by Kim Wagner
Visited Jallian Wala Bagh – walked round and saw numerous bullet marks – Counted 67 on one part of one wall – There must have been at least 200 on the walls I saw [. . .] Changes being made in the garden – Walls raised – Wooden planks put up – A lot of earth being thrown up etc – Many bullet marks very high up – One bullet mark on a balcony just outside the Bagh facing the lane over canal – Most peculiar – Could only have been fired from the lane or else the bullet bounced off.66
Crucially, Nehru, and others, took numerous photographs of the bullet-riddled walls, which even at this early date had white chalk-circles drawn around every single hole.
There were, in fact, various attempts at photographically documenting what had taken place during the unrest at Amritsar. The official photographs taken by the British authorities were aimed explicitly at recording the scenes of riots of 10 April and the extent of damage to buildings and other structures.67 There was thus an almost forensic quality to the images of the burnt-out interior of the National Bank and the room in the Alliance Bank where G.M. Thomson was killed. Yet what this visual evidence had in common was that the buildings, rooms and open spaces were invariably devoid of human life. By contrast, Indian photographers restaged the enactment of the crawling order in Kucha Kaurianwala, and thus literally inserted people into the street scenes of Amritsar. There were also a number of photographs taken surreptitiously at actual floggings during martial law, especially in Amritsar and in Kasur, and it was thus the public punishment and humiliation, real or re-enacted, that came to define the visual repertoire of British oppression in Punjab during April 1919.
There was, however, no similar imagery to depict what had happened at Jallianwala Bagh. Images taken later in 1919, by the Indian photographer N.V. Virkar, showed local men and boys arrayed along the southern wall, each pointing to an encircled bullet-hole as a sort of proxy witnesses.68 The horrors of 13 April could only be captured through the symbolism of the bullet-holes, and it was these that left such an indelible mark on Andrews.
CHAPTER 12
A PIECE OF INHUMANITY
On 14 October 1919, Lord Chelmsford formally announced the setting up of the Disorders Inquiry Committee. Chaired by Lord Hunter, a Scottish advocate and politician, who also lent his name to the inquiry, the Committee consisted of four British and three Indian members who were either civil servants or lawyers, and one army officer. The Committee’s brief was to ‘investigate the recent disturbances in Bombay, Delhi and the Punjab, their causes, and the measures taken to cope with them’.1 The Hunter Committee was, in other words, tasked simply with an investigation and, although it was expected that recommendations might be made based on its findings, the Committee had no authority to pass sentences or legally sanction individuals. Two days after the Hunter Committee had been announced, the unofficial investigation was launched as the Indian National Congress Punjab Inquiry and was soon after joined by M.K. Gandhi and other noted Indian nationalists.2 From the beginning, the relationship between the two parallel investigations was deeply fraught, and Congress eventually boycotted the Hunter Committee because of the restrictions placed on the participation of imprisoned nationalists, including Kitchlew and Satyapal.3 While the Hunter Committee never interviewed any of the nationalist leaders or local residents of Amritsar, the Punjab Inquiry did not have access to British officials.
By deliberately including Indian members as part of the Hunter Committee, Montagu and Chelmsford had sought to restore something of the public confidence in Government prior to the introduction of the reforms, yet there were many who regarded the inquiry with distrust. Indian nationalists suspected that it would simply be a whitewash, while British officials and Anglo-Indians were furious that colonial policy during an emergency would be subject to scrutiny, particularly by Indians. Reunited with Gerard back in Amritsar in October, Melicent was among those who resented the interference by the British Government, and the fact that many of the sentences passed during martial law were now being overturned:
The Commission under Lord Hunter was beginning to rake up all the old feelings, which had really subsided. It was most unfortunate that the Home Government should have shown such complete distrust of the local Government [. . .] Our men in the Punjab are as fine a race as was ever bred, fair-minded, with the highest sense of duty. Working through sickness and in health for the good of the country, with literally never a thought for themselves, and with an understanding and sympathy unparalleled. There is no question but that they must know more than the men at home. They should have been trusted through this but one of the worst errors in the history of our times in India has been perpetrated and with the action of the home government, the waning of our power has begun. The people now show an utter contempt for us and they know they can murder and rob and within a few hours of conviction by the local authorities, who do know, the India Office, who can know nothing, will absolve them. Never have we made so great a blunder. Yet our men still stick loyally to their work and will do so.4
For Melicent, it was both ‘disastrous’ and ‘heart breaking’ that the local administration should be undermined by armchair liberals back home, who had neither experience nor any appreciation of what was required to maintain an empire. The loss of prestige that she believed to be the inevitable outcome of the conciliatory policies was particularly worrying, and Melicent was beginning to doubt whether it was safe for her and the family to remain in India:
With the coming of the National Congress to Amritsar at Christmas, the knowledge of the coming railway strike, the ill feeling aroused by the sitting of the Hunter commission, and the news of the Bolshevist agents working through the Middle East, I began to feel I could not face any more trouble with the children and decided to go home as soon as we could get passages.5
Amritsar was, in Melicent’s imagination, merely one manifestation of a global crisis. At the very point at which the British Empire had reached its absolute zenith, covering the largest geographical expanse at any point in history, Melicent saw the world as she knew it crumbling around her.
During autumn 1919, the Hunter Committee examined dozens of witnesses in all the major cities that had been affected by the unrest, including Delhi, Lahore, Ahmedabad, and Bombay. The inquiry convened at Lahore between 13 and 21 November to hear the testimonies of and question all the key officials who had been involved in the events at Amritsar, including Irving, Beckett, Massey, Plomer and Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, as well as a few senior Indian officials. The focus, however, was almost entirely on General Dyer, who was questioned and cross-examined at length over the course of several days. This was the first time that Dyer was given the opportunity to publicly explain himself, but also the first time that his actions came under close and critical scrutiny. Dyer had already submitted a second and longer report at the end of August, yet it was only with the inquiry that many of the crucial details of the events at Jallianwala Bagh were brought out into the open.
It is often assumed that, over the course of time, Dyer deliberately altered his explanation and justification for carrying out the massacre.6 In various informal conversations with officers and people in Punjab during the summer of 1919, he originally emphasised the precarity of his position and the fear that crowd would attack his small force. Just three days after the shooting, Dyer met with O’Dwyer who later described the General’s account:
He said to me that when he got to Jallianwala Bagh he found this enormous crowd gathered there. He had a very small force under his control. He was in a very remote and isolated part of the city. I think I ought to mention this in justice to General Dyer. He was aware that his retreat might be cut off. I think he said, after he had fired the first volley, the crowd made a rush. He thought that this was intended to intercept his retreat and he went on firing, but he thought afterwards (he was very frank about it) that that was not their intention, after seeing the place more fully, and that this was one of the methods of egress so as to escape from the Jallianwala Bagh.7
Dyer later became more assertive, and increasingly defiant, in his explanations, dropping any hint of his fears of being overrun or concern about the lack of exits from the Bagh. During his testimony before the Hunter Committee, Dyer claimed to have been in full control of the facts and to have carried out the shooting deliberately. These apparent disparities led the writer E.J. Thompson to suggest that the massacre had simply been a tragic mistake, and that the General only fired for as long as he did because he was unaware that there was no way out. When he was subsequently credited with having suppressed the ‘rebellion’, Thompson suggested, Dyer did not want to admit that it had been unintentional and instead concocted the story of a calculated massacre.
Thompson’s explanation of the events at Jallianwala Bagh, as little more than a tragic mistake, nevertheless failed to explain why Dyer felt compelled to shoot on the crowd in the first place – exits or no exits. It is evident that Dyer changed the emphasis of his explanation, from self-defence to the execution of his duty, and that he did so as his actions came under increasing scrutiny. Yet none of his different explanations were mutually incompatible. In fact, everything that Dyer said was a reflection of the same colonial mindset, which carried the indelible imprint of the lessons of the ‘Mutiny’. The large gathering of people at Jallianwala Bagh could only be perceived as an imminent threat to a heavily armed force if Indian crowds were considered to be inherently irrational and violent. The same threat assessment that made Dyer panic thus also prescribed the appropriate response to avert the imagined threat, namely a prompt and striking example. The fear of being overrun and the perceived need to teach the population of Punjab a lesson were two sides of the same coin. The unarmed crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh could only be mistaken for a rebel army, and the surge of fleeing people only perceived as an attack, if Dyer regarded Indians in racialised terms and amenable only to the language of brute force. The bare facts of the case were indeed incompatible with the notion that Dyer had merely been trying to disperse the crowd, or that he had done so with a minimum amount of force. At no point had the crowd actually turned against the troops, and all the casualties were incurred as people were either sitting down, taking cover or running away from the firing, i.e. dispersing, and in many instances people were shot as they were trying to scale the walls to escape.
It was later claimed that the cross-examination had been both hostile and unfair, and one British officer noted that ‘General Dyer, baited beyond endurance made some very silly statements. In this respect he was his own worst enemy.’8 When the Indian lawyer Setalvad asked Dyer whether he would have used the machine guns if he could have brought the armoured cars into the Bagh, Dyer responded ‘I think probably yes.’ Considering Dyer’s evident readiness to make use of extreme force, there was little point in hypothesising what he might have done if greater firepower had been available and the question served no real purpose beyond muddying the waters. It is thus noteworthy that many later accounts, as well as illustrations, of the massacre inaccurately depict the use of machine guns at Jallianwala Bagh.9 The cross-examination of Dyer before the Hunter Committee, however, could not appropriately be described as either manipulative or inquisitional, as even one of the more heated exchanges with Justice Rankin showed:
Q: Did it ever occur to you that by adopting this method of ‘frightfulness’ – excuse the term – you were really doing a great disservice to the British Raj by driving discontent deep?
A: No, it only struck me that at the time it was my duty to do this and that it was a horrible duty. I did not like the idea of doing it but I also realized that it was the only means of saving life and that any reasonable man with justice in his mind would realize that I had done the right thing; and it was a merciful act though a horrible act and they ought to be thankful to me for doing it.
Q: Did this aspect of the matter strike you that by doing an act of that character you were doing a great disservice to the British Raj?
A: I thought it would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realize that they were not to be wicked.10
Faced by probing questions of a layperson, Dyer was compelled to spell out the logic of colonial violence and, as E.J. Thompson put it at the time, ‘Dyer had only blurted out the view commonly held by a high proportion of military and civil officers in India.’11 In his novel, Abdication, Edmund Candler made much of Dyer’s ‘honesty’ before the Hunter Committee, even as he expressed unease with the obvious similarities between British practice and those of the much-maligned ‘Hun’ or Prussian:
Perhaps we were a little hysterical about ‘frightfulness’ at the start. The Hun learnt to rub his nose in blood and filth earlier than we did, that was all; though, thank God, we were not in the habit of saying, ‘I am frightful only to be kind.’ Still Dyer and his school believed in their decency and kindness, and that was the main thing. Anyhow, Dyer was straight about it. He was British enough when it came to cross-examination.12
Being ‘British enough’, however, proved to be Dyer’s undoing. Much as had been the case with Cooper in 1857, who gloried in the slaughter of rebel sepoys, it was Dyer’s blunt description of his thought-process that ultimately made his actions so difficult to justify. Even O’Dwyer, who remained to the last a staunch supporter of the embattled General, claimed that he had approved the shooting as it was originally reported, but that Dyer’s explanation before the Hunter inquiry was ‘indefensible’.13
As the Hunter Committee continued its work, focusing the inquiry on the unrest in other parts of Punjab, the Congress investigation was coming to an end and the people involved began to disperse. With the closing of the Congress inquiry, C.F. Andrews was also leaving Punjab, this time in the company of Gandhi. Considering the tone and content of the statements made by British officers and officials during the preceding weeks of the inquiry, Andrews’ farewell speech at Lahore could not have been more different:
The massacre of Glencoe in English history is no greater blot on the fair name of my country than the massacre at Amritsar, I am not speaking from idle rumour. I have gone into every single detail with all the care and thorough--ness (that a personal investigation could command) and it remains to me an unspeakable disgrace, indefensible, unpardonable, inexcusable. And I am obliged to go on from that incident to what followed under Martial Law. I have seen with my own eyes the very men who have endured the crawling order, the compulsion to grovel on their bellies in the dust, the public flogging which was administered to hundreds of men and a hundred other desecrations of man’s image which according to our Christian scriptures is made in the likeness of God. This ruthless and deliberate emasculation of manhood by the brute force of the military and the police appears to me no less an indelible stain on the fair honour of my country than the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh itself. These are the very few words which I have felt compelled as an Englishman to say with regard to the culminating acts of the Disturbance. Every day that I have been working side by side with my Indian fellow-workers, the deep sense of the wrong done has come home to me, and each act has been in very truth an act of penance, of atonement, an act of reparation for my country.14
In a rather different manner, Montagu had also worked towards a public act of reconciliation to coincide with the introduction of reforms at the end of the year. At the same time that the India Act of 1919 was passed, on 23 December that year, King George V issued a royal amnesty for all prisoners held for non-violent crimes.15 Along with hundreds of people who had been imprisoned since April, Kitchlew, Satyapal and Bashir were thus released and received a hero’s welcome as they returned to Amritsar.16 The Indian National Congress session was at that time being held in Amritsar, and much of the debate invariably concerned the events that had taken place in Punjab and whether the reforms were any longer viable. Reports of Dyer’s testimony before the Hunter Committee had been widely circulated in the Indian press and caused bitterness that the amnesty alone could not alleviate. Gandhi, who still believed that the Government wo
uld ultimately accept responsibility for the violence, nevertheless ensured that the Congress passed a resolution formally thanking Montagu and promising to cooperate on the implementation of the reforms. For Montagu and Chelmsford, this was as good an outcome as they could have hoped for after working on the reform scheme for so long – and with so many obstacles. The success, however, was to be short-lived.
Reports from the Hunter Committee inquiry did not reach London till almost a month later, when Indian newspapers arrived by mail, and it was only then that the British press and public became aware of the actual scale of the shooting.17 ‘Even India had little idea of what had taken place’ it was claimed in the Manchester Guardian on 13 December when they broke the story:
Already it is proved that the reports issued by the Government of India and the India Office were totally misleading, minimising the extent of the rebellion and the extent of the casualties. The following account of the riots at Amritsar, where a crowd numbering some thousands were fired upon in a closed square, suffering casualties between 400 and 500, is the first complete account that has yet appeared, and is taken entirely from the evidence given before the Committee.18
The figure of 400–500 killed was actually derived from Irving’s testimony during the inquiry, and was based on Burton’s assessment, which Dyer then subsequently accepted as a plausible estimate.19 The press soon began questioning why the details of the massacre had been withheld, and Montagu had to admit before the House of Commons that he was not in possession of more information than everybody else: ‘I knew of no details of the circumstances until I saw the report in the newspapers.’20