The question asks itself then: If the situation in other places could be quickly brought under control, what was so different about what transpired in Amritsar and other parts of Punjab?
* * *
1. Quoted in Pandit Pearay Mohan, An Imaginary Rebellion and How It Was Suppressed (Lahore: Kholsa Bros., 1920).
2. Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977), p. 77.
3. Op. cit., p. 77.
4. Benjamin Guy Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty To India (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1920), pp. 53–4.
5. Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty, pp. 53–4.
6. Op. cit., p. 55.
7. Op. cit.
8. Op. cit., pp. 59–64.
9. INC Report, p. 26.
10. Fein, Imperial Crime, p. 56.
11. Fein, Imperial Crime, pp. 56–7.
12. Fein, Imperial Crime, p. 57.
13. Montagu Papers, British Library, MSS, Eur D 523, 523/8.
14. Chelmsford Papers, 264/1, 264/5, British Library, 523/8.
15. Shireen Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire, (London: I.B. Tauris Co. Ltd., 2016), p. 68.
16. Ilahi, Imperial Violence, p. 68.
17. Ilahi, Imperial Violence, p. 68.
18. K.D. Malaviya, Open Rebellion In The Punjab: With Special Reference To Amritsar (Allahabad: Abhyudya Press, 1919), pp. 1–3.
19. Op. cit., p. 56.
20. Hunter Committee Report, p. 6.
21. Hunter Committee Report, p. 1.
22. Op. cit., pp. 3–4.
23. Hunter Committee Report, p. 5.
24. Hunter Committee Report, p. 7.
25. Op. cit., p. 10.
26. Hunter Committee Report, p. 19.
27. Hunter Committee Report, p. 12.
28. Hunter Committee Report, p. 14.
29. Hunter Committee Report, p. 17.
30. Hunter Committee Report, p. 18.
31. Op. cit., pp. 20, 22.
32. Op. cit., p. 28.
33. Hunter Committee Report, p. 26.
6
‘You Cannot Kill a Tiger Gently’
They say that it was brutal and horrible to kill so many people. There are three ideas which occur to me. You cannot put out a fire in a warehouse, which has caught well alight, with a teacup. Equally, as has been said, if your house catches fire, it is no use telling the fireman, after he has put your fire out, that he has used too much water to do it. You cannot kill a tiger gently, I defy you to do it. Lastly, supposing a burglar came into your house, and you had a life preserver, and hit him on the head with the intention of stunning him, it is impossible to say what force you would use.
—Lieutenant Colonel James, MP1
Looking at the evidence a hundred years on, it is difficult to escape the reality that Punjab had been enslaved by a group of men led by O’Dwyer who believed that the natives were incapable of self-rule or having a voice. Anyone who challenged the system had to be wiped out. There was no space for dialogue since the British always knew best and the Indians, like naughty children, had to be punished, coerced or rewarded into good behaviour.
One year before the Amritsar massacre, on a trip to India, the embattled Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, was not complimentary in his description of O’Dwyer, whom he met several times. Though the proposed Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms were being hammered out to build up a power-sharing module, it was staunchly resisted by administrators like O’Dwyer. Montagu said after meeting him, ‘O’Dwyer frankly wants. . . that the Government of India may protect him against the inhabitants of Punjab.’ Calling him ‘long, pugnacious, narrow,’ Montagu said O’Dwyer ‘would not have anything, particularly no elected majority.’2
He added that ‘O’Dwyer. . . is still opposed to everything. As his memoranda show, he is determined to maintain his position as the idol of the reactionary forces and to try and govern by the iron hand.’3
But O’Dwyer had his supporters.
While in India, Montagu wrote in January 1918, after a meeting with Viceroy Chelsmford and others, ‘I heard them say, to my amazement, that it was a most disquieting sign that agitation was spreading to the villages. What was the unfortunate politician in India to do? He was told he could not have self government because there were no electorate, because only the educated wanted it, because the villagers had no political instincts; and then when he went out into the villages to try and make an electorate, to try and create a political desire, he was told he was agitating, and that the agitation must be put a stop to.’ He did not think that interning the politician was an answer.4
Meanwhile, British historians have spent years digging into Dyer’s life to find some evidence that could foreshadow his murder of hundreds of innocents. He was actually a classic, patriarchal representative of the deep schisms that existed at the time and he did what so many others in his place would have easily done. There was underlying mistrust and suspicion of the natives, who had risen once before in 1857 and could do so again. The British may have been fewer in number, and yet they ruled and encouraged men like Dyer to believe that they, the British, were superior. But no one, not even an officer bent upon saving the Empire, should have been congratulated for murdering subjects of his own country, in cold blood. Even if they had a different skin colour.
But discrimination did exist—and Montagu felt that Indians were despised by the British. While in 1919, the Suffragettes in England succeeded in getting the vote for women, in India self-government remained a distant dream. Montagu had said in 1917, on his Indian trip. ‘I am confirmed in my belief that the reasons which make self government impossible in this country now are not really distrust or unfitness or lack of ability or want of character. Unfortunately, there are some people, many people, who agree on this fact that self government is impossible now, but agree because they despise the Indian. . .’5
Gandhi, along with the commissioners of the Congress Sub-Committee Report, condemned the system rather than any one individual and requested that the officers who had suppressed the disorders be relieved from duty—O’Dwyer, General Dyer, Colonel O’Brien, Bosworth Smith, as well as two Indians: Rai Sahib Sri Ram Sud and Malik Saieb Khan. (The brutalities were often supported and perpetuated by Indian collaborators, who were generously rewarded.) They said that Colonel MacRae and Captain Doveton had failed too, but they were young and inexperienced, and ‘their brutality was not so studied and calculated as that of the experienced Officers’.
The INC Report, as well as the Minority Report of the Hunter Committee, were far more critical than the Hunter Committee Majority Report. The INC Report also requested that Viceroy Chelmsford be recalled as he had ignored ‘telegrams and letters from individual and public bodies. He endorsed the action of the Punjab government without enquiry. He clothed the officials with indemnity in indecent haste. He never went to Punjab to make a personal inquiry even after the occurrences. He ought to have known, at least in May, everything that the various officials have admitted, and yet he failed to inform the public or the imperial Government of the full nature of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre or the subsequent acts done under law.’ It was a long list of omissions, made worse by the fact that there were plenty of warnings. Even when responsible people like Pandit Malaviya had raised questions in the Imperial Legislative Council, he chose to ignore them.
As has already been pointed out, there was enough physical distance between the Lieutenant Governor and the Viceroy for anyone to go rogue. Information took a long time to reach, so it wasn’t hard to keep something quiet. This was nowhere more evident than in Punjab, where bans were placed on the most vocal newspapers and martial law curtailed the free movement of people.
In many ways, O’Dwyer created the conditions in which someone like Dyer could kill with impunity—just as he gave an opportunity to Johnson to whip people in public and Bosworth Smith to humiliate. He was in agreement with Sir Aukland Colv
in, once Governor of the United Provinces (UP) who said:
Whatever may be hazarded with the educated minority, the real India is only to be found in the masses of the ignorant millions. To govern this real India, authority and justice should be in full view, but in reserve must be ample force. These are the only methods which under their own rule the masses of that country have ever respected, not even at the desire of the British Government will they readily adopt any other.6
O’Dwyer found Colvin’s words so moving that he wrote: ‘The views (Colvin’s) so admirably expresses are those which many of us, more crudely, in vain endeavoured to impress on those responsible for the Reforms (of 1919).’7 O’Dwyer lamented the fact that ‘a change has come over the spirit of (India’s) rulers’ as men like Montagu worked to reform the imperial system and to share power with their subjects. He was certain this would only lead to anarchy in India.
That O’Dwyer believed in ‘ample force’ was quite apparent in the manner in which he ruled Punjab, even before the disorders. For instance, he was very proud of how many soldiers Punjab was able to provide to fight in the World War. In fact, it could be argued that it was precisely this forced recruitment—largely done through a programme of coercion, inducement and rewards—which caused unrest, especially as recruitment carried on after the war as well.
Most families in Punjab—given the scale of recruitment—would have had someone in the army, posted in some distant land, with whom their only connection was through the ‘goras’. This gave O’Dwyer and his kind enormous power, more than in other ‘non-martial’ states.
There are, of course, romantic stories of Indians fighting for the British and the close links this created; of friendship and shared concerns. In actuality, these were terrible postings. Soldiers were away from home for months on end and expected to perform heroic tasks for European countries they barely recognised. They were separated from their families at a young age, and had to deal with post-traumatic stress disorders when they returned, with little or no help available. Their families, in turn, had to deal with a lack of young, able-bodied men in the state, leaving many young women either unmarried or widowed at a very young age. The impact of this ruthless militarisation may have propagated the myth of the ‘macho’ martial races, but the consequences, including gender imbalance and a marked preference for a male child, are still being felt today.
In the early 1900s, especially following World War I, it would have come as a rude shock to the British that the urban youth of Punjab and their families were choosing to go into professions other than the army, such as law, in which they were not subservient to their colonisers. Education was not widespread, nor was it a priority with the British, as admitted by Montagu.
The British were desperate to keep the ‘martial races’ of Punjab on their side. It was the one state where the soldiers had stood by them even in 1857. The thought that they may have begun to lose faith in the Empire was difficult to bear.
This was also a state where rebellions were becoming more and more frequent. To counter this, public gestures of loyalty were encouraged—indeed, enforced. In Punjab, school children and college-going youth were expected to salute the Union Jack multiple times, every day.
O’Dwyer, who was posted in Punjab between 1913 and 1919 as Lieutenant Governor, notes in his memoir that while in 1914, 28,000 men were raised, of whom 14,000 came from Punjab, by the end of 1916, ‘the Punjab which had started the War with 100,000 men in the Army, had supplied 110,000 out of the 192,000 fighting men raised in India’.8 This was obviously a proud moment for him.
He pushed the numbers ever higher, and believed that there was enthusiasm for the war among the ‘martial races’. As he puts it: ‘The association of the martial races with the Army had become steadily closer, the material benefits of military service had been realised, interest and enthusiasm for the War were stimulated by the civil authorities; the announcement that Indian troops were to fight against a European foe on the Western front caused widespread enthusiasm. . .’
He adds that civil officials and rural ‘men of influence’ were asked to help in recruitment. New depots were opened and ‘Finally, and this was the most effective of all, inducements to the Punjab peasant.’ He said that as soon as the war broke out, ‘I put at the disposal of the Commander-in-Chief one hundred and eighty thousand acres of valuable canal irrigated land for allotment to Indian officers and men who served with special distinction in the field. I also set aside some fifteen thousand acres for reward grants to those who gave most effective help in raising recruits.’ These thousands of acres of land in inducements turned Punjab into a hunting ground for agents who began to scout for suitable men and boys to place in the army. These agents grew rich and owned large landholdings. Many of these collaborators would sustain their material and social dominance in independent India as well.
Even more effort was put into the recruitment process from February 1917 onwards, and ‘all assistance in raising men for the Army was made a duty of all executive and village officials and of all who were enjoying grants of land or other marks of consideration from Government, and one of the main qualifications in establishing claims on Government.’9
Recruitment became a primary function of all government officials and anyone who wanted anything at all from the government. O’Dwyer, without much concern for the freedom of the people he was governing—who were, after all, British subjects enjoying some amount of liberty—commented: ‘. . . the recruiting organisation was rapidly expanded by the appointment of experienced civilians, official and non-official, with a knowledge of the people, as assistants to the military recruiting officers; Indian officials or non-officials of influence were employed on recruiting work in nearly every district; the territorial force of recruitment by which suitable men of every class could be enrolled in nearly every district was substituted for the old class system under which there were only four recruiting centres, Rawal Pindi for Mohammedans, Amritsar for Sikhs, Jullundur for Dogras and Delhi for Jats; while in the more backward districts, unaccustomed to military service local depots were established for the training of the young recruits near their homes.’ The system of rewards continued to be applied and ‘were such as would appeal to the Oriental mind, such as Indian titles of honour from “Raja” and “nawab” down to “Rai Sahib” and “Khan Sahib”, robes of honour, swords of honour, guns. . . cash rewards.’ Depending on how much help the individual had given in recruitment, the grants could go up to 15,000 acres of land.10
While O’Dwyer insisted in his memoir that these and other recruitment processes were not meant to ‘denude the martial tribes of the flower of their manhood,’ the fact was that the target for the year beginning 1 July 1917, for the province, was set at over 200,000 men.11 He explains that the quotas for each district were based on knowledgeable assessments by local experts. A War League or a Recruitment Board was set up, headed by the Deputy Commissioner as President. Each village ‘was told what further numbers it was expected to provide’. As they ventured into newer territory for recruitment, some resistance did arise, and O’Dwyer admitted to at least a few cases of people refusing to join the army in Punjab.
He hit out at Montagu and his visit in 1917–18 to India as diverting attention from the war effort towards political reform. ‘The visit of the then Secretary of State (Mr Montagu) to work out the scheme of reforms at the end of 1917, gave the “politically minded” classes an excuse for forgetting that India, with the rest of the Empire, was still in the throes of a death struggle.’ But he claimed that the ‘fighting races’ were unlikely to forget that those clamouring for ‘Swaraj’ showed little inclination to defend their country.12
Punjab grew more and more uneasy following the King Emperor’s appeal in April 1918. At a public meeting in Lahore in May 1918, it was ‘unanimously decided’ to furnish the quota of 200,000 men. It was also decided that if voluntary measures failed, ‘other means’ were to be adopted.
The pressure remained e
ven after the armistice was announced. In August and September, 21,000 were recruited each month. This was not a happy time, as more than half a million people succumbed to an influenza epidemic. The price of food was shooting up. In the cities, there was growing restlessness: the idea of political reform, introduced by Montagu, was gaining currency.
According to the INC Report, there were instances of recruitment in the rural areas in particular, which amounted to coercion.13 In Shahpur district, a tahsildar, Nadir Hussain Shah, was murdered because of his methods of pressure and persuasion. According to a witness, Shah would get hold of a list of possible recruits prepared by the patwari. He would then visit the village to find out more and gauge whether there were any objections to his recruiting men. He would usually ask a family for their consent, but the witness admitted that the zamindars of the area used to run away when they heard the tahsildar was coming as they did not want to be employed. Some form of force was undoubtedly used—some of the men were stripped naked in front of the women of the household, and women were allegedly abducted in order to force men to join the army.
In another case, in the village of Yara in Karnal district, a number of boys were induced to offer themselves as recruits.14 However, the father of one of them ‘entreated the Magistrate not to take from him his only son’. In the scuffle that followed, five people were convicted under the Defence of India Act. ‘It appears from the judgement that the lower court had acted under the express orders of Mr Hamilton, the District Magistrate,’ the Appellate Court stated and added, ‘The various orders passed by the District Magistrate from time to time clearly show that if these appellants had also supplied recruits from among their near relations or if they were fit for enlistment themselves, they would have been let off, provided twenty recruits were made up from the villages as was originally demanded from it.’ Indeed, twenty recruits were supplied, but the District Magistrate wanted twenty from the same family. This was a bizarre demand and was only meant, no doubt, to create more trouble for the already distressed family.
Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 Page 22