Amritsar 1919 Read online

  In recent decades, much of the debate surrounding the Amritsar Massacre has focused on calls for a formal British apology. When Queen Elizabeth visited the Jallianwala Bagh in 1997, followed by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2013, an actual apology was on both occasions studiously avoided. In December 2017, however, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, urged the British Government to make such a gesture during a visit to Amritsar: ‘I am clear that the Government should now apologise, especially as we reach the centenary of the massacre. This is about properly acknowledging what happened here and giving the people of Amritsar and India the closure they need through a formal apology.’6 What exactly ‘happened here’, however, is again not so clear. The issue has remained in the public limelight, largely due to the tireless efforts of Indian politician and author Shashi Tharoor, whose best-selling book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India seeks to expose the iniquities of the Raj. Tharoor has repeatedly emphasised the significance of the Amritsar Massacre as the linchpin of a British apology, including at this public talk in late December 2017:

  Brigadier-General Reginal Dyer was sent to Punjab. He got to Amritsar and discovered there was a gathering, and he was told that large numbers, thousands of people, [were] in a walled garden, Jallianwala Bagh. He didn’t bother to find out why they were there. They were there to celebrate Baisakhi, the Punjabi spring festival. They were totally unarmed, and for the most part women and children and families, it was almost like a picnic. Yes, some of the people who were addressing them may have been saying anti-British things, but no-one was there to conduct a rebellion or raise weapons or launch violence. As soon as he shows up, Dyer, he doesn’t ask why they are there, he doesn’t order them to disperse. He doesn’t even fire a warning-shot in the air. He just orders his soldiers to take up positions at the only entrance and exit to the Bagh, one gate, and opens fire on the defenceless, screaming, helpless, men, women and children. Later he boasted that not one bullet was wasted. They fired 1650 rounds, every bullet hit someone. About 1300 people were killed, several hundred more were injured, of course many were injured in the stampede as well [. . .] After all of this, of course there is a nation-wide outcry. A commission [of] inquiry is set up that largely whitewashes Dyer, the British House of Commons censures him, the House of Lords exonerates him and passes a resolution praising his decisive action, and the British conduct a collection for Dyer, which amounts to the princely sum of a quarter of a million pound[s] sterling presented to him with a bejewelled sword, and that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, hails him as the man who saved India. So the whole thing [. . .] the cruelty of the massacre itself, the racism and indifference to Indian suffering that accompanied and followed it, and then the racist self-castification [sic] at the end, all of this put together, makes Jallianwala Bagh the single worst atrocity of the Raj and thereby fit to be the symbol of everything that was wrong at the worst of British imperialism. So if on that occasion, at least on the centenary of that occasion, a British official could come and apologize, I think it would send a fantastic message that would cleanse Britain of that original sin.7

  This account of the Amritsar Massacre, it may be noted, is completely inaccurate and so it seems that, even for those to whom it matters deeply, the historicity of the event remains elusive, if not outright irrelevant. This is more than just an academic quibble: when the facts cease to matter, the very grounds upon which historical claims are made, or restitution demanded, are critically undermined.

  This ahistorical conceptualisation of the massacre is by no means restricted to the public sphere or popular debates. For instance, in one of the recent scholarly interventions in global history, A World Connecting, Charles S. Maier simply lists the massacre among the litany of European colonial conflicts of the early twentieth century, describing how ‘General Reginald Dyer famously emptied his machine guns against assembled Indians at Amritsar in 1919.’8 The fact that Dyer used neither machine guns nor all his ammunition is yet again an indication of the extent to which the Amritsar Massacre is referenced – not because of what happened, but rather because of what the event is taken to represent in the most abstract sense. While the Amritsar Massacre may be one of the best-known items on the imperial butcher’s bill, it remains poorly understood. The invocation of the massacre, merely as short-hand for colonial brutality, brings to mind Jordanna Bailkin’s poignant observation that ‘there is nothing more banal about colonial projects than their violence’. Making sense of colonial violence, however, is a different matter and in this book I seek to understand its forms and functions ‘rather than’, to use Bailkin’s words, ‘simply taking it for granted’.9

  Credited as the event that galvanised the first major anti-colonial nationalist movement, and inexorably set Indian nationalists, including Gandhi, on the path towards independence, the Amritsar Massacre is usually understood in an exclusively teleological fashion.10 As indicated by the title of Alfred Draper’s popular account, The Massacre That Ended the Raj, the events at Jallianwala Bagh are commonly seen to mark the beginning of the historical process that came to its conclusion with Indian independence in 1947.11 Assumed to have been the direct result of the global changes brought about by the First World War, the massacre thus provides the starting point in studies of decolonisation that focus exclusively on the twentieth century and privilege change over continuity. In his renowned work on the ‘Wilsonian Moment’, for instance, Erez Manela includes a chapter titled ‘From Paris to Amritsar’, implying a more or less direct link between the 1919 Peace Conference and the events at Jallianwala Bagh – a connection that is never substantiated, and which is in fact unsustainable.12 In such accounts, the causes behind the massacre are identified exclusively in terms of short-term factors unique to the post-1918 world as a particular historical moment and shaped largely by events outside British India and therefore, ultimately, external to the dynamics of colonial rule.13

  The nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, however, was not simply a function of, nor coterminous with, imperial decline after 1918 as Britain and other European powers sought to hold on to their empires by all means possible. Rather than being the beginning of the end, I suggest that the violence of the Amritsar Massacre might better be understood as the final stage of a much longer process. It was in fact the enduring memories of the ‘Mutiny’ that shaped the British understanding of and response to Indian nationalist protests at the beginning of the twentieth century. The story of Jallianwala Bagh is accordingly also the story of a particular colonial mindset haunted by the spectre of the ‘Mutiny’. In this book I have sought to show the interplay between a colonial mentality rooted in the nineteenth century and the contingencies of the unrest in 1919 – an awareness of, and attention to, the varying temporalities at play within a single event that I have elsewhere referred to as ‘thick periodization’.14

  The approach I have taken in this book might perhaps be described as a microhistory of a global event. I have set out to write a history that does not assume that Indian independence would take place two decades later or that, a century on, it would still be remembered with bitterness as a lasting symbol of British oppression. Whereas most studies of the Amritsar Massacre focus on its aftermath – its political impact and the public debates and legal issues it raised, that is, the massacre as a historical watershed – I focus narrowly, and unapologetically, on how events unfolded at Amritsar during April 1919. In doing so I have sought to uncover the local dynamics of escalation, which reached their violent climax at Jallianwala Bagh, through the different experiences of a range of individuals, British and Indian, men and women. Drawing on a range of material from diaries, letters and court testimonies to produce an intimate account of colonial crisis, my aim has been to shed new light on a well-known story from multiple perspectives. I have furthermore sought to foreground the urban setting and sense of space within which the dramatic events took place, and the book is to some extent also a portrait of the city of
Amritsar in 1919.

  One of the methodological obstacles of writing about the Amritsar Massacre is that so much of the primary material was written after the event, and after the event had become a contentious issue. The reports and evidence produced in 1919–20 by the Disorders Inquiry Committee (Hunter Committee) and the parallel investigation conducted by the Congress Punjab Inquiry still remain the key sources. Although I have made extensive use of this well-known material, I have tried to avoid simply replicating the line of questioning, and political concerns at the time, which shaped so much of the testimony. The Hunter Committee only ever heard testimony from British officials or Indians who held offices in the colonial administration, or who were otherwise allied to the Government. Anyone looking for recognition or even acknowledgement of the Indian experience and suffering in the thousands of pages produced by the Hunter Committee will look in vain. The Congress Punjab Inquiry report and evidence, on the other hand, was based exclusively on interviews with local residents and ordinary Indians, none of whom held official positions. The result is, accordingly, two incompatible accounts of what could, to all intents and purposes, be completely different events. I have as a result relied on the testimonies and statements rather than the judgements of these the two reports – the findings of both the Hunter Committee and the Congress Punjab Inquiry were historical artefacts in their own right, rather than objective assessments upon which the historian can rely.

  I have furthermore made use of the much less-known trial records produced under martial law during the aftermath of the massacre, which obviously have to be used with great care and the usual caveats concerning issues of translation and the power dynamics inherent to the colonial archive must be kept in mind.15 I have tried to be as sensitive as possible in representing Indian voices, and not merely to replicate colonial stereotypes, yet it should be obvious that we are always confined by the evidence that has survived.

  Though factually accurate, the conventional account of the massacre, powerfully depicted in Attenborough’s film, is in fact analytically misleading and gives no clue as to the motivation behind Dyer’s actions beyond a vague impression of the colonial mindset or the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone-faced general. Colonial violence is in this view, as I have suggested, simply taken for granted and as such requires no explanation. Yet we cannot locate the causes of violence simply in the circumstances of its enactment, and merely describing the sequence of events leaves the erroneous impression that the Amritsar Massacre was simply a response to the threat posed by Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement.

  In George Orwell’s short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the colonial officer narrator at one point makes the poignant observation that ‘A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened.’16 When called upon to explain his actions at Jallianwala Bagh, General Dyer invoked a similar concern of losing face and explicitly stated that he was afraid of being outnumbered and overrun. From the distance of a century, it is virtually impossible to reconcile the violent spectacle of the Amritsar Massacre with claims of British fears and anxieties. And yet I find Dyer’s admission to be crucially important if we are to understand how violence worked, or was thought to work, at Amritsar and within a colonial context more broadly. The real challenge facing historians is, accordingly, to navigate the dichotomy between what Michael G. Vann has described as the contradiction of ‘white power and white vulnerability’.17

  In seeking to avoid what Marshall Sahlins refers to as ‘the ethnographic cardinal sin of ignoring what the people found important’, we must therefore follow Ann Stoler’s example and read the Amritsar Massacre ‘along the archival grain’.18 This entails trying to reconstruct events not simply as they happened objectively, but as they were experienced at the time – and as they were experienced differently by different people. This does not mean that we validate their worldview or justify their actions: it is, I insist, possible to both describe, analyse and make sense of historical occurrences of violence without either condoning or condemning them. ‘It is so easy to denounce,’ the eminent historian Marc Bloch noted. ‘We are never sufficiently understanding.’19 It is indeed easy to simply disavow acts of horrific violence and brand their perpetrators as evil, yet we cannot confine ourselves to explaining only that which we recognise as rational or with which we might sympathise. It is the things that we cannot easily understand that need to be understood the most – however discomforting. This applies to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh as much as it does to the brutal attacks on Europeans by Indian rioters a few days before. To explain is not to justify and I do not believe that we can afford to be squeamish if we truly want to address the enduring legacies of the Empire and of imperialism that are still with us today.

  My particular take on the events of the Amritsar Massacre will not appeal to everyone, and for those who prefer their Raj nostalgia or Indian nationalist mythology to go unchallenged there are literally dozens of books that will provide reassuring and politically edifying narratives. This book is not that.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Even though my earlier work has essentially been focused on nineteenth-century British colonial history in India, and on the phenomenon of ‘Thuggee’ and the 1857 Uprising in particular, the Amritsar Massacre has always been on my list of things ‘to do’. Working on the British Raj, anxieties of Empire and colonial violence, it is indeed difficult not to be drawn to the events of 13 April 1919 and, in hindsight, it is hard not to see a thread running through the various subjects I have chosen to study. For me, Amritsar in 1919 always constituted an end-point, the cataclysmic conclusion of a much longer historical process that cannot be understood simply with reference to Gandhi or the post-1918 crisis of Empire.

  When writing yet another book about the Amritsar Massacre, which already has a substantial literature, there are texts that you read and then ignore, firmly convinced that you can do better. But then there are others that you keep returning to for inspiration and to guide your own writing, and among these should be counted the work of V.N. Datta, K.L. Tuteja, Nigel Collett, Derek Sayer, Taylor Sherman, Alex Tickell, Mark Condos, Gajendra Singh, Gavin Rand and the late Nasser Hussain. Anyone who has read Shahid Amin’s classic account of the Chauri Chaura incident will, I hope, also recognise one of the key sources of inspiration for my approach.

  Writing a book is often assumed to be an entirely solitary endeavour but the truth is that, for me at least, it is also a collective effort – albeit one that I have imposed on others. Without the generous help and advice of friends and colleagues, this book would not have been possible, and I hope that people will find in these pages some evidence that their time was not entirely wasted. I cannot express enough gratitude to Mark Condos, Gavin Rand and Hardeep Dhillon, who helped with editing and provided crucial feedback on early drafts of the manuscript. Dan Todman has also proven himself to be a model colleague who provided much-needed emotional support when the unenviable combination of deadlines, stress and sleep deprivation seemed overwhelming – thanks!

  I have been fortunate enough to have been able to read early drafts of two amazing book manuscripts: Joseph McQuade’s ‘Anti-colonial Nationalism and the Birth of “Terrorism” in Colonial India, 1857–1947’, and Derek Elliott’s ‘Torture: A History of Colonial Power in British India’, which both provide important historiographical interventions. Even though she was in the middle of her own PhD research, Hardeep Dhillon was also incredibly generous in sharing archival findings and she further provided much-needed criticism of some of my key chapters. Her thesis ‘Indians on the Move: Mobility, Resistance and Law in the Age of Empire’ is something to look forward to.

  Many friends and colleagues have answered questions, offered feedback or patiently indulged me as I rambled on about Amritsar. I owe a debt of gratitude, in no particular order, to: Saul Dubow, Dane Kennedy, Will Jackson, Martin Thomas, Susan Pennybacker, Steven Wilkinson, Vijay Pinch, Michael Vann, Jon Wilson,
Harald Fisher-Tiné, Michael Mann, Gautam Chakravarty, William Gould, Huw Bennett, David Anderson, Richard Toye, Moritz Feichtinger, Roel Frakking, Matthew Hilton, Ricardo Roque, Taylor Sherman, Brian Drohan, Chris Pinney, Kama Mclean, Derek Elliott, Ammar Ali Jan, Yasmin Khan, Paul Lockhart, Priya Gopal, Alex von Tunzelmann, Stacey Hynd, Sarah Ashbridge, Matthew Ford, Kathy Davies, Jasdeep Singh.

  Two of the scholars who, each in their own way, influenced this project, are sadly no longer with us: C.A. Bayly (1945–2015) and Jan-Georg Deutsch (1956–2016) are much missed.

  I consider myself blessed to have come to know Amandeep Singh Madra, Parmjit Singh and Davinder Thoor during the process of writing this book, and I am very grateful for their help and generosity. Anita Anand and I have been working on our respective books in parallel, and it has been a real pleasure to share the writing process with her – her book, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj, tells the story of Udham Singh and thus complements my own focus on the Amritsar Massacre. Gajendra Singh and Maryam Sikander were incredibly helpful in translating Hindi and Urdu material, and Shilpa Sharma and Callum Saunderson both provided crucial assistance with research and collecting archival material in the UK and in India. Even though we are, technically speaking, rivals, Nigel Collett has also been very helpful and has unhesitatingly shared notes and research material from his own book The Butcher of Amritsar. Thanks also to Caroline Garvey and Roderick Wathen for sharing their family stories and letting me use the unique material in their possession.