Amritsar 1919 Read online

  While the mob violence may have been frenzied, it was not indiscrimi--nate, and even as Eurasians, Indian bank clerks and other local government employees were threatened, none were actually harmed. As the flames from the grim bonfire outside Alliance Bank rose higher, people in the crowd furthermore called for caution, as one eyewitness recounted: ‘As the fire in the street was close to the thara [platform outside house] and there was a fear of the Bank building, which is owned by one of the city men, catching fire, some persons shouted for the fire to be extinguished lest the whole building and market bazaar may catch fire. Aziz, Chara, then threw water on the burning heap and extinguished it.’92 People were at this point still busy looking for loot inside the bank and one man recovered a set of keys from the charred remains of Thomson to try and open a safe deposit.93 It was only then, hours after the riots had begun, and too late to do any good, that the police finally responded to the calls for help sent from the banks. Around 4.30–5pm, twelve constables thus arrived at the Alliance Bank and chased away what remained of the crowd. Hans Raj had by then long since left the scene and had joined some of the other volunteers, including Ratto and Bugga, who had congregated at Dr Bashir’s house. The doctor, Hans Raj noted, ‘had just finished operating on two wounded men’, and they then all proceeded to the mosque where the bodies of the dead were still laid out. Hans Raj described the scene at the mosque:

  We all then went to the Khair Din’s Masjid where a big mob had collected. Seeing the Doctor, the mob collected around him and asked whether badla [revenge] would not be taken for these dead. Doctor Bashi replied ‘ghabrao nahin waqt a jaega kuch ho gaya hai or kuch ho jaega’ [‘Don’t panic, the time will come, one way or the other’]. He told the mob that this was the first instance in Hindostan that Indians had been killed and Europeans had been killed also.94

  Bashir also called for the burial of the dead to be postponed till the next day so that all the shahids could be buried together. Among others, Hans Raj was tasked with gathering the bodies at the mosque the following morning. Since shops were still closed due to the hartal, Bashir gathered people from the bazaars that evening and told Bugga and others to arrange a langar, or communal kitchen, for the poor.95 As the police had effectively stopped functioning, and there were fears that the peasants who had arrived in the city for the Baisakhi and cattle fair might cause trouble, Bugga and Ratto also organised Satyagraha volunteers, and local gundas, to patrol the city during the night. These local leaders and their strongmen had been involved in much of the riots during the day, and even some of the violence, yet ultimately they served a crucial social role within their local communities.

  At Khalsa College, Melicent was still waiting anxiously for her husband. ‘It seemed hours till he came back,’ she recalled, but finally, late in the afternoon, Gerard returned, ‘looking ghastly’, with news of what had occurred that day: ‘Stewart, Scott, Thomson and two others had been hideously murdered. All Banks wrecked, the station wrecked, the telegraph office, a church and various other buildings and that but for an unexpected company of Gurkhas who had just passed through we must have been wiped out. All communication was cut and the lines below and above the station pulled up!’96 As the Wathens were trying to come to terms with the magnitude of the day’s events, they were interrupted when ‘a roar of voices proceeding from the College broke on our ears’.97 As they turned the corner outside their bungalow, they were suddenly faced by a large crowd of Indian staff and students. Unsure of their intentions, Melicent feared the worst: ‘here’s the end I thought!’98 Yet Melicent’s worries turned out to be misplaced as they ‘came to beg Gerard to let them guard us and the college through the night and not to send us to the Fort!’ ‘It was,’ she asserted, ‘a triumphant moment. After that my spirits rose a little.’99 Melicent had nevertheless resolved to leave with the children, and their luggage was sent ahead to the small station of Chheharta in readiness for their departure by train to Rawalpindi the next day.

  Meanwhile, in the Civil Lines, Mrs Beckett and the women and children were waiting to be escorted to Govindghar Fort, which was considered the safest place for them at the time. ‘The afternoon passed slowly,’ Mrs Beckett remembered, ‘with rumours and alarms which increased the suspense of the many women who did not know where their husbands were.’100 They could see smoke rising from the city and heard various stories about the attacks on the banks and the horrid fate of the Europeans who had been killed. Finally, half an hour before sunset, the preparations for their move to the fort were complete. Gurkhas and men from the Indian Defence Force lined the route across the Rego Bridge, west of the railway station, and into the fort. ‘Every possible conveyance had been secured,’ Mrs Beckett noted, ‘and we packed ourselves in, making a picture like Epsom road on the Derby Day.’101

  As the women and children were making their slow way towards the fort, they were being covered by the troops on the ramparts of the fort, who had prepared both guns and a maxim machine gun in case of an attack.102 As had been the case earlier in the day, the British officers still believed themselves to be in the middle of an uprising and were expecting the worst. When an Indian officer who had been attending the cattle fair offered his services at the fort, the commanding officer welcomed him, explaining that ‘because the number of men in the fort was inadequate, and reports were coming in that the city mob, which was armed with lathies, might perhaps assault the fort by putting up ladders [. . .] it was necessary to defend the fort walls’.103 While the people of Amritsar were thus mourning the dead and planning the next day’s funerals, or feeding the poor and organising neighbourhood watches, the British troops in the Govindgarh Fort were anxiously preparing for an all-out attack. As the 135 women and children eventually arrived, settling in as best they could under the circumstances, there was, as Forster might have put it, ‘the air of the Residency at Lucknow’.104 Lieutenant McCallum, of the Gurkhas, happened to be at the fort at the time:

  I was greatly shocked to see by chance a barrack room of women and children who had been brought into the fort from the Civil Lines for safety. There was a terrible quietness in that barrack room. The ladies seemed so bemused and sad. Imagine leaving your own comfortable bungalow or quarters to be put in a room with a long line of beds, cots, camp beds or floor, and no privacy.105

  As darkness fell, more details of the riots in the city began to emerge, and a number of survivors, including the heavily wounded Miss Sherwood and Mrs Easdon, found their way to the fort, escorted by friendly locals. Their accounts were anything but reassuring and only contributed further to the sense of vulnerability among the Europeans gathered in the fort, as Mrs Beckett related:

  Two Indian ladies, school-teachers, who had driven out of the city in a closed carriage, told us of the Sikh peasants who were pouring into the city with their iron-bound sticks. The booty from the National Bank had been carried out into the district as proof that the British rule was over, and all the riff-raff for miles round hurried in to be early on the spot if looting began again.106

  Such rumours were implicitly believed by the British officials, already shaken by the day’s events. ‘If the villagers of the Majha [region] had turned loose,’ Irving noted with great concern, ‘we should have had a situation not paralleled since the Mutiny. We know them to be hot-headed men, who, if they thought that the government was falling, would step in for anything they could get.’107 The fear was accordingly that the recalcitrant rustics of the countryside, as the stereotype went, might be joining forces with the nationalist agitators of the city. What had so far appeared mainly to be urban unrest thus assumed a far more menacing appearance, and the fact that phone and telegraph lines had been disrupted in and around Amritsar only contributed to the impression of a large-scale uprising.

  Luckily for the embattled garrison, reinforcements now began arriving from Lahore as well as the divisional headquarters at Jullundur, 50 miles away. These included 130 men of the 2/6th Royal Sussex Regiment, 181 men of the 1/124th Baluchis, 1
07 men of 1/25th Battalion London Regiment, 130 of the 2/151st Infantry, and 100 of the 59th Rifles.108 As a senior officer, Major MacDonald of the 1/124th Baluchis took over from Captain Massey and assumed charge of the military forces at Amritsar, which, combined with the original garrison, now consisted of well over a thousand British and Indian troops.109 With the arrival of Commissioner Kitchin earlier that afternoon, Irving too had been relegated to a decidedly marginal position. Irving’s panicky letter of 8 April had already marked him as overwrought, and, the impression at Lahore was evidently that he had lost control of the situation – and, as the Commissioner of the Division, Kitchin simply took over.110 The local men in charge of both the civil authorities and the military at Amritsar were thus immediately sidelined in favour of Kitchin and Massey, who reported directly to O’Dwyer in Lahore. Kitchin later claimed that he never intended to deprive Irving of his authority but that ‘it grew into that’.111

  Not only was it Kitchin’s impression that Irving was ill-suited for the task at hand, he also believed that the severity of the situation called for the military to act independently of civil authority. The Commissioner’s instructions to MacDonald were unequivocal: ‘I told him that the situation was beyond our control and that he must take such immediate steps as the military situation demanded.’ While Massey had been reluctant to enter the city in a show of force, Kitchin advised MacDonald to do just that and, notably, not to bring along a civil magistrate. This was, Kitchin explained, ‘because we expected that the party would have to fight their way, and the presence of a civil magistrate would embarrass the military officer. It was purely a military operation.’112 The idea was evidently to relieve the military from being dependent on civil officials, yet without formally abdicating civil authority. There was no name for this type of parallel authority, as Kitchin himself admitted: ‘There is no rule about it. In a situation of that kind I thought under the ordinary rules of the Executive Government, I had such authority.’113 In the true spirit of the Punjab style of colonial governance, with its emphasis on discretionary powers, Kitchin nevertheless still insisted that MacDonald should ‘act in consultation with me’.114

  Around midnight, a heavily armed column of troops under MacDonald thus prepared to enter the city. ‘It was determined to go in,’ Kitchin stated, ‘and fight our way into the Kotwali.’115 Apart from scattered rumours, there had been no communication from the city for hours, and the Commissioner later admitted that he expected to find everyone at the kotwali to have been massacred.116 In the event, the column found the streets of Amritsar to be deserted, though the fires at the National Bank and Town Hall were still burning.117 The force reached the kotwali from where they evacuated Jarman and the two managers from the Chartered Bank.118 The rescue party also retrieved the charred remains of the three bank managers. ‘The bodies were horribly burnt,’ Jarman noted of Stewart and Scott, whom he had talked to earlier that day. ‘I have seen them and neither is recognisable.’119 The mangled body of Robinson was also brought into the fort that night.120 The disfigured corpses, and the fate of Miss Sherwood, ‘who was lying between life and death’, provided striking evidence of the fate that awaited them all – and of the apparent frenzy of the rioters, as Mrs Beckett described: ‘During the night three survivors who had escaped into the police station were brought out of the city in Indian clothes. They told us of the infuriated crowds that had swept through the city on that terrible afternoon drunk with their victory over unarmed men, and calling for “white blood”.’121 For now, however, an uneasy calm seemed to prevail. Reinforcements were still coming in and both an armoured train and Royal Air Force aeroplanes were on their way from Lahore.122 While the British officers and officials hunkered down at the makeshift headquarters at the railway station, the women and children could sleep safely behind the walls of the fort. ‘Some of us went up on the ramparts for a few minutes’ quiet,’ Norah Beckett recalled, ‘and from the top of the western wall we saw the native city ablaze with electric light – a contrast to the darkness behind us.’123

  Earlier that evening, Melicent and Gerard had visited the fort to see if they could be of any help:

  It was a tragic sight – never did I see horror so grimly written on any face except those who had come from the trenches. There were women and children all herded together, several not knowing if their husbands were dead or alive. Some knew within the hour that they were dead. Others were not relieved of their suspension till after midnight. I uttered a heartfelt prayer of thankfulness as I drove home to my own house to sleep. There were over 400 people in the Fort with no provisions but bully beef and biscuits and only four bathrooms and three rooms. The dust and glare and heat were ghastly – and several people and children went in ill. So much for the forethought of our D.C. Miles Irving and yet he must have known. [emphasis in the original]124

  Though horrified by the events of the day, Melicent appeared to be more distraught by the prospect of having to endure the discomfort with everybody else at the fort. While the other Anglo-Indian families were huddling up in the fort, the Wathens thus decided to rely on their Indian friends and remain in the relative safety at Khalsa College. Their lack of faith in the ability of the local authorities to protect them had furthermore only been confirmed by what they saw of the preparations in the Civil Lines. Melicent later wrote in her diary of the day’s events – as the British understood them at the time:

  After the mob had gone mad, they attacked National Bank, beat Mr. Stewart with lathis and then pouring oil on him when he was half unconscious burnt him. They did the same to Mr. Scott – first piling the furniture on the top of him. Nothing was left of the Bank . . . it was gutted. They then went to the Alliance Bank – Mr. Thomson defended himself and then ran upstairs and hid, but they found him, dropped him out, threw him out of the window, poured oil on him while he was alive and burnt him. [The rioters] hunted and beat a Missionary, Miss Sherwood, saying she was English and must die, though she was eventually picked up unconscious and carried by an Indian into his house and safety. [They] hunted Mr. Jarman who was rescued by Indians, and another Thompson and another missionary lady, all of whom owed their lives to their clerks, and then pulled up the lines and wrecked the station – killing a goods inspector with lathis, trampling to death a Tommy whom they caught escaping to the Fort. It was just as they were marching to the Civil Lines that the Gurkhas turned up, were detrained – fired on the mob and drove it back into the City and held it. At 7pm an aeroplane at last arrived from Lahore. At midnight the Londons came from Jullundur. At 2am those British troops and an armoured train arrived from Lahore. Only then may we have been said to be in some safety.125

  When the aeroplanes from Lahore finally arrived, and flew low over the city, Melicent noted the effect it had on her countrymen: ‘Such was the relief, you could see the change on the men’s faces.’126 That night the family slept in the garden as usual, and Melicent even forgave the students who asked for new hockey balls so that they could see them and play by moonlight, although they ruined her flower beds.

  CHAPTER 6

  ALL FORCE NECESSARY

  11 APRIL

  When the train steamed into the station here, the whole place looked like a regular Military post, with soldiers and guns scattered all over. The military consisted of Europeans, Baluchees and Gurkhas. On the main down platform, I saw a long armoured train. Some persons on the station, whom I knew, wanted to tell me all about what had happened, but could not talk freely, through fear. No coolie or conveyance of any kind was to be had. Just as I came out of the platform, Sardar Bikram Singh met me, and advised me either to go back where I came from, or not to enter the city in any case. Being extremely nervous, as it appeared to me, he did not talk to me long. By the kindness of a Railway servant, after waiting for 20 minutes, with great difficulty, I got a coolie to carry my luggage as far as the Golden Temple. At the foot bridge there was a guard of some European soldiers, who would not let anyone enter the city without searching all thi
ngs thoroughly. Sticks of all kinds were taken away from everyone [. . .] At every step outside the city, one could see nothing but only Military or police at short distances with rifles and bayonets.1

  On the morning of 11 April, Girdhari Lal, a local factory manager who had been away on business, returned to Amritsar to find the city in a state of emergency. Once inside the old city of Amritsar, Girdhari Lal for the first time realised the destruction of the riots: ‘While proceeding to the Golden temple I saw marks of violence. Telegraph wires were cut, some buildings were burnt. Although shops were closed, the city was quiet, but every person looked depressed and terrified.’2

  As the sun rose over Amritsar that morning, the British awoke to the realisation that their worst nightmares had come true. For the first time since 1857, European civilians had been killed by Indian rioters, and white women had been attacked by brown men. One Punjab official described vividly how the British perceived the events of the previous day:

  Those of us who have seen an Indian mob in action can picture the scene. All night there has been drum-beating, and glib-tongued orators have been haranguing the populace, harping on the sins of the Government, the ini--quitous Rowlatt Act and the insult offered to Mahatma Gandhi by turning him back from the Punjab. The time is drawing near, they shout, for dealing properly with the ‘white monkeys’, and the looting will be great! Morning comes, and through all the streets and alleyways the rabble swarm in their thousands, yelling their war-cries, ready to join in wholesale plundering and murder. There are more fiery speeches; and then the speakers, mindful of their own skins, fade cleverly out of the picture. The rabble has been sufficiently worked up.3