Amritsar 1919

by Kim Wagner

  to show publicly in the eyes of all men, that, at all events, the Punjab authorities adhered to the policy of overawing, by a prompt and stern initiative (the only way to strike terror into a semi-barbarous people), and to the last would brook nothing short of absolute, active, and positive loyalty. Government could not condescend to exist upon the moral sufferance of its subjects.11

  These were almost the exact same words as Dyer spoke before the Hunter Committee and what happened at Jallianwala Bagh was thus in many ways predictable and cannot simply be explained ad hominem. ‘Amritsar is not an isolated event,’ as the Labour MP Benjamin Spoor noted in 1920, ‘any more than General Dyer is an isolated officer.’12 Dyer himself invoked his ‘thirty-four years’ residence in India’ in what amounted to a plea of diminished responsibility, and during the debate in the House of Commons even his supporters made the same argument:

  Whenever the people of India show signs of unrest or of conspiracy or of revolution there rises before the minds of Anglo-Europeans the spectre of the Indian Mutiny and the horrors of Cawnpore, and they are constrained to ask themselves whether the disturbances are only the precursors of a similar revolution. So a greater force is used in quelling disturbances than would be used in other places where British rule is more firmly established.13

  After 1857, the British in India did not respond to local unrest as much as to what they imagined that unrest was or could become – hence the consistent disproportionality of violence on the part of the colonial regime. The Amritsar Massacre was accordingly both retributive and pre-emptive: Dyer took revenge for the attacks on Europeans, including Miss Sherwood, during the riots three days earlier, but he also acted to prevent a much bigger outbreak that he believed to be imminent. In 1920, General Sir Herbert Lawrence, the son of Sir John Lawrence of ‘Mutiny’ fame, came out strongly in support of Dyer whom he described in almost mystical terms and as part of a distinctly colonial genealogy:

  Dyer had saved a massacre of Europeans and had nipped in the bud a serious outbreak. [. . .] Dyer had been brought into the world solely that he might be at Amritsar at that precise time; for no other soldier of his rank would have been so fearless as to act as he did without thought of his own future, and have acted with such an understanding of the ‘half devil and half child’; as Kipling also born in India diagnosed the natives to be.14

  Despite the claims of Herbert Lawrence, Dyer was far from unique, and, considering Kitchin’s advocacy for stronger measures, or Lieutenant-Colonel Smith’s proposal to drop bombs on Amritsar, he was not even the most belligerent among his peers. Elsewhere in Punjab, aeroplanes were indeed deployed against Indian crowds, as Adjutant-General Havelock Hudson later explained: ‘It may, of course, be argued that a bomb cannot be dropped, nor a machinegun fired from an aeroplane with any great degree of accuracy. This may be true, but when the mark aimed at is an unlawful assembly it is not very material whether those in front or behind are made to suffer.’15

  Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh thus reflected commonly held sentiments among the British officers involved in the suppression of the disturbances. In the colonial capital, for instance, the senior officer commanding openly stated of the shooting there on 30 March that: ‘Composed as the crowd was of the scum of Delhi city, I am of firm opinion that if they had got a bit more firing given them it would have done them a world of good and their attitude would be much more amenable and respectful, as force is the only thing that an Asiatic has any respect for.’16 At Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer simply pursued this logic to its extreme conclusion as he made explicit when questioned by the Hunter Committee:

  Q. I take it that your idea in taking that action was to strike terror?

  A. Call it what you like. I was going to punish them. My idea from the military point of view was to make a wide impression.

  Q. To strike terror not only in the city of Amritsar, but throughout the Punjab?

  A. Yes, throughout the Punjab. I wanted to reduce their morale; the morale of the rebels.

  This was, it might be added, not simply a military action in support of the civil authorities to disperse a riot but a massacre that emulated the spectacle of a formal execution. Whether it was the people gathered at Jallianwala Bagh or the young men flogged for the attack on Miss Sherwood, the guilt of the individuals was more or less irrelevant to the real purpose of the violence – namely the performance of colonial power pure and simple. Colonial punishment had little to do with justice, and the suppression of the unrest in Punjab in 1919 exposes the fundamental lie about the pre-eminence of the rule of law in British India in the most glaring fashion. A week after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, on 21 April 1919, O’Dwyer made a remarkable statement when defending Dyer’s actions to Viceroy Chelmsford: ‘The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that there should be, it was best at Amritsar.’17 O’Dwyer was here using the word ‘holocaust’ in its literal sense of a ‘burnt offering’ – as a sacrifice. The crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, in other words, had to be sacrificed to produce the necessary effect, ‘clearing the air’, and preventing a second ‘Mutiny’.

  The racialised logic that underpinned Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh, and colonial violence more generally, was furthermore not confined only to ‘exceptional moments’ of crisis or warfare. What has been described as the ‘rule of colonial difference’ was instead an intrinsic aspect of the paternalism, despotic or liberal, on which British rule in India was founded.18 The perceived need to maintain racial hierarchies barred Indians from the European Club, permitted the beating of ‘native’ servants, but also allowed Dyer to perceive the people at Jallianwala Bagh as an undifferentiated crowd that could be shot down for moral effect.19 Each and every one of the punitive measures deployed at Amritsar, from the compulsory displays of respect to the crawling order, was predicated on the bodily alterity and essential ‘othering’ of Indians.20 Under colonial rule, the local population never enjoyed the full status of subjects and could instead be treated collectively as potential enemies during disturbances.

  While British rule in India was not essentially maintained through terror and spectacles of violence, the same cannot be said for the borderlands of the Raj, nor of the ever-expanding frontiers of the Empire.21 Fighting a range of local populations, variously described as ‘tribal’, ‘savage’ or ‘fanatic’, on the North-West Frontier, in Afghanistan, in Sudan or throughout parts of Africa and elsewhere, the British routinely massacred locals with machine guns, drove off cattle and burned villages in demonstrative displays of power.22 What became known as ‘savage warfare’ was not simply shaped by the tactical necessities of asymmetric fighting against irregular enemies but was based on deeply encoded assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents.23 During moments of crisis, as in Punjab in 1919, the ‘frontiers’ of the Empire can be said to have contracted as spectacular modes of coercion, punishment, and violence, usually relegated to the margins of colonial control, were deployed within the heartland of the colony. It was this implicit admission of colonial failure, however brief, that caused such an outcry and embarrassment, as the pretences of the civilising mission were momentarily cast aside, and the brute power of the colonial project revealed in all its bloody glory.24

  It is often assumed that the experience of four years of brutal warfare during the First World War, as well as the transformation of the political landscape after 1918, led to the abandonment of exemplary violence in colonial warfare. The Amritsar Massacre is thus usually regarded as the last colonial atrocity following which a doctrine of ‘minimum force’ came to characterise British colonial counter-insurgency. The truth is that, while the British public may have become less accepting of colonial violence with the passing of time, the abiding belief in both the efficacy and necessity of exemplary force against anti-colonial movements and rebellions persisted.25 The use of airpower within the British Empire reveals the continuing distinction in the types of military te
chnologies that could be deployed against ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ populations later in the twentieth century.26 Similarly, the scale and level of brutality in the counter-insurgency campaigns in places such as Palestine, Kenya, or Malaya would have been inconceivable in, for instance, Northern Ireland or Cyprus.27 The language changed over time, as Callwell’s ‘small wars’ became Gwynn’s ‘imperial policing’, followed, after the Second World War, by ‘counter-insurgency’.28 The principle, however, remained largely the same and the rule of colonial difference never lost its purchase. Ultimately, Churchill’s notion of ‘frightfulness’ was a perfect summary of the forms and functions of colonial violence as deployed throughout the British Empire in the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century: ‘What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.’29 Considering the use of spectacles of violence to maintain the Empire, ‘frightfulness’ was very much ‘a remedy known to the British pharmacopœia’.

  Rather than an exceptional episode, ‘in singular and sinister isolation’, the Amritsar Massacre revealed the inner workings, and imagined vulnerability, of British colonial rule in India. Although contemporary events, such as the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 or the outbreak of violence in Egypt in March 1919, might have provided the more obvious precedents for Dyer to act upon, it was still events sixty years earlier that guided his actions. At Amritsar on 13 April 1919, Dyer was not responding to the dramatically changed political situation of the post-war Empire. Rather, as the writer E.J. Thompson put it in 1927, ‘it was our inherited thought concerning the Mutiny and Indians and India that drove him on. The ghosts of Cooper and Cowan presided over Jallianwala.’30

  Not only did the spectre of the ‘Mutiny’ exacerbate perceived threats, it also obscured the nature of the real challenges facing colonial rule in 1919. When Michael O’Dwyer was called upon to justify the deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal, he made a remarkable claim: ‘I felt that if they stayed there longer a very grave state of rebellion and bloodshed would be brought about and in fact, even their deportation did not obviate such occurrences.’31 O’Dwyer’s assessment of the unrest in Punjab thus ignored the fact that it was British panic, and pre-emptive action, that sparked the riots on 10 April, which eventually led to the Amritsar Massacre. The key precipitating factor in stirring discontent, namely the Rowlatt Act, had of course also been a piece of purposely pre-emptive legislation. Following the advice of Forster’s colonial policeman McBryde and taking the lessons of the ‘Mutiny records’ to heart, was accordingly not the panacea it was supposed to be, but instead a form of self-fulfilling paranoia. Churchill’s description of ‘frightfulness’ thus crucially failed to acknowledge the extent to which that doctrine itself was the product of colonial anxieties. Perhaps, after all, General Dyer had not been so disingenuous when he claimed that ‘we cannot be brave unless we be possessed of a greater fear’.32

  When passing his final orders in the Kuka affair in 1872, Governor-General Lord Napier made a poignant observation regarding the use of violence in the Empire: ‘Summary orders are often taken for acts of vigour, when they are in truth acts of weakness. Such orders frequently show that those who give them doubt their own strength, and are afraid to be merciful to their opponents.’33 Similar to the violence of 1857 and 1872, the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh was thus the function of a colonial order that was never sufficiently confident to do without the spectacle of exemplary violence. That the use of violence might be counterproductive was even conceded in the final report of the Hunter Committee, when Dyer’s rationale for opening fire at Jallianwala Bagh was finally dismissed in 1920: ‘The employment of excessive measures is as likely as not to produce the opposite result to that desired.’34

  Colonial violence ultimately undermined colonial rule by alienating the local population and turning its victims into martyrs of nationalist movements. It is thus noticeable that the sites of colonial violence have become central to anti-colonial narratives and today function as the locus of post-colonial pilgrimage. When the details of the Amritsar Massacre first reached London in December 1919, Colonel J.C. Wedgwood with remarkable foresight warned of how the event would be remembered:

  In the ordinary English primer the only thing the ordinary person learns about British rule in India is about the Black Hole of Calcutta and the massacre of Cawnpore, where there was a well choked with corpses. Centuries hence you will find Indian children brought up to this spot. just as they visit now the Cawnpore Well, and you can imagine the feelings of these Indians for generations over this terrible business [. . .] Think what all this means! You will have a shrine erected there and every year there will be processions of Indians visiting the tombs of the martyrs and Englishmen will go there and stand bareheaded before it.35

  A shrine was indeed erected at Jallianwala Bagh, which till recently had a sign stating that ‘this ground was hallowed by the mingled blood’ of the victims. The notion of a ‘sacred spot’ is strangely reminiscent of how Dyer conceived of Kucha Kaurianwala, where Miss Sherwood was attacked and the crawling order subsequently enforced. When renewing the call for an official apology in 2016, Shashi Tharoor told a journalist: ‘Imagine what it would be like if a British prime minister sank to his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh.’36 The symbolic symmetry is unmistakable, yet the question of what an apology would mean, or actually achieve, remains more elusive.

  In the twenty-first century, empire nostalgia paradoxically relies on amnesia to produce an edifying narrative that can be nourished in times of distress and postcolonial decline. Taking succour in Britain’s past glory requires that colonial violence and events such as the Amritsar Massacre be glossed over, or otherwise written out of the narrative. A British apology for the Amritsar Massacre in 2019 would, as a result, only ever be for one man’s actions, as isolated and unprecedented, and not for the colonial rule, or system, that, in Gandhi’s words, produced Dyer. Rather than being an act of humility, an apology in the centenary year would thus simply sustain a sentimental vision of the British Empire – a vision in which the red blotches on the world-map are not blood but clusters of eternally grateful ‘natives’, and on which the sun stubbornly refuses to set.

  We are not responsible for the past, but we are responsible for how we choose to remember – or forget – the past. And perhaps there are wounds that we should not attempt to heal.

  EPILOGUE

  JALLIANWALA BAGH

  The plants and flowers are all scorched or withered

  Deprived of its scent, the pollen is scattered like a stain on the ground

  Alas! This lovely garden is drenched in blood

  Come spring, dear king of seasons, but come quietly

  This is a mourning-place, so make no noise

  Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, ‘Jallianwala Bagh Mein Basant’

  [Spring in Jallianwala Bagh] (1929)1

  Within a year of the massacre, and long before its real consequences were known, Jallianwala Bagh was purchased after a public subscription and turned into a memorial park.2 There was originally some opposition to the idea, and it was suggested that a memorial at Amritsar would – like the British ‘Mutiny’ memorial at Cawnpore – simply ‘perpetuate bitterness and ill will’. Gandhi, who was one of organisers behind the subscription, responded with great poignancy:

  Can we afford to forget those five hundred or more men who were killed although they had done nothing wrong either morally or legally? If they had died knowingly and willingly, if realising their innocence they had stood their ground and faced the shots from the fifty rifles, they would have gone down to history as saints, heroes and patriots. But even as it was, the tragedy became one of first class national importance. [. . .] We were unable to protect our helpless countrymen when they were ruthlessly massacred. We may decline, if we will, to avenge the wrong. The nation will not lose
if we did. But shall we – can we afford to – decline to perpetuate the memory and to show to the surviving members of the families of the dead that we are sharers in their sufferings, by erecting a national tombstone and by telling the world thereby that in the death of these men each one of us has lost dear relations?3

  For the poet Hasan Manto, who grew up in Amritsar, the Bagh retained much of its symbolic significance as a gathering place for anti-colonial protests, where the myths and the memories of 13 April 1919 soon became indistinguishable. In the short story ‘For Freedom’s Sake’, Manto described how he and his friend Ghulam Ali would spend hours in Jallianwala Bagh:

  ‘You know, Ghulam Ali, don’t you, how this well was once filled to its mouth with the bodies of people slain in the firing? Today everybody drinks from it. It has watered every flower in this park. People come and pluck those flowers. But strangely, not even a drop carries the salty taste of blood. Not a single petal of a single flower has the redness of blood in it. Why is that?’

  I vividly remember that as I spoke I had looked at the window of a neighbouring house where, it is said, a young girl had been shot dead by General Dyer as she stood watching the massacre. The streak of blood had begun to fade on the old lime wall behind the window. Blood had become so cheap that spilling it no longer affected people as it once had. I remember I was in the third or fourth standard at school, and six or seven months after the bloody massacre our teacher had taken us to see Jallianwala Bagh. It hardly looked like a park then, just a dreary and desolate stretch of uneven earth, strewn all over with clods of dried dirt. I remember how the teacher had picked up a small clod, reddened I believe from paan spittle, and showed it to us, saying, ‘Look, it’s still red from the blood of our martyrs!’4