Amritsar 1919 Read online

  There was a mob at the Sultanwind Gate. We had a little difficulty in dispersing them. They would not go away. So I considered the advisability of opening fire on them. I thought it would not be quite right and that perhaps I had better issue a proclamation personally before I took that drastic measure.15

  Dyer thus returned to the headquarter to write up a proclamation and to prepare his next move.

  The situation for the British at Amritsar was characterised by a profound sense of vulnerability and, above all, uncertainty. ‘The news was often vague,’ Norah Beckett noted from inside the fort, ‘but with the breakdown in communications and our own experiences we were left to imagine the worst, and the native population had some excuse for their belief that the British Raj was over.’16 Throughout the remainder of the day, 12 April, Dyer received snippets of news from the surrounding countryside, in some cases transmitted by aeroplane from Lahore, when the telegraph was interrupted. ‘I did not note down all the messages that were constantly coming in,’ Dyer later noted, ‘but I know I was constantly hearing rumours and messages all throughout the 12th and the morning of the 13th that the situation was growing more serious every moment.’17 At the station of Kasur, some 40 miles to the south, for instance, rioters were reported to have attacked and looted the train station and killed two British officers on a passing train.18 Dyer furthermore had to send detachments of troops to several smaller outposts to prevent unrest, including evacuating the women of the Ashrafpur Mission Hospital 60 miles away.19

  At Amritsar itself, making sense of the situation inside the city also proved increasingly difficult, as Irving described:

  The temper of the people was actually defiant; they were organizing themselves in a hostile manner; they were openly making it known that they regarded themselves as being in control of the city and independent of the British Crown, and it was believed that the leaders desired, according to the best information we could get, to fight it out and see who is the master. All these things came to one inevitably by hearsay. We were unable to enter the city alone without the Military protection, and the opinions were arrived at from the general aspect of affairs in the city.20

  During this profound moment of crisis, the British were thus entirely dependent on CID undercover agents and other local informants, whose reports invariably confirmed their worst fears.21 ‘The ordinary administration had broken down,’ Irving admitted, ‘and there was no means of knowing anything definitely.’22 Unconfirmed rumours, for instance, suggested that Indian soldiers deployed at Amritsar were being offered sweetmeats by the locals, which was seen as tangible proof that attempts were being made to tamper with their loyalty.23 Despite the fact that there was no real substance to these reports, British officials all over Punjab were deeply alarmed by the prospect of a mutiny among their Indian troops.24 Ashraf Khan also continued to provide Dyer with worrying news concerning the ‘turbulent’ villagers of the surrounding area, as the General described: ‘Hearing that Manjha Jats had collected outside the city to plunder the city that night, I gave orders to the City Inspector of Police to patrol and give me timely information of any such movements as I feared the intentions of these Manjhas who would certainly make common cause with the city mob on being told that the British “Raj” was at an end.’25

  While there was widespread unrest in the countryside, there was in fact no army of villagers ready to invade Amritsar, and the key source for the rumour later turned out to have been someone who overheard a conversation between a few villagers.26 For Dyer, however, all of this added up to a veritable nightmare scenario, which, to a British officer raised in India, and at one point stationed at Meerut, pointed in one direction only. ‘I thought they were going to isolate me and my forces,’ Dyer claimed, ‘Everything pointed to the fact that there was a widespread movement, and that it was not confined to Amritsar alone.’27 What is noteworthy about Dyer’s assessment of the situation is that at no point did he recognise, or even consider, the political nature of the unrest at Amritsar. While O’Dwyer and many others suspected Afghan or Bolshevik intrigues, or, like Melicent, were reminded of the Russian Revolution, Dyer never drew any such comparisons. He thus dismissed entirely the possibility that Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement may have been related to the ‘rebellion’ that he believed was unfolding: ‘I should say that the acts that were now committed, that is, the uprooting of railway lines, cutting of telegraph wires, murdering of citizens, etc., was more than hartals, and the two had nothing to do with each other.’28

  The disturbances of 10 April 1919, when official buildings were burnt and British civilians were attacked and killed by Indian crowds, closely replicated the pattern of anti-colonial violence that constituted such a crucial element in the colonial memories of 1857. The rioters at Amritsar had thus inadvertently triggered a response that was overdetermined by the past. ‘I had to put all that together in my mind,’ Dyer noted, ‘and say this is a rebellion.’29 In reaching this conclusion, Dyer was given much encouragement by the indomitable Kitchin, whose penchant for hyperbole was given free rein in his description of the news from Lahore: ‘We heard that the troops had mutinied, and that the Lieutenant-Governor had been murdered. For all we knew, we were the only white men left in India.’30 Furthermore, Dyer and the other officers and officials were not the only ones affected by the uncertainty and relentless stream of frightening rumours. Holed up in the fort with the other women and children, Norah Beckett described the situation: ‘Everything was done to stop false reports: under the conditions I have described, morale was of paramount importance. But the real truth was so often worse than anything rumour could invent that one realised the uses of censorship. It is not surprising that there was a certain amount of hysteria, but our people as a whole showed both courage and good sense.’31 One of the other women installed at the fort, Mrs Ashford, the wife of John Ashford, the Commanding Officer of the Indian Defence Force, was nevertheless scathing in her critique of the local authorities’ handling of the riots: ‘The 10th was on Thursday and at that date our O.C. Station was a Captain Massey an awful fool and our O.C. Fort was an irresponsible child!!!’32 Like Melicent, many of the European civilians at Amritsar had severe misgivings about the way that the local authorities had failed to protect them on 10 April, and Irving, in particular, became the target of their anger. General Dyer’s appearance at Amritsar thus seemed to be answer to their prayers, as Mrs Ashford wrote in a letter to her brother:

