His excursions into what was an unknown world included a third-class return railway journey between Madras and Bombay to discover what was, so to speak, the darker, hidden side of the Raj. He paid thirteen rupees (91p) for what turned out to be a most unpleasant experience for a man from a middle-class background who would normally have paid 65 rupees for a first-class ticket. He squeezed into an over-crowded, dirty carriage, used a foul lavatory and, when the train halted for meal breaks, was served fly-blown food and unpotable tea – ‘tannin water with filthy sugar and whitish looking liquid miscalled milk’. Railway officials hectored passengers and took their bribes.6
‘I hold strong and probably peculiar views,’ Gandhi confessed in August 1918, adding that they were not shared by the Congress leadership.7 He was right. The championship of the rights of women and the assertion that the treatment of Untouchables was a ‘blot on Hindu society’ bewildered many from the higher castes and outraged others. It would have been difficult for educated, middle-class Indians to accept his quirky economic doctrines which demanded that, like everyone else, they learned how to spin cotton to promote national self-sufficiency and personal self-awareness. Nor would the urban businessman have applauded Gandhi’s request to peasants to use their village baker rather than one from a nearby town.8 This hostility to the large-scale producer, whether capitalist corporation or socialist co-operative, stemmed from a romantic attachment to the artisan and peasant, both of whom Gandhi saw as the backbone of India. He favoured man rather than machine power, distrusted all forms of modern technology and preferred Indians to be taught in Hindi rather than English. This was not a programme to attract the conventional liberal, progressive Congress member.
Had it not been for the government’s decision at the end of 1918 to introduce stringent anti-terrorist laws, Gandhi might have stayed an eccentric philosopher on the fringes of the Congress, well-loved but with little influence. The legislation, known as the Rowlatt Acts, was the outcome of the deliberations of a committee which had been instructed to investigate sedition. Its findings were bleak: an under-manned police force which had scarcely contained terrorism was bound to be overwhelmed once wartime legislation lapsed, detainees were released and large numbers of ex-soldiers returned home. The answer was the abolition of normal legal processes for all political offences, which henceforward would be tried without juries in courts where the burden of proof would be weighted in favour of the prosecution. Gandhi was appalled and prepared for what he described as the ‘greatest battle of my life’ which, incidentally, he felt sure would restore his failing health.9
Gandhi’s weapon would be the satyagraha he had perfected for his contest with the authorities in the Transvaal. It was often called ‘passive resistance’, a phrase he disliked because it missed the essence of what he had in mind. Satyagraha was a quality of the soul which enabled an individual to endure suffering for what he knew to be morally right. Injustice, as represented by the Rowlatt Acts, was profanity and would wither in the face of the superior moral stamina of those who had prepared themselves and taken the satyagraha pledge. The British were, he believed ‘sound at heart’ and so would bow to the ‘supremacy of moral force’.10 During February and March 1919, Gandhi outlined his philosophy and what would be expected from those who submitted to the vows of the satyagraha. What he had seen of India during the past four years had made him confident that even the peasantry would understand the nature of what he was demanding from them, and would behave with the necessary patience and restraint when confronting the police. And yet, remembering his Transvaal experiences, he noted that the warlike Pathan could not suppress his instincts sufficiently to accept the self-discipline needed not to lose his temper and lash out.11
II
Although the spirit of satyagraha was essentially Hindu, hundreds of thousands of Muslims agreed to participate in the protests planned for the end of March. They did so more out of sectarian sympathies than hostility to the Rowlatt Acts. Since the surrender of Turkey the previous October, Muslims had been disturbed by a persistent rumour that Britain was bent on the abolition of the caliphate. The response was the Khalifat movement, which urged the British government to preserve the religious status of the Turkish sultan as head of Sunni Islam. As the agitation spread, Khalifat supporters became convinced that their faith was in some way imperilled. Ancient animosities against the infidels surfaced among India’s Muslims and were expressed by the poet Akbar Ila Wahabi:
Our belly keeps us working with the clerks
Our heart is with the Persians and the Turks.12
Fissile, atavistic sentiments were being fomented by agitators based in Tashkent and Samarkand, where Russian agents were cultivating a Pan-Islamic–Bolshevik axis which would broadcast revolutionary propaganda in India, Persia and Iraq. During the winter of 1918–19 intelligence sources in Mashad reported that rumours were spreading to the effect that British troops had desecrated Muslim holy places and that the Afghans were poised to invade India.13 The government took this superficially improbable alliance of Bolshevism and Islam seriously, and, in May 1919, Chelmsford was disturbed by the diatribes ‘against the British who choke all native races’ that were pouring from Tashkent.14 More alarming were calls for revolution, like this one delivered by a Turkish agitator in Merv during the early summer:
Oh working Muhammadans! The Soviet Government has been formed to free you all . . . Are you aware that your fellow labourers in other parts of the world are being cruelly and shamefully strangled in cold blood by the British – the greatest enemy of Islam? The British Government is the same which has enslaved 70 millions of Muslims in India, which rules Egypt with fire and sword, which had wiped out Tripoli and dismembered the Turkish Empire . . . You know that the Afghans have risen against them, and that the British are running like hares before the gallant Afghan troops. You can send your friends to the Indian sepoys . . . who are deceived by British pay to be against them in their right and win them to your side, turning them against their infidel employers.15
Appeals to mutiny always struck a chill note in India. There had been chronic unrest on the North-West Frontier since 1917 and it persisted until 1924, despite several punitive expeditions and the widespread use of aircraft. There were occasional signs of wobbling among Muslim troops, and, in January 1920, the commander in Waziristan thought it prudent to look out for signs of Pan-Islamic subversion among men being asked to fight their co-religionists.16 Periods of uncertainty spawned rumours and they ran riot through India during 1919 and 1920, adding to the authorities’ headaches, for they could not be stifled and denials seldom convinced. Among the crop during the summer of 1920 were bizarre tales that the Russians had invaded Afghanistan and occupied Chitral and that Gandhi was on his way to Moscow.17
Even without Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign, there was a prospect of serious unrest during the spring of 1919, although its form and extent were unclear to the government. It was simultaneously faced with Muslim apprehension about the future of the caliphate, distress in the wake of the recent influenza epidemic, prices outstripping wages, dearths and undercurrents of expectation stirred up by news of massive upheavals in Russia and the Middle East. As Chelmsford told the princes in November, they were living through unquiet, envious times. There was a ‘new spirit abroad in the world . . . prone to look on order as tyranny, prosperity as profiteering, and expensiveness of living as the result of administration’.18
Riots marked the first satyagraha hartal in Delhi on 30 March. They had started, as they were bound to, when some food vendors refused to accept the closure of businesses and they ended with police and troops firing on mobs. The pattern was set for the next fortnight, when each hartal was marked by disorderly processions, looting, arson and attacks on police and Europeans. The trouble was worst in Delhi, Ahmadabad and the Punjab and worsened after 10 April when Gandhi was arrested and taken to Bombay. His crime, Chelmsford believed, was naïve irresponsibility. ‘Dear me,’ he wired Montagu on the 9th, ‘what
a damned nuisance these saintly fanatics are! Incapable of hurting a fly, honest, but he enters lightheartedly on a course of action which is the negation of all government and may lead to much hardship to people who are ignorant and easily led astray.’19 As the anarchy and bloodshed spread, Gandhi gradually realised the ferocity of the passions he had unwittingly unleashed. On 5 April he blamed the Delhi disturbances on the police, but, on the 11th and 12th, he pleaded for restraint, asking his followers to stop mass demonstrations, stone throwing and railway sabotage. They ignored him and on 14 April he was forced to admit that he had ‘over-calculated’ his countrymen’s capacity for self-discipline, but, and here the Hindu was speaking, wondered whether Muslim fervour had been the catalyst for the disorders.20 The expressions of hatred towards the British, the murders and the savagery of Indians shocked Gandhi, who had ingenuously imagined them incapable of vindictiveness and violence.21 Chelmsford believed his remorse was sincere, but thought him a ‘tool’ in the hands of ‘revolutionists’.22
‘Micky’ O’Dwyer had no doubts as to the Indian capacity for mayhem and was ready for it in the Punjab, where he expected a repeat of the revolutionary conspiracy he had thwarted in 1915.23 But the governor’s preparations were insufficient to withstand the riots which convulsed Lahore, Kasur, Jalandhar, Multan and Amritsar on 10–12 April. They were, he informed Chelmsford, the pre-meditated work of ‘an unholy alliance (chiefly Hindu) between a section of extremist Intelligentsia and the low class Muhammadans, workers, pimps and bravadoes’.24 Their aim, O’Dwyer believed, was a full-scale uprising coupled with attempts to lure Indian soldiers into a mutiny and, as events unfolded, he found plenty of evidence which appeared to uphold his thesis. His reaction, therefore, was to treat the disturbances as the first stages of an insurrection intended to overthrow the Raj. Condign measures resolutely enforced alone would save the Punjab and with it British India.
O’Dwyer’s views on the precariousness of the situation in the Punjab were shared by Brigadier-General Rex Dyer, a chain-smoking, 55-year-old career soldier who had been born in India. His Times obituary described him as a ‘breezy, kind-hearted man’ with a ‘dauntless spirit’ which had been proved when he commanded a detachment on the Indo-Persian border during the war.25 He was the typical bluff, no-nonsense sahib, the epitome of a type which was happiest knocking a frontier into shape. Once he told a tribal chief that, ‘No Englishman ever makes war against women and children.’ On another occasion he warned a bandit: ‘Halil Khan, if you play me false, or ever raise your hand against me, I will blow your head off.’26 Dyer was not a natural subordinate and upset Chelmsford when, off his own bat, he began ‘annexing large chunks of Persia’ in 1918, and it was only his ill-health which saved him from being dismissed.27 After he left the frontier, mothers invoked his name to still their fretful children. Outwardly tough, Dyer suffered considerable discomfort and pain from old injuries, which did nothing to improve an already brittle temper. At the beginning of April, he commanded the 45th Brigade based at Jalandhar.
In spirit and strength of will, Dyer was the natural partner of O’Dwyer at whose orders he was sent to Amritsar, where he arrived on the evening of 11 April. What he saw and heard had a powerful effect on his imagination: there were over 100 terrified European women and children crowded into the Gobindgarh fort, refugees from a city which had passed out of British control into that of the mob. During the past thirty-six hours it had stormed two banks, murdered three European members of their staff, burned their bodies and looted cash. The buildings had then been fired, as had two mission schools. Other Europeans had barely escaped alive and one, Miss Marcia Sherwood, a mission doctor, had been brutally beaten by Indian youths, an assault which outraged Dyer, for it seemed to symbolise the contempt in which his countrymen were now held.
Amritsar was a city of 150,000 which had exploded after the arrest of its two leading nationalists: Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, a 31-year-old Cambridge barrister who was a strong supporter of the Khalifat movement and a fiery orator (he eventually became a Communist), and Dr Satya Pal, a medical practitioner. Both had organised the anti-Rowlatt hartals on 30 March and 6 April, which had been marked by enthusiastic displays of Hindu–Muslim unity, but no serious trouble. The riots on the 10th, ostensibly in support of the detained men, turned into a general attack on Europeans and their property. There had been some firing by police and troops which had been insufficient to coerce but enough to inflame the rioters. By the time of Dyer’s arrival all attempts to restore order had been suspended; the Raj appeared paralysed.
Dyer had under his command over 1,100 troops, about a third of them British, and two armoured-cars equipped with machine-guns. On the morning of the 12th he led a detachment of over 400 and the cars through the streets and met a sullen, hostile reception. The following day he reentered Amritsar and, at various places, a proclamation was read which imposed a curfew at 8.00 P.M. and banned all processions and meetings. Again, Dyer and his troops were ill-received: among the slogans shouted at them was ‘The British Raj is at end.’28 This appeared to be confirmed when Dyer heard garbled details of further commotions in Lahore and Kasur. Most disturbing of all were the reports which reached him of Amritsar agitators, who were alleging that if Indian troops were ordered to open fire on demonstrators, they would refuse.29 Similar predictions were being broadcast elsewhere in the Punjab and heightened anxieties about a second mutiny.
By the evening of 13 April, if not before, Dyer had convinced himself that the recent disturbances in Amritsar were the prelude to a general uprising, that the city had to be recovered and some sort of deterrent punishment inflicted on its inhabitants which would convince them that the British will to rule was as strong as ever. Intelligence that, in defiance of the previous ban, a mass meeting had been planned that afternoon must have concentrated his mind on the possibility that the subversives wanted a trial of strength. His resolve and that of the Raj were about to be tested. The assembly, which attracted between fifteen and twenty thousand, was held in an enclosed area of wasteland, the Jallianwala Bagh. It is not known how many present had heard of Dyer’s interdiction, although the appearance of an aeroplane overhead was a spur for some to leave. Earlier, there had been rumours that the city was to be bombarded in retaliation for the outrages.30
Dyer, accompanied by the two armoured cars and fifty Gurkha and Sikh infantrymen (O’Dwyer favoured the use of Indian troops to give the lie to rumours of imminent mutiny) and a further forty Gurkhas armed with kukris reached the bagh just after 5.00 P.M. The chosen entrance was too narrow for the cars, and so Dyer deployed his men facing the crowd and, without warning, ordered them to fire. They continued to do so, reloading twice, for the next ten minutes. Many years later, a Gurkha told a British officer: ‘Sahib, while it lasted it was splendid: we fired every round we had.’31 It was a methodical, directed fusillade with Dyer ordering volleys against parties of demonstrators who were scrambling over walls. When it was over 1,650 rounds had been fired, and 379 lay dead or dying and 1,500 wounded in an area about the same size as Trafalgar Square. Dyer and his party then departed, leaving the injured to fend for themselves, or wait for help from friends and kinsfolk who were willing to defy the curfew.
From then until his death eight years after, Dyer believed that at a stroke he had restored the authority and prestige of the Raj in the Punjab, and saved the lives of his countrymen and women in Amritsar and elsewhere. ‘My duty and my military instincts told me to fire,’ he would repeatedly claim.32 At the time it was calculated that there had been about 200 casualties, the figure which reached Delhi and was relaid to London on 15 April. The cable ended: ‘The effect of the firing was salutary.’33
In the meantime, O’Dwyer had been given permission to declare martial law and the process of pacification was under way across the Punjab which, Chelmsford assured Montagu, was now in ‘open rebellion’.34 At Gujranwala an aeroplane was used to strafe and bomb rioters attacking a railway station. In Amritsar, Dyer addressed the lead
ing citizens in forthright terms. If they wanted war, the government was ready, if they did not then they were to open their shops. ‘Your people talk against the Government,’ he continued, ‘and persons educated in Germany and Bengal talk sedition. I shall uproot all these.’ Punishment had to be seen, felt and inflicted in ways which humiliated as well as hurt. In the street where Miss Sherwood had been attacked, all Indians were forced to crawl on their bellies, including perhaps those anonymous but brave folk who rescued the doctor and tended her wounds. British soldiers who enforced Dyer’s orders found the business amusing and, in other parts, the British onlookers applauded floggings and some shouted out: ‘Strike hard, strike more.’35 Special care was taken to whip men from the higher castes in public places where their shame would be seen by all; in Kasur the punishment was carried out in the presence of local prostitutes.36
O’Dwyer’s diagnosis and remedies for the Punjab’s problems were accepted in Delhi, but not without qualms. ‘If only people would realise that the day has passed when you can keep India by the sword,’ an exasperated Chelmsford told Montagu on 28 April. Dyer, he thought, was beyond anyone’s control, and he reminded O’Dwyer that, ‘we have to live with Indians when this is all over’.37 In private, the Viceroy had been appalled by the ‘crawling order’ which, he rightly believed, would raise ‘racial animosity’. Nevertheless, Chelmsford praised ‘Dyer’s otherwise admirable conduct of a most critical situation’. If, as Montagu had demanded, he was recalled, his treatment would be most ‘bitterly resented by all Englishmen in this country’.38 The Secretary of State remained sceptical, and early in September Chelmsford had to remind him that the emergency in the Punjab would have had dire consequences had not O’Dwyer and Dyer acted so promptly and decisively. The unrest might easily have spilled over into the United Provinces and beyond, and ‘at any moment the Army might have gone, and once they had gone we should have had a state of things which would have been infinitely more serious than the Mutiny of 1857’.39 It was a view which was already generally accepted throughout the British community in India and would shortly gain wide currency in Britain.
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