The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  CHAPTER 11

  TRAUMAS AND TRUTHS

  Amritsar seemed to contract after the massacre, seized by a convulsion of anger and fear. Local politicians were either arrested or went into hiding. The civilian population, rudderless without them, shied away from the streets. The soldiers had their city now and their uniforms represented subjugation, humiliation and summary execution. Many, who just days before had been happy to march in Gandhi’s non-violent parades, now vowed to take up arms against the Raj. Ramji Dass Sunami, one of Udham’s friends from his father’s hometown, described seeing him driven mad with grief and rage shortly after the declaration of martial law: ‘[He] went to the Golden Temple and immersed himself in the holy pool of nectar [the expanse of water surrounding the Temple] and took a solemn oath to avenge it with the blood of O’Dwyer.’1

  Another of his friends, Manjit Singh Kassid, was worried that the young man’s untrammelled rage would devour him. Udham was talking of vengeance and murder without caring about the consequences.2 In the days after the massacre, talk alone could have landed him and maybe those who listened to him in jail.

  As for Brigadier General Dyer, Udham could barely bring himself to say his name: ‘He was deeply moved whenever he talked of the incidents of 13 April 1919. When he talked of General Dyer and his action, his eyes became bloodshot with rage.’3

  Udham was desperate to act, to spill British blood, but he did not know where to begin. He lurked around the bookshops of Hall bazaar, places where boys had once collected seditious pamphlets and distributed them around the province, hoping to be gathered up by some militant group. Nobody came for him. What made things worse was that Punjabis around him seemed to be conflating the identities of Dyer and O’Dwyer, merging them into one ‘rakshas’ or demon. ‘Brigadier O’Dwyer’ became a composite villain,4 as omnipotent and terrifying as the devils in ancient scripture. If his fellow Indians did not recognise their enemies, how would any of them be able to punish them?

  Udham Singh was not the only one who would see an atrocity that needed to be avenged. Jallianwala Bagh, after the lifting of martial law on 11 June 1919, became a place of pilgrimage. One of those said to have made the journey was a twelve-year-old boy from Lahore named Bhagat Singh. According to his biographers, young Bhagat travelled the 30 miles between the cities unaccompanied, determined to see for himself what the British had done. Though it may seem implausible that such a young boy could make the journey alone, but Bhagat Singh was no ordinary boy.

  His father had been in jail the day he was born on 27 September 1907, serving a sentence along with two of Bhagat’s uncles, convicted of organising a peasant revolt against the Land Colonisation Bill.

  A much-detested piece of legislation, it forced the transfer of property to the government if a farmer died without a son and heir. The bill gave the British the right to sell this confiscated land to developers, zamindars, who were rich, indigenous landowners loyal to the Raj.

  Leading the farmers, Bhagat’s family pushed back, and as a result found themselves in and out of prison throughout his formative years. Bhagat grew up hating the British occupation of his country as much as the absence of the men he loved. If he did indeed make the apocryphal pilgrimage to the Bagh, the bullet holes in the walls gave the twelve-year-old hundreds more reason to fight them.

  Bhagat Singh would grow to become one of India’s most wanted men and the most important influence in Udham Singh’s life. However, in 1919, when Udham was desperately looking for a mentor, their paths never crossed. Even if they had, what would an angry twelve-year-old boy have been able to do for a chaotic Kamboj orphan?

  Within months of the massacre, Udham Singh was out of money, having run through what was left of his army pay. Revenge would have to wait; he needed to eat. Udham desperately needed to find a job – not an easy task in post-war India. The war led to a dramatic increase in defence expenditure, which in turn led to increased tax demands from the masses in British India. Though the economy stagnated, trains still managed to run, and where there were railways, there was work.

  The British hired senior staff from their own kind, drivers and engineers from the bi-racial ‘Anglo-Indian’ community and manual labour from indigenous Indians. Jobs for natives were usually to be found in the ditches or cuttings by the side of the tracks, but some skilled workers found work in the repair sheds – long hours for low pay.

  Udham Singh had carpentry skills from his time at the orphanage and a knowledge of engine repairs from his time in the army, but even with these he seemed unable to find work in Amritsar. He was forced to try his luck further afield.

  Lahore Junction, John Lawrence’s legacy to his compatriots, was still one of the busiest railway stations in all of Asia. It was here that Udham Singh finally found some employment late in 1919, but it was barely enough to keep him from destitution. Things got so bad that, by his own admission, he was forced to sleep by the water tanks outside the station, waking to find casual jobs by day.5 Such a hand-to-mouth existence would have been depressing and debilitating for any man in the prime of his life. For a man who now felt he had a higher purpose, it must have been unbearable.

  Casting his net wider still, Udham moved from city to city, lurching from crisis to crisis, taking jobs that lasted no more than a few weeks at a time.6 By the end of 1919, found himself back in Lahore, but by that time his enemy, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, was gone, retired and back in England, where he had received a hero’s welcome.

  Sir Michael was always meant to move on from Punjab in April 1919,7 and some historians have speculated whether he meant to leave his province in the hands of the army at the end of his tenure. Nigel Collett, in his excellent book on Dyer, The Butcher of Amritsar, points out that Sir Michael engaged in a ‘bitter and unsuccessful fight’ to wrest control of Punjab’s administration before he had to leave: ‘Inconceivable as it may seem, it really does appear that he thought he could bring down martial law on his province, yet still remain in charge. The viceroy, compliant in all else, would not yield on this.’8

  The new lieutenant governor of Punjab was Sir Edward Douglas MacLagan, more academic than autocrat. MacLagan had written extensively on the history and people of India, and his work on the census of Punjab, in 1891, betrayed something close to affection for the natives. Punjab’s pain seemed to lessen with the new appointment, but Udham’s life got no easier. By February 1920 he had sunk to new lows, sleeping rough near the railway station again,9 relying almost entirely on the charity of a local gurdwara for his meals.10

  Every Sikh gurdwara has a langar (dining hall), where people from every background are welcome to come and sit together as equals, eating meals prepared by volunteers. It is more than likely that while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the langar Udham first heard of jobs in Africa. Contract work overseas paid considerably better than the piecemeal labouring work he was getting in Punjab. Companies provided billets for workers, and allowances for food. Some even paid for passage, offset against future earnings.

  A man named Andrews ran the office on Lahore’s Mall Road and, after asking him a few questions, signed Udham up. He was told to expect 240 rupees per month, if, and only if, he committed to an employment period of no less than three years.11 His new employer was the British-owned Ugandan Railway Company.12 With few other options, Udham headed for east Africa.

  During the ‘Scramble for Africa’, a period of rapid imperial expansion between 1881 and 1914, colonial powers carved up the continent. Britain, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, France, Spain and Germany vied with each other for land and resources. By the outbreak of the First World War, European powers controlled 90 per cent of all African territory, with the British taking the lion’s share. Imperial domination was due, in large part, to the railways.

  India had proved that trains could move great volumes of goods to and from ports, and men and guns to restive regions. In Africa, with such daunting expanses to exploit and control, building the Uganda Railway became a priority for th
e British Empire.

  The Uganda Railway stretched 600 miles from Mombasa (in present-day Kenya), a coastal town in the south, to Kisumu on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. It was built in just five years – an astonishingly short space of time for such a mammoth undertaking. Fully operational by 1901, the pace of construction came at huge human cost. Almost 2,500 men, predominantly Indians, died while working on the serpentine track.13

  Demand for Indian labourers increased dramatically thanks to railway expansion, and imported Indian workers, coolies to their European masters, were shipped over to Africa in their thousands. The word coolie comes from the Hindi for ‘one who carries heavy burdens’. Over time it would become a racial pejorative for anybody from the Indian subcontinent, regardless of their employment.

  Drawn predominantly from the poorest in Tamil Nadu, ‘coolie’ workers were given lump-sum loans in exchange for signed contracts committing them to work off the debt. Wages were often so paltry that many lived on the point of starvation. Workers were made dependent on their employers, and since quitting a job would have meant overnight starvation, few could afford to object to conditions or to leave.

  Reducing thousands to the status of indentured labour, the treatment of these Indian workers was often so bad that Christian missionaries compared their employers to slave-drivers. Beaten, starved, kept on subsistence wages, Indian workers were regularly humiliated and abused. Most who signed up to work on the Uganda Railway did so because they had been promised a better life. Just like Udham’s time in the army, it must have felt like a brutal betrayal.

  Africans called the meandering Uganda Railway the ‘iron snake’, a reference to an old Kikuyu prophecy: ‘An iron snake will cross from the lake of salt to the lands of the Great Lake.’14 To everyone else it was simply the ‘Lunatic Line’, presumably because you had to be mad to work on it. Thousands of labourers were carried off by disease; others were attacked by wild animals. The treacherous, remote terrain had little or no medical provision, so in the crowded labour camps malaria and black fever could rampage unchecked for weeks on end.

  For a while, Udham worked the line, dutifully sending back wages to his distant relative in Sunam, Subedar Jiwa Singh.15 Jiwa was respected and trusted by all who knew him. Friends and neighbours often left important documents or money in his care, knowing every penny and page would be returned. Jiwa was a man of honour. Udham’s money could be stored in no safer place.

  Then, after a few months, without warning, the letters and wages sent back to Jiwa Singh dried up. With a full two years left to serve on his contract, Udham Singh disappeared. Running away mid-contract was a serious act, with potentially grave consequences. Since many of the ‘coolies’ lived on advances from the Ugandan Railway Company, desertion was treated like theft. Unless workers could quickly pay what they owed, they could find themselves on the run from the law.

  Some ditched contracts because they could no longer bear the conditions. Others did so because they were homesick. In Udham’s case, it would seem that, while he was working on the Uganda Railway, thousands of miles from home, he finally found what he had been looking for in Punjab. He had somehow stumbled on a group of militant Indian revolutionaries, willing and able to begin the next stage of his transformation.

  Sir Michael had all but crushed the Ghadars in Punjab after the war, but, Hydra-like, the organisation had been sprouting heads in the most unlikely places. A man named Sitaram Acharya led the Ghadars in East Africa at the time Udham was working on the line. He was considered so dangerous by the British that three of his cohort had already been shot, two hanged, and eight imprisoned for long and rigorous terms.16 Mere possession of correspondence from Acharya could lead to a death sentence.17

  Udham was far too lowly to have been introduced to the likes of Acharya himself, but he appears to have inveigled his way into some mid-level Ghadar cadre while in East Africa. It was probably their idea for him to get himself another passport, one which would not make any mention of his aborted Ugandan employment. With a clean passport he could apply for endorsements to get to America, where he might receive the training and contacts he so desperately sought. The new passport Udham got was in his birth name, Sher Singh.18 Somehow, perhaps with help from his new friends, he also got an endorsement in Uganda for a visit to the United States.19 He had never been allowed to do more than give out handbills in India, but the East African Ghadars appeared to see greater potential in him. When they sent him back to India, they endowed him with a new confidence, travel documents, and much more than a bundle of seditious handbills.

  SUNAM, AUTUMN 1921

  Udham was back in Sunam and acting like some kind of conquering hero. He roared into town on a motorbike nobody could quite believe he could afford.20 It was not the demeanour one might expect from a contract-breaker. Absconders from East African labour agreements usually kept a low profile, a mixture of shame and fear pushing their heads below the parapet. Yet Udham swaggered back into Jiwa Singh’s home as if he had nothing to be embarrassed about. His wages had stopped coming back to Sunam some time before, nevertheless he was apparently flush with cash. Not only did he have an inexplicable fund of money, on the back of his bike was tied a German gramophone,21 yet another luxury he should not have been able to afford. It was a magnet to Sunam’s children.

  Though Udham had the means to play music, he possessed only one record. Years later, people still remembered the crackling sound of his ‘Vande Mataram’ playing over and over and over again. The song, translated into English as ‘Praise to the Mother’,22 had been set to music by Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore. It was the unofficial anthem for India’s nationalist movement.

  The British had tried to ban the song as soon as it was released. Not only was it a crime to press the disc, even playing it, or singing ‘Vande Mataram’ in public,23 became an offence. An impossible law to enforce, the ban only succeeded in making the song more popular. The closing lines of its first verse showed why the British wanted to stop its spread:

  Mother, I praise thee!

  Rich with thy hurrying streams,

  bright with orchard gleams,

  Cool with thy winds of delight,

  Dark fields waving Mother of might,

  Mother free . . .

  Where Udham had once talked only of Jallianwala Bagh and revenge, he now spoke animatedly of revolution. To some he sounded like a dangerous madman. Jiwa Singh was more patient than most and gave Udham a roof over his head, though the old subedar never really knew when his young guest might be under it; the boy disappeared for days on end, telling nobody where he was going, what he was doing, or when he would return.

  Years later, police would piece together an imperfect picture of these mysterious absences. Speeding off on his bike, it appeared that not only was Udham taking bundles of banned leaflets into the villages, continuing in his attempts to seed a rural revolution, but he also was acting as a money mule for the Ghadars.

  There were rumours in Sunam that Udham was procuring and smuggling guns,24 but those who knew him best found such talk preposterous. All Udham’s money was locked in Jiwa’s almari,* some 1,300 rupees.25 The boy was a big-talker with a bike, that was all. Why would the Ghadars bother with someone like him? It was ridiculous. He was a nobody. A poor, orphan nobody.

  Between mysterious sorties, Udham liked to hold court among the teenagers of the town, telling them they were in the presence of a man destined for much bigger things. He spoke of having friends in America. He would tell them a war was coming that would bring the king of England to his knees. To the most impressionable, Udham seem impossibly, dangerously charismatic. The more they admired him, the more he talked up his part.

  Though the young might have lapped up his talk, the elders of Sunam just shook their heads at his haakna.† The boy was a demonstrable failure, unable to hold down even the most basic jobs in army or civilian life. Wild, full of unwarranted self-importance – Udham was trouble.

  Then one day, o
ut of the blue, Udham Singh asked Jiwa Singh to hand over half his savings.26 He sold his much-loved motorbike, something that must have hurt him deeply, and left.

  When next he would appear in Sunam, nobody accused him of being a fantasist. The scars on his back would be enough to silence them.

  * * *

  * A locked wardrobe, which in many homes doubled as a safe.

  † A Punjabi word for ‘puffed up chatter’.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE UNTOUCHABLES

  Sir Michael’s reintroduction to London life at the end of 1919 had been nothing short of spectacular. Newspaper editors clamoured for his thoughts, and he was welcomed as a guest at some of the most important tables in the capital. It was as if the Jallianwala Bagh massacre had not touched him at all.

  He became a regular on the British lecture circuit, defending his decisions as lieutenant governor and warning packed houses that the Raj was in dire peril. Engaging, commanding and funny, too, audiences devoured his performances, while he, in turn, lapped up their adulation. Thanks to this new-found popularity, Sir Michael had numerous opportunities to berate the secretary of state for India in public. He had never rated Sir Edwin Samuel Montagu, but since his return to England, antipathy had developed into ferocious loathing.

  Deeply unhappy about the massacre and subsequent martial law, Montagu found himself battered by Gandhi while simultaneously being bludgeoned by fellow British MPs. The former wanted justice for the dead and wounded; the latter for him to stay loyal to his men. Though it would end up satisfying neither side, Montagu called for an official inquiry.

  The Disorders Inquiry Committee, which held its first session in October 1919, was headed up by Lord William Hunter, a former solicitor-general for Scotland. Under him, four British members and three Indians were charged with producing an accurate report on both the massacre and its aftermath. Together, the Hunter Committee, as it became known, would spend forty-six weeks interrogating witnesses and gathering evidence from as far afield as Ahmedabad, Bombay, Delhi and Lahore.