Amritsar 1919

by Kim Wagner

  5.See Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  6.Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857, pp. 5–19.

  7.Alexander Duff, The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results – In a Series of Letters (London: s.n., 1858), pp. 54–5.

  8.Edward Leckey, Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed (Bombay: Chesson and Woodhall, 1859), pp. 31–2.

  9.See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Women in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Nancy L. Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); and Alison Blunt, ‘Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian “Mutiny”, 1857–8’, Journal of Historical Geography, 26, 3 (2000), pp. 403–28.

  10.J.W. Kaye and G.B. Malleson, Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, I–VI (London: Allen, 1888–9), II, p. 301.

  11.Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’.

  12.‘Blowing from a Gun’, Preston Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1857, p. 2.

  13.‘Blowing from Guns at Peshawur’, Daily News, 5 Nov. 1857.

  14.Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, II, pp. 369–70.

  15.Frederic Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, from the 10th of May until the Fall of Delhi (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858), p. 164.

  16.J.W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–1858, 3 vols (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1876–80), III, p. 638.

  17.W.H. Russell, ‘The British Army in India’, The Times, 19 July 1858.

  18.Stanley, Hansard, HC, Deb. 14 March 1859, col. 160.

  19.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, pp. 151–2.

  20.Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’, pp. 205–12.

  21.W.H. McLeod, ‘The Kukas: A Millenarian Sect of the Punjab’, in G.A. Wood and P.S. O’Connor (eds), W.P. Morrell: a Tribute (Dunedin, 1973), pp. 85–103.

  22.The main sources for the details of the attacks are to be found in Copy of Correspondence, or Extracts from Correspondence, relating to the Kooka Outbreak (1 Aug. 1872), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (hereafter: KO).

  23.Cowan to Forsyth, 15 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 8.

  24.Cowan to Forsyth, 16 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 11.

  25.Forsyth to Griffin, 8 April 1872, KO, pp. 50–2.

  26.Order by Cowan, 18 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 47.

  27.Forsyth to Griffin, 19 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 18.

  28.Ibid.

  29.Ibid.

  30.Bayley to Griffin, 22 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 8.

  31.Bayley to Griffin, 24 Jan. 1872, KO, p. 17.

  32.Griffin to Bayley, 7 Feb. 1872, KO, p. 28.

  33.See Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  34.Griffin to Bayley, 29 June 1872, quoted in Nahar Singh, Gooroo Ram Singh and the Kuka Sikhs: Rebels against the British Power in India, 2 vols (New Delhi, 1965), II, p. 81.

  35.‘Final Orders of General Governor in Council’, Bayley to Griffin, 30 April 1872, KO, pp. 54–8.

  36.Ibid., p. 54.

  37.Ibid., p. 55.

  38.Ibid., pp. 57–8. Cowan’s attempts at rehabilitation failed and he disappeared into obscurity, while Forsyth successfully lobbied the new Governor-General and went on to enjoy an illustrious career within the colonial administration, see ‘This Evening’s News: India’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 4 Aug. 1873.

  39.Pioneer, 9 May 1872.

  40.Rudyard Kipling ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.’, Pioneer, 11–12 Sept. 1890.

  41.D. Forsyth, Autobiography and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth, edited by his daughter (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), p. 36.

  42.Cooper, Crisis in the Punjab, p. 167.

  43.The Englishman, 10 Feb. 1872.

  44.‘Letter to the Editor’, The Englishman, 14 May 1872. See also The Englishman 7, 8, 10 and 29 May, 1872.

  45.See for instance ‘India (from our correspondent)’, The Times, 26 Feb. 1872.

  46.‘The Kooka Massacre’, The Examiner, 1 June 1872.

  47.Rudyard Kipling ‘On the City Wall’, In Black and White (Allahabad, 1888), p. 78.

  48.Ibid., p. 94.

  49.Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857, pp. xv–xxvii.

  50.See N. Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government in India to Agrarian Unrest’, Modern Asian Studies, 1, 4 (1967), pp. 353–83.

  51.See Countess of Minto, India: Minto and Morley 1905–1910 (London: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 122–5 and 150–1.

  52.Minto to Morley, 8 May 1907, ibid., p. 124.

  53.See ‘The Effect of the Present Unrest on the Native Army’, 12 May 1907, NLS, Minto Papers, MS 12756, p. 433.

  54.‘British Prepare for a Revolt in India’, New York Times, 10 May 1907.

  55.N. Gerald Barrier, ‘Punjab Politics and the Disturbances of 1907’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Duke University, 1966), p. 216.

  56.Ibid., p. 233.

  57.A.A. Irvine, Land of No Regrets (London: Collins, 1938), p. 128.

  58.Minto to Morley, 8 May 1907, Minto and Morley, p. 127.

  59.D.K.L. Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1800–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 4 (Oct. 2004), pp. 965–1002, p. 979; and Michael Silvestri, ‘“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (Oct. 2000), pp. 454–86, p. 465.

  60.Minto to Morley, 8 May 1907, Minto and Morley, p. 131.

  61.Minto to Lady Minto, 15 May 1907, ibid., p. 136.

  62.Barrier, ‘Punjab Politics and the Disturbances of 1907’, pp. 235–40.

  63.Minto to Morley, 8 May 1907, Minto and Morley, pp. 124–5.

  64.Minto to Morley, 29 Aug. 1907, ibid., pp. 151–2; Diary of Sir James Dunlop Smith, 4 June 1907, in Martin Gilbert (ed.), Servant of India: A Study of Imperial Rule from 1905 to 1910 as Told through the Correspondence and Diaries of Sir James Dunlop Smith (London: Longmans, 1966), p. 87.

  65.Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907’, p. 373.

  66.Ibid., pp. 374–77.

  67.‘British Prepare for a Revolt in India’, New York Times, 10 May 1907.

  68.John Buchan, Lord Minto: A Memoir (London: Nelson, 1924), p. 78.

  69.See Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  70.Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019).

  71.Kim A. Wagner, “Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218, 1 (Feb. 2013), pp. 159–97.

  72.Leslie Beresford, The Second Rising: A Romance of India (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1910), ‘Author’s Note’.

  73.Amelia Bennett, ‘Ten Months’ Captivity after the Massacre at Cawnpore’, The Nineteenth Century, LXXIII (Jan.–June 1913), pp. 1212–34, p. 1212.

  74.Ibid.

  75.E.W. Savi, My Own Story (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1947), p. 205.

  76.Wagner, “Treading Upon Fires” and ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’; and Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). See also Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum (eds), Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear, and Radicalization (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); and Harald Fischer-Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017).

  77.E.J. Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 86–7.

  1 Pool of Nectar

  1.Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1901; new edn, Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 2002), p. 38.

  2.Ibid.,
p. 80. See also V.N. Datta, Amritsar: Past and Present (Amritsar: Municipal Committee, 1967).

  3.Satyapal, CPI, II, no. 551, p. 716.

  4.See also Irving, Disorders Inquiry Committee 1919–20, Evidence, vols I–VII (Calcutta: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920) [Evidence, DIC], III, p. 1; Burton, ibid., pp. 61–2 and p. 193.

  5.See Map 3.

  6.George Orwell, Burmese Days (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935; new edn, London: Penguin, 2014), p. 14.

  7.See Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, 23, 3 (spring 1997), pp. 483–93.

  8.F. Yeats-Brown, Bengal Lancer (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930), p. 9.

  9.Orwell, Burmese Days, p. 80.

  10.See Peter Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For a general overview, see Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

  11.See Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910); and Lajpat Rai, Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within (London: Home Rule for India League, 1917).

  12.See Gajendra Singh, ‘India and the Great War: Colonial Fantasies, Anxieties and Discontent’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14, 2 (Oct. 2014), pp. 343–61; and Joseph McQuade, ‘Terrorism, Law, and Sovereignty in India and the League of Nations, 1897–1945’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017).

  13.Robb, The Government of India and Reform, p. 70.

  14.See also Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, and Political Economy (London: Routledge 1998).

  15.Robb, The Government of India and Reform, p. 36.

  16.Ibid., p. 73.

  17.Ibid. For a more recent account, see Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 27–59.

  18.A. Rumbold, Watershed in India, 1914–1922 (London: Athlone Press, 1979), p. 89.

  19.Robb, The Government of India and Reform, pp. 80–1.

  20.Rumbold, Watershed in India, p. 6.

  21.Forster, A Passage to India, p. 107.

  22.J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 22.

  23.See also Elisabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 97–103.

  24.See Condos, Insecurity State.

  25.Irvine, Land of No Regrets, p. 226.

  26.Hari Singh, Gandhi, Rowlatt Satyagraha and British Imperialism: Emergence of Mass Movement in Punjab and Delhi (Delhi: Indian Bibliographers Bureau, 1990), p. 40.

  27.Satyapal, CPI, II, no. 551, p. 716.

  28.Edmund Candler, Abdication (London: Constable & Company, 1922), p. 134.

  29.Forster, A Passage to India, p. 6.

  30.Candler, Edmund, The Mantle of the East (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1910), p. 138–9.

  31.Walter Crane, India Impressions: With Some Notes of Ceylon During a Winter Tour, 1906–7 (London: Methuen, 1907), pp. 164.

  32.Supplement, Punjab Gazette, 16 March 1919, p. 347. See also Anand Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, 1840–1947 (Jalandhar: ABS Publications 1988), pp. 247 and 254.

  33.Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, pp. 222 and 254–5.

  34.Ibid., p. 261.

  35.Candler, Mantle of the East, pp. 137–8.

  36.Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46, 3–4 (2012), pp. 232–54; and Gajendra Singh, ‘“Finding Those Men with Guts”: The Ascription and Re-ascription of Martial Identities in India after the Uprising’, in Crispin Bates and Gavin Rand (eds), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 4: Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2013), pp. 113–34.

  37.See Maya Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); and Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  38.Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).

  39.See Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).

  40.Ibid., p. 134.

  41.Ibid., p. 98.

  42.Ibid.

  43.Burton, Evidence, DIC, III, p. 194.

  44.Ibid. See also Singh, Gandhi, Rowlatt Satyagraha, pp. 15 and 37; and Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 9–20.

  45.E.M. Forster, ‘Reflections in India, I: Too Late?’, The Nation and the Athenaeum (21 Jan. 1922), p. 615.

  46.See also H.A. Newell, Amritsar: The City of the Golden Temple (Bombay, 1913); and Amandeep Singh Madra and Parmjit Singh, The Golden Temple of Amritsar (London: Kashi House, 2011).

  47.G.W. Steevens, In India (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900), pp. 199–200.

  48.Candler, Mantle of the East, p. 137.

  49.Walter Del Mar, India of To-day (London: A. & C. Black, 1905), p. 236.

  50.A. Hugh Fisher, Through India and Burmah with Pen and Brush (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1911), pp. 222–4.

  51.Newell, Amritsar, p. 3

  52.Del Mar, India of To-day, p. 237.

  53.Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, p. 79.

  54.E.R. Scidmore, Winter India (New York: The Century Co., 1903), pp. 304–5.

  55.Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, p. 68; and James Douie, The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province and Kashmir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), p. 339.

  56.Scidmore, Winter India, p. 306.

  57.Kapil Deva Malaviya, Open Rebellion in Punjab (Allahabad, 1920), p. 1.

  58.Arorbans Gazette, 8 March 1918, Punjab Newspaper Reports 1918, IOR/L/R/5/200, p. 157; and Aluwalia Gazette, 16 April 1918, ibid., p. 242.

  59.Diary of Maurice Jacobs, 13 April 1919, http://www.25thlondon.com/mj.htm (accessed 29 Aug. 2018; and Steven Leggett, ‘The Amritsar Hydro-electric Irrigation Installation’, Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, CCXII (1921), p. 66. See also Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, pp. 226–31.

  60.Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, p. 282; ‘An Astounding Statement’, The Indian Social Reformer, XXXI, 3, 19 Sept. 1920, p. 43; and ACC, p. 94.

  61.Sewak, 7 March 1918, Punjab Newspaper Reports 1918, IOR/L/R/5/200, p. 174; and Hindu Gazette, 8 and 16 March 1918, ibid., p. 189.

  62.Hindu Gazette, 8 and 16 March 1918, Punjab Newspaper Reports 1918, IOR/L/R/5/200, p. 189.

  63.Mian Feroz Din, CPI, II, no. 2, p. 21.

  64.Report, DIC, p. 19; and Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 229.

  65.Burton, Evidence, DIC, III, p. 193; Rumbold, Watershed in India, 20; and Hari Singh, Gandhi, Rowlatt Satyagraha, p. 12.

  66.See Kitchin, Evidence, DIC, III, p. 165; and R. Kumar, ‘The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Lahore’, in R. Kumar, Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 272–4.

  67.Singh, Gandhi, Rowlatt Satyagraha, p. 17.

  68.Ibid., pp. 15 and 42.

  69.Arorbans Gazette, 16 March 1918, Punjab Newspaper Reports 1918, IOR/L/R/5/200, p. 189.

  70.Burton, Evidence, DIC, III, p. 193; and Townshend, ibid., V, p. 179.

  71.Townshend, ibid., V, p. 179.

  72.Kitchin, ibid., III, p. 170.

  73.Townshend, ibid., V, p. 180.

  74.M.S. Leigh, The Punjab and the War (Lahore: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab 1922), p. 11.

  75.Townshend, Evidence, DIC, V, pp. 179–80.

  76.‘Influenza in India, 1918’, Public Health Reports, 34,
42 (17 Oct. 1919), pp. 2300–2, p. 2301. See also Rumbold, Watershed in India, p. 129.

  77.See G. Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

  78.See for instance Norman G. Barrier, ‘The Arya Samaj and Congress Politics in the Punjab, 1894–1908’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 26, 3 (May 1967), pp. 363–79.

  79.Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1885–1925 (London: Constable & Company, 1925), p. 266.

  80.Mohinder Singh, The Akali Movement (Delhi: Macmillan, 1978).

  81.Kuwaja Yusuf Shai, Evidence, DIC, III, pp. 94–5.

  82.Burton, ibid., p. 193.

  83.Ibid.; and Smith, ibid., p. 56.

  84.Burton, ibid., p. 195. See also Kitchlew, CPI, II, no. 550, pp. 709–10.

  85.Gauba, Amritsar: A Study in Urban History, pp. 167–8.

  86.Burton, Evidence, DIC, III, p. 193.

  87.Smith, ibid., pp. 50–1.

  88.Ibid., pp. 59–60.

  89.Ratto, 31 May 1919, PSA, 5315: Home Judicial, C, May 1920, nos 268–322, p. 14.

  90.Burton, Evidence, DIC, III, pp. 193–5.

  91.Ibid.

  92.Satyapal, CPI, II, no. 551, p. 717; and Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 224.

  93.Khwaja Yusuf Shah, Evidence, DIC, III, no. 91.

  2 Rowlatt Satyagraha

  1.Wathen, ‘Law Report, 26 May 1924: High Court of Justice’, The Times, 27 May 1924.

  2.I have relied extensively on the diary of Melicent Wathen, ‘India, 1914–1920’, pp. 169–181 (hereafter MWD). I am grateful to Roderick Wathen for letting me work with the original diaries and for the hospitality of the Wathen family in Norwich.

  3.MWD, p. 151; and Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 180–1.

  4.Collett, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 483.

  5.Anon., A History of the Khalsa College Amritsar (Amritsar, 1949), pp. 84–5.

  6.Forster, A Passage to India, p. 25.

  7.Raleigh Trevelyan, Golden Oriole (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), p. 476.

  8.Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, pp. 180–1.

  9.MWD, pp. 169–81.

  10.Mark Wathen, Banker, Soldier, Farmer, Priest: Personal Memories (Dunkirk: Barnwell Print, 2009), pp. 13–14.