Amritsar 1919 Page 15
Meanwhile, at the Jubilee Hospital, just south of Ram Bagh, Lieutenant-Colonel Smith had been in the middle of a cataract operation when his assistants interrupted and told him that there had been firing at the bridges.110 According to Irving’s pre-arranged plan, Smith was to take his ambulance truck and evacuate Europeans inside the city in case of an emergency.111 When Smith found the phone-lines to have been cut, he initiated the evacuation himself:
I got on the ambulance immediately and went off into the city across the police lines to bring out the three European missionary Ladies and Indian Christians. I got back with them and returned for the middle school which is across the Police Lines crossing and close to it but sheltered by a garden. I walked into the walled enclosure and saw a party there smashing everything and the under-storey of the main building on fire. The moment they saw me they made a dash for myself. I was armed with a walking stick. I got on the ambulance and got off.112
As the ambulance sped back towards the railway crossing, Smith saw smoke coming from the church near Ram Bagh Gate: ‘When I saw the Church on fire, considering that it is as much a sacrilege to a Hindu or a Musalman to interfere with a Church as to interfere with a mosque or temple, I came to the conclusion that this show meant the white man root and branch.’113 With his particular penchant for the most alarmist interpretation of the situation, Smith found all his worst nightmares come true on 10 April. He thus confined himself to saving the Europeans and Christian Indians at just two places on the city side of the railway. This was perhaps a sensible line of action, given the chaos and confusion, but it also meant that the remaining Europeans inside the city were left to fend for themselves.
Just a few blocks south of Hall Gate, Isabel Mary Easdon, the medical doctor in charge of the Municipal Female Hospital, was busy attending to her patients. Earlier that morning, Easdon had first become aware that all was not well when the mother of one of the Indian staff told her ‘that all the wells in Amritsar had been poisoned’.114 The story was widely circulated and one local, who was with the crowds further inside the city, similarly heard people warn others: ‘Do not drink water from the pipe. Some deadly poison has been dissolved in it.’115 In the Hall Bazaar, people even smashed the water posts.116 At a time of unrest and uncertainty, this rumour transformed the specific threat posed by British troops at the bridges into a general and immediate danger to all men, women and children, and to all Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.117 The events of 10 April were thus perceived as a much bigger existential crisis and, however implausible this rumour was, objectively speaking, its very existence revealed a deep-seated mistrust and animosity against the Government – and by extension against all Europeans.118
There was a long history of so-called ‘poison scares’ in colonial India, especially during periods of cholera and plague epidemics, when official medical and quarantine measures came to be regarded with suspicion among the local population. In 1908, for instance, it was noticed that only Indians fell victim to the plague, and it was subsequently rumoured that the British themselves were the source of contagion; in some areas, the Government was suspected of having actually poisoned wells and the locals ceased to use them.119 That this type of rumour should resurface in the midst of anti-British protests in Amritsar was certainly no coincidence. Curiously, the rumour had its counterpart in British paranoid fears of being poisoned by Indian servants which harked back to the days of the ‘Mutiny’.120 Around this very time, Rosamond Lawrence, for instance, described how she and her husband feared that their son might be poisoned by ‘seditionists’: ‘I am terrified. When we first came up here had I not seen how, in spite of every precaution, the head mali [gardener] Mahomed, dismissed for gross dishonesty, had yet contrived to poison the whole litter of bull-terrier pups? They were kept in the marble bath room opening out of our bedroom . . . but poisoned they were.’121 There was, in other words, a complete mirroring of anxieties between rulers and ruled in Punjab in 1919. At Amritsar, however, the rumour that the British had poisoned the water served to intensify anti-British anger and mobilise crowd action. The belief that the Government, as well as those who were seen to represent it, were trying to deceitfully kill everyone in the city thus paved the way for unbridled retributive violence.122 Any violence inflicted on the bodies of Europeans would be implicitly justified as being defensive.
At around 12.45, Easdon heard a large crowd going through the Hall Bazaar. Not long after, the son of the Indian midwife came running and told her that Kitchlew and Satyapal had been deported and that the shops were closing.123 Easdon decided to close the hospital for the day, and, along with Nelly Benjamin, a Eurasian assistant surgeon, she went up to the parapet on the roof from where they could overlook the surrounding streets. Right across the street was the dispensary of the Indian Dr Kidar Nath, and a large crowd had gathered around the doctor, who was dressing a man who had been wounded in the foot. The crowd was agitated and people were running back and forth.124 Easdon was by this point getting worried and instructed a female compounder, Massammat Mathri, to make sure the gates were locked. Suddenly, Benjamin shouted from the roof for Easdon to come up. ‘From the parapet,’ Easdon later recalled, ‘I could see clouds of smoke, and the shouts of the mob were ten times worse than they were before.’125
The crowd in front of Kidar Nath’s dispensary across the street kept growing, owing to the steady stream of wounded being brought there. When there was no more room inside, the wounded were placed on charpoys in the street outside, just beneath the two women. People had so far not paid any attention to the memsahib in their midst, but, as Dr Kidar Nath was trying to extract a bullet from a man’s thigh, Easdon thoughtlessly called out to the men on the street. Nelly Benjamin described the incident: ‘Mrs. Easdon enquired of the crowd who had wounded the men. Some body said that English people had fired on them. Mrs. Easdon made some unkind remarks; she said the natives deserved it and it served them right.’126 According to Benjamin, Easdon also referred to the Indian doctor as a fool.127 Down on the street, Easdon’s remarks did not go unnoticed, as one of the men in the crowd recalled: ‘I saw Mrs. Easdon at the roof of the hospital, standing with another lady. She was making fun of the wounded persons. She kept on standing for about 10 or 15 minutes, and when a large number of persons gathered there, she disappeared from the roof of the hospital and hid herself.’128
Outside on the street, word of Easdon’s remarks quickly spread and, according to a witness, ‘people felt enraged’.129 Easdon had in fact gone downstairs at the request of Mr Lewis, another Eurasian and a relative of Benjamin’s, who had just stopped by the hospital. Walking through the crowd minutes before, he overheard people muttering about Mrs Easdon and now told her to hide, as she later described it as ‘they were planning to kill me’.130 Despite Easdon’s pleas for him to stay with her, Lewis hastily excused himself and left, claiming he had ‘urgent work’ to do.131 As a Eurasian, Mr Lewis could come and go more or less undisturbed, but the perceived neutrality of his mixed background was evidently tenuous. The chaprassi now told the distraught Easdon to hide at once as the people outside were going to come for her. When she looked out of the window on to the crowded street below, Easdon recalled, ‘I saw the people in the mob pointing out to me with their fingers.’132 She now took refuge in Benjamin’s room.
Down at the gate, people were asking the chaprassi where the memsahib was. When he told them she had left, he was rebuked: ‘This is a nice kind of Hindu–Musalman union. You are a beiman [dishonest].’133 Soon after, a large crowd returned, as a local living right across from the hospital described:
About 1.30pm on 10th April [I] saw a mob of about 200 people coming from the direction of Railway. It was headed by a young man of 25, bare-headed, wearing spectacles, white shirt, white paijama and black waistcoat. He was shouting ‘Don’t drink pipe-water. It may have been poisoned.’ He was also shouting ‘Catch and kill the English. They have fired on our people.’134
At the hospital, the crowd started hammer
ing on the main gate; finding it locked, they tried to get in through the separate door of the compounder, Massammat Mathri. People were shouting ‘Kill the English and memsahib, they have poisoned the wells.’135 The terrified Mathri eventually let them in and, when she claimed that she did not know where Easdon was, people told her ‘that she was an Indian sister, and it was her duty to tell’.136 Benjamin was then standing upstairs, seeing the compounder being threatened in the courtyard: ‘The crowd were asking her where the lady Doctor was. She pointed to the upper storey.’137 The mob poured into the hospital, as Benjamin described:
The crowd were shouting ‘Where is the Bara Mem-Sahib’. When I heard the crowd coming up I peeped through a chink in the door, and saw that it was armed with lathis. I told Mrs. Easdon to go down and hide in the staircase [at the back]. She was terrified but followed my advice. The mob then hammered on my door. A boy in the mob climbed over the verandah wall and opened the door for them from the inside. The mob stood over me, threatened me with their sticks, and demanded to be told at once where the Lady Doctor was. I swore that she was not in the Hospital. The mob said that they had been told she was. They had come straight to my room without searching the rest of the Hospital. They searched all my rooms and opened my almirahs and boxes. When they saw some gloves and European articles in my box they said that Mem-Sahib must certainly be here. Failing to find the Lady Doctor they went off.138
While this was happening, Easdon was standing, as she described it, ‘not more than 2 yards distant from the place where the mob were talking with Mrs. Benjamin in the verandah by her room’.139 As soon as the mob left, Benjamin came out on the staircase to Easdon, from where they could hear glass and furniture being broken downstairs. People were yelling and suddenly the mob was returning up the stairs again. Benjamin told Easdon to hide in the ‘native closet’, or toilet, on the roof, and so the doctor scrambled up and locked herself in the small space. Alone in the dark, she could hear people running around in the hospital, searching for her, but no-one thought to look for her in the toilet. Finally, Benjamin came to fetch her, and the chaprassi brought Easdon a burka to disguise herself. ‘I blackened my feet with ink,’ Easdon recalled, ‘and then, during a momentary lull in the noise which had been frantic, I escaped through a side door to the house of the woman who had sent me the burka.’140 She stayed in the nearby house till late that evening, when she was eventually taken by her host to the safety of the railway station.141
Considering the fate of the two guards killed near the railway station, Mrs Easdon had a very close call. The crowd on the street was already angered and excited because of the dead and the wounded laid out on the street, yet, despite the tense and menacing atmosphere, things had been fine up till the moment Easdon uttered her careless words. Those few words, however, were all it took for the mood to change and for the crowd to erupt. Most of the people in the crowd were locals who knew Mrs Easdon and some had even been treated by her and yet, in the flicker of a moment, she became an intolerable enemy in their midst. The events at the Female Hospital were thus reflective precarious sense of normality, and constant potential for violence, in the chaos and confusion that engulfed Amritsar on 10 April. The rumours of poisoning also lent further weight to the targeting of Easdon, who, as a doctor, routinely administered medicine to the local people of the neighbourhood and the city. An explicit act of deceitful aggression was thus attributed to Mrs Easdon, which both identified her as a threat and justified any violence against her person.
The incident also exposed the significance of racialised identities in the distinction between friend and enemy, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. With Easdon as the obvious target, the two Eurasians, Nelly Benjamin and Mr Lewis, had almost entirely escaped the wrath of the crowd. When Benjamin was questioned by the people searching for the doctor, the chaprassi had interfered on her behalf, claiming that she was ‘a native woman’.142 At the same time, the chaprassi himself, as well as the hapless Mathri, had been pressured by locals to reveal the hiding-place of the memsahib through very explicit invocations of Hindu–Muslim brotherhood and Indian solidarity.
Half a mile to the south, in the very heart of the narrow twisting alleys of Amritsar’s Katra Ahluwia neighbourhood, the 45-year-old superintendent of the city mission schools, Miss Frances Marcella Sherwood, was riding her bicycle to one of the schools she managed. Earlier in the day she had heard that a hartal had been proclaimed and, despite the warnings of her Indian staff and friends, she insisted on cycling into the city alone, to close down the five schools and dismiss the hundreds of students under her charge. ‘I could see that trouble was imminent,’ she later claimed.143 She had come across several groups of people whom she found threatening, but only had one school left to visit, Bagian di Katra School, where she had promised the two teachers anxiously waiting that she would return. Sherwood was making her way along the narrow labyrinthine alleys of the Katra Ahluwia neighbourhood when a local man she passed warned her to turn back as it was too dangerous to go on. She ignored him. As she turned a corner, she suddenly came upon a large crowd, which yelled at the sight of her: ‘Maro Angrez’ [kill the English]. Sherwood quickly jumped off her bicycle and turned it around to retrace her steps. A young man stepped out from one of the gullies and grabbed hold of her hand, asking her what she was doing. Sherwood was panicking now and people looking on from the windows of the adjacent houses called on him to let her go as she was a woman. The man released his grip and she rode off at great speed and took a right, only to find that she had taken a wrong turn; once again she retraced her steps, narrowly swerving around a man who tried to trip over her bike with his foot. As she reached a narrow lane someone knocked off her hat – but another local picked it up and gave it back to her.
Sherwood left her bicycle behind and ran into a smaller lane and past a well, which would take her through a short cut to the Jamadar ki Haveli School. She was well known in this particular neighbourhood and thought she might be safe. Unfortunately, Sherwood was wrong in this assumption. A large crowd caught up with her in the narrow lane, and a handful of young men, apparently cheered on by the rest, started beating and kicking her. A local sweet-vendor witnessed the attack: ‘I heard shouts that the Mem Sahib had been killed. I ran from my shop and saw her lying on the ground.’144 One of the men was holding her by the hair and then hit her five or six times with his shoe – a traditional symbol of disrespect. As she got up and staggered a few steps, trying to take shelter in a small reservoir, she was struck on the head several times with a stick and finally collapsed. Sherwood herself later recalled the harrowing experience:
I was attacked by one or two men who were coming from the opposite direction and by a number from the rear. I cannot say how many men were my assailants. I feel there was not a crowd. I was hit with sticks on the head and fell down. I got up and ran and was knocked down by further blows on the head and again felled. I was struck with sticks even when I was on the ground. I saw an open door and tried to enter the house but it was shut in my face . . . I then fell down from exhaustion. I made one more effort to get up and did get up although everything seemed to be getting dark and I thought I was getting blind.145
The witness described the subsequent behaviour of the attackers: ‘There was a mob of about 100 people. They were shouting “Gandhi ki Jai” and “Kitchlew ki Jai”. When Miss Sherwood was struck down [. . .] they shouted “She is dead,” and went off leaving her there.’146 Locals later carried Sherwood to safety at the mission school where an Indian doctor attended to her. ‘She was bleeding profusely from the scalp,’ the doctor noted. ‘She was extremely weak [. . .] Her scalp was probably hurt by sticks.’147 He later took her home in his carriage and she was left in charge of a Eurasian woman before finally being taken to the fort late that night.148
The attack on Miss Sherwood had been different again from the targeting of Mrs Easdon. Sherwood had done nothing and said nothing that could be construed as even remotely provocative, and instea
d she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. While the sequence of events that led to the sacking of the Female Hospital and the search for Easdon developed over a period of time, Sherwood was set upon in an instant without any prior notice. The crowd violence had accordingly escalated to a point at which no specific pretext for an attack was necessary. Just like Robinson and Rowlands, Sherwood had been alone and vulnerable and that made her a target. Yet, unlike the two guards, Miss Sherwood was not beaten to death and left as a mangled corpse. For all its brutality, there was something almost demonstratively transgressive in the assault – though neither sexual nor entirely vicious. As the body of a white woman was ordinarily out of bounds for Indians, the attackers seem quite deliberately to have beaten her, pulled her hair and humiliated her. And, even though the crowd left her for dead, her body was not mutilated. The assault on Marcella Sherwood was nevertheless to become the single most emblematic episode of the riots of 10 April.
CHAPTER 5
TOKENS OF VIOLENCE
10 APRIL
At Khalsa College, Thursday 10 April had begun like any other day for Melicent and her family, and the servants sent to the bazaar to buy flour early that morning said that ‘all was quiet’. As the day progressed, however, Melicent began to feel that all was not well – ‘but how bad we did not guess till we were at lunch when Beckett galloped up looking very wild, his horse covered with foam and blood’.1 The Assistant Commissioner jumped off his horse: ‘“The mob is over the railway bridge!” he cried. “I have been trying to keep them back with four gunners, mounted, but someone fired at the mob from the back, and it’s all up. They’ve murdered all the white men in the city. Where’s my wife?”’2 Since the phone-lines at the court house were down, Beckett had been tasked with personally warning the Anglo-Indian population of Amritsar and had ridden out to the Wathens thinking his wife might be with them.3 Melicent and Gerard, however, had no idea as to the whereabouts of Mrs Beckett, and the distraught Assistant Commissioner rode back towards the Civil Lines. All morning, Melicent had been expecting something like this might happen. She had dressed the children in comfortable clothes and prepared three small rolls of bedding that could easily be carried, along with some food; then she put on her own khaki riding dress. For now, however, all they could do was wait, at least until they received further news. Melicent feared they would have ‘to fly to the Professors’ quarters or some village at any moment. It was not pleasant.’4 She and Gerard were walking restlessly around the grounds of the college, when they noticed movement out on the road: