Jallianwala Bagh, 1919

by Kishwar Desai

  I saw hundreds of persons killed on the spot. The worst part of the whole thing was that firing was directed towards the gates through which the people were running out.

  There were small outlets, four or five in all, and bullets actually rained over the people in all these gates and many got trampled under the feet of the rising crowds and thus lost their lives. Blood was pouring in profusion. Even those who lay flat on the ground were shot. . . No arrangements were made by the authorities to look after the dead or wounded. . .

  The dead bodies were of grown up people and young boys also. Some had their heads cut open, others had their eyes shot, and nose, chest, arms or legs shattered. I think there must have been over 1000 dead bodies in the garden then. . .

  Many amongst the wounded, who managed to run from the garden, succumbed to injuries on the way and lay dead on the streets. It was like this that the people of Amritsar held their Baisakhi fair.55

  Inside the Bagh, the firing had gone on for 10 minutes without respite.

  Dyer said, ‘My work that morning in personally conducting the proclamation must be looked upon as one transaction with what had now come to pass. There was no reason to further parley with the mob, evidently they were there to defy the arm of the law.’56

  He added, ‘I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed, and I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present but more specially throughout Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity.’57

  He also said that he wanted to disperse the crowd and went on firing because: ‘If I fired a little, I should be wrong to fire at all.’ Had he stopped, ‘they would have all come back and laughed at him and he would have made a fool of himself.’58

  Even though the crowd was unarmed and were merely trying to find an escape route, he thought ‘they were trying to assault me and my force suddenly. All these pointed that this is a widespread movement which was not confined to Amritsar alone and that the situation was a wide military situation which was not confined to Amritsar.’59

  He did not attend to the wounded, either. He explained that the hospitals were open and medical officers were available. ‘The wounded only had to apply for help. But they did not do this because they themselves would be in custody for being in the assembly. I was ready to help them if they applied.’60

  Despite all the evidence provided, the Hunter Committee said in its final report: ‘It has not been proved to us that any wounded people were in fact exposed to unnecessary suffering from want of medical treatment.’

  However, the evidence provided by all those who went to the Bagh later, looking for their loved ones, disproved this testimony. Those among the wounded who could not get away lay in the open for nearly two days, dying slowly. There was no attempt to do a proper body count till August 1919, by which time it was too late and many would have been left out of the final tally. Those who went to the Civil Hospital for treatment were called ‘rabid dogs’ by Lieutenant Colonel Smith and turned away. He said they should go to Gandhi, Kitchlew or Satya Pal for medical help. What happened to many of them is unknown.

  As per the Report of the Commissioners appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress, mainly authored by Gandhi: ‘Let it further be remembered, the fire was directed even into and from the Hansli, the narrow lane to the right, on the plan. We observed bullet marks on a balcony opposite the lane; and evidence has been laid before us to show that soldiers were posted at points outside the Bagh to guard approaches, and men were shot whilst they were effecting their escape through these approaches. There can be no doubt that General Dyer’s plan was to kill the largest number, and if the number was 1000 and not more, the fault was not his.’61

  How the hours following the massacre passed in Amritsar is the stuff of nightmares.

  * * *

  1. Ian Colvin, The Life of General Dyer (London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1929), p. 172.

  2. M.H.L. Morgan, ‘The Truth about Amritsar: By an Eye Witness’, 72/22/1 T, in the Imperial War Museum.

  3. Nick Lloyd, The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London: I.B. Tauris Co. Ltd., 2011), p. 86.

  4. Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier General Reginald Dyer (Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 141, 152, 214.

  5. Collett, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 476.

  6. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 6–7.

  7. V.N. Datta, New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919 (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), pp. 226-7.

  8. Terence Blackburn, A Miscellany of Mutinies and Massacres in India (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2007), p. 172.

  9. Evidence, Amritsar, p. 202.

  10. Evidence, Amritsar, p. 221.

  11. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 164–5.

  12. K.D. Malaviya, Open Rebellion In The Punjab: With Special Reference to Amritsar (Allahabad: Abhyudaya Press), p. 32.

  13. Tribune, 13 April 1961, quoted in Raja Ram, Appendix B: ‘Forgotten Heroes’ in The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: A Premeditated Plan (Chandigarh: Punjab University, 2002).

  14. Evidence, Amritsar, p. 219; Hunter Committee Report, p. 43.

  15. Hunter Committee Report, p. 42.

  16. INC Report, p. 52.

  17. Extracts from the Amritsar Police Diary and CID Reports, quoted in Raja Ram, Jallianwala Bagh, p. 81.

  18. Transcript of the Sir Michael O’Dwyer versus Sir C. Sankaran Nair trial, May 1924 and evidence of Lala Rup Lal Puri taken by the commission in Punjab, quoted in Collett, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 247.

  19. Datta, New Light, p. 231.

  20. Datta, New Light, p. 231.

  21. Datta, Appendix 23: ‘Statement Showing the Sentences Passed by the Martial Law Commissions Together with the Orders of the Government’ in New Light, p. 643.

  22. Evidence, Amritsar, p. 201.

  23. Op. cit., pp. 67–9.

  24. Datta, New Light, p. 380.

  25. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 67–9.

  26. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 67–9.

  27. Evidence, Amritsar, p. 40.

  28. Datta, New Light, p. 229.

  29. Datta, New Light, p. 379.

  30. INC Report, pp. 52–3, statement 29.

  31. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  32. Colvin, Life of General Dyer, p. 172.

  33. Parliamentary Report, pp. 112–15.

  34. Parliamentary Report, pp. 112–15.

  35. Parliamentary Report, pp. 112–15; Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  36. Colvin, Life of Dyer, p. 173.

  37. Raja Ram, Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 128–51; INC Report.

  38. Sarojini Naidu, Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation. Speech given in London, 3 June 1920. Accessed online.

  39. INC Report; Evidence, Amritsar, p. 103.

  40. Transcripts of the Sir Michael O’Dwyer vs. Sir Sankaran Nair trial and the evidence published, quoted in Nigel Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’, United Service Institution of India, no. 565, http://usiofindia.org/Article/?pub=Journal&pubno=565&ano=430.

  41. Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’.

  42. Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’.

  43. Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’.

  44. Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’.

  45. Collett, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Revisited II’.

  46. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–29.

  47. Colvin, Life of General Dyer, pp. 176–9.

  48. Rupert Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar (George Allen & Unwin, 1963), p. 174.

  49. Colvin, Life of General Dyer, p. 178.

  50. INC Report, Evidence, p. 111�
��12; Raja Ram, Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 95–6.

  51. Op. cit., pp. 40-1.

  52. INC Report, Evidence, Volume II, p. 118.

  53. INC Report, Evidence, Volume II, pp. 94–5.

  54. INC Report, Evidence, Volume II, pp. 94–5.

  55. INC Report, pp. 56–7.

  56. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  57. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  58. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  59. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  60. Evidence, Amritsar, pp. 114–39.

  61. INC Report, p. 57.

  3

  Counting the Corpses

  Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s point of view was and still is the same as that of General Dyer. In his view it did not matter if the people assembled at Jallianwala Bagh were different people from those who had committed murder and arson on the 10th. The very fact that they had assembled was enough to treat them as people who had done murder and arson.

  —Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India toInvestigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, etc.1

  Ratan Devi, who lived close to Jallianwala Bagh, heard the shots and later went with two other women to look for her husband.2 She found his corpse among heaps of dead bodies. She asked some people she recognised, who were also at the Bagh looking for their relatives, to help her get a charpoy to take her husband’s body back home, but as it was 8 p.m. and curfew had been announced, no one came forward. She even asked people from adjacent homes to help. It was 10 p.m. by then, and though some were willing, they were also scared of being shot. So she went back to her husband’s side and sat there all night.

  Accidentally, I found a bamboo stick which I kept in my hand, to keep off the dogs. I saw three men writhing in agony, a buffalo struggling in great pain; and a boy, about twelve years old, in agony entreated me not to leave the place. I told him that I could not go anywhere leaving the dead body of my husband. I asked him if he wanted any wrap, and if he was feeling cold, I could spread it over him. But he asked for water, and water could not be procured in that place.

  I heard the clock ticking at regular intervals of one hour. At two o’clock, a Jat, belonging to Sultan village, who was lying entangled in a wall, asked me to go near him and to raise his leg. I got up and, taking hold of his clothes, drenched in blood, raised his leg up. . . I passed my whole night there. It is impossible for me to describe what I felt. Heaps of dead bodies lay there, some on their backs and some with their faces upturned. A number of them were poor innocent children. I shall never forget that night. I was all alone. . . in that solitary jungle. . . amidst hundreds of corpses. I passed my night crying and watching. I cannot say more. What I experienced that night is known only to me and to God.

  Many like Lala Atmaram, who lived near the Bagh, heard the cries and moans of the dying and wounded through the night. Their agony must have resonated through the neighbourhood, with its close-built houses. He also saw people with lanterns moving about all night, probably searching for their loved ones.

  By the morning vultures had started wheeling around in the sky overhead, waiting for a chance to swoop down on the dead and dying. In the heat, the bodies soon began to decay.

  Lala Nathu Ram, a 35-year-old contractor, remembered how difficult it was to keep his turban on his head as the vultures flew close, snapping at flesh while he searched desperately for his son and brother.3

  Later it was said that 120 corpses were recovered from the well (of which there is no mention in the Hunter Committee Report). This fact, that bodies were pulled out from the well, does not appear specifically in any of the official evidence. According to one account by Raja Ram, people had not jumped in, but fell into the well as they fled the bullets: ‘Many people also ran in the direction of the well. . . and blinded by terror and unable to check their momentum some fell into the well, which unfortunately had no protection wall around it in those days.’4

  But had all the corpses been retrieved? When a few members, including Pandit Malaviya of the Indian National Congress visited Amritsar, some doubts were raised whether the authorities had done their job. At the end of June 1919, Motilal Nehru wrote to his son Jawaharlal that he ‘had seen badly decomposed bodies floating in the Jallianwala Bagh well.’ It is possible that some bodies still remained, though when divers were sent in by the administration, they said they had found only some cloth and an earthen pot. The Congress members said that the stench of death remained in the air till June. Many bodies had apparently been recovered from the Hansli and the canal running through the Bagh in April—though there is no official record of it.

  During debates at the Imperial Legislative Council in September 1919, the Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab, J.P. Thompson, dismissed the discovery of a corpse still floating in the well in June (as had been notified by Pandit Malaviya) saying:

  As regards the corpse which the Pandit says he saw in the well, really the incident is hardly worth dealing with. But one thing is certain, and that is, that if there was a corpse down the well when the Pandit visited the place at the end of June, it was not the corpse of anybody who had been killed on the 13th of April. It is established by expert evidence that after 2 1/2 months in the hot weather a corpse would be a mere collection of bones at the bottom of the well—so that as evidence of anything that had been there from the time when the firing took place on April the 13th, there is nothing in it at all. But it does seem to me that when the Pandit wrote to the Municipal Committee saying that there were ‘still’ one or more corpses down the well, it was perfectly obvious that what he was doing was trying to create horror or pity in the minds of his hearers in connection with the incident at Jallianwala Bagh.

  Even if the corpses had rotted in the water and the heat, and their bones had sunk to the bottom of the well, the smell would have been all-pervasive. It would have also affected the well water and the hygiene of the area—something that Thompson did not venture to address, instead dismissing Malaviya’s concern as one of creating ‘horror or pity’. The British government could only be aggressive in its approach as they had no answers for much that had taken place. How difficult would it have been to arrange for an earthen pot and a pile of clothing to dismiss Pandit Malaviya’s allegation?

  Undeniably, ordinary life would have been severely impacted after the massacre, as blood would have flowed down the streets and mixed with the well water, apart from the flesh and bones of those who died inside the well, and the canal (the hansli) whose waters flowed to the Golden Temple. How was the water itself cleaned up? Could this have been the reason why the water supply was cut off for such a long time? There is no official account anywhere of how the area was finally scoured clear of blood and bodies, either. Was the blood allowed to dry into the mud and any residual skin pecked clean by vultures? Nor are there any accounts of this in the Congress report as by the time the Committee began its work of recording testimonies, it was more focussed on the actual happenings in the Bagh and the callous treatment of the victims. The disposal of the bodies, apart from the hundreds of joint funerals and burials, was never really discussed.

  Without water, how were these hundreds of bodies collected, washed and taken to funeral pyres? All the official records were maintained by the British, and no official visited the Bagh till nearly four days later, so there are no clear answers available.

  By July, when the writer K.D. Malaviya visited Amritsar, he found that the Bagh had been sealed with planks ‘and rendered impassable for any intending visitors’. (These barriers, he said, were erected the day after a visit by Malaviya and Motilal Nehru, which was possibly when they noticed the corpse.)5

  Where were the doctors or the hospitals to deal with a calamity of this magnitude? From the evidence, it appears that most people took their wounded home and cared for them without letting the authorities know.

  But there were also those who desperately needed a doctor. The difficulty was that the injured did not want to go to the Civil
Hospital for fear that Smith, who was in charge, would turn them away. Dr Balmokand, who treated up to 50 of the injured himself—as did other Indian doctors—remembered that Smith was furious. He not only chastised Balmokand for having been at Jallianwala Bagh, he even insisted that he should go to the railway dispensary and stay there, or be whipped. A frightened Balmokand stayed at the railway dispensary for one whole week.

  Smith said that the official figure for casualties at Jallianwala Bagh had been ‘set’ at 1800.6 Given the circumstances, and the lack of information or help from the British, the numbers could have risen to 2,000 or higher, assuming that hundreds of wounded men and boys were refused medical aid.

  Approximately 100 of the wounded were brought to the home of 26-year-old Assistant Surgeon Dr Ishar Dass Bhatia, at Karman Deohri, Amritsar, on 13 April. He treated them but many died at his house.7 There is no way to know if these numbers entered the final tally.

  Most of the wounded had been shot in the back or the back of their legs or arms, or even the soles of their feet. Dr Kidar Nath Bhandari, Senior Assistant Surgeon, who had treated the wounded on 10 April, did so again on 13 April. He visited some of the injured at home.8

  Had it not been for individual doctors who took the risk of being arrested or accused of sedition, it is possible the overall casualty list would have been much, much higher.

  Ram Saran Singh (30), who managed to escape from the Bagh, returned the next day to hunt for his brother-in-law, and found dead bodies spread all over, even outside the Bagh—in the lanes as well as near the entrance of the Bagh. Possibly some among the wounded had been trying to get home but died on the way. He could not find his brother-in-law, though he saw a lot of young boys who had been killed.9

  He recollected the difficulties people faced as hundreds of bodies had to be cremated:

  Early in the morning on the 14th, I again went to the garden with three or four other persons. I saw people removing the dead bodies even then. I found my relative’s dead body in the canal amongst the other corpses. He had three bullets. One on the forehead, and another on the side, and the third in the back. I brought my relative’s body to his house in the Nimak Mandi, and removed it from there to the cremation ground at Chattiwind Gate. The place was full of dead bodies burning, and we had to cremate my relation out in the open; and there were many others being cremated likewise. There was no one to record the number of deaths.10