Amritsar 1919

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Amritsar 1919 Page 28

by Kim Wagner


  Sexual violence against men was in fact a common aspect of police torture, which was endemic in colonial India, and regarded as an intrinsic part of ordinary criminal investigations.62 It was also one that British officials routinely chose to overlook. The Provost Marshal at Amritsar, Major J.R. Shirley, was fully aware of the abuse, since, as he mentioned, ‘numerous reports and complaints were made to the Military authorities with regard to the corruption of police officials and of persons giving false information to the police with a view to the arrest of individuals for their private ends’.63 Given the division of responsibilities during the administration of martial law, however, Shirley did not feel compelled to act on any of this information unless specific evidence was brought before him. Despite the fact that people even outside Punjab, including Gandhi’s and Tagore’s close friend the missionary C.F. Andrews, approached the authorities with information of extensive abuse in Amritsar, the Punjab Government only ever recorded two minor cases of police corruption.64

  Notably, Shirley blamed the police corruption and abuse of power during this period on the population of Amritsar:

  The reluctance of the people of Amritsar City to give information which would lead to the arrest and punishment of conspirators and rioters was very noticeable indeed, and if doubtful methods were used to obtain evidence or if prosecution by the police took place, the inhabitants of Amritsar themselves are more to blame than anyone else. They did not render the assistance which it was their bounden duty to give and their attitude only made the procuring of definite evidence as to the existence of corruption an impossibility but was in my opinion the primary cause and principal incentive to any corruption or persecution that may have taken place.65

  That the victims of colonial violence and oppression only had themselves to blame was indeed a common trope, and one that Dyer too deployed when he claimed that the people of Amritsar ‘brought themselves under martial law’.66

  Everyday police practices of the colonial state in British India relied extensively on extortion and physical coercion, yet at Amritsar the scale of abuse, extortion and torture, as well as allegations of the mistreatment of Indian women, was unprecedented.67 During the period of martial law, however, Dyer, Irving and other officials simply looked the other way while Plomer and his staff were given free rein to apprehend the ‘ringleaders’ and people behind the protests and riots, and to produce the witnesses and evidence to enable their conviction. This was especially so when the prestige of the Raj and the honour of a white woman was at stake.

  In Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, the British civilian Ellis, portrayed as a rabidly racist colonial archetype, is seething with rage after a white man has been killed by the ‘natives’:

  He had brooded all night over what had happened. They had killed a white man, killed a white man, the bloody sods, the sneaking, cowardly hounds! Oh, the swine, the swine, how they ought to be made to suffer for it! Why did we make these cursed kid-glove laws? Why did we take everything lying down? Just suppose this had happened in a German colony, before the War! The good old Germans! They knew how to treat the niggers. Reprisals! Rhinoceros hide whips! Raid their villages, kill their cattle, burn their crops, decimate them, blow them from the guns [. . .] Ah, for a real rebellion – martial law proclaimed and no quarter given! Lovely, sanguinary images moved through his mind. Shrieking mounds of natives, soldiers slaughtering them. Shoot them, ride them down, horses’ hooves trample their guts out, whips cut their faces in slices!68

  While obviously a fictional character, Ellis was not so far from some of the real Anglo-Indians of Amritsar in his expression of rage. Smith’s assistant, Dr Bal Mukund, described an encounter with his irascible superior a week after the massacre:

  He enquired of me, what the number of casualties was at Jallianwala Bagh on the 13th. I replied that some people estimated them at nearly one thousand, while others thought that more had been killed. Thereupon he said ‘No, the official figures are 1800 casualties.’ I told him these people were nearly all innocent; but he said, ‘No, they were not innocent, the people of Amritsar shall have to pay the price of European lives.’69

  At Amritsar, it was the attack on Miss Sherwood more than anything else, that provoked the Anglo-Indian community and gave rise to calls for revenge. Still holed up in the fort, Mrs Ashford noted: ‘General Dyer is a strong man and he only waited for an opportunity to punish the natives.’70

  On 18 April, the residents of Kucha Kaurianwala, the narrow street where Miss Sherwood had been attacked a week before, were interrupted in their daily chores by the arrival of Plomer accompanied by several Indian police officers and British troops. Plomer, who was mounted on a horse, was hitting out with his riding crop, yelling at the local shopkeepers and ordering them to stand in the presence of a sahib.71 A neighbourhood headman, Sunder Singh had been tasked by Dyer to identify the attackers and he and the police immediately began interrogating the local residents.72 A local woman, Lachman Kour, later described her experience:

  At the time all our men were out. The soldiers began to trouble us, women, and asked us who assaulted the Miss Sahib. They caught hold of our servant, kicked him and struck him with the butt-ends of their rifles mercilessly. I am a purda nashin. I never appear in public, not even before the servants. I was however, called down from my house. I went with a pardah (veil). I was peremptorily ordered to take off my pardah. I was frightened and removed the pardah. I was then asked who assaulted Miss Sahib. They threatened me that unless I named the assailant. I would be given over to the soldiers. I said, I did not know and could not name anybody falsely.73

  Lab Chand Seth, who owned a shop in the street, was told to vacate his ground-floor room to accommodate the detachment of eighteen British soldiers of the 25th London Cyclists, who were to be posted there during the day for as long as it took until the culprits had been apprehended. As the involuntary host of the soldiers, Seth was treated more leniently than his neighbours as he later recounted:

  A tiktiki (flogging post) was erected just opposite Kucha Kurichhan [the small side-alley, where Miss Sherwood was attacked], fitted with handcuffs on both sides. Soldiers were posted at different places with loaded rifles, and the passage was closed to everybody. A menial servant was beaten severely opposite my house to draw information about the culprits. He named someone under police pressure, and then another man was got hold of and beaten, and so it went on. I saw several persons so beaten. At about 8pm, a Sikh and a Hindu were handcuffed and were taken away.74

  Another man was kicked and dragged by the beard up and down the street by one of the Indian policemen, who was trying to elicit information.75 The entire neighbourhood was thus terrorised and women and children in particular were cowering in fear behind locked doors in their houses.

  On 19 April, Dyer visited Miss Sherwood, who was ‘lying on a pallet in the Fort, swathed in bandages between life and death.’76 Seeing the injured woman made a powerful impression on the General, as did the prevailing attitude among the European civilians ‘all shut up in the fort, the feeling among them was very bitter . . .’77 Dyer returned to the city and headed for the Kucha Kaurianwala, as he later described:

  A helpless woman had been mercilessly beaten, in a most cruel manner, by a lot of dastardly cowards. She was beaten with sticks and shoes, and knocked down six times in the street. She tried to get entrance at an open door, but the door was slammed in her face. To be beaten with shoes is considered by Indians to be the greatest insult. It seemed intolerable to me that some suitable punishment could not be meted out. Civil law was at an end and I searched my brain for some military punishment to meet the case.78

  ‘We look upon women as sacred,’ Dyer noted, and seized upon the notion that the site of the attack ought to be considered as ‘holy ground’.79

  In seeking to come up with an appropriate response to the outrage, Dyer once more reached back in time. The very notion of a ‘sacred spot’ commemor-ating an attack on a white woman by Indian men echoe
d the memorial at Cawnpore, where almost 200 women and children killed by the rebels in 1857 had been thrown into a well. This was a key site on the ‘Mutiny’ pilgrimage tour, and Indians were explicitly not allowed to enter the memorial itself. When complaints were raised in 1902, especially over the ambiguous sign at the entrance which stated that ‘no dogs are admitted on the grounds’, the then Viceroy Lord Curzon stated that ‘The spot is sacred to the British, not to the Hindus. It is, further, consecrated ground; and, just as the Hindus keep us out of the sacred places of their faith, an exclusion which we never dispute, so we have an equal right to keep them out of ours, particularly in a place with such memories as Cawnpore.’80 Dyer thus decided that the Kucha Kaurianwala should be turned into a ‘sacred space’, as he put it: ‘I gave orders that this street must be blocked at both ends and that no Indians be allowed to go through it and that if they wanted to pass they must go through on all fours.’81 This idea was strongly reminiscent of the British retribution at Cawnpore in 1857, when General Neill infamously forced Indian prisoners to crawl and lick up the blood in the house where the women and children had been killed.82 Dyer’s actions were thus redolent with the memories of the ‘Mutiny’, which, consciously or not, served as inspiration for the reassertion of British authority at Amritsar. Dyer furthermore stated that: ‘My object was not merely to impress the inhabitants, but to appeal to their moral sense in a way which I knew they would understand.’83 There was accordingly a cultural specificity to the forms of punishment inflicted on the local population.

  Dyer later told Irving that the order was also intended to calm the calls for revenge among the European civilians and soldiers: ‘He explained to me that his idea was to emphasise in the most public and striking way the enormity of an offence against a woman, and by so doing to take men’s minds off the idea of private reprisals for an offence so calculated to provoke them.’84 The crawling order thus had more than one audience. Apart from intimidating the local population, the order sent a clear message to the Europeans at Amritsar that Dyer was fully capable of exacting vengeance. Dyer, in fact, announced the order publicly both to his troops and to the civilians in the fort, as his biographer later described:

  On Sunday, the 20th April, all available English-men by special warning attended church parade, and General Dyer addressed them on the duty of their race in the situation in which they found themselves. He particularly warned the troops against reprisals, and pointed out that justice was in the hands of authority. ‘The impression of the solemnity of the speech,’ says an officer who was present, ‘remains with me [. . .] Although the troops had been very much incensed, particularly by the attack on Miss Sherwood, no case came to my notice of any one either exceeding his duties or ill-treating Indians.’85

  Following the announcement of the order, Captain McCallum noted, Dyer told the other officers over breakfast about his drive through the city to inspect the various pickets: ‘Much to his surprise and amusement he had found the guard at the place where the English lady had been beaten up, had told everyone that if they wanted to pass, they must crawl.’86 Like the enforcement of the curfew on 13 April, Dyer had not fully considered the implications of his actions, and he later claimed that: ‘It never entered my brain that any sensible or sane man under those conditions would intentionally go through that street.’87 The fact was that, soon after Dyer had left the street on 19 April, eleven men who had been arrested for not displaying sufficient respect, were taken to the kotwali and their guards deliberately took them through Kucha Kaurianwala.88 The first Indians who were forced to crawl along the lengths of the street were thus random residents of the city who had no choice but to comply with the orders of their captors. Neither Dyer, nor any other official, ever acknowledged that the residents of the street, as well as a number of locals who unknowingly took that route, were all subjected to the brutal treatment of the soldiers of the picket. Irving had previously approved of the order, on the condition that women were exempted, but, when he suggested to Dyer that, instead of crawling, people might be allowed to simply remove their shoes, the General ignored him.89

  The truth was most likely that Dyer simply did not care that much about the finer details of what was indisputably a racialised regime of collective punishment, nor how much the local residents suffered. Having issued the order, Dyer was only too happy to allow it to continue and he later assumed full responsibility for its enforcement.90 It was subsequently claimed that only fifty men had been forced to crawl between 19 and 24 April, and Lieutenant-General Sir Havelock Hudson, the Adjutant-General in India, argued that the measure had been no more than a minor inconvenience:

  The order remained in force for a period of five days and there is good reason for the belief that, except for the party of prisoners already mentioned, those who were subjected to the order came voluntarily to submit to it for the sake of notoriety or martyrdom. One man after going down the street on his hands and knees three times had to be stopped giving further exhibitions.91

  The local residents, however, told a different story. The 25-year-old Kanhya Lal, who worked as a servant for a relative in the street, did not know of the pickets when he went to work early in the morning of 19 April:

  I was going to the house of L. Bute Shah, my master and relative, when I met two British soldiers with rifles in their hands, near the Jain Sabbha Mandir [Jain temple]. I salaamed them. They asked me to lie down on my belly. As they threatened me, I did so. After that, when I was going to rise, they struck me with the butt-ends of their rifles, and asked me to crawl along on my belly. Then I crawled on to the house of L. Bute Shah. All the while, the two British soldiers kept laughing at me. And, when I stopped for a moment in the way to take breath, they struck me again with the butt-ends of their rifles.92

  Everyone who lived on the street was subjected to this treatment, often kicked and abused by the soldiers and, as many of the houses did not have a back-entrance, the occupants were trapped inside. The soldiers who spent days enforcing the crawling order entertained themselves by shooting the pigeons from the sanctuary in the local Jain temple and roasting them on open fires in the street. The women were particularly terrified of the soldiers, as one local described: ‘If, at any time, we happened to stand by our window, the soldiers insulted us by exposing themselves and threw bricks at our house.’93 To add further insult to injury, the soldiers would urinate in the local well and in the entrance to people’s houses.94 With no ready access to water, some residents fell ill, but doctors refused to attend to anyone in the street lest they should themselves be maltreated by the soldiers.95 The soldiers indeed made no exceptions and the blind old beggar Kahan Chand, for instance, was also made to crawl when he inadvertently walked into the picket:

  While I was groping my way into the street with the support of a stick that I always carry, I was asked by a policeman to halt. On my begging of him to let me proceed, I was told that I could only do so if I was willing to crawl over the whole length. I informed the policeman that I had been practically starving for the last two days, but he would not let me go. I then had to crawl on my belly, and had hardly gone a few yards when I received a kick on my back, and my stick slipped off my hands. I then moved on, begging for alms from the residents of the quarter, but was advised to leave the place as owing to the bad times through which they were passing, the residents were not in a position to give me food. I then with great difficulty managed to make my way out of the lane by the side of Kaurianwala well.96

  The crawling order was not the only example of colonial retribution. The very same day that Dyer gave his racialised and righteous colonial sermon in church, a striking example of what ‘justice in the hand of authority’ actually entailed was made in Kucha Kaurianwala. By erecting the whipping post in the street where Sherwood had been attacked, Dyer was very explicitly drawing on a long tradition of executing criminals, and afterwards gibbeting their bodies, on the site of their crime.97 Not only was the public punishment intended to serve as
a deterrent, it also transformed the physical space into a permanent reminder of the power and vengeance of the state.98 Public floggings had taken place from the moment martial law was declared, but on 19 April O’Dwyer had intervened and called a stop to what was too obviously a crude tactic of intimidation.99 When Dyer was ordered to stop the public floggings, he instead had them carried out on the tennis courts outside the club at Ram Bagh and, crucially, ordered the local lawyers and other leaders who had been ‘enrolled’ as magistrates to witness this.100 Without an audience to receive and disseminate the ‘message’, the spectacle of punishment would be ineffective. By closing off the Kucha Kaurianwala, Dyer could moreover make the claim that the street was no longer a public space and the exemplary punishment he had in mind could proceed.

  In order for exemplary punishment to be truly effective, it also had to be prompt, as Dyer himself noted: ‘in martial law you want a speedy punishment [. . .] and that is why whipping comes in’.101 Once the flogging post had been erected, it was crucial that it should be deployed quickly, lest it be perceived as an empty threat. As it happened, on 20 April, six young men aged between 18 and 28, who had been interned in the fort, were sentenced to thirty stripes each by the Provost Marshal for unruly behaviour. One or two of them had originally been arrested on suspicion of having taken part in the attack on Miss Sherwood and, when Dyer heard of this, he decided that they were to receive their summary punishment on the flogging post in Kucha Kaurianwala.102 A large crowd had been gathered in the narrow street to see the flogging, including the relatives of some of the men. One of the local residents described the spectacle:

 

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