by Kim Wagner
Dyer suffered a debilitating stroke in 1921 and was subsequently confined to the cottage near Bristol that he had bought with the money from Morning Post fund. He spent the final years of his life largely isolated and away from the prying eyes of the public. In 1924, his name and the events at Amritsar, however, were briefly brought back into the limelight when the untiring O’Dwyer sued a former member of the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, Sir Sankaran Nair, for libel.27 In his 1922 book about the political upheavals in India, Gandhi and Anarchy, Nair had been highly critical of the administration of Punjab during the war, and explicitly blamed O’Dwyer for the ‘atrocities in the Punjab which we know only too well’.28 This was hardly an outrageous attack, and Nair was furthermore a moderate nationalist who was highly critical of Gandhi, yet O’Dwyer seized it as an opportunity to vindicate himself, and, perhaps more importantly, also General Dyer.
During the trial, more than a hundred written testimonies from residents of Punjab were submitted, while a number of people who had been at Amritsar in 1919, including Kitchin and Gerard, testified in court. During the five-week-long proceedings, however, it became increasingly clear that it was in fact a proxy trial of Dyer. The General was too ill to appear in person, but the judge, H.A. McCardie, was openly sympathetic to the attempt at rehabilitating Dyer and stated that ‘I wish to see that this man who is dying has a fair trial from a living jury.’29 In summing up the case, and instructing the jury, on the last day of the trial, McCardie turned directly to the subject of the Amritsar Massacre: ‘Speaking with full deliberation and knowing the whole of the evidence given in this case I express my view that General Dyer, in the grave and exceptional circumstances, acted rightly, and in my opinion, he was wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India.’30 The jury eventually decided in favour of O’Dwyer, and Nair had to pay substantial damages and the cost of the trial.31 The Government was furious, since McCardie’s pronouncement explicitly undermined the findings of the Hunter Committee and the position of the Government four years earlier, yet the verdict was widely seen simply as a vindication of Dyer. The following day, 6 June 1924, one newspaper headline was ‘Dying General Cleared: “Wrongly Punished”’, while another simply read ‘Dyer Justified’.32
This may have been some consolation to the General, who was by that point wheelchair-bound. In July 1927, Dyer suffered yet another stroke, after which his health deteriorated rapidly. His daughter-in-law, who was looking after him, tried to comfort the old General who appeared to be agonising over the massacre. On his death-bed, Dyer told her, ‘Thank you, but I don’t want to get better. So many people who knew the condition of Amritsar say I did right . . . but so many others say I did wrong. I only want to die and know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong.’33 He died shortly after, on 23 July 1927. In stark contrast to the ignominy of his return from India and resignation, Dyer received a full military funeral, and his coffin, draped in the Union Jack that had flown over his headquarters at Jullundur, was carried in state on a gun-carriage of the Royal Horse Artillery past the Cenotaph. Among the flowers subsequently laid at the foot of the Cenotaph was a wreath from Rudyard Kipling with a small inscription, and what can only be described as a qualified tribute: ‘He did his duty as he saw it.’34 In its obituary, the Morning Post described Dyer as a martyr to political expediency and likened him to the heroes of the ‘Mutiny’ – and to John Nicholson in particular. Considering Nicholson’s brutality during the suppression of the uprising in 1857, this was perhaps not entirely inappropriate.35
Although Dyer became the central figure in the controversy over the Amritsar Massacre, he was not the only officer whose life and career was affected by the events of 13 April 1919. It never received much attention by the press, yet several of the key officials at Amritsar were subsequently censured by the Government of India: the two senior Indian policemen who had failed to take action at the kotwali on 10 April, Deputy Superintendent of Police Khan Sahib Ahmad Jan, and Inspector of Police Muhammad Ashraf Khan, were both demoted and the former retired on reduced pension. Miles Irving and Kitchin, too, were singled out for criticism for having handed over authority to Dyer and for afterwards not maintaining close contact with the General.36 Kitchin retired a year later, but Irving continued to work within the Civil Service in India. ‘He never talked about Dyer and the shooting if he could avoid it,’ Irving’s daughter later recalled. ‘His career went on, but the episode did him no good.’37
For some of the men involved, there seems to have been a strong desire to put it behind them, and McCallum of the 9th Gurkhas noted how his friend, Captain Crampton, who commanded the troops at Jallianwala Bagh, ‘has never spoken to me about the “incident” either then or since’.38 Girdhari Lal, who witnessed the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, also claimed that the Inspector of Police at Amritsar, John Rehill, ‘could not bear to see the firing through and went outside the garden to avoid the sight’.39 Rehill’s surprisingly brief testimony before the Hunter Committee, in which he claimed that he never saw anything, seems to bear this out. Years later, Rehill’s niece noted that, although he continued to work in the Punjab police, he never fully recovered from the experience of 13 April 1919:
After the massacre he took to the bottle and several times was the worse for wear on duty. His colleagues covered up for him. He became depressed and moody [. . .] He completely lost his zest and, for very many years, had the most appalling nightmares. As a youngster, they tell me, he had been a bold and daring man but, when I knew him, he was a shadow of that former self.40
Others, however, were completely unmoved about what had taken place in Amritsar. Following his return from Punjab in 1919, Michael O’Dwyer worked tirelessly in support of General Dyer and his uncompromising stance was further expressed in the libel case against Nair in 1924, as well as his autobiography published the following year, entitled India as I Knew It. O’Dwyer’s name was thus forever linked to that of Dyer and Amritsar, and, when the Indian revolutionary Udham Singh shot and killed the retired Lieutenant-Governor in London in 1940, it was in revenge for the massacre.41 Although O’Dwyer was not the scheming cartoon villain who orchestrated the Amritsar Massacre, as Indian nationalists have portrayed him, he was fully complicit in that he gave his tacit encouragement, and explicit approval, for the violent suppression of the unrest in Punjab.
Melicent and Gerard Wathen were at that point living in England, where he had become the headmaster of the Hall school. Although Gerard had been awarded a Companion of the Indian Empire in 1922, for his services in the field of education, Melicent lamented that he never received any official recognition for the role he played in tempering the official response during the disturbances in Amritsar.42 Indeed, Gerard was more or less written out of the official history of the events of April 1919, and he was never asked to testify before the Hunter Committee. He did, however, provide testimony at the libel trial in 1924, and, following the murder of O’Dwyer, Gerard wrote a letter that was published in The Times:
It fell to me to be the first to tell Sir Michael O’Dwyer of the shooting in the Jallianwala Bagh. I reached Government House at Lahore from Amritsar at 3 a.m. that night and urged Sir Michael to go at once to Amritsar and replace in the hands of the civil authorities the power being vested then under martial law in the hands of General Dyer. I told him that I feared intense bitterness among the Sikhs, and probably a rising.
