Amritsar 1919 Read online

  Thanks to the staff at the Gelman Library, George Washington University, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the National Archives of India in Delhi, the Punjab State Archives in Chandigarh and the Asian & African Studies Reading Room in the British Library. While there is no real substitute for physical archival research, I still remain deeply dependent on hathitrust.com, archive.org and newspapers.com.

  Thanks to Heather McCallum at Yale University Press (who gave me a contract back in 2013!), and to Marika Lysandrou, Rachael Lonsdale, Sophie Richmond and everyone else at Yale University Press for their hard work in turning an inchoate manuscript into something more presentable. Thanks also to Ranjana Sengupta at Penguin India for taking on yet another book. I am also grateful to the editorial boards of Past & Present, History Workshop Journal and Itinerario for permission to use material from my earlier articles. Research for this book has been generously supported with funding from the British Academy and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 658047.

  I would like to apologise unreservedly to all my students at Birmingham and Queen Mary on whom I have selfishly inflicted numerous essay, exam and dissertation questions on the Amritsar Massacre. You helped hone my questions and suggested many answers, and if this book is a paltry outcome after so many boring lectures it is my fault entirely.

  Thanks to everyone I have met in Amritsar who helped me climb walls, get onto the roof of the Town Hall, or gave me a ride on their motorcycle down the Grand Trunk Road. The amazing food served at Brothers Dhaba restaurant, right across from the Town Hall, is one of the reasons I keep coming back, and the same goes for the lassi at the unassuming Kesar da Dhaba, not far from Kucha Kaurianwala, as well as the legendary Gian Chand Milk Bhandar.

  Finally, I want to thank my family, and especially the Danish-American ragamuffin crew – Ada, Max, Sigrid and Gustav – for bearing with me while I was preoccupied with this project. Having written two books back-to-back, I fear that the customary acknowledgement of my wife’s support is becoming somewhat stale. While this book is but a small recompense for my near-total absence, physical as well as mental, these past years, I hope she knows I could never have pulled it off without her – I love you, Julie, with all my heart.

  1. The Punjab, showing offences committed between 10 April and 1 May 1919.

  2. Amritsar City.

  3. The area around the two railway bridges, the site of the shooting on 10 April 1919.

  4. Ground plan of Jallianwala Bagh.

  PROLOGUE

  SHADOWS OF THE MUTINY

  ‘When an Indian goes bad, he goes not only very bad, but very queer.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘How should you? When you think of crime you think of English crime. The psychology here is different. I dare say you’ll tell me next that he was quite normal when he came down from the hill to greet you. No reason he should not be. Read any of the Mutiny records; which, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, should be your bible in this country.’

  E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)1

  In Forster’s classic novel exploring the relationship between rulers and ruled in British India, a Muslim, Dr Aziz, is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a young Englishwoman. News of the alleged assault, which occurred during a misconceived picnic to the fabled Marabar caves, throws the local Anglo-Indian community into a state of frenzied panic. Only Aziz’s friend, the progressive schoolmaster, Cyril Fielding, keeps his calm and intercedes on the doctor’s behalf in a tense exchange with Mr McBryde, the District Superintendent of Police. Born on the subcontinent, McBryde is the ‘old India hand’ par excellence and he mocks Fielding’s attempt at applying conventional logic to comprehend the actions of Dr Aziz. Not only can Indians ‘go bad’, like some kind of rabid pet, we are given to understand, but they are also perfectly capable of deceitfully hiding their true intentions and emotional state of mind. It is, however, the final sentence of McBryde’s patronising admonition that stands out: described as the ‘most reflective and best educated’ of the local officials of Forster’s fictional town of Chandrapore, McBryde argues that the best guide for a European to understand the local population, and by extension to rule effectively, is the ‘Mutiny records’, or the colonial accounts of the Indian Uprising of 1857. Rather than any deeper cultural knowledge, for which the classic text of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Ghita, is invoked as a somewhat naïve short-hand, the lessons of the ‘Mutiny’ serve as the British bible in ruling India – even by the second decade of the twentieth century.

  The reference to the ‘Mutiny records’ would have been clear to Forster’s readers at the time – the young Rudyard Kipling had written an entire story about a bundle of such files, and innumerable history books, novels, paintings, historical sites and memorials served as constant reminder of the event itself.2 In May 1857, sepoys, or Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company, had rebelled over fears that Christianity was being duplicitously forced upon them and their social and professional status undermined.3 British rule was only ever as strong as the support of its local allies and once the sepoys turned against their erstwhile masters the authority of the colonial state soon collapsed. During the summer of 1857, the uprising continued to spread as new, localised conflicts erupted; popular rebellion grew out of a long-standing climate of dissatisfaction, but assumed different regional characteristics, and was by no means universal across northern India. Some dispossessed rulers and landowners seized the opportunity to regain lost wealth and status, while others engaged in long-standing feuds over land and political power.4 What set the events of 1857 apart from the numerous smaller uprisings that had regularly taken place during the previous half century was the impetus provided by the sepoys’ mutiny. The sepoys of the Bengal Army constituted a uniquely coherent group, cutting across religious and social divides, and as such they added a sense of unity to the outbreak that did not exist elsewhere in India. It was only by mobilising new Sikh and Muslim recruits from Punjab that the British managed to launch a counter-offensive and begin the slow work of re-establishing colonial control.

  The complex religious, political and socioeconomic causes behind the military mutinies and popular rebellions of northern India in 1857–8, were, however, largely lost on the British. Instead a narrative emerged which was part tragedy and part revenge-tale – with the rebels cast as bloodthirsty savages, driven by superstition and primitive passions.5 Secret conspirators were believed to have manipulated the gullible masses, stirring up animosity against the British by spreading false rumours.6 This narrative conveniently avoided the question of whether there were any genuine grievances that fuelled revolt. The insidious nature of the conspiracy was further exacerbated by the alleged peculiarities of the ‘Oriental’ character. As one missionary described it:

  Throughout the ages the Asiatic has been noted for his duplicity, cunning, hypocrisy, treachery; and coupled with this [. . .] his capacity of secrecy and concealment. But in vain will the annals even of Asia be ransacked for examples of artful, refined, consummate duplicity, surpassing those which have been exhibited throughout the recent mutinies. In almost every instance, the sepoys succeeded in concealing their long-concocted and deep-laid murderous designs from the most vigilant officers to the very last.7

  The uprising was characterised by the desperate brutality common to colonial conflicts or slave revolts, and at places such as Meerut, Delhi and, most infamously, Cawnpore, European men, women and children were massacred by the Indian rebels. Following the outbreak at Meerut, for instance, one eyewitness described how a search party arrived at a bungalow where a British officer had been attacked along with his children:

  [They] found him lying about forty yards in front of his dwelling, with his body ripped open and his head cut off; and one of his children, a girl aged six years and a half, lying dead a few yards from him. In the house, two children were found alive; one, Eliza, aged nine ye
ars and ten days, had her arms hacked off the shoulders, and left hanging only by the skin, besides having both of her cheeks cut off so that no fluid could be retained in the mouth; the other, a boy upwards of five years of age, had a part of his ear cut off, besides being otherwise severely wounded. These two children were conveyed in a litter to the artillery hospital, where the girl died the next day.8

  Where white women had been killed, it was simply assumed that they had first been sexually assaulted and this, more than anything else, spurred outrage among British men involved in suppressing the revolt.9 John Nicholson, one of the colonial heroes forged in the crucible of the ‘Mutiny’, at one point wrote to his superiors, proposing a bill ‘for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi’. ‘The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening,’ Nicholson wrote. ‘I wish that I were in that part of the world, that if necessary I might take the law into my own hands.’10 While there were plenty of opportunities for colonial officers such as Nicholson to vent their indiscriminate fury on the local population with fanciful methods of punishment, the British authorities increasingly took recourse to formalised and spectacular executions during 1857.

  Following what had originally been a Mughal practice, captured sepoys and rebels were strapped to the mouth of cannon loaded just with gunpowder and literally blown to pieces in front of crowds of local spectators forced to watch the execution.11 The sepoy regiments forced to watch the executions were deliberately positioned as near to the guns as possible, and the prisoners had ‘their intestines blown into the faces of their former comrades who stood watching the scene’. Often the executions went terribly wrong, turning the carefully choreographed ceremony into the sort of grim farce described by one medical officer:

  One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. Whilst hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head, and three times the cap snapped, the man each time wincing from the expected shot. At last a rifle was fired into the bottom of his head, and the blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly handled pump. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.12

  This punishment was quite deliberately aimed at the religious beliefs of Indians, since the physical destruction of the body would make the final rites of both Hindus and Muslims impossible. It was, in the words of one British eyewitness, ‘the only form in which death has any terrors for a native’.13 In the semi-official history of the uprising, John W. Kaye described the efficacy of these executions:

  To our newly-raised levies and to the curious on-lookers from the country, the whole spectacle was a marvel and a mystery. It was a wonderful display of moral force, and it made a deep and abiding impression . . . Among the rude people of the border the audacity thus displayed by the English in the face of pressing danger excited boundless admiration. They had no longer any misgivings with respect to the superiority of a race that could do such great things, calmly and coolly, and with all the formality of an inspection parade.14

  The spectacle of the execution by cannon was thus regarded as the ultimate tool of exemplary deterrence. It was, however, by no means the only type of violence deployed during the bitter struggle of the uprising. After a regiment of sepoys killed their officers and deserted in July 1857, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, Frederick Cooper, pursued them at the head of Sikh levies to the banks of the Ravi River. Trapped on an island, the fugitives were either driven into the water, where they drowned, or were later executed by firing squad – more than 200 alone were killed in this manner, and some were dragged kicking and screaming to the edge of the well where their bodies were dumped. When Cooper later described his massacre of the fugitive sepoys in his memoirs, he did so with an unmistakable sense of achievement:

  [A] single Anglo-Saxon, supported by a section of Asiatics, undertaking so tremendous a responsibility, and coldly presiding over so memorable an execution, without the excitement of battle, or a sense of individual injury, to imbue the proceedings with the faintest hue of vindictiveness. The Governors of Punjab are of the true English stamp and mould, and knew that England expected every man to do his duty, and that duty done, thanks them warmly for doing it. The crime was mutiny, and had there even been no murders to darken the memory of these men, the law was exact. The punishment was death.15

  Cooper here presented an explicitly racialised portrayal of the embattled colonial officer carrying out his horrible duty in a dispassionate manner and without ever losing his head. This was the proverbial ‘stiff upper lip’ at its most colonial and most brutal. And where British officers failed to live up to the ideal, and their excesses proved too difficult to explain away, they were still not held morally accountable. One British officer, Major James Brind, whose brother had recently been killed, took a brutal revenge at the fall of Delhi, where he personally oversaw the massacre of as many as 200 local residents. Those who were not bayoneted on the spot were forced to clean the latrines in the British camp before also being executed. Even from the distance of several years, Kaye still found it possible to defend Brind’s actions:

  There was not a kinder-hearted, as there was not a braver man in the Delhi army than James Brind; but he was a man of an excitable temperament, and he had been working day and night in the batteries, under a fierce sun, seldom or never sleeping all the time. And he had ever before him the memory of the fact that his brother had been killed at Sealkote by the treacherous connivance of his own servants.16

  While the violence of Indians was perceived as innate and treacherous, British brutality could be explained and even justified with reference to the climate, physical exhaustion and, ultimately, the savagery ascribed to their Indian victims.

  Not everyone, however, believed the relentless slaughter reflected well on British rule in India. The Times correspondent William Howard Russell was scathing in his reports, exposing the combination of fear and vengefulness that characterised the attitudes of many of his compatriots:

  I have no sympathy with those who gloat over their death, and who in the press and elsewhere, fly into ecstasies of delight at the records of each act of necessary justice, and glory in the exhibition of a spirit as sanguinary and inhuman as that which prompted murderers, assassins, and mutilators to the commission of the crimes for which they have met their doom. The utterers of those sentiments have been so terribly frightened that they never can forgive those or the race of those who inflicted such terrible shocks to their nervous system. They see no safety, no absolute means of prevention to the recurrence of such alarms but in the annihilation of every Sepoy who mutinied, or who was likely to have done so if he could.17

  Unfortunately, such critical voices had little impact on either official policies or public opinion, mainly because violence and spectacular displays of brute force were commonly believed to be the most effective means of preserving British control in India. Back in the imperial metropole, Lord Stanley expressed this sentiment in no uncertain terms during a speech in the House of Commons: ‘Only by great exertions – by the employment of force, by making striking examples, and inspiring terror, could Sir J. Lawrence save the Punjab; and if the Punjab had been lost the whole of India would for the time have been lost with it.’18 British rule in India, in other words, was sustained by the application of exemplary violence, and this became one of the founding narratives of the colonial state in India after 1857. ‘The Punjab authorities adhered to the policy of overawing, by a prompt and stern initiative,’ as Cooper put it after the ‘Mutiny’, adding that this was ‘the only way to strike terror into its semi-barbarous people’.19

  As the uprising was eventually put down, power was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown, heralding what many expected to be a new era of order and tranquillity. But memories of the ‘Mutiny’
died hard, and 1857 was not to be the last time that British rule in India was so demonstratively maintained by the sword rather than the pen.

  Years later, when Punjab was again shaken by unrest, a British officer responded by inflicting an indiscriminate and brutal punishment. Fearing that the disturbance might escalate and turn into a second ‘Mutiny’, he singlehandedly decided to teach the so-called ‘rebels’ a lesson. Called upon to justify his actions, the officer claimed that, effectively echoing Cooper, ‘A rebellion, which might have attained large dimensions, was nipped in the bud, and a terrible and prompt punishment was in my opinion absolutely necessary to prevent the recurrence of a similar rising.’ As tradition dictated, the British authorities in Punjab supported the man on the spot, who was allowed considerable personal discretion in dealing with such emergencies. As soon as details of the incident reached the press and the wider public, however, a heated debate erupted both in India and in Britain. Recent events had changed the way people in Britain perceived such brutality within the Empire and many were no longer prepared to accept oppression on this scale the way they had just a decade earlier. The affair became a cause for national embarrassment, and it was hotly debated in London and throughout the imperial metropole. The officer responsible was eventually removed from his post, but there was substantial support for his actions among the Anglo-Indian community and a public collection of funds was later organised for his benefit.

  This brief outline of events refers to the suppression in 1872 of what became known officially as the Kuka outbreak.20 Following an attack on the small Muslim principality of Malerkotla in Punjab by so-called Kuka Sikhs, Deputy Commissioner J.L. Cowan summarily executed sixty-eight prisoners by blowing them from guns. The Kukas, formally known as Namdharis, were a revivalist sect within Sikhism who became known during the early 1870s for a series of murderous attacks on Muslims in Punjab.21 After the failed raid on two small towns, Malodh and Malerkotla, the surviving members of a Kuka gang, many of whom were wounded, were captured in mid-January 1872.22 The attacks had been desperate undertakings by a motley group of impoverished men; they had no clear plan or strategy and they were certainly not part of a bigger conspiracy or the vanguard of a Kuka rising. Yet, amid rumours that Kukas were gathering in the thousands for renewed attacks, Cowan hastened to Malerkotla to deal with the captives.23 It soon turned out that initial reports of the attacks had been hugely exaggerated, but Cowan nevertheless proposed to execute the prisoners immediately: ‘they are open rebels, offering contumacious resistance to constituted authority, and, to prevent the spreading of the disease, it is absolutely necessary that repressive measures should be prompt and stern [. . .] this incipient insurrection must be stamped out at once’.24 Cowan went ahead with the mass execution and, when he was joined on the following day by his superior, Commissioner and Superintendent T.D. Forsyth, the remaining prisoners were also put to death as well.25