Amritsar 1919 Read online

  During the afternoon of 13 April, as many as 15,000–20,000 people were present in the Bagh and, while some had come specifically for the advertised meeting, there were many who simply happened to be there.59 Jallianwala Bagh functioned as both a public park, where children would play and visiting villagers might spend the night, and as a wasteland where buffaloes grazed and people dumped their rubbish.60 During religious festivals and fairs, the Bagh was particularly busy and pilgrims who had visited the Golden Temple, just a few hundred yards away, went there to rest and seek whatever shade could be found. ‘People were continuously pouring in from all the openings into the garden,’ a man living next to the Bagh noted. ‘I saw a number of children sitting on the shoulders of the men assembled.’61 Also, the cattle fair outside the city walls was closed down at 2pm by the authorities as a precautionary measure and in compliance with the prohibition of gatherings. At that point, it was estimated that there were five or six thousand people at the fair, but they were now dispersed by the police and many of them made their way into the city and to Jallianwala Bagh.62 A local resident, the 60-year-old Mulchand, had heard of Kanhyalal’s lecture at the Bagh that afternoon: ‘As the Bazar was closed and I had nothing to do, I went to the garden at 3pm with my son, son-in-law and a few other boys, some of whom were children of 7 or 8 years only.’63

  Just under a third of the people present were Sikhs, almost half of whom came from villages outside the city. Just over half the people who had gathered were Hindus, most of whom came from the city, while about a sixth of the crowd were Muslims, almost all of whom came from the city.64 All in all, it would appear that about a third of the crowd came from outside Amritsar, while the rest were local residents. People had come from all over the city, and from all walks of life: students, labourers, carpenters, watchmakers, barbers, milkmen, tailors, servants, goldsmiths, clerks, masons and grain dealers. There were also a number of hawkers and pedlars, as well as sweetmeat sellers, who were at the Bagh for the business.65 There may have been a few women present, but, as was the case for the previous meetings at the Bagh, they rarely attended such public gatherings, and the crowd was almost entirely made up of males, including infants, boys and grandfathers. The 29-year-old bank accountant Lala Karam Chand went to the Bagh to see Kanhyalal along with a friend:

  In the bagh, there was a very large crowd, so big that people could not hear. There were many of those who could not hear, who were sitting on the grass and the children were playing around [. . .] It was the Baisakhi Festival and the shops were closed and there was nothing to do, and when the lecture was announced, the people came there. Some people were sitting down playing cards. Some were coming, others were going. Many people had come from the country . . .66

  There were very few people in Amritsar who were aware of Dyer’s prohibition, and many had gone, in the words of one local, simply to see a ‘tamasha’, or spectacle, in the Jallianwala Bagh.67

  At the Ram Bagh, Dyer gave the orders for the troops to prepare to move out. The General himself would take command and lead the column into the city: ‘If there’s anything to be done,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it alone.’68 While it was hardly usual for a commanding officer to personally take charge of such an operation, there was nothing sinister about Dyer’s decision. This was not a routine patrol and the General would have been aware that much of the confusion during 10 April, when the first picket was pushed back across the bridge, had been confounded by the absence of a senior officer to take command. According to Captain Briggs, ‘Dyer had no intention of saddling a subordinate with what he knew might be a difficult and hateful assignment.’69 And unless he did ‘something strong’, Dyer reasoned, the crowd ‘might go off full of derision and contempt of my force to burn or loot elsewhere, or surround and overwhelm my troops as they moved out of the city’.70

  That morning, before he set out with the column to make the proclamations, Dyer’s last words to Morgan, who stayed behind at Ram Bagh, proved to be quite revealing: ‘If we are not back by 2pm you must come into the city with the rest of the troops and look for us.’71 Dyer considered Amritsar to be enemy territory and, as he entered the city for the second time that day, he did not know what he would come up against. It was evident, however, that he approached the task before him as a strictly military operation. Though Dyer had more than a thousand British and Indian troops under his command, many of these were deployed in the fort or on pickets around the train station and throughout the Civil Lines, leaving him with just 340 men at his disposal. Dyer had just the day before entered Amritsar with more than 400 troops and thus had a clear sense of how easy it would be to lose control over a large force stretched out along the narrow and winding streets – especially if they were ambushed, or if people started throwing stones from the rooftops. ‘From a military point of view,’ Dyer noted at the prospect of street-fighting, ‘I must not allow myself to be surrounded.’72 The General accordingly split up his force: leaving a reserve of fifty men at the Ram Bagh, he posted five pickets of forty men each at the main gates all around the old city, including Hall Gate, Lahore Gate and Sultanwind Gate.73 The remaining ninety men were to make up the column that he would take to Jallianwala Bagh. If Dyer’s strike force got ambushed, there would accordingly be strong detachments on hand and able to extract his force.

  What Dyer described as his ‘special party’ consisted of fifty fully armed infantry: twenty-five men of the 9th Gurkhas, and twenty-five men of the Frontier Force, namely the 54th Sikhs and 59th Scinde Rifles, most of whom were Muslims and were referred to collectively simply as Baluchis or Pathans.74 It is very likely that there were at least some Sikhs among the sepoys of the 54th.75 While the Gurkhas were mostly raw recruits, the 54th had previously been deployed during the riots on 10 April. Dyer also brought the two armoured cars that had been sent from Lahore with him. One was a Napier, which was little more than an armoured lorry with a Vickers machine gun mounted on the back. The other was a big and heavy Jeffery-Russell armoured car, fully enclosed in plating and with a Vickers in a revolving turret. They each had a four-man crew and were, somewhat incongruously, painted in a green and tan camouflage pattern.76 Inside the city, with its crooked narrow streets and buildings blocking the line of fire, the use of armoured cars and machine guns would be somewhat limited. The mere presence of such vehicles, however, would serve as an effective deterrent, and, in the case of an ambush, the deadly rapid fire of the machine guns would be able to stop even the most dedicated assault by a mob.

  With several hundred fully armed British soldiers on hand, Dyer’s decision to complete the strike force with forty Gurkhas armed only with kukris makes little sense, unless the General believed there was a high chance of hand-to-hand fighting with the mob in the narrow streets of the old city. In a close-quarters struggle with hundreds of ‘rebels’ armed with stones and lathis, the heavy kukri knives might indeed prove more effective than rifles. There was also a real concern that the locals might try to obtain firearms, and McCallum was explicitly reminded not to lose any rifles and to make sure his men had secured them to their equipment.77

  Equipped with a combination of machine guns, rifles and knives, Dyer’s strike force was prepared for every conceivable scenario, both offensive and defensive. The Indian troops came from outside of Punjab and were unlikely to have much sympathy for the locals, and Gurkhas in particular were considered to be intrinsically loyal and impervious to attempts by either Hindus or Muslims to win them over.78 The fact that British troops seemingly hesitated and initially failed to open fire, allowing the protesters to cross into the Civil Lines on 10 April, might also have been a factor in Dyer’s decision-making. Dyer anticipated that there was going to be fighting, but he did not know what form the struggle would take, or who would strike first. As the column marched through Hall Gate, the first picket was left behind, and as they continued deeper into the city the other pickets dropped out – to Lahore Gate on the western side of the city, to Sultanwind on the eastern side, as
well as further entry points to the south.79

  General Dyer did not go to the Jallianwala Bagh with the intention of carrying out a massacre since he did not know where it was, or what the layout of the Bagh was like, or even if he would find a crowd there. The only report he had received up to that point indicated that a thousand people had assembled for the meeting. If it turned out that his warnings were being flouted, and that British authority was being mocked, however, he would have to open fire. ‘My mind was made up as I came along in my motor car,’ Dyer later explained: ‘if my orders were not obeyed, I would fire immediately.’80 The decision to take the strike force to Jallianwala Bagh thus constituted the final stage of the process that had begun with the proclamation march earlier that day – it was, as he later claimed, all ‘one transaction’.81 Yet, even so, the General worried whether he would should have the resolve to do it: ‘I was only wondering whether I should do it or whether I should not.’82

  Quite by coincidence, Girdhari Lal happened to be present when Dyer’s strike force and pickets set out from the Ram Bagh. Girdhari Lal had made his way to the Civil Lines to meet some English friends. Worried that it might be unsafe for Europeans to visit the city, they went to see Irving, as Girdhari Lal described: ‘We all reached Ram Bagh garden, near the Club, about 4.15pm. Mr Rehill and other military officers were standing near the Club Gate. This garden was used as Military Headquarters in those days. I saw the troops there getting ready.’83 Irving had by this point left for the fort and so Lal and his friends returned to their nearby hotel on Queen’s Road:

  When we reached the hotel I saw troops coming out of the garden and passing in front of the Cambridge Hotel. First of all was a body of Baluchees about 40 to 50, followed by Gurkhas about the same number, and then Baluchees again. Behind them were two motor-cars. In the first there were two or three European military officers whom I did not know. In the second car were Messrs. Rehill and Plomer, and then came one armoured car in which there were 10 or 12 European soldiers. Last of all were some five or six European soldiers on foot.84

  Girdhari Lal now realised that the troops were heading for Jallianwala Bagh, and he hurried into the city to warn people. At the Bagh, the meeting was by then well under way and the thousands gathered blissfully unaware of any imminent danger.

  Hans Raj had been busy all day preparing for the meeting with the help of friends and boys from his neighbourhood.85 A makeshift platform had been prepared and part of the Bagh swept, while some of the locals arranged for drinking water to be available to the crowd.86 The turnout was bigger than anyone could have imagined, and around 4pm the speeches began. The 33-year-old Pratap Singh was sitting in the crowd with his young son. He had originally come to hear the lecture by Kanhyalal but was now listening to Hans Raj speaking from the makeshift platform: ‘He had put up the picture of Dr Kitchlew and said that his portrait would preside. He said that men were wrongfully shot on the 10th, because they were going at that time to make a complaint to the Deputy Commissioner. He also said that a resolution should be passed asking for the repeal of the Rowlatt Act. Gopinath then read a poem about the faryad [complaint] of the people not being heard.’87 Apart from Hans Raj and Brij Gopi Nath Bekal, a bank clerk, the speakers included Dina Nath, the editor of the local Waqt newspaper, and Dr Gurbaksh Rai, who had also spoken at the meeting the previous day.88 The first two resolutions, of the five that had been prepared, were proposed from the platform and unanimously passed:

  1. This grand meeting of the inhabitants of Amritsar looks with extreme indignation and disapproval on all those revolutionary actions which are the inevitable result of the inappropriate and inequitable attitude on the part of the Government, and entertains apprehension that this despotic conduct of the Government might prove deleterious to the British Government.

  2. This grand meeting of the inhabitants of Amritsar strongly protests against the despotic attitude which the Government adopted when the subject-people within the domains of law invited the attention of the British subjects by means of the only effective and last expedient, i.e. ‘passive resistance’ to improper legislation of the Government of India, i.e. the Rowlatt Act, which was passed in disregard of the united voice of the public.89

  This could hardly be described as either inflammatory or seditious, and the speeches made that day were in fact not much different from those Kitchlew and Satyapal had been giving during previous gatherings at the Bagh – the iniquity of the Rowlatt Act was still the main focus and much of the rhetoric focused on the sacrifice that Indians had made during the war. According to Hans Raj, the audience were reminded that ‘you have given thousands to the Sarkar, widows and orphans are sitting in villages and this is your reward’.90

  Few among the crowd would have been able to hear much of what was being said from the platform, and there were many just sitting in the Bagh, or leisurely walking around chatting with friends.91 At one point, a large funeral procession for one of the men shot during the riots passed the Bagh along the Lakar Mandi Bazar road towards Sultanwind Gate. Several thousand people got up and left to join the procession, despite the protestations of the speakers. Shortly afterwards, the appearance of an aeroplane again interrupted the speeches, as Khushal Singh, who had helped arrange water for the crowd, noted: ‘After the procession, an aeroplane hovered over the meeting. There was a stir in the crowd then, and Hans Raj shouted out to people not to be afraid of the aeroplane and to remain seated.’92 The speakers were beginning to worry about losing the attention of the crowd, which was tenuous at best, and Hans Raj told people to ignore the plane: ‘the aeroplane is doing its own work; you do your own’.93 When more people got up, one of the other speakers again tried to reassure them, saying that ‘We need not fear anything. The sarkar is our father and mother: why should Government kill its own children.’94 This way of thinking about the relation between the colonial state and its subject was entirely in keeping with the notion of Ma Bap, which had informed the attempt to petition Irving on 10 April. An abiding belief in the paternalist, but essentially rational, character of the Government, combined with the emergent spirit of defiance and local nationalism, thus led the organisers of the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh to assume that they were engaged in a mutually acknowledged negotiation with the authorities. Hans Raj and the others might be protesting against the actions of the Government, yet, ultimately, they were still invoking the authority and wisdom of the Sarkar.

  The Sarkar was actually well represented at the Jallianwala Bagh that afternoon, and there were many people who noticed the conspicuous presence of plainclothes detectives who came and went throughout the afternoon.95 After Dyer and the column had returned to Ram Bagh, the meeting was kept under surveillance by half a dozen CID detectives and local informers, who went back and forth between the Bagh and the kotwali to report. This was hardly a covert undertaking, however, since most of these men were known to people and made little effort to hide their objective. One informant, Mohanlal, simply approached a local resident, who lived next to the Bagh: ‘Mohanlal [. . .] proposed they should go up to the roof of the top storey and watch the meeting from there. He said he was sent by Sub-Inspector Ibadullah [Obadullah] to the Bagh to see what was going on there, and that he had been to the Kotwali and reported about the people assembling and had come back from the Kotwali.’96 At one point, two of the CID detectives even approached Hans Raj directly and asked him questions about the meeting.97 While the exact role of the police at Jallianwala Bagh was later to be questioned, the truth was that they were deeply ineffective and hampered by their growing unpopularity among the local population.98 As a result of the unrest, the position of the police in Amritsar had become so precarious that Sub-inspector Obadullah hired a local strongman for protection when he went to the Bagh to observe the meeting.99 One of the CID detectives, Jowahar Lal, expressed the very same concern when he went to Jallianwala Bagh that afternoon: ‘I tried to go in, but there was a large crowd of people. I could not hear anything. Moreover, it
was risky for me to go there, so I came back.’100 While doing undercover work inside the city two days before, Jowahar Lal had in fact been recognised in the street and had to flee when someone shouted, ‘there is a CID dog’.101

  In other words, the police were deeply scared and were not going to intervene in the meeting at the Bagh, let alone try to make any arrests. Their only role on 13 April thus consisted of relaying information on the progress of the meeting to the British. As the eyes and ears of Dyer and Irving, who believed the city to be a veritable nest of rebels, the local police and CID officers thus played a crucial role in feeding the anxieties of the British at Amritsar. The CID did not prepare a ‘death-trap’ at Jallianwala Bagh as was later alleged, but they also did nothing to prevent it.102 Jowahar Lal’s description of the crowd, for instance, can only be described as deeply misleading: ‘Their attitude was very hostile and they were shouting and praising Gandhi, Kitchlew and Satya Pal.’103 In the reports that reached Dyer during the afternoon of 13 April, there was also no mention of the people present in the Bagh who were there because of the Baisakhi fair and not the meeting, nor that there were small children and boys in the crowd.

  Once it had been reported to General Dyer, via Rehill, that the meeting was going ahead, the police and CID knew well what was going to happen. As Jowahar Lal put it: ‘I thought the troops might come, so I only stayed there for 2 or 3 minutes. Martial Law had been declared at 11 o’clock am that day, and the meeting was held in contravention of orders.’104 At the entrance to the Bagh, a local resident was explicitly warned by one of the men working for the police: ‘He told me that soldiers would come and start firing on the people and told me to clear out.’105