Amritsar 1919
Page 34
On 26 May 1920, Montagu’s despatch to Chelmsford, which represented the British Government’s official position on the issue of Dyer’s actions, was published alongside the report of the Hunter Committee:
His conception of his duty in the circumstances in which he was placed was so fundamentally at variance with that which His Majesty’s Government have a right to expect from and a duty to enforce upon officers who hold His Majesty’s commission, that it is impossible to regard him as fitted to remain entrusted with the responsibilities which his rank and position impose upon him. You have reported to me that the Commander-in-Chief has directed Brigadier-General Dyer to resign his appointment as Brigade Commander, has informed him that he would receive no further employment in India, and that you have concurred. I approve this decision, and the circumstances of the case have been referred to the Army Council.3
Just as Chelmsford had handed over the matter to the military, so too did Montagu refer to the Army Council to make the final decision on Dyer’s future. Due to the politically contentious nature of the case, however, the Army Council refrained from taking a committed position, and, in the end, merely affirmed the decision already made by the Commander-in-Chief of India. This meant that Dyer would simply be allowed to retire, and no further action would be taken.
The Government’s decision on Dyer’s case finally came before the House of Commons during the debate on 8 July 1920, at which both Dyer and O’Dwyer were present. The Secretary of State for India was under enormous pressure yet in his opening speech he made the link between Dyer’s case and the future of British rule in India quite explicit. The real question, he asked the House, was ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire?’4 This was a debate about the reformist policy of conciliation in India with which Montagu was so closely identified as much as it was about the fate of an ageing officer. The debate soon turned openly acrimonious, and Montagu was repeatedly interrupted and heckled. The Conservative Austen Chamberlain later recalled the debate: ‘I think I have never seen the House so fiercely angry – and he threw fuel on the flames. A Jew, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves – that was the feeling.’5 When the Unionist leader, Carson, rose to respond, he dismissed the relevance of Montagu’s broader points concerning the legitimacy of British rule in India and instead focused narrowly on the official denunciation of General Dyer. Carson came well-prepared and quoted at length General Hudson’s speech from the Indemnity debates the previous September:
No more distasteful or responsible duty falls to the lot of the soldier than that which he is sometimes required to discharge in aid of the civil power. If his measures are too mild he fails in his duty. If they are deemed to be excessive he is liable to be attacked as a cold-blooded murderer. [. . .] Should not officers and men, who through no choice of their own, are called upon to discharge these distasteful duties, be in all fairness accorded that support which has been promised to them?6
This was a powerful invocation of the central tenets of colonial governance in the Punjab tradition, and the very same case that had been made by Cooper in 1857, as well as Forsyth and Cowan in 1872. A similar appeal to the colonial sensitivities of the members of the House of Commons was also made by the Conservative Joynson-Hicks, who read out several letters from Anglo-Indian women, including one from Miss Sherwood in which she stated that ‘I am convinced that there was a real rebellion in the Punjab, and that General Dyer saved India and us from a repetition of the miseries and cruelties of 1857.’7
It was nevertheless Winston Churchill’s speech that came to define the terms of the debate and, ultimately, shape its outcome. As Secretary for War, he provided a strong rebuttal to Carson’s line of attack, which implied that the censure of Dyer was ‘un-English’, and instead suggested that it was Dyer who had betrayed British values. The Empire was based on a stronger moral foundation, Churchill argued, and resorting to what was widely considered as ‘Prussian’ tactics of terror effectively undermined British prestige: ‘We cannot admit this doctrine in any form. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopœia.’8 Following a drawn-out and divisive debate, the Government won with 230 to 129 votes, thus upholding the censure of Dyer. The General had, as his biographer described it, witnessed the entire debate: ‘Dyer, who looked moodily down from the gallery, may or may not have understood how little the merits of the case entered into the decision; Mrs Dyer, who sat with Lady Carson, wept a good deal at the cruel abuse of her husband.’9
A week later, Dyer received the letter from the War Office, informing him of the Army Council’s final decision.
Sir, I am commanded to inform you that the Army Council have considered the report of the Hunter Committee [. . .] I am to say that the Council consider that, in spite of the great difficulties of the position in which you found yourself on 13 April, 1919, at Jallianwalah Bagh, you cannot be acquitted of an error of judgment. They observe that the Commander-in-Chief in India has removed you from his employment, that you have been informed that no further employment will be offered you in India, that you have in consequence reverted to half pay, and that the Selection Board in India have passed you over for promotion. These decisions the Army Council accept. They do not consider that further employment should be offered to you outside India. They have also considered whether any further action of a disciplinary nature is required from them; but in view of all the circumstances they do not feel called upon, from the military point of view with which they are alone concerned, to take any further action.