He took a different view; said that the shooting, however horrible, would mean an end of rioting, and besides, he added: ‘I always trust the man upon the spot.’43
Gerard concluded the letter with a remarkable statement: ‘He was right and I was wrong.’44 After twenty years, the man who had done more than anyone else to prevent further bloodshed at Amritsar, ultimately found himself to be siding with the most reactionary colonial mindset. In 1942, Gerard contributed to E.M. Forster’s radio programme on BBC, entitled ‘My Debt to India’, and both Melicent and her husband lived to see India become independent five year
s later.45 By that point, however, the events at Jallianwala Bagh were overshadowed by the sheer scale of violence and suffering as the border between India and Pakistan was drawn and Amritsar turned into a veritable battleground. Marcella Sherwood, who had retired from missionary work, remarkably returned to Punjab at the age of 70 to help with relief work among the thousands of refugees uprooted by the violence.46 While her name had become indelibly linked to that of General Dyer and the crawling order, Sherwood did not let her harrowing experience on 10 April 1919 stop her from returning to India three decades later. She died in 1966 in England.47
Others, however, never forgot their experience. Fifty years later, Sergeant Howgego of the 25th Londons, who had been in the picket at Kucha Kaurianwala and taken souvenir photos of himself and his comrades enforcing the crawling order, still remembered General Dyer with great fondness. In 1978, the old veteran wrote a letter of complaint to the editor of Sunday Express, in relation to a review of the final volume of Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy.48 The sentence that caused offence was seemingly inoffensive: ‘In India in 1919 hundreds of unarmed Indian civilian demonstrators were massacred.’ To Howgego, this was nevertheless a great calumny:
Killed yes, massacred, no. Demonstrators, no, rioters yes. Martial law was already in force in Amritsar and all meetings had been prohibited, warning was given that fire would be opened if the mob did not disperse. The mob did not disperse and fire was opened. [The review] does not mention the fact that Europeans had been murdered, banks burnt, trains derailed and stations attacked and looted. Not a pretty sight, I know I was there . . .49
Having been there, in this case, did not preclude Howgego from being mistaken about both martial law or the warning. Yet that mattered little to the veteran who still nourished the Morning Post narrative:
Brig Gen Dyer was later recalled, censured and relieved of his command. The man who saved India, was condemned quite unjustly by people who knew nothing of India, and died soon afterwards of a broken heart. I have since met retired people who served in civil administration in India, all say he saved India. The army would have gone anywhere and done anything with him.50
While he found time as an old man to complain about the mischaracterisation of the Amritsar Massacre, Howgego himself never reflected on his actions in April 1919, noting simply that ‘we did various guard duties’. On the back of the photograph he took of the flogging post in Kucha Kaurianwala, Howgego wrote with a biro: ‘Set up as a deterrent. I did not see or hear of it actually in use.’ That, of course, was a blatant lie.
Others were more candid in their recollections. When interviewed in 1986, Alfred Griffith, who had served as an RAF despatch rider at Lahore and Amritsar during the unrest, described his still vivid memories of the riots:
We were pelted with bricks, mud-bricks, and the noise . . . that was what put the wind up you, the screech, its worse than anything, you hear it and as you’re getting nearer the roar runs, and all you can think of is open mouths and eyes, staring eyes, the mouth is wide open and the eyes are nearly jumping out of their heads, and their arms are flailing. There’s nothing on earth like it, to see a crowd of Indians.51
Even after six decades, Griffith had forgotten none of the lessons of colonial rule, and when asked what he thought of Gandhi and what he referred to as ‘striking niggers’, the old man answered with a laugh: ‘Well, I know what I’d do, I’d put a machinegun on them. There’s only one thing that’ll stop a riot and that’s physical punishment.’52
CONCLUSION
AN EMPIRE OF FEAR
When historical significance is attached to an occurrence independent of the event, the facts of the case cease to matter. And where all subsequent accounts are parasitic on a prior memory, documentation seems almost unnecessary.
Shahid Amin1
When British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jallianwala Bagh in 2013, he wrote a brief message in the visitor’s book in lieu of a formal apology:
This was a deeply shameful event in British history, one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the time as ‘monstrous’. We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world.2
This was a skilful reference to Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons on 8 July 1920, which is often taken as proof that the British Government straightforwardly condemned the Amritsar Massacre. What happened at Jallianwala Bagh, Churchill proclaimed:
is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.3
The real point, however, is to be found elsewhere in Churchill’s speech:
Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.4
Dyer, in other words, was explicitly singled out as a rotten apple, and the massacre itself portrayed as an aberration within an otherwise benign imperial project. Churchill’s much-quoted disavowal of Dyer’s actions was accordingly not an acknowledgement of the violence of empire. It was, on the contrary, an elaborate act of deflection and a staunch attempt to reassert the moral legitimacy of the British Empire in the aftermath of the Amritsar Massacre. Considering that Churchill, just a few months later, initiated the indiscriminate policy of brutal reprisals in Ireland and oversaw the violent suppression of unrest elsewhere in the Empire, the speech was in fact blatantly disingenuous.5 Yet, by invoking Churchill at Jallianwala Bagh, David Cameron could in 2013 both denounce the massacre and reclaim the moral narrative of Britain as a force for good in the world. It should thus be clear that to quote Churchill at Jallianwala Bagh does not constitute a reckoning with the past so much as a continuation of colonial policy.
