by Anita Anand
In a later inquiry, Dyer would be pushed to give a fuller explanation of his actions and state of mind,6 and asked why he had failed to provide any medical help to the wounded. His reply bordered on belligerent: ‘It was not my job. Hospitals were open, and they could have gone there.’7
The boy who had once supposedly cried over a wounded monkey would take years to show a shred of compassion for the hundreds of men, women and children he gunned down in cold blood on 13 April 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh.
In Lahore, General Beynon was completely supportive, insisting that ‘Dyer had crushed the rebellion at its heart in Amritsar.’8 Sir Michael agreed: ‘My own view, based on my knowledge of the people and the opinions of competent judges like the Commissioner Mr Kitchin, was that not only did Dyer’s action kill the rebellion at Amritsar, but, as the news got round, would prevent its spreading elsewhere.’9
Anxious to reassure Dyer, Beynon asked whether he might add Sir Michael’s support to his own in writing. The lieutenant governor’s initial hesitation would be taken by some in the Indian National Congress as an admission that he knew he would be rubber-stamping a massacre.
Sir Michael denied that, insisting he hesitated because he thought the action was a military matter, not civilian. It was for the army to pass judgement, not him. Beynon reminded Sir Michael that Amritsar was still under civilian government and therefore he was beholden to say something, so he agreed for a message to be sent to Dyer on his behalf.
The telegram sent from Lahore by Beynon to Dyer was simple but reassuring: ‘Your action correct and Lieutenant-Governor approves.’10
News of the massacre reached the far corners of Punjab within hours. The response was predictable. From Gujranwala, 45 miles north of Lahore, desperate messages started to pour into Governor House. The deputy commissioner rode as fast as he could to a communications hut, 8 miles away from his city, and tapped out a message steeped in panic: ‘Hartal [strikes] and disturbances going on. Mob active, more expected. Bridges on either side of station burnt. Police insufficient. Military arrangements required.’11
Sir Michael’s troops were too thinly stretched to deploy to Gujranwala without leaving their own jurisdictions unguarded. One military commander in Rawalpindi, some 200 miles away from Gujranwala, summed up the logistical position: ‘He had not troops to send, and even if he had them to send, there was no means of sending them owing to the communications being cut.’12
Sir Michael had been thinking about mutiny for so long, he already had contingencies drawn up, even before the first shot was fired at the Bagh. Acutely aware that the massacre might unleash a tsunami of rage, he decided to act pre-emptively. Men on the ground were one thing, but Sir Michael had already made plans for the sky:
General Beynon and I had discussed with Captain Minchin, the Officer Commanding the Air Force, the conditions under which aeroplanes might drop bombs or use their machine guns. The suggestion I then made, was that as a rule, no bombs should be dropped in cities or towns, and machine guns might be used in the circumstances in which troops on the ground would fire.13
On the afternoon of 14 April, British planes took off for Gujranwala, a highly populous civilian centre. Sir Michael would later paint a sanitised picture of their mission in his memoirs:
The military authorities at once dispatched a few aeroplanes which arrived in the nick of time – about 3 p.m. – to save the Treasury building (in which the few European women and children had taken refuge) and the jail, which the rebels – having destroyed all other public buildings – were threatening. The aeroplanes speedily dispersed the rebellious mobs by bomb and machine gunfire – causing some dozen death casualties, and restored the situation pending the arrival of troops from the North late that night.14
The truth was far more chilling, and just as in Jallianwala Bagh, innocent men, women and children were killed in cold blood. In one incident, 150 peasants, making their way home after a long day in the fields, suddenly felt the shadow of a plane flying low over their heads. One of the planes despatched by Sir Michael made a pass and then wheeled back. Without warning, the pilot opened fire with machine guns. The screaming of the civilians was drowned out by the engines of the plane. Those who could ran for their lives, the others fell onto the road where bullets strafed them in the back. One woman, a child and two men were cut to pieces by automatic fire there on the dirt road. Bullets ricocheted off the ground around them, kicking up dust like raindrops in the monsoon.
The lucky ones fled into their village, but to their horror found themselves pursued by Major Carberry in his First World War BEX bi-plane. He turned his machine guns on them again, shooting many in the back. Even the ones who managed to reach their homes found no sanctuary. Carberry continued to fire through their roofs and walls, with no idea who was inside.
As far as Carberry was concerned, all the people of Gujranwala and the surrounding area were rebels or rebel sympathisers. To him, anyone on the road that day was fair game. Like Dyer before him, he was intent on teaching Punjab a lesson. As well as machine-gunning civilians that day, he also dropped eight 20-pound bombs on and around Gujranwala.
When later challenged about his actions, Major Carberry was entirely unrepentant:
Q: Those bombs you dropped on particular crowds that you saw there?
A: Yes.
Q: Where were the crowds, in the streets or outside the village?
A: They were on the road outside the village.
Q: That crowd consisted of how many people?
A: I reported 150, I cannot tell you exactly.
Q: How many miles was this village from Gujranwala.
A: About two miles north-west of Gujranwala.
Q: What was this crowd doing?
A: They were going towards Gujranwala.
Q: How were you able to ascertain they were coming to Gujranwala?
A: They were walking in the direction of Gujranwala.
Q: And you dropped three bombs on them?
A: Yes.
Q: And you say in your report that you fired a machine gun into the village itself?
A: Yes.
Q: That firing was not at any particular crowd?
A: It was the people on whom I dropped the bombs and who ran back to the village.
The lines between war and peacetime, civilian and combatant, were entirely blurred in 1919. In Delhi, the senior commanding officer, Brigadier-General D. H. Drake Brockman, a man who would also give an order to fire indiscriminately on crowds in his city that same year, gave voice to the new morality. Indian men, women and children were lesser humans. Collective punishment had become the unofficial doctrine of the men giving the orders:
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.15
Two full days after Jallianwala Bagh, on 15 April, Sir Michael O’Dwyer finally declared martial law and officially handed over control to the army. Everything that had happened up to date – the deportation of Gandhi, the arrests of Satyapal and Kitchlew, the massacre, the use of war planes against civilians – had all taken place on his watch. Though Sir Michael would argue that he did not know about the worst of the military excesses that followed the massacre, it later emerged that, even before he formally handed power to the army, Sir Michael gave the order to build gallows in public spaces. As far as he was concerned, Indians needed to see how they would be dealt with if they challenged the sirkar, the government. The terror that continued after 15 April may not have been under his supervision, but he had laid the foundation for its architecture.
It would take the secretary of state himself to intervene and veto the idea of public executions. Edwin Samuel Montagu was becoming convinced his lieutenant governor had lost all sense of proportion.
One of the most dogged critics of Sir Michael O’Dwyer
and his soldiers was a British journalist named Benjamin Guy Horniman, editor of the Bombay Chronicle. Born in Sussex and educated at a military academy, young Horniman had no interest in joining the army and chose instead to work for newspapers. For twelve years he worked for a variety of titles before he decided to venture east towards India.
Horniman joined the Bombay Chronicle, a newspaper founded and owned by an Indian, and worked his way up to the editor’s job.16 The imposition of martial law after the massacre imposed a news blackout, and even though he was hundreds of miles away in Bombay, Horniman was one of the only men with the courage to defy it.
Using C. F. Andrews, the clergyman confidante of Gandhi, who travelled to Punjab to see with his own eyes what had taken place, Horniman collected testimony and photographs of the wounded. British newspapers were busy congratulating Sir Michael and his brigadier general when Horniman unleashed his tirade against the Raj. The barbarity of what had been done in its name turned his stomach. So did the way his countrymen were effectively whitewashing the story.
Benjamin Horniman was arrested for his efforts and deported back to England. One of his reporters, an Indian, was sentenced to three years’ hard labour for sedition. Horniman’s newspaper was shut down. However, even in exile in London, Horniman continued to savage Sir Michael and his men:
The public are asked to believe that this promiscuous dropping of bombs or the firing of altogether 255 rounds of a machine gun, apparently at close quarters, into crowds of people, resulted in the killing of nine and wounding of only about sixteen people! Can anyone who remembers the work of the German aeroplanes in England during the war, doubt that the popular assertion of many more casualties is well founded?17
Horniman was particularly scathing about Carberry, the pilot who had strafed villagers from the sky:
Major Carberry, RAF, was the gentleman who bombed a party of people, because he thought they were rioters going or coming from the city. These wretched people fled after the bombs were dropped and he then pursued them to a village with a machine gun. He ‘could not say if any casualties were caused by the machine gun firing’. Major Carberry’s account in this evidence of the bombing and machine-gunning in the city differs even from the Official Report . . . He was at a height of feet 200 and could see perfectly what he was doing.18
Horniman reminded readers that, until recently, Punjabis had been fighting side by side with British Tommies in the trenches:
Let it be remembered that these operations were conducted not against a city or villages in a hostile territory of a country with which Great Britain was at war; they were not reprisals for similar acts against ourselves. They were inflicted on an unarmed civilian population of a province, whose loyalty and sterling assistance of the Empire in the war was Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s constant boast, when it suited him to ‘boost’ his own achievements as a Lieutenant Governor.19
In England, Horniman’s voice was drowned out by others in Fleet Street. They, like Sir Michael, ‘approved of the action’.
The brutality in Punjab continued for weeks. Two men, Lieutenant Colonel H. McRae and Captain A. C. Doveton, showed particular enthusiasm. Despatched to Kasur, 45 miles south-west of Amritsar, they assembled the city’s schoolboys, pulled six out at random, and had them whipped in front of their classmates. The boys had committed no offence. The youngest was just thirteen years of age.20
Soldiers raided homes and dragged out hundreds of people who found themselves arrested without being told what they were accused of, or what evidence was held against them. One elderly and well-respected lawyer was detained for forty-six days in Lahore’s notorious Central Jail. He was released without ever being told what he was supposed to have done.
Captain Doveton, who ‘did not like to go through the formalities of trial and sentence’,21 invented special punishments for Punjabis in his jurisdiction. Those who failed to salaam a white man or woman with sufficient humility were forced to prostrate themselves on the ground, with their foreheads and lips pressed to the dirt.22
Others, no matter what their age or infirmity, were required to perform acts of pointless hard labour. Many were sent to the railway station and forced to lift heavy bales, carrying them from one end of the yard to the other for no particular gain. Those who were not up to the task were forced to skip on the spot, without break, or to ‘mark time’23 by climbing up and down ladders. Educated prisoners were forced to write poems in praise of martial law and their British masters. All these ‘fancy punishments’, as they were called, were designed to debase and humiliate the Indian population.
In Amritsar, Rex Dyer and his men remained busy. They erected large wooden triangles around the city – ‘flogging triangles’, which struck fear into the heart of the civilian population. Though only six people were flogged in public (twenty others were whipped in camera), the incidents were so horrifying that entire neighbourhoods were left traumatised.
Wrists tied to the apex, legs splayed and fastened to the base, the six young men suspected of taking part in the brutal attack on Miss Sherwood were given summary punishments of thirty lashes. According to one resident of Kucha Kaurianwala, some were no more than boys. With her house right opposite one of the triangles, Ishwar Kaur had no escape from the sound of their screaming:
Sometimes, I stood up to see the flogging; sometimes I sat down, not being able to bear the sight. The first Sikh boy was whipped with his clothes on, and then his clothes were taken off, and he was flogged naked. Then all the boys were whipped naked. The third boy became senseless three times. Each time, he was unbound, laid flat in the street, and water was poured down his throat. [The flogging resumed when the boy regained consciousness.] It was cruel – cruel!24
Some of the flogged boys were later released without charge.
Public whippings were the ‘kindest method of punishment’,25 the only language Indians really understood, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Johnson in Lahore: ‘. . . mere imprisonment and mere fines do not act, they do not deter the people.’26 ‘I would sooner have been deprived of the services of 1,000 rifles than the power of inflicting corporal punishment.’27
Dyer was also enthusiastic about public floggings, but not because it was kind, as his colleague Johnson argued, but rather because it was a fate worse than death. Those accused of attacking Miss Sherwood deserved nothing less: ‘Shooting was, in my opinion, far too mild a punishment and it was for me to show that women must be looked upon as sacred.’28
Dyer, who had visited Miss Sherwood in hospital, ordered the street where she had been attacked to be blocked with picquets at either end. Anyone wishing to traverse the street had to do so crawling on all fours. People whose only crime was that they lived in the street found themselves brutalised and humiliated every time they tried to get home.
British soldiers followed his order and augmented it, kicking as the Indians crawled or crushing them into the dirt with their heavy boots. At the point of bayonets they were ordered to crawl on their bellies through the dirt. Some of the soldiers manning the lane enjoyed the experience so much they took photographs of themselves with the prostrate natives making their way along the lane: Lala Megha Mal, a 46-year-old cloth merchant from Kucha Kurichhan, described the effect the crawling order had on the innocent and vulnerable:
On the very first day, soldiers were posted in Kucha Kurichhan. I was stopped by the soldiers, when I was returning home at about 5 p.m., and I was ordered to creep on my belly. I however ran away and kept away till the soldiers had left. That day, I came home at 9 p.m. and found my wife laid up with fever. There was no water in the house to be given to her, and no doctor and no medicine. I had to fetch water myself late in the night. The seven days following, my wife had to be without any treatment, as no doctor would like to creep on his belly.29
Lala Gonda Mal, a 66-year-old goldsmith, also lived nearby:
I had with me my four sons, Jaggan Nath, aged about 13 years, Mohan Lal, aged 10, Nand Lal, aged 15, and Nath, aged 23.
They ordered us to crawl on our bellies. We sat down but were made to crawl on our bellies. We reached home crawling. They walked with us and struck the butt-ends of their rifles on the ground in order to frighten us . . . This continued for eight days. During that period, no sweeper ever came to clean any house; nor was filth and refuse removed. The water man did not come. Late at night, we used to bring water ourselves. Women and children remained confined in the houses with the doors closed.30
Dyer never seemed to understand the fuss his so-called ‘Crawling Order’ would create. Nor did any of his superiors draw a parallel between that abject humiliation of Indians and the ‘Devil’s Wind’ that had swept the country after the mutiny of 1857. Back then, those who lived in Cawnpore in the area of the Bibighar massacre had been dragged to the site of the bloodbath and ordered to lick the walls and floor clean of gore. They may have had nothing to do with the slaughter, but the British soldiers decided that since they had done nothing to stop it, they deserved punishment. The Raj had once again failed to discriminate between combatants and innocent civilians. It had been blind to the distinction between adults and children, too.
In Lahore, schoolchildren were ordered to parade three times a day for thirty minutes at a time, saluting the British flag as they marched. The order applied to infant classes, too, thus children as young as five marched. In some cases, children were made to repeat the mantra: ‘I have committed no offence. I will not commit any offence. I repent, I repent, I repent.’31 Punjab was in the grip of madness, and everyone, from the very young to the very old, was afraid. They prayed for justice but expected none.