  We hardly knew what was being done and John and I felt that things were not being done quickly or strongly enough so we suggested a meeting of the women to send a resolution to the Lieutenant Governor that we need a strong man here. I talked to our Deputy Commissioner’s wife and told her we were not satisfied. You see up to then the Deputy Commissioner was at the head of affairs. However, she assured me something was going to be done. Up till then we had done nothing!!! Not a shot fired, no prisoners taken. We are so angry. The next day, Saturday, the General [Dyer] came and among others asked to see me. I insisted something should be done to the City where at night the natives had their electric light and fans in their own homes while we were herded here like pigs. I believe that night both lights and water were cut off.33

  Both the water and electricity supplies to the city were indeed cut off, and, while British officials later claimed that this had been for purely practical reasons, including the rumour of poison in the water, it was in fact a very deliberate collective punishment.34 Amritsar was, as Irving described it, ‘a city in a state of rebellion, in a state of what was judicially found to be a state of warfare’.35 ‘The military thought this inconvenience would bring the city to a more sane frame of mind,’ he continued, and ‘it would be a means of bringing pressure to bear on these people with whom we were at war.’36

  Mrs Ashford’s insistence that ‘something should be done’ was in full line with Kitchin’s earlier reports to O’Dwyer and Beynon, and there was accordingly a clear expectation, and great pressure, for Dyer to take strong ac
tion. Even though Dyer was not formally ordered to go to Amritsar, he was the third officer to take over command within a period of just twenty-four hours. The cumulative effect of ‘weak’ officers being replaced by ‘men of action’ effectively precluded the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the unrest and virtually guaranteed a violent confrontation. Even though the response of the local authorities on 10 April could hardly be described as restrained, there was furthermore a general consensus that the failure to crush the protests then and there had emboldened the ‘rebels’ of Amritsar. As the situation appeared to be spiralling out of control, and railways and communication lines across the province were disrupted, a dynamic of escalation thus drove the official threat assessment. ‘The military situation was so serious that an example was necessary,’ Kitchin asserted. ‘Strong steps were necessary.’37 The perceived need for decisive action was shared at all levels of the British administration. On the evening of 12 April, O’Dwyer at Lahore had a phone conversation with H.D. Craik, Deputy Secretary in the Home Department, who was standing in for the Viceroy: ‘I was told from Simla,’ O’Dwyer later recalled, ‘that the view there was that if troops “had to fire they should make an example.”’38

  The notion of a striking example was deeply ingrained in the mindset of colonial officers and harked back to the spectacle of mass executions in 1857, and even earlier. The assumption that the only language understood by ‘un-civilized’ people was a prompt and forceful response was, for instance, invoked by Cowan when he executed captured Kukas in 1872, and later assumed the force of doctrine in C.E. Callwell’s classic military manual, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice from 1896.39 In savage warfare, the basic strategic aims of military operations differed from conflicts between ‘civilized’ nations, as did the means by which victory could be achieved. When fighting ‘un-civilized’ people, who did not possess formal government institutions, regular troops were, according to Callwell, ‘forced to resort to cattle lifting and village burning and [. . .] the war assumes an aspect which may shock the humanitarian’.40 One of the key tenets of colonial small wars, as defined by Callwell, was in fact the great principle of ‘overawing the enemy by bold initiative and resolute action’.41 ‘Un-civilized’ people were not, as a rule, considered as rational political actors and, accordingly, could not be negotiated with; the only language ‘savages’ understood was violence:

  The lower races are impressionable. They are greatly influenced by a resolute bearing and by a determined course of action. ‘A la guerre,’ wrote Napoleon, ‘le moral et l’opinion sont la moitié de la réalité’ – a maxim which is especially applicable to small wars. ‘Do not forget that in Asia he is the master who seizes the people pitilessly by the throat and imposes upon their imagination’ was Skobelef’s view.42

  In the suppression of a rebellion, Callwell argued, ‘refractory subjects of the ruling power must all be chastised and subdued’, as ‘part and parcel of the system of overawing and terrifying the enemy, which is the great object always to be kept in view’.43 The absence of the restraints of conventional rules of war was explicitly invoked by Callwell as an element of colonial conflict since ‘operations are sometimes limited to committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction’.44 Dyer had himself actually served as a young lieutenant in Burma in 1886, during the tumultuous aftermath of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, when British forces got bogged down in bitter and drawn-out guerrilla warfare. During the early stages of the conflict, colonial forces routinely burnt villages and carried out summary executions, as well as public floggings, as warnings to the local population.45 Over the next two decades, Dyer participated in several of the countless campaigns fought on the North-West Frontier, where colonial forces again deployed many of the same tactics, including collective punishment and the burning of villages.46 This too had been Dyer’s strategy as he ‘pacified’ local tribes during his most recent deployment in Persia and Baluchistan in the summer of 1916.47 Dyer, in other words, was steeped in the tradition of colonial warfare and thoroughly familiar with the logic of exemplary force.48

  That evening, a meeting was held at the Hindu Sabha School by the depleted number of Satyagraha volunteers. The police were at this stage too scared to actively carry out surveillance and the meeting was instead attended by a local reporter who took notes:

  Hans Raj, ex-Ticket Collector, Amritsar, made a speech in which he said that as they had no leader to guide them, therefore every one of them was a leader. He also read a telegram from Dr Kitchlew saying that he was alright. The speaker remarked that he could not positively say whether it was the mischief of the Government or Dr Kitchlew had sent the telegram. He announced as well that a meeting will be convened tomorrow in Bagh Jallianwala, where letters from Drs Kitchlew and Satya Pal will be read. He exhorted the audience and said that they were prepared to make more sacrifice and would resist the Government. He also proposed that volunteers should be raised whose duty would be to inform the public in general of the arrests made in the city, and said that those proposals would be discussed in tomorrow’s meeting. The suspension of business should be carried on, unless Dr Satya Pal and Kitchlew were finally released and the audience agreed to it.49

  At the very same time that General Dyer was dictating a proclamation to Briggs, according to which all gatherings would be dispersed by military force, Hans Raj and what remained of the Satyagraha movement were thus preparing for the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh the following day, 13 April 1919.50

  CHAPTER 8

  BAISAKHI

  13 APRIL

  For a couple of days now, airplanes had been soaring overhead in the still air, like black eagles with wings outstretched, on the lookout for prey. Every now and again, flaming red winds bore the tidings of a bloody event. The patrol of the armed policemen in the deserted streets rendered the atmosphere strangely sinister. The bazaar which just days ago was abuzz with crowds was now forsaken due to some unknown fear. A mysterious quiet had descended upon the city. A terrible dread was everywhere to be felt.

  Manto, ‘Tamasha’ [Spectacle]1

  As Dyer awoke early on 13 April, after a few token hours of sleep, he was greeted by the unwelcome news that communication with Lahore had yet again been cut off and that messages could only get through by aeroplane. Troops also had to be despatched to Tarn Taran with an armoured train while 130 British soldiers of the Royal Sussex Regiment had been recalled to Lahore since the authorities there expected further trouble to be imminent.2 Dyer was furthermore surrounded by panic-prone people, such as Irving, who insisted that the situation at Amritsar:

  continued very critical. We were able to hold the outskirts of the city. We made no impression in the city. The city was still impenitently hostile and that was not the worst because the great danger was from the outside. If the villagers of the Majha had turned loose, 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 failing, would step in for anything they could get.3

  It was now clear to Dyer that the prohibition against public gatherings issued earlier by Irving had failed to have the desired effect, and the incident at Sultanwind Gate the day before only confirmed the impression that the local population no longer respected the authority of the Government. ‘Amritsar,’ Dyer noted, ‘from a military point of view, would soon be completely isolated if matters were allowed to continue as they were doing.’4 The General accordingly decided to impose a curfew and march through the city in a show of force to ensure the inhabitants understood that his patience was exhausted.

  At 9am, the procession got under way, marching through the city at a slow pace to the beat of the town crier’s drum. At the head of the column, the two police officers, Ashraf Khan and Obadullah, rode on horses, followed by the city’s Naib Tahsildar, or deputy revenue official, Malik Fateh Khan, in a bamboo-cart, along with the town crier.5 Then came a large detachment of troops followed by Dyer, Irving, Rehill and Pl
omer in open cars, with two armoured cars making up the rear.6 The route, which had been drawn up by Plomer and Ashraf Khan, started from the Town Hall and then wound its way up along Hall Bazaar to Hall Gate before skirting along the western city wall, stopping at the Hathi, Lohgarh and Lahore Gates, and finally ending with half a dozen stops inside the south-western part of the city.7 At each stop, the Naib Tahsildar would first read out the two proclamations in the Urdu translations provided by Irving, and then subsequently explain them in Punjabi, which most of the population in Amritsar understood.8 The first proclamation, which had been written up by Briggs the previous evening, was concise:

  The inhabitants of Amritsar are hereby warned that if they will cause damage to any property or will commit any acts of violence in the environs of Amritsar, it will be taken for granted that such acts are due to the incitement in Amritsar City, and offenders will be punished according to Military Law.

  All meetings and gatherings are hereby prohibited and will be dispersed at once under Military Law.9

  The Naib Tahsildar also had printed copies of this order in Urdu, which he distributed by hand to people who had gathered around the town crier.10 The second proclamation had only just been written up that morning, and so no printed copies had been made.11 It was also more formal and officious in tone and style than the first proclamation: