Amritsar 1919 Page 11
Since mid-March, O’Dwyer had ordered the CID to step up their surveillance of the political activities of Kitchlew and Satyapal at Amritsar, and Irving had been told to warn both leaders of the potential consequences if they continued making ‘violent’ speeches.101 When O’Dwyer learned of the initiation of the Rowlatt Satyagraha, and Satyapal’s encouragement for people to take the pledge in a speech on 24 March, the Lieutenant-General of Punjab acted immediately. The Defence of India Act of 1915 was still in operation, and it was very easy to shut down Satyapal’s political activities. Peaceful Indian protests against the Rowlatt Act, which many feared would be used to stifle political dissent, were thus met with what amounted to a gagging order by the British authorities. In a strange way, everybody’s worst fears were coming true: the silencing of Satyapal proved to Indians that the British would abuse their powers, while the anti-Rowlatt protests confirmed to the likes of O’Dwyer the urgent need to keep emergency legislation on the books. A dangerous dynamic of mutual miscognition was thus shaping the growing estrangement between rulers and ruled.
Meanwhile, the Anglo-Indians at Amritsar, and across Punjab, were becoming increasingly alarmed. ‘We hear,’ Rosamond Lawrence noted, ‘of Gandhi’s “satyagraha” for the first time. All this is mixed up with violent racial bitterness, and economic as well as political discontent.’102 ‘By the beginning of April,’ Melicent Wathen wrote in her diary, ‘we realised things were nasty [. . .] Kitchlew and Satyapal were making most inflammatory speeches and things were in a very bad state.’103
CHAPTER 3
PARTY OF ANARCHY
30 MARCH–9 APRIL
While the authorities were trying desperately to curb what they imagined to be a nefarious conspiracy, life in Amritsar went on despite the gathering clouds on the horizon. After the hartal on 30 March, the Wathens decided to get out of Amritsar: Gerard took the week off to go shooting and the family went together to see the festivities at the Mela Hola Mohalla festival at the nearby Sikh shrine at Tarn Taran. ‘A wonderful sight,’ Melicent recalled. ‘All day from early dawn the crowd a moving mass as far as the eye could see, of gaily-dressed Sikhs and their families. On our way home we walked round the big tank of Tarn Taran Golden Temple, so densely packed with Sikhs for the whole mile round that we could hardly move.’1 A missionary couple they met at the shrine nevertheless reminded the Wathens of the political turmoil and ‘spoke gravely and foretold a bad Sikh rising in the near future’.2 The very idea of a rising was obviously an alarmist, and entirely improbable, throwback to the nineteenth century, but rumours were evidently rife among the colonisers as much as the colonised. Back in Amritsar, Melicent went in to the city to make some purchases a few days later:
I pulled up at the shop of a Mohammedan I knew and was greeted with a stare and no answer to my salaam. He continued smoking his hookah. Paying no attention, I got off my horse and was stepping inside his shop when he turned his back on me saying that none of his things were for sale. I saw that things were not right, and remounting I rode on into the city. Instead of being greeted with smiles and salaams I became aware that on all sides I was being stared at. The streets which at that hour were usually untenanted except by those going about their work, now seemed full of men moving restlessly hither and thither with no apparent object. My friends avoided my gaze, and those who did not know me stared in a way that I had never before experienced.3
Melicent hurried home towards the Civil Lines, noting that ‘for the first time, I had an instinctive feeling of relief as I crossed the railway bridge out of the city’. The railway bridge was not just a link between the ‘native’ city and the Civil Lines – it was also a marker of distinct racialised spaces and symbolic of the enduring distance between rulers and ruled.4 During times of crisis, the extent of British rule became constricted to the imagined security of the Civil Lines, with its straight and leafy avenues, whereas the ‘native’ city came to be seen as the site of sedition and hence the geographic location of fear.5
While the hartal at Amritsar on 30 March had passed peacefully, events elsewhere spun out of control. At Delhi, scuffles thus broke out when Satyagraha volunteers tried to force local shops to close down and the police intervened and arrested two young men.6 As word spread that the authorities were clamping down on the protests, large crowds gathered in the area around Delhi railway station (now known as Old Delhi station), Queen’s Park (now Mahatma Gandhi Park) and Chandni Chowk. When armed police and British soldiers sought to push back the crowds, protesters started throwing stones and the troops subsequently opened fire on two occasions, killing at least eight people.7
A British officer, Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer, who commanded the 45th Brigade at Jullundur, 50 miles east of Amritsar, was at that time driving in a car through Delhi on a holiday with his wife and niece. Unaware of the proclamation of the hartal, the small party inadvertently got caught up in the massive crowds that thronged the streets of the new capital of British India. Dyer later described the experience: ‘On going through the native quarters of the city we passed through a large and unruly crowd which roared at us and two men actually climbed on to the back of my car. That night I learned the true meaning of what we had gone through.’ Later during the Dyers’ trip, their car was pelted with stones as they drove through some of the smaller towns in Punjab, and at one point a large piece of wood was apparently thrown out on the road in front of them to upset the car. ‘During my tour,’ Dyer later stated, ‘I was thoroughly impressed with the dangerous nature of the inhabitants.’8
When Gandhi learned of the violence at Delhi, his immediate response was to remind his followers that for a hartal to be successful it had to be voluntary and that Satyagraha volunteers were moreover obligated to obey the orders of the police. Those who had been killed at Delhi were nevertheless regarded as martyrs whose sacrifice was necessary for the movement to succeed: ‘I never contemplated that those who are our associates would not have our own blood spilt, though I do confess that I was totally unprepared for the “stern measures” of the Delhi authorities. But to satyagrahis, they must be welcome. The sterner they are, the better. They have undertaken to suffer even unto death.’9 Others were less confident and at Amritsar Satyapal began worrying that what had happened at Delhi might also happen there. As a result, he wrote to Gandhi, as the latter later described:
I had received a letter from Dr. Satyapal from Amritsar saying that he had been trying to follow the Satyagraha movement, that he appreciated the thing and he liked it immensely, but that he himself did not fully understand it, nor did the people. Would I not go over to Amritsar, be his guest, and deliver a few speeches explaining the doctrine of Satyagraha, as they were, on a superficial observation of it, enamoured of the thing? As I happened to know from information given to me by the police officers that this letter was intercepted, copied by them and then given to me, I told Dr Satyapal that I should do so at the very first opportunity that I had.10
Gandhi, in other words, intended to go to Amritsar in order to assert ‘a pacifying influence’, and the authorities, who were openly keeping him under surveillance, and reading his letters, were fully aware of this.11
The prospect of Gandhi entering Punjab, however, was deeply disconcerting for O’Dwyer, who saw in this figure, with his ‘ascetic pose and the vague impracticable Tolstoyan theories’, the root cause of the political protests.12 While Gandhi might have been preaching non-violence, it was he who had initiated the anti-Rowlatt Satyagraha, and who was accordingly deemed responsible for the riots at Delhi. According to O’Dwyer:
The knowledge that the situation in the Punjab was very critical, that the people of the Punjab were not of a class to whom Mr. Gandhi’s spiritual ideals would appeal and that they would translate Passive Resistance into an Active Resistance movement. At the time when he was advertised to come to the Punjab, the atmosphere both in Lahore and Amritsar was very highly surcharged. If he had been allowed at that time, it would have probably resulted in very s
erious disorder.13
The solution, as far as O’Dwyer was concerned, was the time-honoured strategy of summary deportation of the so-called ‘ringleader’, and thereby containing the ‘poison’ of sedition. The Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab originally wanted to have Gandhi deported to Burma under Regulation III of 1818, as had previously happened in the case the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah in 1858, as well as the leader of the Kukas, Ram Singh, in 1872.14 Given Chelmsford’s commitment to reforms and a conciliatory approach, that was nevertheless out of the question, not least because Gandhi had not actually broken any laws. While the Government of India weighed its options of how best to deal with Gandhi, O’Dwyer was at greater liberty to move against the alleged agitators within Punjab. On 4 April, the same day that O’Dwyer applied for Gandhi to be deported, orders were issued for Kitchlew and one of the other speakers at the meeting on the 30 March, Kotu Mal, to refrain from political activities – as had earlier happened to Satyapal. Since the most prominent Satyagraha leaders were effectively confined to Amritsar, this measure amounted to a sort of political quarantine.15
One of the most persistent concerns for the British colonial authorities was their apparent inability to know and control what was happening within ‘native’ spaces. There was a fear of things happening just under the surface, of rumours in the bazaar or ‘jungle drums’ purveying hidden meanings undecipherable to the ‘white’ man.16 Just after the ‘Mutiny’ in 1857, one British official described this uncanny sense of uncertainty:
We certainly have not yet got to the bottom of the native character. Facts crop up daily which prove incontestably to all . . . that the depths of that character cannot be fathomed by our ordinary plummet, or marked with certainty on the chart by which we navigate in European waters. Take for instance those extraordinary symptoms which preceded the great mutiny; the marvellous organization of that vast plot; the mysterious but intimate connexion between the mutineers and the independent native powers; the dim prophecies and ghastly rumours which foreshadowed the outbreak; the secrecy; the unanimity; the tokens passed from hand to hand throughout a million villages.17
The remedy for this ‘information panic’ was not heroic sahibs in disguise eavesdropping on the ‘natives’, as depicted in countless novels, but rather an abiding reliance, and even dependency on, local allies.18 These intermediaries invariably hailed from the ruling classes, and included landowners and minor royalty, who more often than not owed their power and position to the British. The men in whom administrators like O’Dwyer and Irving thus placed their trust were accordingly anything but representative of the views of the general population and, furthermore, were invested in the pursuance of their own interests.19 Kitchlew made this point very clearly: ‘Not only in Amritsar but throughout the Punjab the officials in general were in the habit of believing what the title-holders and sycophants represented to them as to the feelings and aspirations of the people and so they were never able to be in touch with popular feelings and sentiments.’20 When Deputy Commissioner Irving wished to ascertain whether or not the hartal planned for 6 April was going to go ahead, he consulted this very cadre of ‘the Khan Bahadurs and the Rai Sahibs’ – honorific titles bestowed by the British upon Muslims and Hindus respectively.21 Without any knowledge of the popular politics of Amritsar, these local dignitaries simply told Irving what he wanted to hear, namely that the hartal would not take place.22
At that very time, during the afternoon of 5 April, Kitchlew, Hans Raj and many of the other Satyagraha volunteers were gathered at Gol Bagh, also known as Aitchinson Park, just outside Hall Gate, watching a cricket match between two Indian clubs.23 There was still some uncertainty as to whether a hartal should be organised, but, since it was expected to take place all over the rest of India, Kitchlew eventually decided that they should observe it at Amritsar as well. Late that night, Hans Raj and others went through the city and proclaimed the hartal by beat of drum.24 ‘We were joined, as we went along,’ Hans Raj noted, ‘by hundreds, who shouted “Gandhi ki Jai”, “Kitchlew Satya Pal ki Jai!”’25 When Irving learned that the hartal was being proclaimed throughout the city, despite the assurances he had received, he felt betrayed. In his mind, the hartal was a direct provocation by Kitchlew and Satyapal who deliberately announced it so late in the day in order to surprise the authorities. This was not actually the case, but, to Irving, everything was beginning to assume a sinister prospect.26
On 6 April, there was a substantial military presence in Amritsar. Indian troops had been despatched from the nearby garrison of Jullundur and there were as a result strong pickets at both the railway station and the banks during the hartal.27 This precaution nevertheless turned out to be quite unnecessary as the only ‘disturbance’ that took place occurred when Hans Raj and a group of young boys invaded the pitch and interrupted a cricket match.28 The hartal itself was a resounding success and throughout Amritsar business came to a standstill while tens of thousands of people attended the meeting held in the afternoon at Jallianwala Bagh.29 Since both Kitchlew and Satyapal were prevented from speaking, Hans Raj found himself unexpectedly speaking on behalf of the leaders of the anti-Rowlatt movement, informing the people gathered that: ‘a Satyagraha Sabha had been established at Amritsar whose President was Dr Kitchlew and that the Office of the President was at his house, and that whoever wanted to take the Satyagraha vow could go to his house and take the vow’.30 As an act of passive resistance, the hartal was the ultimate weapon of the weak and its success further bolstered the solidarity among the protesters and Satyagraha volunteers in other parts of Punjab, and of India. At Bombay, Gandhi noted with joy how both Hindus and Muslims had joined in the hartal, but also reminded his followers that ‘if anyone is arrested, he should without causing any difficulty allow himself to be arrested and [. . .] there should be no demonstration of grief or otherwise made by the remaining satyagrahis by reason of the arrest and imprisonment of their comrades’.31
To the British, however, the hartals constituted a direct challenge and a visible loss of control. Edmund Candler’s description of a fictional English sahib riding through the ‘native’ part of a city as a hartal is proclaimed, provides an almost surreal vision of eeriness:
An atmospheric change had come over the city. Everyone was running about excitedly. He met a man charging down the street with a huqa in his hand, another carrying a brass mortar and pestle, yellow with pounded turmeric. It seemed that for some reason all the normal activities of life were held in suspense. He heard the jingle of metal-ware and crockery hastily packed away, the bolting of locks, the rattling of sliding doors, the closing down of shutters. He was mystified by the spontaneity of it all. He saw folk running and looking over their shoulders, as if seeking shelter from an unseen hand, as who should say, ‘It has come.’ It was like a rustle in the trees before a storm. A dust-storm or an earthquake crossed his mind. He had seen people running about in just the same way in an earthquake. His sense of something impending was so strong that he even imagined a darkening of the sky. Someone was shouting that the shops were already closed in every quarter of the city. Then above the confused murmur he heard the cry of ‘Mahatma Gandhi-ki-jai’, and he remembered it was the hartal . . .32
In Amritsar, Melicent and Gerard continued to go about their ordinary routine, yet the pretence of normalcy became increasingly difficult to maintain: ‘We went to church but the road was guarded and the soldiers wore ball cartridges.33 After that no Englishman could get a tonga – the shops refused to serve us – a sais was beaten who had been sent to fetch a tonga. There was no doubt that clouds were gathering – I refused to let the nurses go to the City.’34 During the outbreak of the uprising in 1857, British troops had been caught off guard and unarmed while they attended church service and carrying loaded arms for church became one of the legacies of the ‘Mutiny’. The re-enactment of such precautionary measures constituted a tangible link between the past and the present and was, as such, constitutive of the manner i
n which the situation in 1919 was perceived. British soldiers would conventionally attend church service unarmed, but ever since the days of the ‘Mutiny’, the presence of armed soldiers on a Sunday had been a certain indicator of colonial panic – the equivalent of colour-coded threat levels.
Although none of the students at the Khalsa College had so far observed the hartals, Gerard was hearing ‘serious rumours’ through his teachers.35 On Wednesday, 9 April, Mr P.E. Jarman, Municipal Engineer, lunched with the Wathens and told them that ‘a plot had been discovered to murder all Europeans on the 16th when Gandhi was expected’.36 This was yet another baseless rumour reflective of a paranoid colonial mindset, but Melicent decided to leave Amritsar with the children as soon as possible. The annual trip to the hills, to escape the heat of the summer months, had been scheduled for 25 April but she now wired for a car for the 13th instead. Afterwards, Melicent and Gerard both drove over to Irving’s bungalow to inquire about the state of affairs. The Commissioner was not at home and they were instead received by his wife who, to Melicent’s dismay, ‘seemed not to have grasped the situation at all’.37 If the Wathens had expected their worries to be put at ease, they were sorely disappointed and Irving’s wife simply ‘laughed at the people who were nervous, said someone had thought arrangements ought to be made for women and children to go to the Fort if anything occurred, but nothing had been done and she didn’t think they had remembered the people in the Khalsa College at all!’38 Melicent and Gerard left the Commissioner’s house ‘thoroughly dissatisfied about things.’39
That night Melicent and Gerard dined with some friends, including the Becketts, who had just come back from Lahore, where they witnessed the military and police disperse the crowds protesting against the Rowlatt Acts. ‘But though it subsided then it was by no means over,’ Melicent lamented, ‘and yet this had not opened people’s eyes.’40 Melicent tried to get her dinner guests to come to their senses but, like Mrs Irving, they dismissed the seriousness of the situation: ‘They laughed and Scott [accountant in the National Bank] said it was ridiculous to be nervous with all our machine guns and aeroplanes.’41 Melicent nevertheless resolved to leave with the children at the earliest possible date, though a car could not be acquired sooner than Friday 11 April, two days later.