Churchill’s insistence on British exceptionalism has proven to be remarkably resilient, and, indeed, forms the cornerstone for renewed attempts within the last decade or so to rehabilitate the Empire and its legacies. In the twenty-first century, empire nostalgia is predicated on the assumption that colonial violence was the result of rogue individuals, rather than part of the structure of imperialism itself. In reference to the suppression of Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya, for instance, author Lawrence James concedes that the British ‘behaved savagely at times’, but complains that ‘An empire that lasted 300 years is judged solely on the misconduct or errors of a handful of its servants. The crimes of one vicious intelligence officer in Kenya obliterate all the patient and benevolent labour of hundreds of district commissioners throughout Africa.’6 Niall Ferguson, whose name has become virtually synonymous with chest-thumping neo-imperialism, similarly describes British brutality in Kenya as ‘exceptional’.7 This approach is not limited to popular writers pandering to conservative sentiments. When British historian John Darwin was criticised in 2015 for not sufficiently highlighting the role of racialised violence within the British Empire, his response was tellingly dismissive:
Exactly how to discuss violence in relation to the British Empire is an interesting question. Plainly there were many brutal episodes in its history. Plainly, its authority depended ultimately (and sometimes immediately) upon the use of violence. But then so has that of almost every state in history, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (and things are not getting better). To say that violence played a central part in Britain’s imperial history is not to add much to the sum of knowledge.8
Since violence was not unique to imperialism, Darwin seems to suggest, no further examination is warranted beyond a token gesture towards t
hose ‘episodes’ about which it is difficult to equivocate. The inevitable invocation of the Amritsar Massacre or the suppression of the Mau Mau, as unfortunate yet singular excesses, ultimately serves to marginalise the role of violence as a key aspect of British colonialism. Add to this the similarly inevitable comparison to German or Belgian colonial atrocities, or, in Darwin’s case, to the mass murders of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, which relativises British colonial violence to the point of whitewash. The result is an implicitly sanitised account of the British Empire. By downplaying the ubiquity of racialised violence in Britain’s imperial history, or simply relegating the subject to the margins of analysis, respectable scholarship ultimately ends up sustaining more insidious narratives. Indeed, there is but a small step from Darwin’s ‘brutal episodes’ to the Daily Mail proudly proclaiming that the Empire did much good, despite ‘the occasional massacre’.9
Churchill’s description of the Amritsar Massacre, however, was profoundly misleading and Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 were neither ‘without precedent’ nor ‘foreign to the British way of doing things’. A more appropriate speech to quote from the House of Commons debate of 8 July 1920 would in fact have been Wedgwood’s brief but poignant intervention:
The complaint is not that General Dyer committed this crime. It is not just a question of punishing General Dyer. I agree with Mr. Gandhi, the great Indian, representing, I think, all that is finest in India, when he said, ‘We do not want to punish General Dyer; we have no desire for revenge; we want to change the system that produces General Dyers.’10
At Amritsar, Dyer had simply followed the example of so many colonial officials before him – including Cooper in 1857, or Cowan in 1872 – who, as described in the Prologue, resorted to exemplary and indiscriminate violence when faced with rebellion and anti-colonial unrest. When justifying the mass slaughter of sepoys in 1857, Cooper described such violence as necessary: