by John Keay
A nationwide hartal (‘lock-out’) scheduled for 6 April 1919 had mixed results. Delhi got the date wrong and shut down on 30 March; there were violent protests and some shooting. Bombay was brought to a complete standstill on schedule; most other cities witnessed some disruption; and Gandhi, while travelling north to supervise satyagraha in Delhi and the Panjab, was removed from the train and informed of his confinement to the Bombay presidency. This ‘arrest’ sparked more protests, especially in Bombay and Gujarat. But it was in the Panjab, still mindful of the Ghadrites and heavily policed under an uncompromising lieutenant-governor called Sir Michael O’Dwyer, that tragedy struck.
Although most Panjabis had little understanding of satyagraha – some were reportedly unsure whether Gandhi was ‘a person or a thing’22 – his call was respected even in the Sikhs’ holy city of Amritsar. There, on 10 April, two of those who had addressed the 6 April protest were arrested for incitement. This brought their supporters out onto the streets on the eleventh. They were stopped, fired on by troops, and then took revenge in an orgy of arson and violence which left five Europeans dead. According to an admirably dispassionate assessment, ‘it is difficult, given the clear difference in Panjab methods [of dealing with protesters] and the unmistakable evidence about crowd reactions, not to conclude that the violence was largely due to government action.’23 In the same uncompromising spirit and without apparently attempting any form of consultation, O’Dwyer also sent for more troops. They arrived next day under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer who, for pig-headedness as well as a nearly identical surname, is easily confused with the governor. Dyer stationed pickets throughout the city of Amritsar and issued orders prohibiting all meetings and demonstrations.
On the thirteenth, a Sunday, word came of an assembly at the Jallianwala Bagh, an open space hemmed in by houses. It was also the feast-day of Baisakhi, and many of the several thousand in the Bagh are thought to have been villagers from outside Amritsar who had come into the city to celebrate this popular spring festival. Dyer probably knew nothing of this. Arrived at the Bagh, he was disappointed to find that there was no access for his armoured car. He left it outside, marched in with a mixed force of Indian and Gurkha troops, and immediately ordered them to fire into the crowd. He gave the order to cease firing only when their ammunition was nearly exhausted. Then he withdrew.
The crowd had offered no threat, Dyer had given no warning; communication was by bullet alone. Because Dyer’s men were occupying the main exit, the crowd obligingly formed a dense scrum round the only other way out. It was impossible for the troops to miss; nor did they. After the firing stopped, they shouldered arms and turned about. The wounded were left untended, the dead uncounted. Dyer simply drove away, mission completed.
The official inquiry would later conclude that 1650 rounds had been fired inside the Jallianwala Bagh, that over 1200 men, women and children had been seriously wounded, and that 379 had died (an equally reliable but unofficial source gave the latter figure as 530). There were other casualties, too. On an April afternoon in Amritsar, in a few minutes of vindictive folly, the moral pretence for British rule had been riddled into transparency, and all hope of peaceful post-war collaboration blown away in the maelstrom of killing.
There was no excuse for it. The massacre had occurred before the imposition of martial rule; even if it had occurred afterwards, Dyer’s conduct would have been indefensible under any military code. To make matters worse, when later questioned, Dyer seemed if anything proud of his action. His intention, he said, had been to exact revenge for the previous killings and to make an example which would deter further defiance anywhere in the Panjab. To this end he had also had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public, and had made Indians crawl the street where an English missionary lady had been attacked. Nor was he alone. Equally provocative methods were employed in Lahore, where there had also been arson attacks. At Gujranwala, when the situation appeared to be getting out of control, Governor O’Dwyer had simply ordered up aircraft and had the city bombed.
Dyer came from a British family long-resident in India. They ran a brewery near Simla and there the general had perhaps imbibed the racial fears which had haunted his countrymen ever since 1857. Certainly he knew his history. His punishments reeked of the Kanpur reprisals, and his behaviour looks to have been conditioned by 1857 ideas of ‘saving the Panjab’ when, as now, Delhi was already wracked by disturbances. Moreover it soon became apparent that many other British people felt the same way. Although relieved of his command, Dyer was never formally punished. To have done so, it was argued, would have provoked a white backlash like that which had greeted the Ilbert Bill. On the contrary, in England he was rewarded. As the ‘Saviour of the Panjab’, a Morning Post subscription was raised on his behalf; it realised £26,000. Designated ‘Defender of the Empire’ he was also presented with a gilt sword.
This lionising of Dyer was as offensive to Indian opinion as was the repressive conduct of the Panjab authorities. Details of the Amritsar massacre emerged only slowly as government and Congress inquiries got underway. The gasps of Indian horror thus coincided with the grunts of Indo-British approval. For many hitherto ‘moderate’ nationalists it was the turning point. Tagore, for instance, renounced his knighthood. The December 1919 Congress was switched to Amritsar to highlight the sense of betrayal; and it was presided over by Motilal Nehru, an immensely successful Allahabad lawyer who had previously been denied permission to enter the Panjab in order to defend one of the Amritsar protesters.
Up till now no family could have been more staunchly pro-British than Motilal’s. Such was his admiration for British ideals of legality and humanity, and such his expectations of British – Indian collaboration, that he had sent Jawaharlal, his only son, to school at Harrow and university at Cambridge. On Jawaharlal’s return he had censured his radical outbursts. Now he began to endorse them. The British were no longer worthy of respect. Anand Bhawan, the Nehrus’ palatial residence in Allahabad, was stripped of its European furniture. Motilal abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing the homespun cottons recommended by Gandhi. A great bonfire of the dresses, ties, boas and homburgs discarded by the Nehru clan would be the earliest memory of granddaughter Indira, born in 1917. Although still opposed to any action outside the law, Motilal would join the imminent non-co-operation movement and make the considerable sacrifice involved in withdrawing from legal practice.
PURNA SWARAJ
In 1920–2 India was convulsed by a crescendo of satyagrahas, swadeshi boycotts, strikes and disturbances in the greatest display of mass non-co-operation and organised protest yet witnessed. Gandhi at last emerged as its inspiration and, with the death of Tilak in 1920, he also became the dominant figure in Congress. At his instigation the organisation was transformed into a more permanent, representative and effective institution, with the subscription reduced to attract a mass membership, a new structure of committees headed by a standing ‘working committee’, and more frequent meetings at national and provincial level. As well as repeal of the Rowlatt Acts and redress for the subsequent atrocities, protest focused on two other issues: the political opportunities opened by the Montagu – Chelmsford reforms, and a wild-card grievance dear to Muslim opinion concerning the plight of the caliphate, or khilafat.
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COUNTDOWN TO INDEPENDENCE
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The office of caliph, the supreme political and religious institution according to many exponents of Muslim law, had long since passed from Baghdad to Cairo and then on to Constantinople and the Ottoman sultans of Turkey. It had therefore been to Constantinople that in the 1780s Tipu Sultan had appealed for recognition of his Mysore sovereignty. When Turkey entered the First World War as a German ally, some Indian Muslims had raised objections to Muslim troops being used against their ‘spiritual leader’. The British had largely allayed these by insisting that the caliphate would be respected in any eventual peace treaty. Some Khilafatist supporters had nevertheless been intern
ed during the war. Released in 1919, and fearing that the government of India would prove unwilling and perhaps unable to influence the peace process, these activists immediately began to apply what pressure they could.
Gandhi had worked closely with Muslims in Natal. He realised the importance of Hindu – Muslim collaboration in the struggle for swaraj, and adopted the Khilafatist cause as a means to that end. A non-co-operation programme was organised and, when the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres revealed that the caliph would indeed lose out to the extent of ceding control over the holy places of Islam to the Arabs, it swung into action. Medals were to be returned, appointments declined, schools and government institutions boycotted.
Additionally a hijra, or ‘flight’ like that of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, saw about thirty thousand Muslims flee from infidel rule in the Panjab to Islamic brotherhood in Afghanistan. Most soon trailed back, penniless and exceedingly bitter. In India those of their brethren who urged Muslim sepoys to disobey orders were quickly arrested. The movement served to unite many shades of Islamic opinion and to politicise some of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Thanks to Gandhi’s leadership, it also gave the impression of a united Hindu – Muslim front against the British. But in reality ‘Hindus and Muslims were fairly launched not upon a common struggle but upon a joint struggle; they worked together but not as one.’24
The chosen issue of the caliphate emphasised the allegiance of Muslims not to Indian sovereignty but to an external sovereignty of the dar-ul-Islam, the ‘world of Islam’. Gandhi hoped that joint action would create its own bond; and for a time it did. The non-co-operation movement, started by Gandhi and the Khilafatists in mid-1920, had quickly spread to Congress, whose members, already in an uproar over the Panjab atrocities, were at last examining the implications of the long-delayed Montagu – Chelmsford reforms.
These significantly increased Indian representation at all levels of government; they also introduced a new principle, known as dyarchy, whereby certain subjects – agriculture, health, education, local government – were devolved from the central government to the provincial governments. Since the provincial governments were now to have ministers who would be chosen from, and responsible to, the provincial legislative councils which themselves now consisted mainly of elected Indian members, dyarchy meant that the devolved subjects passed into Indian control – save, that is, for the casting veto of the governor. Additionally, Indian representation in the viceroy’s Executive Council was increased from one to three members, while his central Legislative Council became two chambers, one a Legislative Assembly, the other a Council of State; both were to have a majority of elected members but, again, the viceroy retained a superior prerogative.
Before the war these provisions would have caused a sensation, but by 1921 they were barely acceptable. In recognition of her wartime contribution, India had sent representatives to the peace conference at Versailles and had been enrolled in the League of Nations. The appetite for full nationhood could no longer be met by the drip-feed of heavily diluted constitutional concessions. It was only browbeating by Gandhi which wrung from Congress a grudging vote of thanks for the new reforms, and this was more from policy than gratitude. To him, as to most Congress members in the aftermath of Amritsar, dyarchy sounded too much like a lame apology for ‘Dyer-archy’. Moreover the powers reserved to the governors and viceroy clearly negated the veneer of self-rule. As for the new seats and offices on offer, they became simply targets for renunciation as Congress endorsed the new wave of non-co-operation.
At its Calcutta meeting in September 1920 Gandhi narrowly won a trial of strength in persuading the majority of Congress to endorse the new programme of boycott. By December, when elections under the new dispensation had nevertheless been held and various dissident groupings had successfully contested them, Congress was ready to take a much sterner line. Support for non-co-operation at every level was now overwhelming as Gandhi, not without a sense of triumphalism, promised swaraj within one year.
On a state visit in 1921 the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) processed through streets that were empty and silent as the boycott took effect. Cultivators rallied to the cause in UP and elsewhere to form kisan sabhas, ‘peasant societies’, pressing agrarian grievances. Industrial workers from Bombay to Bengal organised strikes and formed themselves into unions. Amongst the tens of thousands arrested and sentenced to short gaol terms were both Nehrus.
But 1921 ended with Gandhi’s promised swaraj still unattained. Indeed he looked to be losing control of the situation. Like satyagraha, he interpreted swaraj in a personal as well as a national sense. It could as well be translated as ‘self-control’ or ‘self-reliance’ as ‘self-rule’. Political emancipation lay through economic emancipation from dependency on manufactured and imported products, through ideological emancipation from the materialism of the West, and through individual emancipation from the tyranny of self and the violence of desire. His obsession with spinning, with the nationwide distribution of spinning wheels, and with the wearing of homespun khadi looked to many like a wildly eccentric distraction at this time of national upheaval. Gandhi, though, saw in it the discipline and the dignity of a more profound and universal resurgence. In short, like everyone else, he had his own agenda. While Khilafatists looked to the crescent of international Islam, India’s first communists brandished the Marxist hammer and socialists like Jawaharlal Nehru took up the kisan’s sickle. Hindu revivalists saw swaraj as Ram-raj (the utopia of the Ramayana), Sikhs as a return to the rule of the khalsa (the ‘pure’), and practically every caste and language group as a chance for self-promotion. Meanwhile Gandhi fixed his gaze on human redemption.
In early 1922, in a bid to refocus the movement, he announced a new phase of civil disobedience which was to start at Bardoli in Gujarat and to include the ultimate defiance of refusing to pay taxes. Imprisoned activists sensed a climax; India braced itself for the great showdown. Then Gandhi called it all off. Hindu – Muslim collaboration was already crumbling at the edges. M.A. Jinnah had walked out on Congress over the boycotting of the new reforms and what he regarded as Gandhi’s rabble-rousing techniques; in distant Kerala the moplahs of Calicut and Cannanore (Muslims who claimed descent from the first Arab traders to settle on the Malabar coast) had taken up arms against Hindus as well as Europeans; and in the north Madan Mohan Malaviya’s Mahasabha, a Hindu revivalist movement like the Arya Samaj, stood accused of forcibly converting Muslims with a form of Hindu baptism. Then came news from UP of mob violence in which twenty-two Indian constables had been burnt to death in their own police station. For Gandhi it was the last straw. India was obviously not ready for ‘self-rule’. He retired to his spinning wheel, was promptly arrested for past incitements, pleaded guilty, and successfully secured the maximum six-year sentence; he thought of it more as a penance.
Partly out of frustration, partly out of ambition, in that same year Motilal Nehru and others successfully argued in Congress that the limitations of the new reforms could be more effectively exposed, and swaraj promoted, from within the system. Known as the ‘Swarajists’, these Congress members then stood for election, assumed office, and fitfully suborned the operation of government. But since they were always overruled by the powers reserved to the governors and viceroy, their ardour soon cooled and they lapsed into a more collaborative mode.
Thus by 1923 many Congress members had ceased their protest, and Muslim Khilafatists were already feeling betrayed by their Hindu colleagues. A worse betrayal awaited them from the caliphate itself. In 1924 it was, of all people, a Turk, in fact Kemal Ataturk, who simply abolished the whole institution when he overthrew the last Ottoman sultan. Indian Muslims now felt more isolated than ever. They were left, in the words of a noted authority, ‘politically “all dressed up with nowhere to go” … [They] had hitched their wagon to the crescent of the caliphate and it had dragged them “up the garden path”.’25 After this bitter experience it would be more than a decade before pan-Indian
Muslim sentiment would again unite on a single issue. By then Jinnah would have joined the Muslim League, and the ideal of an Indian dar-ul-Islam would have replaced that of the caliphate.
While Gandhi languished in gaol some of his disciples, like Rajendra Prasad, continued to boycott government office and to concentrate on the social programmes dear to their leader. From 1925 onwards these programmes included the support and education of those downtrodden members of Hindu society who were conventionally regarded as ‘untouchable’ but whom Gandhi renamed as ‘Harijans’ (‘Children of God’). Jinnah, meanwhile, stood aloof from both Congress groups. And ‘communal strife’, the Indian euphemism for Hindu – Muslim conflict, worsened; in 1926 riots in Calcutta left over a hundred dead.