by Robert Payne
When a great imperial power fires on defenseless people with the aim of inspiring terror, it acknowledges its own weakness. The dialogue between the conqueror and the conquered can no longer be maintained on any level where reasonable compromise is possible; it becomes disjointed, strangely static, with the same phrases interminably repeated even when they have lost all meaning. The imperial power becomes increasingly more grandiloquent as effective power grows less. There are more parades and processions, more uniforms are designed, more titles and honors and medals are distributed, the tone of official pronouncements becomes more regal and imperious, even when inviting the confidence of the conquered people, and the gestures of imperial authority become more dramatic and rhetorical. So it had been in Russia after the massacre outside the Winter Palace in January 1905, and so it was in India. Imperial authority began to wear the appearance of an abstraction; the reality lay in the dead bodies on the streets.
The Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar was a large wasteland, about the size of Trafalgar Square, with a few straggling trees growing amid refuse dumps. “Bagh” means garden, but it had long ago ceased being a garden, being used as a fairground or a place for public meetings. The wasteland formed an irregular square with here and there a few salients thrusting out among the houses surrounding it, leaving only three or four narrow entrances where it was impossible for more than three or four people to walk abreast. On that day a crowd of about six thousand people had congregated to celebrate a Sikh festival and to listen to a speaker mounted on a platform in the center of the square. Most of the crowd consisted of peasants who had come in for the fair, and there were Sikhs armed with sticks and kirpans, the short Sikh swords. It was a good-humored, orderly crowd, unarmed except for those occasional swords which the Sikhs often carry, and indeed are supposed to carry according to the articles of their faith.
Two days earlier Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, an Irishman born in Simla and well-known for his excellent war record—he had fought on the Northwest Frontier, in Burma and Persia, and he had taken part in the relief of Chitral—arrived in Amritsar to assume command of the garrison force. His first order was to prohibit all public meetings until further notice, and this order was announced by the police in scattered areas of the city. It was not posted up on the walls; instead, the town criers were sent out with their drums, accompanying the announcement with drum taps. When the police later drew up a map showing where the public announcements were made, it became evident that the criers were given instructions to read the order only in places where no one was likely to hear it. The police therefore bore a heavy responsibility for the tragedy that followed.
At one o’clock in the afternoon General Dyer learned that a mass meeting had been called in the Jallianwalla Bagh for half-past four. He was incensed at what he regarded as deliberate defiance of a military order and determined to exact exemplary punishment. Waiting until shortly before four thirty, he rushed to the Jallianwalla Bagh in an armored car at the head of a column of Gurkha and Baluchi troops. Altogether there were sixty-five Gurkhas, of which twenty-five were armed with rifles and forty with kukris, the curved Nepalese daggers which the Gurkhas have always regarded as more effective than rifles, and there were twenty-five Baluchis armed with rifles. One other armored car accompanied the column, and General Dyer’s intention was clearly to sweep through the crowd, cutting through it like a knife and terrifying it with the spectacle of armored strength, leaving the Gurkhas and Baluchis to mop up.
General Dyer did not know Amritsar well, and he had no knowledge at all of the topography of the Jallianwalla Bagh. None of the entrances to the wasteland were large enough to permit passage of an armored car, and the two cars were therefore abandoned in the long street that runs parallel to one side of the square. Then with his troops he made his way down the narrow alleyway which is the main entrance. Having come out into the Jallianwalla Bagh he found himself on rising ground looking down on the hollow filled with people who, in his heated imagination, appeared to be engaged in a mass demonstration. He deployed his troops along the whole length of the rising ground, and ordered them to fire into the crowd until all their ammunition was expended.
For ten consecutive minutes the Gurkhas and Baluchi riflemen, who had been given thirty-three rounds apiece, continued to fire into the crowd, choosing their victims as they pleased. No warning was given. The crowd dispersed as well as they could. Many tried to leap over a five-foot wall, and since this wall was quite close to the soldiers, no more than a hundred yards away, the soldiers had no difficulty in picking off the people at the foot of the wall and the others who were clambering over it. Children ran screaming across the wasteland, and some women threw themselves into a well. General Dyer contented himself with marching behind his soldiers and directing them to fire where the crowds were thickest. Altogether the Gurkhas and Baluchis fired 1,650 rounds, and since they were excellent marksmen capable of picking off people with ease at a thousand yards, they inflicted considerably more than 1,650 wounds. According to the police report issued some months later, there were 379 dead and four times as many wounded. The wounded were left where they fell. General Dyer gave instructions that nothing should be done to tend their wounds. Having commended his troops, he then marched them down the narrow alleyway and proceeded to the military cantonment at the other end of the city.
General Dyer’s intention was clear from his order to give no succor to the wounded. He wanted to inflict a salutary bloodletting that would be remembered for many years to come. The people must be made to feel the agony on their skins. But while one part of his brain rejoiced in the infliction of pain, another part rejoiced in the fact that by his actions he was saving the Punjab from anarchy. Henceforward they would obey orders not only in Amritsar but throughout the Punjab and perhaps also throughout India. At a small cost in human lives he had upheld the pax britannica. That evening the city was completely peaceful.
During the following days General Dyer learned that his victory over an unarmed crowd was only half won. Reports came to him that the city was in a hurt and resentful mood, and it was necessary to inflict further punishment. On April 10, the day before his arrival in Amritsar, a Miss Sherwood, the headmistress of a girl’s school, was brutally attacked by hooligans and left for dead. The general ordered that all Indians passing along the street where she was assaulted must crawl on all fours. The soldiers who were posted along the street interpreted this as an order that they should crawl on their bellies. In addition, a whipping post was erected on the exact spot where Miss Sherwood was attacked, and any Indians who refused to crawl were tied to the whipping post and beaten. Public floggings were also ordered for minor offenses like the contravention of the curfew order, refusing to salaam to a commissioned officer, disrespect to Europeans, and the tearing down of official proclamations. An entire marriage party was flogged. Students were ordered to go on sixteen-mile route marches in the broiling sun, and schoolchildren were summarily dismissed from school so that they could salute the flag and listen to speeches on the benevolence of British rule. In a hundred different ways, by intimidation and humiliation, the general sought to bring the people of Amritsar to their knees. Two days after the massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh he proclaimed martial law. A strict censorship was imposed; it was so strict that many weeks passed before the news reached the rest of India.
The crime could not be concealed indefinitely, and in October 1919 a commission of inquiry was set up to discover whether General Dyer had exceeded his instructions. The chairman of the commission was Lord Hunter, a senior judge of the College of Justice of Scotland, sitting with four British and three Indian members. General Dyer was asked why he had given the order to fire on an unarmed crowd, and he gave a variety of answers. Justice Rankin, a member of the commission, said: “Excuse me putting it in this way, General, but was it not a form of frightfulness?”
“No, it was not,” the general replied. “It was a horrible duty I had to perform. I think it was a mercif
ul thing. I thought that I should shoot well and shoot strong, so that I or anybody else should not have to shoot again. I think it is quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made what I consider to be a fool of myself.”
That was one of many interpretations he offered; there were many others. At one time he expressed the opinion that he was firing in self-defense; at another time he said that he wanted to crush the morale of the people; and several times he confessed that he had decided to fire into the crowd long before he arrived on the scene. He also said: “I had made up my mind. I would do all men to death.” Those strange words, worthy of Tamerlane, uttered calmly and self-righteously as though a duty had been imposed on him from above, seem to have convinced the commissioners that he should never again be given a position where he could do any harm. The British commissioners issued a majority report expressing their horror of the massacre in guarded terms, severely condemning the general for his action, while the minority report submitted by the Indian commissioners was even more damning. The inevitable consequence was that General Dyer was relieved of his command.
While the Hunter Commission was sitting Jawarharlal Nehru found himself traveling from Amritsar to Delhi by the night train. In his autobiography he described how he heard General Dyer talking to his fellow officers:
The compartment I entered was almost full and all the berths, except one upper one, were occupied by sleeping passengers. I took the vacant upper berth. In the morning I discovered that all my fellow-passengers were military officers. They conversed with each other in loud voices which I could not help overhearing. One of them was holding forth in an aggressive and triumphant tone and soon I discovered that he was Dyer, the hero of Jallianwalla Bagh, and he was describing his Amritsar experiences. He pointed out how he had the whole town at his mercy and he had felt like reducing the rebellious city to a heap of ashes, but he took pity on it and refrained. He was evidently coming back from Lahore after giving his evidence before the Hunter Committee of Inquiry. I was greatly shocked to hear his conversation and to observe his callous manner. He descended at Delhi station in pyjamas with bright pink stripes, and a dressing-gown.
Some months later General Dyer returned to England in disgrace. He felt that he had been thrown to the wolves and deserved more consideration than he had received for helping to preserve the Indian Empire. He was not long in finding allies. Influential voices spoke on his behalf in the House of Lords, the Morning Post invited its readers to subscribe to a fund to be donated to him and he received what was then the vast sum of £30, 000, while a group calling itself “The Women of England” solemnly presented him with a sword of honor. Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was considerably less sympathetic. He said: “Amritsar was a disaster.”
So tight was the censorship imposed on Amritsar that even Gandhi did not know the full extent of the massacre until June. At first he could not bring himself to believe that so many people had been killed in cold blood, and said that in his view “both sides had gone mad.” He thought there must have been some form of provocation. But he was infuriated by the Crawling Order, saying again and again that this was a humiliation which no Indian could tolerate, that it was better to die than to submit to such degradation, and that it was no part of his responsibility to preserve a decaying empire. On the anniversary of the massacre, for all the remaining years of his life, he would fast for twenty-four hours.
Although he was deeply distressed by the widescale rioting and hooliganism that followed his announcement of the hartal, he was not in the least convinced that the Satyagraha movement was responsible for it In his view, “the Himalayan blunder” could be broken up into many smaller blunders, most of them committed by the British. There would have been no burning and looting in Ahmedabad if he had not been arrested while on his way to Delhi. There would not have been bloodshed in Calcutta and Lahore if the authorities had permitted peaceful processions. The massacre in Amritsar could be explained only as the act of a madman, and must be considered apart from the general picture of events in India. In fact, Amritsar was essential to the understating of India, just as the word that came to him in a dream was essential to an understanding of the Indian mind. On both sides men were having recourse to desperate measures. Instead of lessening the tensions, they seemed determined to increase them. It was as though, blindly and unconsciously, the British and the Indians were embarking on a collision course.
Gandhi announced some days later that although he had suspended the Satyagraha campaign, he proposed to begin again in about two months time. The problem was to ensure that it would be truly non-violent, and he seems to have recognized that the problem was very nearly insoluble. Since Satyagraha must be peaceful, it would be necessary to find men capable of acting peacefully under all circumstances. Where could they be found? Perhaps, after all, it would be better to have a Satyagraha campaign formed of only a very few people. This idea appealed to him, and as the days passed he spoke more often about a movement which would be localized in time and place, with only a few chosen ones taking part. The great hartal which had engulfed all India was abandoned for a symbolic hartal with only a handful of people performing a symbolic task.
If this idea was carried to its logical conclusion, only one Satyagrahi would be necessary. “One real Satyagrahi is enough for victory,” he had said, and now once more he examined the possibility of a one-man Satyagraha campaign. The more he examined it, the more he liked it. He announced that the new campaign would be launched in July with himself as the sole participant. He was under orders not to travel outside the Bombay Presidency, and he had decided to offer Satyagraha by refusing to obey the order. The authorities were provided with a timetable of his movements so that, if they wished, they could arrest him the moment his train crossed the border.
The government was alarmed. A one-man Satyagraha campaign, if the man was Gandhi, was likely to produce fearful consequences. The rumor that he had been arrested while traveling to Delhi brought about murder, arson and riots; Ahmedabad was still reeling from these crimes; and it was pointed out to him that the government would have to deal ruthlessly with any riots which took place as a result of his arrest. His nerve failed him. He called off the Satyagraha campaign, and during the following months devoted himself more and more to the khadi campaign, giving innumerable speeches on the benefits of homespun cloth.
The idea of a one-man Satyagraha campaign was a novel one, but it was implicit in his general theory. The problem was to discover how it could be used effectively, for to seek arrest under present circumstances was simply to provoke both the government and his own followers. It was not long before the perfect solution occurred to him. The supreme act of a Satyagrahi was to fast unto death. When Gandhi fasted, all India, instead of rioting, held its breath.
In his speeches on the khadi movement, Gandhi liked to paint a picture of India before the British came, when every village was a small paradise and the young comforted the old, when all the ancient virtues were practiced in a solemn peace. He would remind his listeners that in those days the women wove their own cloth, and did not buy silks from Japan, lace from Paris, or cotton fabrics from Lancashire. He would say: “The old ways were best. Let us return to them.” Sometimes he was reminded that in the old days the scribes patiently copied books, a task taken over by the mechanical printing press. Similarly, carters used to carry produce to distant towns, but now the railroads did the same work at greater speed. Should the printing presses and the railroads be abolished? He answered that these arguments merely begged the question. The scribes became printers, the carters became railwaymen, but the village women who spun their own thread and wove their own cloth were practicing a trade that kept them usefully employed and gave dignity to their lives. But these were simple answers to complex questions. He was himself a man of infinite complications, reducing himself to simplicity by an effort of will. He knew he was reverenc
ed and adored, and that he had only to stand before any group of Indians to find himself worshiped. He had created his own legend and his own simplicities, and sometimes they threatened to devour him. Sometimes, when he wanted to be heard, his voice would be drowned with the now familiar cry, “Gandhiji ki jai”—“Victory for Gandhi.”
In November, accompanied by Charlie Andrews, he visited Amritsar, for the Viceroy had canceled the order forbidding him to leave the Bombay Presidency. His appearance in the city set off wild jubilation, and when he walked into the Golden Temple of the Sikhs the crowds followed him in a state of elation. He would stand and talk to them, and then they would sit on the marble floors quietly, but once he began to walk again they would surge after him. Annoyed, he attempted to teach them discipline, telling them to remain still when he walked, but they refused to obey him. Five or six times he attempted to escape from the crowds, but they refused to let him go. Then he did something which he had never done before. To show them that he was determined to be free of them, he began to walk backward.
It was a strange and exhilarating scene: the Mahatma walking backward to prevent the crowd following him. Finally they let him go. Later, he chided them for their obstinacy. Almost they had drowned him with their affection. “Those who had suffered much washed away their grief with the waters of love,” he wrote, and he knew that no maharajah entering Amritsar had ever been greeted with such spontaneous joy.
Yet there was little he could give them except his darshan. The massacre at Amritsar left him with the confused feeling that there would be more to come, but it was so out of character with the behavior of the British officials he had known that it could be explained only as an act of blind rage. What was the duty of a Satyagrahi when confronted with acts of blind rage?