by Kim Wagner
Twenty-seven-year-old Lala Gian Chand had gone to the Bagh to hear Kanhyalal and was sitting on the ground and never saw the soldiers:
the crowd round about me stood up and began to run. Immediately, I heard shots fired. No warning was given. I ran towards the wall side and the rush of people was too great, I could not climb over the wall and sat down and dropped my face between my knees. People fell over me. After the firing of three successive volleys, I got up and with the greatest difficulty, leapt over the wall, head downwards. I could not see the people firing.22
Lala Karam Chand had been about to leave, since he could not hear the speakers anyway, when he found the exit blocked by the soldiers entering. He and a friend immediately ran to the north-eastern corner, where the Hansli canal, which ran under the earth-bank where the soldiers stood, exited:
We went running at once to the right, where there is a passage. I rushed towards the passage and heard the soldiers firing. There were many who rushed there before me and after me. The people were all running when the firing began. The soldiers came in and formed into a line at once, and there was no warning given at all. They began to fire at once. I was near the Hansli passage when the firing began. The end of the passage was blocked by a wall as high as my chest, and so people could not get out quickly, but only one by one. When I got into the passage, I saw that people were being shot down behind me. I tried to crouch down and saw that the trap door of the Hansli was broken. So, in the crush, I managed to get down into it, one leg at the time. I got into the water up to my thigh at the place where the lid over it was broken. Three other men slipped in.23
A few were thus able to find some sort of cover but not everyone was so lucky. Abdul Ahad, an old shawl-maker, was hit four times in the leg as he took cover beneath the tree next to the well. As he lay on the ground he saw the soldiers firing at the men who had tried to save themselves by climbing the tree: ‘I saw them drop to the ground one after another.’24 The 17-year-old Nathi survived by hiding in the hollow trunk of one of the trees, and then climbed the wall and escaped during a lull in the firing. While he was hiding in the tree, Nathi saw several men run and fall into the nearby well.25 Another eyewitness later ‘saw one or two dead bodies in the well’.26 As the bodies began to pile up near the corners and exits, people also became trapped, as Moulvi Gholam Jilani, a cattle inspector, described:
I ran towards a wall and fell on a mass of dead and wounded persons. Many others fell on me. Many of those who fell on me, were hit and died. There was a heap of the dead and wounded over, under and all around me. I felt suffocated. I thought I was going to die. I cannot remember how I managed to extricate myself when the firing ceased. I crept out and then fled. When I reached the street, fresh air gave me some relief and then I ran homewards, and reached my house about the evening. There I fainted.27
From the vantage-point of the rooftop, Girdhari Lal witnessed the slaughter taking place just a few hundred feet away, from beginning to end:
The firing continued incessantly for about 10 to 15 minutes at least, without any perceptible break. I saw hundreds of persons killed on the spot. In the Bagh there were about 12 to 15 thousand persons and they consisted of many villagers, who had come to Amritsar to see the Baisakhi fair. The worst part of the whole thing was, that the firing was directed towards the gates through which the people running out. There were small outlets, four or five in all, and bullets actually rained over the people at all these gates. Shots were fired into the thick of the meeting. There was not a corner left of the garden facing the firing line, where people did not die in large numbers. Many got trampled under the feet of the rushing crowds and thus lost their lives. Blood was pouring in profusion. Even those who lay flat on the ground were shot, as I saw the Gurkhas kneel down and fire.28
As the number of prostate bodies on the ground before them steadily grew, Dyer did not abandon the notion that he was engaged in a military operation. In what could have been a direct quote from Callwell’s Small Wars, he stated that: ‘I was liable to be assailed from behind and the extrication of my small force from the city would have been practically impossible if after the firing the rebels had maintained an aggressive spirit.’29 And so the firing continued.
At one point, Dyer turned to one of the officers and said, ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then went on, ‘No, we’ll give them 4 rounds more.’30 Dyer thus pursued the logic of exemplary force to its extreme conclusion:
I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed and I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral, and widespread effect it was my duty to produce, if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would be greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity.31
As Dyer made clear, the firing at Jallianwala Bagh had ceased to have the specific strategic aim of enforcing the ban on political gatherings, and had instead become a pure spectacle of brute force in which the ‘rebels’ were perceived as an undifferentiated mass. With more than a passing resemblance to a firing squad on a massive scale, Dyer’s actions closely mimicked the ritual of formalised punishment. And, while the Amritsar Massacre was not, technically speaking, an execution, the logic that underpinned its violence was identical to the colonial rituals of power enacted during the nineteenth century. The local confrontation at Amritsar was perceived by Dyer in the light of a bigger existential struggle, and the fear that he and his men might be cut off and ambushed in the narrow alleys of Amritsar was the very same fear that the British in India might be overrun. Crucially, the same act could save them all with a single stroke. The shooting at Jallianwala Bagh was thus ‘calculated to strike terror’ as much as were the mass executions of sepoys during the ‘Mutiny’ or of Kukas in 1872. ‘Every man who escaped from the Jallianwala Bagh,’ Dyer later stated, ‘was a messenger to tell that law and order had been restored in Amritsar.’32 As a technique of power, the shooting was not simply a means to an end but an end in itself.
After more than ten minutes had passed, Dyer finally gave the order to cease fire.33 There was no longer any discernible movement in the Bagh, but as the guns fell silent, a ‘low moaning’ could be heard from the dying and wounded strewn on the ground and piled along the walls.34 The fifty soldiers stood up, shouldering their arms, and their officers gathered the empty cartridges which had piled up at the feet of their men.35 The twenty-five Gurkhas advanced down to the flat ground with their kukris drawn to cover the retreat of the officers and rest of the force, as they left through the passage from which they had entered.36 The Gurkhas were then pulled back and also exited the Bagh. ‘I returned to the Ram Bagh,’ Dyer explained, ‘without counting or inspecting the casualties.’37 He did not offer any medical assistance to the wounded, later claiming that to remain at the Bagh would have exposed the column to an ambush: ‘I had to be most careful of not at the last giving up the victory.’38 As the strike force retraced its steps and passed through the bazaar, Plomer noted how normal it seemed: ‘People were coming and going. Some people put on a sullen mood. Shops were all closed. People were hanging about.’39 The residents of Amritsar did not yet know what had just taken place.
As the troops withdrew from the Bagh, the survivors slowly began to stir, and the cries of the wounded rent the still evening air. There were bodies everywhere and people’s belongings, clothes, shoes and pagris (turbans) were scattered all over the ground.40 One man, who had been shot twice in the leg, dragged himself to an upright position:
After the soldiers had left, I looked round [. . .] There must have been more than a thousand corpses there. The whole place was strewn with them. At some places, 7 or 8 corpses were piled, one over another. In addition to the dead, there must have been about a thousand wounded persons lying the
re. Close by where I was lying, I saw a young boy, aged about 12 years, lying dead with a child of about 3 years clasped in his arms, also dead.41
Those who could tried to tend to the wounded and Sardar Partap Singh, a bookseller, went to get water for a dying man from the Hansli drain: ‘When I tried to take water from the pit, I saw many dead bodies floating in it. Some living men had also hid themselves in it, and they asked me, “Are they (i.e. soldiers) gone?” When I told them that they had gone, they came out . . .’42 One of these men was Lala Karam Chand, who had almost been suffocating while hiding in the drain. As he crawled out, drenched but alive, Chand looked at the scene around him: ‘I saw the Bagh was like a battlefield.’43
The wounds inflicted by the .303 ammunition had been devastating – at a distance of less than 600 feet, and what was at first practically point-blank range, bullets passed right through the body and could wound several people.44 Not only had people been unable to escape from the Bagh, as the bodies and crush of the crowd blocked the exits, but bullets would ricochet off the surrounding walls, or fragment, and injure yet more people. Shooting fish in a barrel was sadly a fitting analogy. One eyewitness noted how ‘most of the persons were hit at various places on the back of the body’, and many of the dead and wounded had multiple wounds.45 Some of the survivors also suffered horrific injuries: Wazir Ali, a teacher, had his right eye shot out, the bullet exiting through his temple, and was also shot through the chest, but miraculously survived.46
The effect of the firing had furthermore not been contained within the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh, which were pock-marked with bullet-holes, even at the upper levels of the surrounding houses.47 Local residents were wounded by ricochets while watching from their balconies, and stray shots killed at least one woman outside Sultanwind Gate and also wounded a nearby villager outside the city.48 One 5-year-old boy had witnessed the shooting from a nearby roof, believing it to be fireworks, and it was later found that the ‘walls round about him were riddled with bullets’.49
Back at the Ram Bagh, Lieutenant McCallum of the 9th Gurkhas was catching up on sleep in a chair in the club, when he was rudely awoken by Captain Gerry Crampton, who said ‘Come on, get up, go and count the empties.’ ‘Oh, have you had a show,’ McCallum replied, ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’50 McCallum eventually got down to the tedious task of counting the empty cartridges of which there were 923. The remaining ammunition in the troops’ pouches were also counted and it was found that a total of 1,650 rounds had been fired by the 50 men – or an average of 33 shots per man.51 McCallum could get little information out of his friend:
but I gathered the following at the time and in conversations later from the then Jemadar Jitbahadur that the General Sahib had been informed that a very large gathering was taking place in Jallianwala Bagh and ordered a column of 25 rifles from each 9th Gurkhas and 59th Rifles to go with him into the city. ‘He told us to double through the narrow road leading to an open square and then said Gurkhas right, 59th left fire.’52
A British official in Nepal later talked with two of the Gurkhas who had been at Jallianwala Bagh: ‘Asked what they thought of the incident they both replied with evident relish: “Sahib, while it lasted it was splendid: we fired every round we had.”’53 While this suggests that the Gurkhas had little sympathy for the local population of Amritsar, the statement concerning their ammunition was slightly misleading. The bandolier and pouch carried by the sepoys and Gurkhas contained sixty rounds and it was accordingly evident that Dyer did not exhaust his ammunition at Jallianwala Bagh.54 The General himself insisted that he ‘duly took care that a reserve of rounds was preserved sufficient for the extrication of the force, and subsequent emergencies’.55 The two Gurkhas thus spent every round they had available to use at Jallianwala Bagh, but without touching half their ammunition, which was kept in reserve.
For a few frantic hours, in the semi-darkness of dusk, the Bagh became busy with anguished people searching for their friends and relatives among the piles of dead. One man, who lived next to the Bagh, had to go searching for his brother, who had not returned from the meeting:
All the exits were blocked by a very large number of the dead and the wounded. I searched for my brother, and had to turn over every dead person, till at last I found him lying dead, under three or four dead bodies, near the foot of the raised ground. He was 25 years of age. There were about 200 dead bodies at this spot alone. I believe that 1500 were killed in the Jallianwala Bagh. Lots of kites were hovering very low over the dead and the wounded, so much so, that it was with great difficulty that one could keep his turban on his head.56
Lal Gian Chand, who had himself just escaped the Bagh, came back to look for his nephew, who was reported to be among the dead:
On reaching the garden, I found my nephew’s body riddled with bullets. His skull was broken. There was one shot under his nose on the upper lip, two on the left side, one on the left neck, and three on the thigh and some two or three on the head. Ram Labhaya had just passed the 8th class from the Baij Nath High School. His age was 17 years.57
Inside the house next to the Bagh, Girdhari was meanwhile busy clearing it of all the people who had taken refuge there. Afterwards, he too went into the Bagh to look for his friend, Hakim Singh, whom was missing:
There were heaps of them at different places, and people were turning over dead bodies to recognise their relations or friends. The dead bodies were of grown up people and young boys also. At or near the gates the number was very large, and bodies were scattered in large numbers all over the garden. Some had their heads cut open, others had eyes shot, and nose, chest, arms or legs shattered. It was a fearful and ghastly sight. I noticed one or two buffaloes also killed on the ground. I think there must have been over one thousand dead bodies in the garden then.58
It later turned out that his friend was fine but Girdhari Lal had to return once more to look for some boys who were thought to be in the Bagh. By that time, however, it was getting late: ‘I saw people were hurrying up, and many had to leave their dead and wounded, because they were afraid of being fired upon again after 8 pm. Many amongst the wounded, who managed to run away from the garden, succumbed on their way to the injuries received, and lay dead in the streets.’59
The boys were later found, alive and well, but all across the city people were scurrying indoors before the curfew came into force at 8pm. If Dyer’s proclamation had previously failed to make much of an impression, the shooting had brutally disabused the population of Amritsar of any lingering doubts that the British were prepared to enforce their orders. The dead and the dying were thus simply abandoned. ‘I heard the wounded in the Bagh moaning and crying for water and help,’ a man living next to the Bagh recalled. ‘I dared not leave my house to render any help.’60 By this point the sun had set and, in the poet Manto’s words, ‘the evening haze began to settle over Jallianwala Bagh and lights came on here and there in nearby houses.’61
That evening, a squadron of 11th Lancers arrived at Khalsa College, and a young British officer unceremoniously ordered Gerard and the other European teachers to pack their belongings and move to Ram Bagh where they were to join the general camp. ‘Gerard was furious,’ Mel later wrote. ‘But it was the General’s orders.’62 Dyer evidently expected further unrest and did not want to leave small groups of Europeans isolated. Gerard happened to arrive at the military headquarters at Ram Bagh around the same time that Dyer returned from Jallianwala Bagh, and Melicent’s husband found ‘a prevailing fear of the effect on the surrounding country, that the massacre might have the effect of setting it all ablaze’.63 Gerard now learned that the very kind of violence he had sought to prevent on the 11th had just now taken place and there were rumours, furthermore, that several of his students were among the casualties.64 To Gerard, the shooting appeared to be completely unwarranted and he criticised General Dyer to his face, saying that ‘India would never forget.’ Dyer replied simply that ‘he had to make up his mind in a few seconds or his men
would have been overpowered – he also said he meant to strike hard as a lesson’.65
Shortly after, when the sun had set, Irving also turned up, roused from his ill-timed nap at the fort. He, too, was surprised by the hectic activity at the Ram Bhag: ‘I found the military making various arrangements for the safety of the civil station in case of a further attack. They were conducting it as in a state of warfare in the face of an enemy . . .’66 Dyer knew he had dealt the ‘rebels’ a severe blow, but the fear that his position at Amritsar might still be surrounded and overrun had not diminished. Briggs noted that during the evening of 13 April ‘special precautions were taken in case of reprisals’.67
At the fort, the women learned of the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh soon after. ‘This has cowed the natives,’ Mrs Ashford noted, ‘but there is a great spirit of revenge about which of course is dangerous.’68 Around 10pm, Dyer nevertheless took a small detachment into the city, to ensure the curfew was being observed, and to check on the pickets left at the city gates.69 Morgan, who accompanied Dyer, noted simply that ‘the curfew was one hundred per cent, there was not a soul in the streets’.70 Norah Beckett later claimed that Dyer had gone to see the women at the fort that very evening: ‘General Dyer came in looking very sad and we gave him a drink from the only bottle in the fort and then he said “I’m for the high jump but I saved you women and children.”’71
That night, Irving had sent a telegraphic message to Lahore, stating simply that seven arrests had been made and a prohibited meeting dispersed with heavy casualties.72 Gerard was, however, becoming increasingly alarmed by the attitude of the authorities, and he convinced the Deputy Commissioner to send another more detailed report to Lahore.73 This message, however, had to be delivered by hand since the lines were cut, and Gerard volunteered to go to Lahore by car along with a civil servant, a Mr Jacob. Since dacoits, or bandits, were supposed to be roaming the countryside, they were both well-armed as they drove into the night, but they made it through to the headquarters of the Punjab Government without any trouble.74