I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, H.J Creedy10
Dyer formally resigned on 17 July 1920 and, as far as the Government was concerned, that was the end of the matter. When Dyer’s case was debated in the House of Lords just two days later, however, a motion was put forward by the conservative Viscount Finlay: ‘That this House deplores the conduct of the case of General Dyer as unjust to that officer, and as establishing a precedent dangerous to the preservation of order in face of rebellion.’11 Although there were several Lords speaking in favour of the Government’s decision, including former Viceroy of India Earl Curzon, it was the conservative element that won out with an evocative appeal by the Marquess of Salisbury, which overruled any qualms concerning the use of excessive force:
If your Lordships do not support this Motion you will strike a great blow at the confidence of the whole body of Officers throughout your Empire whose business it is to defend the cause of law and order and maintain your Government. It will have a most demoralising effect, not only upon our own countrymen but also upon the people of India. The people of India are entering upon a great experiment; and surely the lesson which, above all others, you must teach them is that there is nothing in self-government which authorises disorder.12
The House of Lords voted 129 to 86 in favour of the motion, which was not only a direct rebuke of the Government’s position but also called into question the findings of the Hunter Committee. On the day of the House of Commons debate, the conservative Morning Post had moreover launched ‘an appeal to patriots’ for funds for the benefit of Dyer – or, as the headline had it, ‘The Man Who Saved India’:
While General Dyer saved India, the politicians are saving themselves at his expense. It is a burning reproach to the British nation that such a thing should be possible. But the politicians have the power; and the only appeal is to the generous instincts of the people. In spite of the specious gloss put upon the case by those who, while reaping the benefit of General Dyer’s action, find it convenient to escape the responsibility for it, there are thousands of men and women in England who realise the truth – that the lives of their fellow-country-men in India hung upon the readiness of General Dyer to act as he acted. It is to those men and women that we appeal, to do what is in them to redress the callous and cynical wrong which has
been done. General Dyer has been broken.13
Although the appeal relied on a populist rhetoric, which maligned politicians and eulogised patriotic men and women, there was nothing spontaneous about the Morning Post fund, which mobilised the support of people such as O’Dwyer and Joynson-Hicks, and ensured a steady stream of letters from ‘old India hands’ and worried memsahibs lamenting the betrayal of Dyer could be published on a daily basis.14 The Morning Post had actually seized upon an initiative already suggested in the Anglo-Indian press in India, including The Englishman and The Pioneer, to start a subscription for Dyer who, as it was argued, deserved recognition for ‘saving India from the horrors of another ’57’.15 In 1872, it was these very same newspapers that had organised the fund for Cowan, and, notably, the narrative remained the same: similar to his colonial predecessors, Dyer was depicted as an honest officer, callously betrayed by armchair liberals, and the perpetrator of the Amritsar Massacre was thus paradoxically turned into a victim.
The Morning Post fund became an immediate success and by 30 July alone more than £15,000 had been collected.16 The pseudonyms used by people who contributed, which were printed daily in the Morning Post, revealed something of the mindset and politics mobilised by the fund: ‘One who remembers 1857’, ‘The Price of a White Man Slain’, ‘In gratitude to Gen. Dyer, from an Englishwoman who heard the mob’, ‘A Widow who remembers reading, when a child, of the horrors of 1857’, ‘An Old Anglo-Indian’. Ranging from anywhere between £50 to 1 shilling, people from all over the Empire, and from all walks of life, felt compelled to support Dyer, including Rudyard Kipling, who gave £10. When the fund eventually closed, more than £26,000 had been raised, which meant that Dyer could retire in comfort and without any financial concerns. His letter of thanks was subsequently published in the Morning Post:
I am proud to think that so many of my fellow-countrymen and women approve of my conduct at Amritsar, and I accept the token of their approval in the spirit in which it is offered. On my part my conviction was, and still is, that I was bound to do what I did, not only with a view to saving the military situation and the women and children, but with a view to saving life generally. No hesitating or half-hearted measures would, under the circumstances, have served the purpose.17
The vocal and widespread support for Dyer in the imperial metropole caused irreparable damage to the relationship between the British and their Indian subjects, and effectively killed off any hopes of reconciliation. Tagore, who happened to be in London at the time, wrote despairingly to Andrews:
The result of the debates in both Houses of Parliament makes painfully evident the attitude of mind of the ruling classes of this country towards India. It shows that no outrage, however monstrous, committed against us by agents of their Government, can arouse feelings of indignation in the hearts of those from whom our Governors are chosen. The unashamed condonation of brutality expressed in their speeches and echoed in their newspapers is ugly in its frightfulness.18
Even Gandhi, who had held out for so long, hoping for justice, returned the medals he had been awarded for his services to the Empire and formally withdrew his loyalty to the British Government.19 More than the massacre, it was the oppression and humiliation of the martial law period that caused Gandhi the most grievance, and the crawling order was, of course, the most emblematic of these measures, though by no means the only one:
The Army Council has found General Dyer guilty of error of judgment and advised that he should not receive any office under the Crown. Mr. Montagu has been unsparing in his criticism of General Dyer’s conduct. And yet somehow or other I cannot help feeling that General Dyer is by no means the worst offender. His brutality is unmistakable. His abject and un-soldier-like cowardice is apparent in every line of his amazing defence before the Army Council. He has called an unarmed crowd of men and children – mostly holiday-makers – ‘a rebel army’. He believes himself to be the saviour of the Punjab in that he was able to shoot down like rabbits men who were penned in an enclosure. Such a man is unworthy of being considered a soldier. There was no bravery in his action. He ran no risk. He shot without the slightest opposition and without warning. This is not an ‘error of judgment’. It is paralysis of it in the face of fancied danger. It is proof of criminal incapacity and heartlessness. But the fury that has been spent upon General Dyer is, I am sure, largely misdirected. No doubt the shooting was ‘frightful’, the loss of innocent life deplorable. But the slow torture, degradation and emasculation that followed was much worse, more calculated, malicious and soul-killing, and the actors who performed the deeds deserve greater condemnation than General Dyer for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The latter merely destroyed a few bodies but the others tried to kill the soul of a nation.20
By the summer of 1920, the Indian National Congress decided to withdraw its support for the reforms and Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement as the struggle for swaraj entered a new and critical phase. The tragedy was that the single most divisive issue of British post-war policy in India ultimately turned out to have been both redundant and avoidable. The Rowlatt Act, over which so much blood had been spilled, was quietly repealed a few years later. Its provisions were never invoked.21
At Amritsar, Melicent felt keenly that something had been irrevocably broken. She no longer experienced the sense of safety in the place she once considered as her home, and even the most banal incidents assumed a deeply menacing appearance:
I seldom drive in the City now, and when I did it was with a feeling that I dared not catch the eye of the men who now stared insolently at me in a way I had never experienced till last spring. One day as I went down to the Ivory Market, two men ahead of me began to fight. In an instant, men collected from nowhere. Six sadhus were coming up the street behind me shouting and singing, the crowd grew, but many of them were no longer interested in the fighters they were staring at and talking about me. I sat there quietly awaiting a chance and as soon as the fighters got into a side street I pushed through, and to my inexpressible relief met a mounted native superintendent of police and several men with him, he made way for me, followed me and did not leave me until I was safely in a broad street again.
Like Forster’s Marabar Caves, which so frightened the old Mrs Moore, the claustrophobic alleyways of Amritsar now filled Melicent with dread. India had become a foreign land, and even Gerard, who taught local students and worked closely alongside Indian colleagues every day, noticed the change: ‘There was a marked estrangement, not so much due to the firing as to the orders of a humiliating kind which were made.’22 British rule in India, Melicent believed, was at a crossroads:
Now is the time, even a few months later it will be too late, and then we shall drag on month by month with a dagger at our throats in an intolerable position, losing our best men by murder, and our best men too because they will not go to India under such conditions, till finally weakened beyond all hope we shall have to let the country go in the same state and a great deal worse than what Ireland is now.23
It was to be several years before Orwell, serving as a colonial policeman in Burma, came to the grim realisation that ‘the Empire is dying’ and Indian independence was still further away.24 The unrest throughout the Empire in 1919, however, made decolonisation suddenly seem like a very real prospect – something cherished by Indian nationalists, but deeply lamented by the British and Anglo-Indians. A conversation between the colonial policeman Westfield and the character of Ellis in Orwell’s ‘Kipling-haunted club’ in Burmese Days revealed this early onset of imperial melancholia:
‘It’s all this law and order that’s done for us,’ said Westfield gloomily. The ruin of the Indian Empire through too much legality was a recurrent theme with Westfield. According to him, nothing save a full-sized rebellion, and the consequent reign of martial law, could save the Empire from decay. ‘All this paper-chewing and chit-passing. Office babus are the real rulers of this country now. Our number’s up. Best thing we can do is to shut up shop and let �
��em stew in their own juice.’
‘I don’t agree, I simply don’t agree,’ Ellis said. ‘We could put things right in a month if we chose. It only needs a pennyworth of pluck. Look at Amritsar. Look how they caved in after that. Dyer knew the stuff to give them. Poor old Dyer! That was a dirty job. Those cowards in England have got something to answer for.’25
The Amritsar Massacre might thus appropriately be understood as the dying gasp of an imperialist ideology mired in nineteenth-century racialised notions of exemplary violence, and one which was ill-suited for the changing world of the twentieth century. Crucially, neither Melicent nor her fictional counterparts in the works of Forster or Orwell were ever able to recognise that it was their own policies, and their own violence, that had made the continuation of British rule in India unsustainable.
Melicent made the last entry in her diary as she and the children set out on their final journey back to the imperial homeland while Gerard stayed behind. It had been less than a year after the disturbances, yet right till the very end, Melicent’s experience was characterised by fear and the uncertainty of what had become a headlong flight from the Empire. Tinged by a Kiplingesque sentimentality, her single biggest concern remained the safety of Gerard and a dark foreboding of what the future might bring for British rule in India:
And now that England was really within my grasp, I never felt I wanted to leave India less. I was really depressed at going. All this year I had looked forward to the voyage home with Gerard, and here I was going off alone with the three children, leaving him to go back to Heaven knew what. At the very least to a miserable cold comfortless house, with his eyes so bad that he could scarcely read a line to himself and his health far from good . . . And at the worst, and quite a possible worst, bloodshed and murder. No wonder I hesitated now the time had come. Besides, we had been happy at Amritsar in a way we had never been happy before, and life glowed with interest . . .26