main entrance on the far left. The people in the photograph are standing on the earth bank from which Dyer’s troops fired.
19. Locals inspecting bullet-holes in the southern wall, behind the shrine, in late 1919. This part of the wall no longer exists but would have been just to the left of the palm tree visible in other images.
20. A speaker addressing a crowd from behind the lowest part of the southern wall in late 1919. This was the spot right behind the shrine
where many people escaped by crawling over the wall.
21. A cartoon by artist Eduard Thöny for the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus in January 1920. This is the first ever visual representation of the massacre, though it is obviously not very accurate.
22. The crawling order being enforced by soldiers of the 25th London Cyclists in one of Sergeant R.M. Howgego’s snapshots.
23. A cartoon drawn by David Low in December 1919, which shows Britain terrorising both India and Ireland.
24. Howgego’s picket while they were stationed in Kucha Kaurianwala between 19 and 24 April 1919.
25. A later re-enactment of the crawling-order in Kucha Kaurianwala.
26. An aerial view of Amritsar in the 1930s. Jallianwala Bagh had by this point been established as a memorial park and is visible in the bottom left corner.
CHAPTER 9
MASSACRE
13 APRIL
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet [. . .] A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)1
General Dyer believed he had stumbled upon nothing less than the epicentre and hotbed of the rebellion. ‘What faced me,’ he claimed, ‘was what on the morrow would be the Danda Fauj.’2 The Danda Fauj, or ‘Bludgeon Army’, was what rioters at Lahore called themselves. Dyer had evidently heard of this name, but it had nothing to do with what was happening at Amritsar. Besides the sullen expressions, or spitting on the ground, Dyer had not actually experi-enced any violence or witnessed any aggression from the population since he arrived. And yet he ‘knew’, as he later claimed, ‘that the assembly was primarily of the same mobs which had murdered and looted and burnt three days previously’.3 Where popular depictions show a peaceful crowd of locals quietly listening to a political speech, Dyer simply perceived a defiant and murderous mob, one which had only days before run rampant through Amritsar and which still had the blood of Englishmen on its hands. If there were any villagers from outside Amritsar present, Dyer surmised, they had been attracted by the rumours of the collapse of British rule or the prospect of loot and were, in his words, ‘not very innocent’,4 Dyer was, therefore, not reacting to the actual crowd in front of him as much as to what he imagined that crowd to be – and the hostility and aggression that he ascribed to that crowd.
The symbolic significance of Dyer’s actions was further revealed by his later admission that: ‘I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself.’5 The perceived need to maintain British prestige and save face at all costs thus imbued Dyer’s actions with a crucially performative function. The people of Amritsar had already taunted the General earlier in the day, calling out that his warning was an empty threat and claiming that he would never shoot. Dyer was furthermore mindful of the fact that the firing that had taken place during the riots three days before, had, in his own words, been ‘quite ineffective’.6
For Dyer to lose face in the middle of what he believed to be a second ‘Mutiny’ would furthermore mean certain defeat. If the ‘natives’ no longer feared the British Government, Dyer and his thin khaki line of fifty men would have perished as one of his contemporaries, Brigadier Surtees, described it:
There are vast areas in Africa and the Pacific, where the sole British representative is the one white man. It is up to him to keep the native race more or less in order, to look after administration, to see to justice, and, as far as possible, to stamp out violence and vice. In the most favourable circumstances this official is allowed a small armed native guard, but in the case of any serious upheaval, he and his police would be scattered like chaff, but for one thing. That one thing is British prestige. Once you destroy that British prestige, then the Empire will collapse like a house of cards . . .7
Dyer evidently saw himself as that one white man, the last defender of the Raj, and unless he held the line, the consequences would be far-reaching and disastrous:
if one dominant motive can be extracted it was the determination to avert from the European women and children and those of the law-abiding Indian community the fate which I was convinced would be theirs, if I did not meet the challenge and produce the required effect to restore order and security. I am conscious that it was this motive which gave me the strength of will to carry out my duty.8
Dyer himself later admitted that ‘we cannot be very brave unless we be possessed of a greater fear’ – unfortunately, his was a fear caused by a paranoid colonial imagination, rather than a clear-headed assessment of the situation confronting him.9 ‘I realized that my force was small and untrained,’ he noted, ‘and to hesitate might induce attack.’10 Preventing his small force from being overrun and punishing the rebels who defied the Raj thus became one and the same thing. The deadly logic of Dyer’s own actions had forced him into a position from which there was but one way out:
It was a merciful act that I had given them chance to disperse. The responsibility was very great. I had made up my mind that if I fired I must fire well and strong so that it would have a full effect. I had decided if I fired one round I must shoot a lot of rounds or I must not shoot at all. My logical conclusion was that I must disperse the crowd which had defied the arm of law.11
He had spent all morning making the proclamation and now, Dyer stated, ‘further warning was not a practical requirement of the situation’.12 Just 30 seconds after he had first entered Jallianwala Bagh, he ordered his men to open fire. In the Bagh before them, the bullets found their targets among the thousands of people, as Dyer’s personal bodyguard, Sergeant W.J. Anderson, described:
When fire was opened the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a whole flutter of white garments, with however a spreading out towards the main gateway, and some individuals could be seen climbing the high wall. There was little movement, except for the climbers. The gateway would soon be jammed. I saw no sign of a rush towards the troops. After a bit, I noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in pain, and was plucking at the General’s elbow. Mr. Plomer, Deputy Superintendent of Police, told the General during a lull that he had taught the crowd a lesson they would never forget. The General took no notice, and ordered fire to be resumed, directing it particularly at the wall.13
The noise in the Bagh was deafening as Briggs later recounted: ‘fifty men firing rapid in a walled-in enclosure made a simply shattering noise, quite apart from that made by the crowd’.14 It was subsequently asserted that the noise made it difficult for General Dyer to make his commands heard, but that was not the case.15 ‘I saw nothing of the General trying to stop the firing,’ Anderson noted, ‘There was no din except for the firing, and when it ceased during a number of occasions, everything seemed silent.’16
The fifty Gurkhas and sepoys of the 54th and 59th were armed with the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield firing a .303 bullet (Mark VI) with a muzzle velocity of around 2,000 feet per second.17 Designed for the battlefields of the Empire, it was accurate up to 500 yards, but with a maximum range of almost 3,000 yards. If the round-nosed bullet did not hit any bone or vital organs, it could pass right through a person causing minimal damage. Yet the Mark VI had been designed with a thinner cupro-nickel jacket around the lead core, which meant that the projectile fragmented more easily. If the bullet struck bone, it would accordingly disintegrate inside the body, causing extensive and usually lethal wounds. A trained rifleman could easily put fifteen rounds in a target at 300 yards within one minute – a rapid fire prac
tice known as the ‘mad minute’.18 At Jallianwala Bagh, however, the pace of the shooting was much slower and more deliberate: individual fire, rather than by volley, directed at the crowd rather than at individuals.19 Dyer supervised the shooting as a military operation, as if he had been facing enemy troops, rather than a large crowd of civilians. Crucially, he still reasoned as if it was he who was under attack:
The crowd was so dense that if a determined rush had been made at any time, arms or no arms, my small force must instantly have been overpowered and consequently I was very careful of not giving the mob a chance of organizing. I sometimes ceased fire and redirected my fire where the crowd was collecting more thickly.20
‘The fire control and discipline of the native troops was first class,’ Anderson noted. ‘The officer in charge kept his eyes on the General, gave his fire and cease fire orders to his men, and they obeyed him implicitly; there was no wild sporadic firing.’
Panic rippled through the crowd as people realised what was happening, and there was a surge towards the exits on the eastern and western sides of the Bagh, or simply away from the firing-line, towards the southern wall. An eyewitness in the crowd described how some people even tried to reach the gate in the north-western corner, right next to Dyer’s troops:
A small group of gamblers, altogether separate from the others, was on their right; when they saw the firing begin, they stopped their gambling and ran towards the gate behind the troops to escape from the death trap, and as they tried to slink through the wicket gate, some soldiers were turned to fire on them, and they were killed as they tried to struggle through the little gate.21