Amritsar 1919

by Kim Wagner

  During the latter part of April, General Dyer had been occupied touring the countryside with a movable column in a show of force to impress upon the villagers the continuing strength and resolve of the Raj. Although martial law was still in place, order had been restored throughout Punjab and the British authorities could turn their attention to the looming conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan. On 6 May, war broke out when the new ruler of Afghanistan sought to instigate a rising at Peshawar and then invaded British India in an ill-fated attempt to shore up domestic support for his rule. Throughout Punjab, military forces were hastily mobilised and Dyer left Amritsar two days later, on 8 May, and later played a significant role commanding the British forces in this short-lived colonial war.138 Before his departure, however, Dyer was celebrated by some of the local residents of Amritsar and invited to the Golden Temple, as his biographer described:

  ‘Sahib,’ they said, ‘you must become a Sikh even as Nikalseyn Sahib became a Sikh.’

  The General thanked them for the honour, but he objected that he could not as a British officer let his hair grow long.

  Arur Singh laughed. ‘We will let you off the long hair,’ he said.

  General Dyer offered another objection, ‘But I cannot give up smoking.’

  ‘That you must do,’ said Arur Singh.

  ‘No,’ said the General, ‘I am very sorry, but I cannot give up smoking.’

  The priest conceded, ‘We will let you give it up gradually.’

  ‘That I promise you,’ said the General, ‘at the rate of one cigarette a year.’

  The Sikhs, chuckling, proceeded with the initiation. General Dyer and Captain Briggs were invested with the five kakas, the sacred emblems of that war-like brotherhood, and so became Sikhs. Moreover, a shrine was built to General Dyer at their holy place, Guru Sat Sultani, and when a few days afterwards came the news that the Afghans were making war upon India, the Sikh leaders offered the General ten thousand men to fight for the British Raj if only he would consent to command them.139

  This anecdote, undoubtedly embellished for literary effect, cast Dyer in the mould of General Nicholson of ‘Mutiny’ fame – as one of those Victorian heroes of the Empire, who were admired and respected by the ‘natives’ whom they understood and treated as their own children. This was in many ways a deeply incongruous finale to Dyer’s brief stay in Amritsar, but reflected the close links maintained by the British with those ‘loyal’ communities from which many soldiers were traditionally recruited. With large parts of the local political elite and nationalist leaders essentially imprisoned or silenced, there were many men of means in Amritsar who seized the opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the British administration. During the upheaval of April, the political rivalries that had first expressed themselves during the municipal elections earlier that year had re-emerged with renewed force, and expressions of loyalty to the British were thus deeply entangled in the power dynamics of local politics.140 The Golden Temple was, furthermore, managed not by the Sikh community but by Mahants or priests appointed by, and thus loyal to, the British Government.141 Dyer’s apotheosis and investment with the symbolic emblems of a Sikh was thus an explicitly political gesture, rather than one which reflected the genuine sentiments of the local population more generally.

  A few days later, on 13 May, the missionary C.F. Andrews arrived to make inquiries at first hand of the stories of violence and oppression that had begun to emerge and spread beyond Punjab. Before he was unceremoniously put back on the train by the authorities and expelled from the province, Andrews described the tense atmosphere that still prevailed in Amritsar, exactly a month after the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh: ‘I have seen the police, at every corner, dominating the city. I have seen the long lines of cavalry patrolling the streets. I have understood from the lips of many witnesses, the terror which these forces have inspired.’142

  CHAPTER 11

  TESTIMONY OF BLOOD

  I feel degraded and ashamed that we white people, subjects of the King and Emperor of India, have had to fly for our lives and hide like rats in a drain, for it is no exaggeration to say that if they had got at us they would have murdered every one of us.

  Letter from Mrs Ashford at Amritsar1

  During April 1919, hundreds of European women and children had been fleeing the turmoil of the plains onboard special trains, heading for the safety of the hill stations that dotted the mountains north and east of Amritsar and Lahore. This was the first time in living memory that the ruling class had been reduced to refugees in what they considered to be their own land. Melicent Wathen and the children were among the many evacuees leaving the plains and they eventually made it to Rawalpindi and from there onwards to Gulmarg. It was from the safety of this small hill station in the beautiful hills of Kashmir that Melicent sat down and wrote her diary. Although her diary entries recounted events as they were unfolding, they also reflected an attempt to make sense of a traumatic experience and trace the sequence of events that had brought her and the children there. Having left Amritsar just a few hours after Dyer arrived, Melicent’s diary presented an account of the British Raj in peril and of having only just escaped a terrible outbreak.

  Exactly what Melicent and the children were fleeing from, however, was never quite clear, and her conception of the threat remained vague:

  We in Kashmir didn’t feel altogether safe. I never felt really happy – till I got to Gulmarg. Things in the state were unsatisfactory. There was shortage of rice – a muddle over fuel – so that many were starving and as Kashmiris were beginning to return from the looting of Amritsar, there was some cause to fear their influence might be brought to work and used as a further tool by the Bolsheviks.2

  Melicent was far from alone in imagining the unrest to be somehow related to the intrigues of foreign revolutionaries; one of her compatriots expressed the very same concerns in a letter to an acquaintance back in Britain in early May:

  If you hear the Indian Government criticized for severity, don’t believe the critics. It is possible that the old Amir’s murder and the new Amir’s conduct and the risings in so many places are all parts of one big plot financed by Germany and Bolshevism. Bolshevik money is reported to be reaching India. It is a blessing we kept all so quiet during the war.3

  With the outbreak of the Third Afghan War, the alarmist threat assessments that since the beginning of April had linked the actions of Gandhi and anti-Rowlatt protests to a larger conspiracy, seemed to be retrospectively justified. O’Dwyer would later claim that: ‘It was, and is, common knowledge that the Afghan invasion and tribal risings were encouraged, if not instigated by emissaries from Delhi and Amritsar.’4 Administrators such as O’Dwyer could not recognise Indian nationalism and popular politics as either genuine or legitimate and instead interpreted the protests of 1919 exclusively in light of earlier precedents – especially the challenge to colonial authority posed by the Ghadar movement and revolutionary violence during the First World War. In their most outlandish iterations, these accounts were little more than a feverish concoction of unlikely intrigues that could have been taken straight from John Buchan’s catalogue of imperialist spy-thrillers, including the 1916 classic Greenmantle. One British intelligence officer, who had been active in Central Asia during the aftermath of the war, in all earnestness referred to ‘the Soviet-Afghan defeat in the Jallianwala Bagh’.5

  The Indian nationalist leaders accused of being behind this plotting could only respond with disdain and incredulity. As Satyapal put it:

  The only basis on which such a grave charge was made against us was the tutored statement, full of falsehood and base accusations of the approver, a man of no morals, no education and no social status in life. I do not wish to seriously discuss this, as I honestly believe that no sane man would ever believe that the Afghan War was a result of our schemes or that we had anything to do with it directly or indirectly.6

  The fact was that, despite the global rise of anti-colonial movements during these
years, the unrest in Punjab had not been the result of a conspiracy. As in 1907, there was never any concerted efforts to ‘tamper’ with the loyalty of the Indian soldiers in British service, nor was there ever any evidence of either German, Bolshevik, or Afghan involvement. In May 1919, the Director of Central Intelligence, Sir C.R. Cleveland, explicitly stated that:

  So far no traces of organized conspiracy have been found in the Punjab. There was organized agitation, and then in particular places the people went mad . . . I am sorry to see that the Times of India and The Pioneer have committed themselves to the theory of Bolshevism or Egyptian instigation for our Indian troubles. I have satisfied myself that they have no evidence worth the name to support the theory.7

  No proof of the alleged conspiracies ever materialised and Thompson, O’Dwyer’s secretary, later had to admit that ‘we did not claim that we had much direct evidence on the subject’.8 This did not, however, prevent the story from becoming firmly entrenched within the narrative of what colonial officials such as O’Dwyer dramatically referred to as ‘The Punjab Rebellion of 1919’.9

  While most Anglo-Indians applauded what they perceived to be Dyer’s suppression of the uprising at Amritsar, there were a few who, like Gerard, were horrified by the British violence. Malcolm Darling, a friend of the Wathens who was in the civil service at Lahore, visited Gerard in Amritsar that summer and later described the situation in a letter to E.M. Forster:

  We’re in a bit of a mess out here. Racial hatred in towns leaping in a twink to pillage and murder, murder too of the most horrible kind. Then panic and cruelty – the two go together. I understand now why Germans did those terrible things in Belgium, they got cold feet passing through and fell blindly upon the people whom they feared. We did not rape or hack to pieces, but one day in Amritsar they shot down hundreds, mostly zemindars, there by religious hazard (Bhaisakh Day). I have seen the place – a death-trap. 5 or 6,000 there, the kernel of them thoroughly seditious, but the majority lookers on, mooching about as zemindars do. Enter infuriated general – ‘I took thirty seconds to make up my mind,’ said he to Wathen – and then – 1500 rounds. God it makes me sick to think of it. Yet I was told by my chief ten days later – ‘people at the Club (Lahore) say you ought to be court martialled for criticising’.10

  It is difficult not to recognise in this letter the origins of some of the key scenes in Forster’s A Passage to India published four years later. Cyril Fielding being shunned by the infuriated Anglo-Indians at the club at Chandrapore, for example, appears to be lifted directly from Darling’s letter.11 Darling was, in fact, later charged with dereliction of duty during the unrest, although he was eventually exonerated of the accusations of cowardice levelled against him by the likes of Kitchin.12 During moments of crisis, there was no room for dissent, as Forster’s irascible Major Callendar put it: ‘You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, at least not in this country.’13 In Burmese Days, Orwell similarly included the adage that ‘we white men must hang together’ as one of the ‘five chief beatitudes of the pukka sahib’.14

  If Gerard and Darling served as the inspiration for Forster’s liberal and humane protagonist, Melicent revealed herself to be a perfect Mrs Callendar – or perhaps even Orwell’s Mrs Lackersteen. Describing Dyer’s actions in a letter to a relative back in Britain, Melicent showed little sympathy for her husband’s views, and even less for the people of Amritsar:

  The order went out that no meetings were to be held. The blackguard leaders told the mob we should never dare to fire, so a huge meeting collected. They got their desserts this time, for the troops were ready, and fired and killed over 200, and a good thing too [. . .] Fear is the only thing by which you can rule a wild uneducated crowd, and thank heaven Sir Michael and General Dyer acted as they did. I don’t care what Gerard says, or any of those other sentimentalists. That shooting was drastic, but it was needed, and it’s done more good than a hundred years of soft talk and reasoning – and I believe it will carry more weight than all the subtle lies and reasonings of these seditionists – for the people have learnt that after certain limits we do at last turn, and hurt, and that is a fact . . .15

  Norah Beckett, who had left for the safety of the hills along with Melicent, similarly described what was becoming the prevalent attitude among so many Anglo-Indians in Punjab at the time: ‘It has been stated that there was no real insecurity and no more trouble than the police should have dealt with. No European who was in Amritsar or Lahore doubts that for some days there was a real danger of the entire European population being massacred and that General Dyer’s action alone saved them.’16

  While the more conservative-minded Anglo-Indians gleefully told themselves that Dyer’s actions had effectively saved the Raj, Indians in Punjab and beyond were reaching a very different conclusion. Just two days after the massacre, the Indian secretary of the YMCA, S.K. Datta, visited Jallianwala Bagh along with a friend, who described the scene: ‘The dead had been removed, but the testimony of blood remained; and Datta stood weeping and saying, “This ends the British connexion with India.”’17 The subsequent experience of living under martial law only served to further deepen the loss of faith in the Sarkar as a stern but fair Ma Bap, as one resident of Amritsar described:

  I must say, however, that the pride which I myself, and my countrymen felt in British justice has received a rude shock. None of us could ever have thought, that what happened during the Martial Law period was possible anywhere within the British Empire. Much of the ideal, which we cherished of British justice and beneficence, has been, I regret to have to say, shattered. So far as the people of Amritsar are concerned, I pray to god that we may not have to see those Martial Law days again.18

  Strict censorship of the press and the restrictions on travel under martial law nevertheless allowed the British authorities to contain such sentiments. A young Jawaharlal Nehru, who was later to become independent India’s first prime minister, remembered how complete the news black-out was:

  The Punjab was isolated, cut off from the rest of India; a thick veil seemed to cover it and hide it from outside eyes. There was hardly any news, and people could not go there or come out from there. Odd individuals, who managed to escape from that inferno, were so terror-struck that they could give no clear account. Helplessly and impotently, we, who were outside, waited for scraps of news and bitterness filled our hearts.19

  Nehru was perhaps taking some poetic licence here, yet the British Government enforced the gagging policy scrupulously. When critical accounts of the conditions in Punjab were published in the Bombay Chronicle towards the end of April, its editor, Benjamin Horniman, was promptly and unceremoniously deported from India.20

  Both Montagu and Chelmsford were deeply concerned about the way that the crisis in Punjab was being handled, yet there seemed to be a real danger that negative press might risk further derailing the reforms due to be implemented at the end of that year. Between London and Simla, the British Government found itself again having to strike a balance between the proverbial ‘pen and the sword’. Neither the Secretary of State for India nor the Viceroy had much affection for O’Dwyer and, when Montagu first learned of the use of aeroplanes, bombs and machine guns, he observed tersely that ‘our old friend, firm government, the idol of the Club smoking room, has produced its invariable and inevitable harvest’.21 Montagu realised that the suppression of the unrest would damage the Government’s reputation and that, furthermore, the rumours emerging from Punjab would sooner or later have to be addressed.22 Towards the end of May, he thus announced that he had directed Chelmsford to set up an inquiry to investigate the accusations of suppression and use of excessive force during the disturbances and period of martial law in the province.23 The Secretary of State for India was not at this point aware of the true extent of the violence that had taken place; instead, he simply assumed that an open inquiry would convince Indian moderates of the British commitment to fairness and reform.24

  At a time
when Indian nationalists, as well as Labour politicians in Britain, were clamouring for an investigation, the announcement was expected to mollify the critics and buy the British Government more time. After the Rowlatt Satyagraha protests descended into violent unrest and official retribution, Gandhi felt compelled to call for the ‘suspension of civil disobedience’ on 18 April, famously admitting that it had been a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’.25 Gandhi nevertheless refrained from any direct criticism of the Government, and instead encouraged a cautious approach on the assumption the British would, by setting up an inquiry, ultimately show themselves to be amenable to reason and justice. Others were less patient. The Indian poet and writer, Rabindranath Tagore, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, was the first person to take a public stance and dramatically denounce the British suppression of the unrest in Punjab. On 31 May, just a month and a half after the massacre, yet before any details had become known, Tagore wrote to Chelmsford and formally renounced his knighthood:

  The accounts of the insults and sufferings by our brothers in Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers – possibly congratulating themselves for what they imagine as salutary lessons. This callousness has been praised by most of the Anglo-Indian papers, which have in some cases gone to the brutal length of making fun of our sufferings, without receiving the least check from the same authority – relentlessly careful in smothering every cry of pain and expression of judgement from the organs representing the sufferers. Knowing that our appeals have been in vain [. . .] the very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror.