Amritsar 1919 Read online

  I was sitting at my house upstairs doing tupa work. It was food time and I came downstairs and saw a bare-headed crowd of men [. . .] They were shouting out that Kitchlew and Satyapal had been arrested and taken away. They were closing all the shops as they went along. I joined them and we came along to the Queen’s Statue Chauk where people said we should go to the Deputy Commissioner and have them released. We came to Hall Gate and our strength was then quite 5,000 or 10,000. When we came to the road bridge over the Railway line we found a piquet of British soldiers. There was a Sahib in uniform on horseback with them. This mounted soldier waved his hands to us to retire. The mob did not heed and insisted on advancing. Then shots were fired at us and we got back and wended our way to Hall Bazaar where the mob was shouting that some of their brothers had been killed and that we would also kill.43

  Asdulla gave voice to the sense of solidarity of the people gathered, and the empowerment that came from being a large crowd – but also, and crucially, the perceived injustice of the British actions, which provided an implicit justification for revenge. If people had gathered more or less spontaneously, as Asdulla had, and without much deliberation, the shooting instantaneously turned the crowd into a vengeful and committed mob. As the bodies of more than a dozen men were carried into the city by Ratto and Bugga and laid down at the Khair Ud Din mosque in the Hall Bazaar for everyone to see, the fear and anger was rekindled.44 The way the bodies were carried through the crowds clearly invoked the symbolism of a religious procession, and it is noteworthy that those who had been killed were spoken of as shahids, or martyrs, whose sacrifice demanded revenge.45 If the protests had initially started because of the deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal, they had by this point escalated into reciprocal violence rooted in the events of the day. ‘Two cousins of mine were shot in the mob at the bridge,’ a local butcher later recalled. ‘This excited me and I joined in the mob.’46 According to another Indian eyewitness, ‘a part of the mob that had seen the fearfully mutilated bodies of their friends and neighbours, lost all control . . .’47 From the window of his house near Hall Bazaar, a local cloth merchant observed the angry crowd: ‘They were very excited and some of them were calling out, “Come brethren! They have killed innocent and unarmed brethren of ours, let us take Lathis and avenge them.” Some were seen with wounded bodies on charpoys. Some were running on with Lathis.’48

  Having moved up from the Town Hall, Hans Raj and some of the other volunteers merged with the streams of people converging in Hall Bazaar in front of the National Bank. Just 300 yards down the street from the mosque, where the bodies had been taken, the National Bank, with its massive Greek pillars and iron-bar gates, stood out as an obvious target. The bank was known to be managed by Europeans and it was, furthermore, one of the only businesses in the city at the time that remained open despite the hartal. Hans Raj described how people outside were calling out for government property to be looted – ‘Loot lo Sarkari Mal hai’ – clearly showing that the bank was considered simply as an official building.49 People started banging on the front doors and shutters and pulling at the iron gate leading into the back yard and the godowns or storerooms of the National Bank.

  Inside the bank, Stewart, the manager, and Scott, the accountant, had just come back from lunch when the crowd first began gathering in the street outside.50 One of the Indian clerks tried to reason with the crowd: ‘I went out to tell people not to be so wicked. They started throwing bricks at me. Narrow escape. I got in and closed outer wooden door.’51 The two Europeans were beginning to panic now, running from room to room, and even contemplating getting their staff to lock them inside the lavatory for safety. Stewart asked the head clerk to run for help at the kotwali, less than 300 yards away, but since the building was surrounded this was impossible. Outside the National Bank there were actually several Indian police detectives in plain clothes, but they were well known and people in the crowd started threatening them, calling them ‘Government boys’, and so they eventually fled.52 The Kashmiri weaver, Asdulla, was at this stage coming down the street with the crowd from Hall Gate:

  When we reached the National Bank we found a mob breaking the doors and windows there. Some men cried out ‘Sahib ko pakar lo’ [catch the sahib]. The mob that were breaking the doors and windows were armed with lathis, lakars, etc., and on the cry the ‘Sahib ko pakar lo and Sahib ko mar lo’ [kill the sahib] being raised we rushed into the Bank. Another war cry was ‘kilja ko saro.’ [lit. burn the office]. These war cries were really started in Hall Bazar before we reached the National Bank.53

  One mob broke in through the front door, while another pulled down the iron gate to the backyard and entered the bank through a side door. Inside the terrified staff were hiding in the main office, as one of them later described:

  Mob got in by back door – broke the door of our room, caught hold of my neck and threw me to the mob saying ‘Kill this Kirani’ [clerk]. Two persons pleaded for my life and I was spared. I found myself in the compound and I saw [the attackers] going into the Bank with the mob. Mr. Stewart had a revolver but in spite of my prayers he refused to use it.54

  Asdulla was with the group of about twenty men who burst into the bank, shouting ‘Hindu Mussalman ki jai’: ‘On entering the Bank we went to the room of the Sahib which is on the right side as one enters Bank. We found the Sahib standing at his table with a pistol in his hand. The mob fell on the Sahib with dangs and he fell down from the blows. The Sahib did not fire his pistol at all.’55 Stewart had been told the previous day that there might be trouble, and, while he dismissed the warning, he did carry a gun to work at the bank that day.56 As the mob broke through the door into his office, however, he appears to have lost his nerve and froze up. While Stewart lay unconscious on the floor, someone dealt him a blow to the face with a hatchet while a Muslim butcher stabbed him several times in the back with a knife.57 In the office next door, the angry crowd found Scott, as Asdulla described: ‘He was hiding behind the door. He was sitting down with a hat on.’58 The frightened accountant was immediately set upon by the mob and beaten senseless with heavy sticks and whatever else was at hand. Furniture, folders and paper was then piled on top of the bodies of the two men and, after being doused in kerosene taken from the bazaar, the grisly pyres were set on fire.59 Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Scott had laughed at the Wathens over dinner and ridiculed their concerns about the safety of Europeans at Amritsar.

  As the fire spread throughout the interior of the bank, the crowd eventually left, ‘shouting the Sahib had been killed’.60 Hans Raj, who had remained with the hundreds of people gathered outside on the street, heard one of the attackers bragging about killing the sahibs, saying ‘he threw them down catching their legs and killed them with lathis’.61 Others commented that the butcher ‘had avenged the men killed on the bridge’.62 While the main building rapidly went up in flames, people broke into the storehouses at the back of the bank and looted cloth worth several lakhs (hundred thousand) rupees.63 At a time when the prices of fabric were high, the prospect of such loot attracted hundreds of locals, especially among the poor of Amritsar. Nearby, an Indian eyewitness heard someone in a crowd shouting: ‘“The National Bank has been set on fire. There is plenty of loot to be had. Come along.” Then the whole mob shouting “Gandhi ki jai” ran off towards the National Bank.’64 Following the rallying call of Gandhi was thus fully consistent with looting and no real distinction can actually be made between the destruction of government property, as the banks were perceived to be, and pillaging. Hours later, as the main building was but a smouldering ruin, people were still seen carrying away arms-full of cloth, chintz and silk.65

  The crowd now moved down towards the Town Hall and attacked the Chartered Bank, which was just next door.66 The Indian clerks were calling out from the upper balconies that there were no Europeans inside, but people soon managed to break the doors down and started ransacking the place. Inside, the two European managers were trying to hide, but, before they w
ere discovered, the police came to their aid from the kotwali. It had taken the two senior police officers at the kotwali much precious time arguing over who should go the 100 yards between the Town Hall and the Chartered Bank, but eventually Ahmad Jan came with twenty-five armed policemen and chased the crowd away.67 The old Deputy Superintendent later described the relief of the bank as a heroic effort, claiming there had been at least 2,000 people gathered: ‘Some of them, I should say, were inside the Bank, and there were a lot of others outside; when I reached there I made a rush and cried out pakao, pakao, that is to say, seize them, seize them, and the people ran away, and I found a lot of papers burning outside the Bank and all the Bank glasses and other property were smashed.’68 Ahmad Jan then brought the European managers, who had had a lucky escape, back to the kotwali, where they joined Jarman. That, however, was the sum total of the police effort that day. It is noteworthy that the crowd was easily dispersed by the police, without a single shot fired, or even a stone thrown. The crowds, however, subsequently reassembled around the statue of Queen Victoria, just behind the Town Hall. People were beating the marble statue with sticks when some of the volunteers intervened, saying that ‘we had suffered no taklif [misery] during the Queen’s raj’.69 Apart from a finger that was broken off, the statue thus escaped further damage due to this peculiar expression of nostalgic attachment to the erstwhile Empress of India.70 The attention of the crowd was meanwhile directed towards the Alliance Bank in the bazaar, a bit further into the city to the south-east.

  Located behind the Saragarhi memorial, on the corner of one of the smaller streets winding off the main thoroughfare, the Alliance Bank was managed by Mr G.M. Thomson and a staff of half a dozen Indian clerks. Earlier in the day, Thomson had noticed the crowds of people that could be seen outside and made the phone-call to Jarman at the Town Hall, which was broken off when the telegraph office was attacked. After the peon sent to collect the mail returned empty-handed, due to the unrest, the chaprassi went out and returned around 1pm and told Thompson that the National Bank was being attacked and people were throwing stones.71 The clerks urged Thomson to leave immediately, but he refused to abandon the bank and instead suggested they save themselves. In the end they all remained, closed down the bank and shut the doors and windows, hoping for the best. One of the clerks locked the front door from the outside and went home, to make it appear as if the bank was shut for the day. Outside in the street, Hans Raj was in the crowd, which now attacked the bank: ‘They were breaking open the doors when some Babus came on to the roof and said there was no one inside and not to break the Bank. On this Ghulam Hussain replied that as they were inside and the door was locked from outside, the Sahib must be inside also. The door was broken open with a hammer and the mob went inside of the building.’72 Meanwhile, Thomson and his staff retreated to the offices upstairs ‘We wanted to hide him in a pitch dark room where we keep parcels,’ one of the clerks later recalled, ‘but he said he did not want to die a dog’s death.’73 Instead Thomson went up on the roof to escape to another building, but he was immediately spotted from the street and people started throwing stones and bricks at him. Out on the rooftop and exposed in the open, Thompson was clearly visible to the hundreds of people gathered in the streets below, and in panic he fired a shot in the air with his pistol to show that he was armed. This, however, had the opposite effect of what he intended, and the crowds now rushed to the upper floor, from where stairs led to the roof. Asdulla was once again at the front of the action:

  Eventually a Sikh rush upstairs and we heard a shot and the Sikh rolled downstairs dead. The Sahib followed him and came down to the Bank office [. . .] The Sahib after shooting the Sikh began coming down to the office room where we were. He showed us the pistol as he was coming downstairs and as he was doing the mob rushed on him and attacked him with lathis. A chaprasi was putting his hand out and saying na maro [don’t beat him]. The Sahib was not dead but he was lying on the floor, and the chaprasi was standing with outstretched hands protecting the body.74

  The attackers then went downstairs again and joined the people who were tearing the main office of the bank apart in their search for loot. Someone climbed up on top of an iron safe and cut open a bag full of rupee coins, which he scattered all over the floor for everyone to fight over. Others were trying to prise notes out of a small iron box, with the result that the paper was ripped and rendered worthless.75 One particularly resourceful man gathered coins up in his tehmat, the Punjabi version of the lungi or sarong, and, according to a witness, ‘slinging the bundle of rupees over his shoulder scrambled away naked with the money.’76

  Upstairs, the frightened clerks now made the mistake of shouting down to the crowd that the sahib was dead and that they ought to leave bank, thus drawing attention once more to Thomson. ‘Shouts were raised,’ according to one of the clerks, ‘that we had falsely said before that the Sahib was not there.’77 Several men returned upstairs and, when one of them struck at Thomson’s hat, which was lying on the table, the wounded man hidden underneath cried out in fear. Thomson was pulled out from under the table and the mob once more pounded him with sticks as one eyewitness described: ‘The Sahib’s head was bleeding frightfully. There is blood on the wall still.’78 The clerks watched in terror as the men dragged the lifeless body to the window: ‘They threw him out of the balcony into the bazaar, he was dead then. The mob put books, stationary and furniture on the body – and lit it with a canister of the Bank oil.’79 Down in the street, Hans Raj was watching the spectacle along with hundreds of others: ‘The mob stayed in the building for about 10 minutes and when they came outside [one of them] had an Angrezi Topi [English hat] in his hand. The mob were destroying the records and files. The topi was thrown about and all the records were set on fire . . .’80 A local who carried a clock away from the bank was warned to smash it in the street, ‘as it would be a nishan [sign] of Government property’ – that is to say, the clock could easily be identified as loot.81

  Just as had been the case with the National Bank, the Alliance Bank was perceived simply as a Government institution. It is indeed noticeable how the rioters on 10 April attacked people, buildings, and objects in an expression of collective violence: whether it was the interior of banks and post offices, telegraph equipment, the statue of Queen Victoria, or the bodies of Europeans – they were all beaten with sticks or broken with stones with the same frenzied intensity and frustrated rage.82 Furthermore, no distinction was made between the bodies of the bank managers as they were set on fire along with papers, broken furniture and, in the case of the National Bank, the building itself. The five Europeans who had been beaten to death were accordingly not targeted for who they were as much as for what they represented.83 The selection of targets was thus almost entirely opportunistic rather than premeditated: while some, such as Mrs Easdon and the three bankers, were specifically sought out, Miss Sherwood and the two guards were encountered quite by coincidence. Notably, the mob did not attack the British troops in Govindgarh Fort, or even the local police in the kotwali; instead they attacked those individual Europeans who were most vulnerable and exposed within the city and its immediate surroundings. Powerless against armed soldiers at the bridges, the mob exercised the complete power it wielded over the lives of Europeans inside the city.84

  The nature of the violence was moreover contingent on the availability of makeshift weapons: bricks and stones found along the road, firewood taken from the municipal storage, the legs of charpoys looted from railway-stores. At the National Bank, Stewart was attacked with sticks and clubs, but one of Ratto’s gundas used a hatchet snatched from a sugar-cane stall in the bazaar, while a Muslim butcher used his knife to finish off the victim.85 In the absence of heavy clubs and stones, Miss Sherwood was beaten with a stick but also kicked and punched, and hit with her attackers’ shoes. The kerosene used to set Mr Thomson’s body on fire had also been found in the bank itself, but ultimately proved to be the symbolically most powerful weapon on hand for
the rioters.86 ‘Of all means of destruction,’ it has been suggested, ‘the most impressive is fire. It can be seen from far off and it attracts ever more people. It destroys irrevocably; nothing after a fire is as it was before. A crowd setting fire to something feels irresistible . . .’87 In the street outside Alliance Bank, the crowd surrounding Thomson’s burning body was celebrating the defeat and destruction of the all-powerful sahibs. There was an almost carnivalesque sense of the world having been turned upside down, and one Indian eyewitness described how ‘the mob had been shouting out from the commencement that it was our raj now and to do as we liked’.88 The people of Amritsar felt safe from the British troops inside the city and, with the police holed up in the kotwali, it really appeared as if swaraj had been achieved – however momentarily. ‘It was freely said,’ Irving was later informed, ‘that it might be the Raj of the Sarkar outside, but inside it was Hindu–Musalman ki hakumat [Hindu–Muslim rule].’89 The politics of the crowd were thus encapsulated in the assertion of communal unity and empowerment first mobilised by Gandhi through the anti-Rowlatt Satyagraha movement. The shouts of ‘Gandhi ki jai’ that reverberated through the crowded streets of Amritsar, however, were first and foremost a call to arms against a common enemy. Rather than his teachings of non-violence and passive resistance, it was Gandhi’s stirring message of self-sacrifice and righteous resistance against the oppression of the British which served as a rallying cry for the rioters. What has been described as ‘the paradoxical and cruel cries in the name of Gandhi’ may thus be explained by the distance between idealism and the brute reality of popular politics and shaped by the dynamics of crowd violence.90 On 10 April, the name of the Mahatma was invoked with as much fervour and sincerity when Miss Sherwood was attacked, or the bank managers bludgeoned to death, as it was during the peaceful mass-meetings and hartals of the preceding weeks.91