Amritsar 1919 Read online

  Coming down Court Road, Extra Assistant Commissioner F.A. Connor had been despatched to try and reach the kotwali in the city, and was approaching Queen’s Road when he met Lieutenant Dickie and the reserve coming fast from the opposite direction: ‘I came upon a military picket, a mounted picket trotting back at a very fast pace, and they were being very badly stoned by a large mob, a very dense crowd.’63 The panicking Lieutenant was shouting to Connor, ‘Oh, for God’s sake send reinforcements.’64 ‘He was in very serious peril,’ Connor recalled, and ‘they were in such distress that they were practically bolting into the civil lines’.65 Similar to the other British officers that day, Connor noted the ‘murderous yell’ that could be heard from the crowd.

  With some effort, Connor managed to halt Lieutenant Dickie and the four troopers and to turn them around and regroup – the two Indian sowars had lost their lances during the headlong flight, and they had only one carbine and a revolver between them. Connor at first berated the Lieutenant for not having opened fire on the crowd, but Dickie explained the situation and Connor hastily gave his permission. ‘Two of the men,’ he noted, ‘were very glad to have even an order of that kind.’66 While the Indian sowars held the reins, the British troopers dismounted, one with the carbine and the other with a revolver.67 The trooper with the carbine took cover behind a culvert at the corner of the intersection and fired off four or five shots in rapid succession at the people gathered near the footbridge and Madan’s shop, about 140 yards away.68 The boys who had been running ahead of the crowd scattered to all sides, as did those local residents who had come out of their houses. As the road cleared, and the crowd at the end of the road dispersed, the second trooper walked into the middle of the intersection and fired his revolver in the same direction.

  At this moment, reinforcements finally arrived. After alerting Massey earlier on, Plomer had rushed to the police lines east Hall Bridge and now came back with twenty-four armed policemen on foot in addition to seven mounted police. As he reached Connor and Dickie, he saw the road was littered with stones and ‘there were two or three bodies in front of Madan’s shop’.69 Plomer and the armed police advanced and the crowd, which he estimated to be many thousand, extending all the way back to Hall Gate and Aitchinson Park, slowly fell back onto the footbridge and along the tracks, carrying with them several wounded.70 Plomer and Connor went down towards Madan’s shop, where two of the wounded had been left behind; one was shot in the buttock, the other in the back, and both were bleeding onto the road.71 Locals came out and people called for a tonga to take the men to the hospital. As the tension dissipated, a strange lull occurred, during which people intermingled fearlessly. Connor described the exchange he had in the gathering around the wounded:

  I heard a few of the mob left behind and they were shouting at the Indian sowars. They came afterwards. When I was talking to the men who had assembled round this wounded man they demanded the immediate release of these two men Drs. Satyapal and Kitchlew. I even told them that the men would be released, but one man from the mob struck his chest and said they should have back these two men now or they were ready to die.72

  Connor also heard another man shouting that ‘we had promised them self-government and we were giving them bullets’. The Extra Assistant Commissioner responded tersely that ‘they would be fired on sooner or later’.73 The wounded were eventually carried away on charpoys serving as makeshift stretchers.

  Plomer was preparing to clear the footbridge by force and was about to order his police to fire with buckshot at the crowd still on the bridges and railway tracks, when a group of Indian members of the local Bar arrived from the court house. They included pleader Maqbool Mahmood and lawyer Gurdial Singh Salaria, who had been working at the court when the news of the unrest at the bridges reached them.74 They had quickly rushed down to the scene of the clash, as Gurdial Singh Salaria described:

  The bridge was simply packed with crowds of people. I told Mr. Plomer that the Deputy Commissioner requested us to help him, and we intended to try and induce the crowd to get back to the city. He said, ‘For God’s sake do.’ [. . .] I rushed up to the bridge, and made an appeal to the crowd to disperse. Some people in the crowd said they that they would disperse, if they were given the dead bodies of their brethren who had been shot down. I appealed again, and with the assistance of my friends, the bridge was cleared. I then got down to the other side of the bridge, and tried to persuade the people to go back to the city.75

  This was to become a recurrent feature of the stand-off at the railway bridges, as local lawyers and community leaders sought to mediate and de-escalate the situation: the British officers recognised the lawyers as allies, while people such as Salaria could at the same time assert some authority over the crowd. By the time military reinforcements arrived – twenty-four soldiers of the Somersets belatedly mobilised by Massey, and hastily transported down from the Mall in tongas – both the bridges had effectively been cleared of people.76

  Just as the British misread the nature of the protests, so too did the population of Amritsar fail to grasp the extent to which their mass protests sent the authorities into paroxysms of panic. This was the first time in living memory that a crowd had been fired upon at Amritsar, and people were shocked and outraged at what they perceived to be the British refusal to recognise the time-honoured practice of submitting a petition. At the footbridge, people in the crowd complained to the Indian lawyers ‘that unarmed people who were going to see the Deputy Commissioner to ask for the release of Drs. Kitchlew and Satyapal had been shot down by the police and military, unprovoked’.77 The Indian journalist Malaviya similarly noted that ‘the account which is going the round [sic] here in the city is that the first crowd which wended its way towards the Deputy Commissioner’s house was wantonly and unprovokedly fired at by the picquet without being asked to get back, as a consequence of which some men died at the spot. This gratuitous murder of their men enraged the mob . . .’78 The protesters did not recognise that by forcibly crossing the bridge and throwing stones at the pickets they had themselves escalated the confrontation with the authorities. A local clerk described how the bodies were taken through the crowd and back towards the city: ‘The men with the dead body were clamouring that they had gone to submit their “faryad” [complaint] to D.C. quite “armless” (without any lathis) about the deported leaders, but they were stopped and fired on.’79 Some of those shot had suffered horrific wounds: ‘The sight of the mutilated bodies of the dead persons enraged the people, who formed into a crowd again, picking up whatever they could lay their hands on, like sticks and dandas (staffs), wooden logs and firewood pieces etc., and began to advance [. . .] some of them towards the railway station.’80 As the call for revenge was raised, the mood among the thousands of people gathered between the city walls and the railway lines changed. The crowd that had been repelled from the Civil Lines, and which the British perceived simply as a mob acting in concert with one mind – ‘one sea of human heads’ as Connor put it – was really far less coherent and much more evanescent. People took to the streets on 10 April for different reasons and with varying degrees of intent. The individuals in the crowd thus behaved in different ways; while some might seize the initiative, others would simply lose themselves and be dragged along. Ratto and Bugga could lead, yet only up to a point, beyond which the ungovernable dynamics of crowd behaviour took over. The crowd could be fickle one moment and act with deadly determination the next. In a volatile crowd of thousands, there was always the likelihood of violence, yet once the British had opened fire it became inevitable.81

  Located right next to the footbridge on the city side, the telegraph office was an obvious target for the crowd coming back over the bridge after the first shooting. It was just little more than an hour ago that Hans Raj had been there to send a telegram, but now the crowd entered the compound and began breaking the telephone exchange and wrecking the offices.82 The quick thinking of an Indian telegraphist, however, saved some of
the instruments:

  This man armed himself with a stick with which he beat the table without injuring the instruments. He pretended that he had joined the rioters and assured them that all the instruments were broken. The first intimation of what was happening in the Telegraph Office was signalled to Lahore by this telegraphist while the rioters were actually breaking up the telephone exchange.83

  The Telegraph Master, a Eurasian named Pinto, remained at his post till the last minute, when his Indian staff urged him to hide in his private quarters with his wife and child. Pinto was nevertheless spotted by the mob and was dragged out onto the veranda by the neck. At this moment, a small detachment of sepoys of the 54th arrived, sent over from the railway station to protect the telegraph office, and Pinto’s attacker was bayoneted on the spot and the crowd driven away with a few volleys of rifle-fire.84 Half a dozen sepoys remained on guard at the office for the rest of the day, while the office staff got back to work, trying to repair the damage and reconnect the lines of communication.85

  Meanwhile, the crowd that had been repulsed from the Civil Lines converged on the railway station a few hundred yards down the line. Built like a fort, the station was a striking symbol of British rule and, due to the platform agitation just a few months before, it was also a particularly contentious space – emblematic of the discriminatory policies of the Raj. A mob made its way along the tracks, across the platforms and into the station itself. Here they chased down and attacked the Station Superintendent, Bennett, who had been at the centre of the platform-ticket dispute.86 The picket of 54th Sikhs Frontier Force, posted by Massey before he left, eventually chased the rioters away, and Bennett survived although he had been badly beaten.87 Crowds were at the same time spilling across the tracks and began looting the goods-yards, workshops and sheds on the city side, opposite the station.88 Among the goods plundered from the railway storage was a shipment of side posts for charpoys – short sturdy wooden legs – which the authorities later mistook for bludgeons deliberately prepared for the unrest.89

  A British railway guard, T.W. Robinson, happened to be on his way towards the railway sheds, when he saw the large crowd moving in his direction. He immediately turned around and jumped down on the tracks to run back towards the station building, but he never made it very far. Local labourers who witnessed the attack described how the ‘the mob closed round’ Robinson, who ‘joined his hands, and implored them not to kill him’.90 Alone and defenceless, the hapless guard was killed with sticks and clubs by the crowd; the doctor who later examined the body noted that ‘His head was beaten to a pulp by blunt weapons.’91 The goods-yards were subsequently looted and a number of the workshops wrecked. At about the same time, Sergeant T.A. Rowlands, who was Cantonment Electrician, was attacked and killed by a crowd near the power-station south-east of Hall Gate. His death was witnessed by his comrades in Govindgarh Fort as he was trying to make it back to safety and the body was later found in a tent on the grounds of the horse fair, with the head ‘bashed in’.92

  While there was a back-story to the targeting of Bennett at the railway station, the attacks on Robinson and Rowlands were completely random – and yet the violence of the mobs was not without its own logic. As the Deputy Commissioner, Irving was the most important representative of the Govern-ment at Amritsar, and since he was known to have executed the deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal, the anger of the crowds centred on his person. Right from the outset, anger was accordingly directed not just at buildings and symbols of the Government, but also against its local representatives – and by extension all Europeans. Since the angry mob was prevented from entering the Civil Lines, or getting to Irving directly, those Europeans who happened to be vulnerable and within reach of the mob were targeted instead. This was, in other words, a case of displaced aggression: the fear, frustration and anger caused by the actions of the authorities was taken out on individuals like Robinson and Rowlands, who simply happened to be white, and who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.93 There was thus an inverse relationship between the vulnerability of the victims and the intensity of the violence enacted on their bodies. The blows aimed at Robinson and Rowlands were delivered with the rage and intensity of an attack on the very edifice of British rule. Almost imperceptibly, the protests against the deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal had thus turned into a general attack on everything, and everyone, associated with the Government. In practice, this included all Europeans in Amritsar on 10 April 1919.

  Unaware of the drama taking place outside the city walls, Hans Raj and Satyapal’s father were still busy proclaiming the hartal in the heart of Amritsar. The driver of the carriage that took them around later recalled the journey:

  We went through several Bazaars to the Clock Tower. We were going as fast as traffic permitted. Near the Queen’s statue there was a great crowd; they said ‘six or seven people have been shot, get off the gari’. I drove the men as far as the ‘Comb Bazar’ [just east of the Town Hall] and pulled up. They got off and went away without paying any fare.94

  Events had thus overtaken Hans Raj and the announcement of a meeting at Jallianwala Bagh was no longer relevant. In the crowded gathering behind the Town Hall, Hans Raj managed to find some of the other volunteers, including one of the wrestlers, Ghulam Hussain, from Bugga’s neighbourhood.95 One of the crowd recalled how ‘we were told not to go empty handed as bullets were being fired from the bridge . . . and we all went to the Municipal wood stack and armed ourselves with pieces of wood’.96 People were thus arming themselves with firewood near the Town Hall, which, much like the piles of stones near the footbridge, simply happened to be there.97

  Jarman was just then working in his office in the Town Hall. It was about 1pm when he heard people outside shouting: ‘They have killed two of us. Bring lathis!’ About the same time Mr G.M. Thomson of the Alliance Bank, which was a bit further into the city, behind the Sahagarhi shrine, called Jarman on the telephone. ‘What is all this tamasha about?’ That was all Jarman heard before the line went dead and when he tried to call back he could not get through. Unknown to Jarman, this was the very moment that the telegraph office was being attacked and the phone exchange destroyed.98 Just next to Jarman’s office, however, the crowd started destroying the post office. Hans Raj was with the crowd in the street outside the Town Hall: ‘They broke up everything in the Post Office, and also the places where people sit and write letters. The mob had largely increased by now, some stayed back saying that they would set fire to the Post Office while others came on towards the Kotwali. On reaching the Town Hall, they broke the windows . . .’99 Just as people started smashing the windows of Jarman’s office, where he was anxiously loading his revolver, the police from the kotwali just the other side of the Town Hall building, chased them away. Jarman was then escorted over to the police headquarters, where he remained for the rest of the afternoon.100

  At the kotwali, the central police station in the heart of Amritsar city, the two senior Indian police officers were in charge of seventy-five armed policemen, specifically held in reserve in case of unrest. The ageing Deputy Superintendent of Police, Khan Sahib Ahmad Jan, and the Inspector of Police, Muhammad Ashraf Khan, were, however, entirely unprepared for the task at hand.101 There was first of all some confusion as to which of the two officers was actually in charge, and, while Ahmad Jan was ostensibly the most senior officer, the dozen or so detectives in plainclothes who were following the crowds reported only to Ashraf Khan.102 Plomer had furthermore not issued any specific instructions, and since the kotwali was cut off from contact with the Civil Lines when the telephone lines were broken, the two officers had to act on their own discretion. Afraid of making any wrong decisions, they accordingly made no decisions at all.103 Ahmad Jan later admitted that, in spite of thirty-one years’ experience, ‘I have never had such an experience in my whole life.’104 After they phoned Plomer that morning, reporting on the crowds heading for Gol Bagh under Ratto and Bugga, the entire police force thu
s simply remained ensconced in the kotwali, hoping the storm would pass them by. The result was that the crowds swarming through the city, and through the main gateway of the Town Hall, mere yards from the kotwali, were never once challenged. This had a dramatic impact on the way the riots unfolded as the very inaction of the most visible forces of colonial authority within the city gave the rioters completely free rein.105 Just next to the kotwali, the Town Hall itself was soon after set on fire, and its interior destroyed, as Jarman described: ‘The natives, meanwhile, went into the Town Hall, pulled down the portraits of the civic fathers, tore them up, trampled on them and fired them. They treated every office in a similar manner, except mine curiously enough; but they burnt my bicycle.’106

  Throughout Amritsar city, the most visible symbols and offices of government were thus attacked, including local post offices and even the clock on Hall Gate, which was broken with stones.107 At the local post office in Majith Mandi, for instance, south of the Golden Temple, a crowd of hundreds gathered, calling out: ‘They have caught our men; let us loot Government property.’108 While the safe was broken open and the valuables stolen, the office-building was physically dismantled: railings were torn off the veranda, telegraph and phone wires pulled down, the clock broken and stamp-books burnt.109 A number of other buildings were set on fire at the same time, including the Religious Society Book Depot just inside Hall Gate, and later also the church outside Ramgarh Gate. Overtly Christian structures and institutions, linked closely to missionary activities, were, and had always been, the most obvious target for anti-colonial riots.