Amritsar 1919 Read online

  And now the men from the fair were pouring past our house. Wild looking Pathans driving their horses in front of them; men galloping; horse dealers mad to get their valuable charges away before the looting, which they knew must follow. All were making in one rush down the Grand Trunk Road to Lahore, and my husband and I stood and watched them stream past, realizing it was too late to escape ourselves, and that we had now only the loyalty of our Sikhs to save us.5

  Shortly afterwards, Commissioner Kitchin and two other officials came by car from Lahore, summoned by the fragmented but highly disturbing news they had received from Amritsar.6 The message Pinto sent off right before the telegraph office was attacked had been received at Lahore, but Irving had also managed to get a panicked phone-call through via the railway line: ‘All shops closed. 50,000 rushing through Civil Station and stopped by British men and Cavalry Officer on railway bridge. Three shots fired in my presence. One man either wounded or dead.’7 This was clearly an exaggerated description of the first firing, when Beckett’s picket was pushed back across Hall Bridge, but it had triggered an immediate response from the provincial government at Lahore. Kitchin asked Gerard to join them and so he got in the car and they went off to look for Irving – leaving Melicent behind at the college to wait for her husband. ‘I don’t know that I even expected him back,’ she noted, ‘everything seemed all on end.’8

  While Beckett was riding around, warning people, his wife, Norah, was happily oblivious of the events taking place less than a mile from the bungalow they had recently moved into near the Mall in the Civil Lines. That morning, she had decided against going into the city, and instead took a nap: ‘The extreme heat which succeeds the extreme cold of the Punjab was already beginning to be oppressive, and I preferred the coolness of the bungalow to the heat and glare outside . . .’9 Norah had given very specific instructions to her servants that she was not to be disturbed, and was annoyed when she was woken up shortly afterwards with the news that visitors had arrived. Babies could be heard crying, and as Mrs Beckett reluctantly got up, she soon realised what was going on:

  It flashed upon my memory that the house had been chosen as a rallying-post for European women and children in the event of trouble. My suspicions were quickly confirmed when I came into a drawing-room full of people I had never seen before, who paid no attention whatever to my entry. Fresh arrivals poured in every minute, and from one or two acquaintances among them I elicited the little that they knew of what had happened. A few minutes earlier a wild crowd had burst over the Hall bridge (which connects the city with the Civil Lines), driving back and stoning the small pickets which was posted there . . . the howl of the mob could be heard a quarter of a mile away, and the residents in the main thoroughfare were rapidly warned to leave their bungalows for the rallying-posts. The crowd was close at hand, and a moment’s delay might prove fatal; but at this somnolent hour it was no small task to persuade the women to move, and one of them persistently refused to quit her house because her baby was asleep. As people left their bungalows a few shots were heard from the direction of the bridge . . .10

  Around this time, reinforcements unexpectedly arrived at Amritsar. A train happened to draw into the station, carrying 260 men of the 9th Gurkhas on their way to Peshawar. One of the British officers, Lieutenant F. McCallum, was standing at the coach window, with his fellow officer Captain Gerry Crampton, and noticed that things were not quite right:

  First a howling crowd at the level crossing and on the overhead footbridge. Then a shout from Gerry Crampton ‘to look out’ as a bamboo stave came hurtling through the window. Out of which he had been looking. I had been looking out of the window on the opposite side – Gerry had done a smart step sideways thus avoiding damage. The train drew into the platform and a very agitated major appeared, who turned out to be OC Amritsar [Massey]. Somehow we learned that there had been a serious rioting in ‘the city’ – that one English woman had been knocked off her bike, beaten up and killed – that there were other ladies in the city – that the mob had begun to loot – that fires had been started and OC Amritsar had only a handful of troops to support civil authority.11

  Massey immediately commandeered the new arrivals, and the Gurkhas were posted at the station and along the railway lines to help hold the perimeter of the Civil Lines.12

  Meanwhile, at the two bridges, the stand-off between the British and the protesters continued. Irving was back in charge, and the crowd had been pushed back across the railway tracks and the dead and wounded had been removed. At the foot of each of the bridges, on the city side, a picket of about a dozen soldiers of the Somerset Light Infantry had been positioned. Just behind these troops, on the Civil Lines side, there was another small reserve of infantry, while the armed police were guarding the railway crossing a few hundred yards to the east. The danger, as far as the British were concerned, was, however, far from over. There was still an enormous crowd near the telegraph office and in Gol Bagh, as Connor described: ‘It was one sea of human heads that one could see, and of course the whole city was full of a mob. I was told by an Indian himself that he reckoned the number of men who had risen that day to be nearly 30,000.’13 These crowds were furthermore regarded as inherently violent and, in Irving’s assessment, the people who had forced their way across the carriage bridge an hour and a half earlier had been neither peaceful nor respectful: ‘They were not going to make an ordinary protest. When people come to an official’s house, they come properly clad. These people had thrown off their shoes and pagris and were coming with all the tokens of violence.’14 By this point, there was no doubt in Irving’s mind that what he faced was an irrational and frenzied mob of thousands: ‘They were very noisy, a furious crowd, you could hear the roar of them half way up the long road, they were an absolutely mad crowd, spitting with rage and swearing.’15 Irving and the other handful of Englishmen in charge of the tiny pickets were clearly outnumbered and saw themselves as the only thing that stood between the European men, women and children of Amritsar and total annihilation.

  Given the circumstances, Irving was only too happy for the Indian lawyers and other local intermediaries to try to keep people back from the bridges. Getting people in a volatile crowd of this size to move in a particular direction was, nevertheless, no easy matter. ‘They were excited,’ Maqbol Mahmood later recalled, ‘having seen their men shot dead and so would not listen.’16 Working tirelessly among the crowd, Salaria, Mahmood and others nevertheless managed to gather people in Gol Bagh, and again requested them to refrain from any violence. A local businessman, Mr Dhaber, described the effort to hold back the crowd:

  I continued my work at the foot bridge helping to clear the square between the Telegraph Office and the foot bridge (city side). In order to induce the people to go inside the city, I had told them to go to Jallianwala Bagh, where a meeting would be arranged to discuss matters and to represent matters to the officials. Those men wanted a promise that they would not be molested by the military, if they gathered in the Bagh, and on that promise being forthcoming, they were prepared to leave. Thereon, I went up to the D.C. who was near Madan’s shop and told him about the promise asked for. He said he had no intention to go into the town . . .17

  With this assurance, people began to slowly make their way back towards Hall Gate, and Plomer noted that ‘the mob began dwindling away from the rear’.18 It is noteworthy that Jallianwala Bagh was considered as a safe space for the people of Amritsar to gather: deep inside the city and beyond the reach of authorities. Despite a warning shot being fired by the guard of sepoys at the telegraph office, who were spooked by the moving crowds, Mahmood and the others eventually succeeded in leading a large group inside the Hall Gate.19 At this moment, Mahmood noted, ‘somebody shouted out that a fresh picket of soldiers had come on the carriage bridge and that the military were going to besiege the city’.20 Hearing this, people rushed back towards Hall Bridge.

  The fact that the arrival of the reserve picket on the bridg
e was perceived as an offensive move, in preparation for a siege of the city, is suggestive of the general level of panic and confusion among the crowd. By this stage the notion of submitting a petition at Irving’s house was no longer a real aim for the angry crowd once again converging on Hall Bridge – but the urge to express their protest and challenge the picket persisted. The British had no right to stop people from crossing the bridges, they believed, and the very presence of the military pickets was in and of itself a provocation. Helpless against British firearms, people were nevertheless fuelled by anger and, since they had pushed their way through once before, they believed they could do it again. With thousands of people gathered, the dynamic of collective action thus compelled men armed with nothing more than sticks and stones to face armed troops.

  The indefatigable lawyers once more put themselves between the angry crowd and the British pickets. Gurdial Singh Salaria had borrowed a horse from Beckett and rode over to Hall Bridge, calling out for the British not to open fire as it was still believed they would be able to get the crowd back with peaceful means.21 Irving, who was at the footbridge, was now urgently called over by Plomer, who was in charge of the infantry picket at Hall Bridge. Irving rode up and across the bridge, from the Civil Line side, and through the picket so that he was directly facing the crowd:

  I went taking with me some mounted men and I found [. . .] a very threatening crowd and as far as we could tried to make our voices heard in the noise and told them to disperse. The crowd began to close in and we went back into the ranks. And once more Mr. Plomer went out of his own accord and told them that fire was going to be opened. I was rather reluctant to fire; because at that time two Indian gentlemen were endeavouring to persuade the crowd to go back. I was afraid of shooting them. So I pointed them out to the picket.22

  One of the pleaders caught up in the crowd in front of the picket, now found himself next to Ratto, who had long since lost control of the people around him. The pleader called out to Ratto: ‘Tum pagal ho! Lejao mob!’ – ‘you are mad, take the mob away.’23 And so it was that, somewhat ironically, Ratto ended up trying to hold back the mob he had himself originally rallied.24 Magbool, who was also between the mob and the picket saw Ratto desperately trying to restrain people, shouting: ‘Get back; don’t get killed!’25 Unfortunately, Irving mistook Ratto’s presence in front of the crowd as a sign that he was leading the imminent rush on the picket. Stones were now being thrown, hitting one of the soldiers, and, as the situation was very quickly getting out of hand, Irving decided it was time to act: ‘I suggested to the non-commissioned officer that he might pick out a ring-leader but he could not. I was trying to pick out the ring-leader when the crowd made a rush and began to put over stones on the picket. I called on the non-commissioned officer commanding the picket to take action. He opened fire.’26 Irving later stated that ‘I was holding fire until it got so eminently dangerous that I could not wait for a moment longer.’27

  Without warning, the dozen men of the Somerset Light Infantry fired more than sixty shots at point-blank range into the massed crowd of people.28 The lawyers were caught right in the crossfire, and Mahmood, who was hit in the foot, described how ‘bullets whistled to my right and left’.29 ‘After the first few shots,’ he noted, ‘the crowd rushed back, but the firing was continued even after they began running away. Many of them were hit in the back. Most of the wounded were hit above belt on the face or on the head.’30 The effect of the rifle-fire was devastating and between twenty and thirty people were hit, many of whom were killed instantly.31 As the survivors were scrambling for safety, Mahmood saw the dead and wounded strewn on the ground around him: ‘I saw a corpse actually with an eye ball and the whole brain blown out. [. . .] A boy of 16 or 17 years of age lay wounded with his entrails protruding, having been hit on the belly.’32 The boy died soon after. One of the lawyers, Golam Yaseen, later described his frustration in trying to keep the crowd back and the British from shooting:

  We tried our best. We appealed to them from many points of view, and at last we saw the crowd moving city-ward. We were going up the foot-bridge, city side, to inform the authorities that the square had been cleared, but before we could go half the way, we heard volleys fired [from the telegraph office]. We then saw the crowd rushing back shouting, and as we thought that, under the circumstances, we could do no useful work, I went home. On my way, a little beyond Madan’s shop, I heard firing again and again.33

  The British were at first unwilling to allow anyone to cross the bridge and get assistance from the nearby hospital, but eventually some stretchers were brought and a couple of the wounded taken away. Most of the casualties, however, were taken into the city, where local doctors and others with medical experience gathered to help treat the wounded at Dr Bashir’s house or Kidar Nath’s dispensary.34 Many of them, however, had injuries far beyond the capabilities and facilities of local practitioners, and Mahmood blamed the British for not providing better medical assistance.35

  It was still early afternoon and just a few hours since Kitchlew and Satyapal had been deported.36 From the vantage-point of Hall Bridge, Plomer for the first time noticed the unmistakable signs that the unrest had spread: ‘I could see the smoke rising inside the city close to Hall Gate especially from the Preaching Hall and then from buildings inside the city.’37

  As the crowd scattered and people headed back into the city by the hundreds, their anger was directed at the lawyers and others who had intervened at the bridges, as Mr Dhaber described:

  The crowd then came up [to] me as I entered the Hall Gate near Davee Sahai’s house and told me that I had been false to them. I had promised them that they would be safe if they went home and here were their brethren returning city-ward from the carriage bridge, when they were fired at. They also accused Salaria of being treacherous to them. They said, as they were returning, he gave the signal for firing, and added that all those shot at by this firing had been hit from behind. I did, in fact, see two men hit in the back.38

  Salaria obviously had nothing to do with the shooting, and the lawyers had instead done everything in their power to prevent bloodshed, even at the risk of their own lives. In the aftermath of the shooting, however, and amidst the chaos and confusion of the dispersing crowd, their actions were seen as dupli-citous.39 Another Indian witness similarly noted how people in the crowd felt ‘betrayed by their own men’.40 Any authority that lawyers and local leaders may have had over the people of Amritsar, as an inhibiting force during the riots, was thus lost. Dr Bashir, who had originally taken the initiative for the hartal and petition, was furthermore busy tending to the wounded who were brought back into the city.41 Whatever leadership and guidance he had provided was thus also absent as the riots spiralled out of control and, though still active in the crowd, Ratto and Bugga were as likely to be dragged along by the sheer number of people as they were able to lead them.

  In a strange sort of way, both the British and the protesters perceived themselves to be under attack. Irving and the other officers believed they had only just fought back yet another determined rush on the Civil Lines by a frenzied mob of tens of thousands, while the people in the crowd saw the shooting as yet another unjustified killing of innocent Indians. The British believed that, by physically removing the two main leaders of the anti-Rowlatt agitation from Amritsar, they could eliminate the main source of discontent. All that they achieved, however, was to remove the leadership of a mass movement which had up to that point managed to keep all meetings and protests entirely peaceful. Crucially, this pre-emptive move provoked the local population, in the most demonstrative way possible – by arresting Kitchlew and Satyapal in what was inarguably an underhand manner, people’s worst fears concerning the new legislation were confirmed. The fact that the deportation had been carried out under the provisions of the Defence of India Act 1915, and not the Rowlatt Act, was immaterial. The Rowlatt Act had not even come into effect, but to the population of Amritsar there was a direct correlation b
etween the silencing and subsequent deportation of their two leaders, followed by the rejection of the petition and firing by the pickets at the railway bridges. This was all experienced as the result of the same general policy of oppression, crystallised in the Rowlatt Act, which seemed to prove definitively that the British Government was bent on crushing all hopes of swaraj among Indians.

  On 10 April, the rioters were fighting back against each and every iniquity they believed they had suffered under British rule. The actions of the crowd were thus implicitly justified and, after the firing at the bridges, there was no inhibition in terms of the level of violence that could be inflicted against Europeans with moral impunity.42 A Kashmiri weaver, Asdulla, described the progression of the protests from a local perspective – from the moment the news of the deportation first spread, leading almost inexorably towards their bloody climax: