Amritsar 1919 Page 5
The wave of revolutionary assassinations and bombings carried out by Indian nationalists during the decade before the First World War raised the tone of the debate to fever pitch. In 1910, for instance, the author Leslie Beresford published a new kind of ‘Mutiny’ novel called The Second Rising, which described ‘a revolution on lines such as, I think, all Anglo-Indians would admit to be not only within the bounds of conception, but even a practical realisation should existing anarchical and socialistic tendencies be allowed to smoulder unrepressed . . .’72 The very distinction between political commentary and fiction was accordingly porous as sentimental tales, watered-down copies of Kipling in essence, carried blunt warnings of things to come. When Amelia Bennett, one of the few survivors of the Cawnpore Massacres of 1857, published the story of her experiences in 1913, she also drew very explicit links between the past and the present:
The organised unrest that is now spreading through the length and breadth of India has prompted me to place this reminder before my fellow-countrymen of the horrible atrocities perpetrated on our women and children during those dark days of 1857. The misplaced sentimentalism dealing with Indians to-day, in the face of the repeated discovery of the existence of secret societies having for their object the overthrow of British rule, is opening a way for the addition of an equally terrible chapter in Indian history.73
Novels and narratives of the ‘Mutiny’ were thus neither simply quaint entertainment, nor were they even about the past. Bennett concluded the preface of the introduction to her harrowing tale with the following admonition: ‘I trust therefore that the following narrative, the greater part of which was written the year immediately following the Mutiny, will be the means of awakening the rulers of India to a more befitting sense of the present situation, lest the tragedies of fifty-six years ago are enacted once more.’74 A few years after Bennett’s account was published, the Anglo-Indian writer Ethel W. Savi visited the site of the Cawnpore Massacres, as she noted in her autobiography:
By the time I had read the inscription and visited the ghat by the river – where that inhuman fiend, Nana Sahib, allowed British men, women, and children to put out in boats, and then fired on them killing them indiscriminately – I had such a Mutiny-complex that I could hardly sleep that night and kept listening for all sorts of noises that might indicate a rebellion.75
In the British colonial imagination, the ‘Mutiny’ never ended and in India the ruling class were surrounded by constant reminders of the potential dangers of ‘native rebellion’. The confidence and self-assertion of the British in India was in truth illusory, and the vision of absolute control and ability to listen in on their colonial subjects, as imagined by Kipling in Kim, for instance, was little more than wishful thinking – after 1857, the British were raked by anxieties and a pervasive sense of vulnerability.76 At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, the very notion of the ‘Mutiny’ did not refer simply to a historical event as much as a particular colonial outlook – a cause of persistent panic but also a blueprint for the maintenance of colonial control in the form of exemplary punishment and indiscriminate violence. Both a trauma to be repressed and a lesson never to forget. And this is what Forster’s officious policeman McBryde alluded to when he told the ‘native’-friendly Fielding in A Passage to India that he ought to rely on the ‘Mutiny records’, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, as his bible in India. As the world map was being redrawn after the First World War, as empires were crumbling, and new nation-states emerged, the British in India were still guided by colonial myths and the collective memory of events more than half a century before. In 1927, in his remarkable book The Other Side of the Medal, the writer E.J. Thompson offered this poignant description of the lasting legacies of the ‘Mutiny’:
From Bihar to the Border the Mutiny lives; it lives in the memory of Europeans and of Indians alike. It over-shadows the thought and relations of both races. A friend who visited the mutiny country after many years of residence in the South told me with what a vivid shock this throbbing, tense existence today of the agonies of that time was brought home to him. The memories have never slept, and now they are raising their heads as never before.
Because of the Mutiny a great fear broods over the European community in India, and from time to time, often a very slight provocation, leads to an outcry from ‘energetic people’ for immediate martial law. The Mutiny – that nightmare of innumerable savage hands suddenly upraised to kill helpless women and children – has been responsible for the waves of hysteria which from time to time have swept the European community and for a while made it a pathological case for pity and sympathy. It has done worse than this, however.77
CHAPTER 1
POOL OF NECTAR
A traveller alighting at Amritsar railway station in April 1919, after the train came to a jerking halt along the third-of-a-mile-long narrow platform, would have been met by much the same scene as described by Rudyard Kipling: ‘the station filled with clamour and shouting, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands’.1 The noise would have been amplified by the cavernous structure of the station, reverberating metallically across the platforms as the spasmodic bursts of steam from the spluttering locomotive slowly dissipated. Built by the British in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’, the station was a massive whitewashed masonry structure with gargantuan pillars, horseshoe arches, and a maze of girders, supporting the corrugated roof covering the platforms. It was designed, should the need arise again, to be turned into a defensive position, to guard the lines of transport and communication so crucial to the security and maintenance of colonial power. Amritsar was a strategically important railway junction and entrepôt, straddling the Grand Trunk Road: the century-old trade route described as the ‘backbone of all Hind’, linking New Delhi, the newly built capital of British India, with Lahore, the administrative centre of Punjab just 30 miles to the west.2
Pushed and shoved in the busy cram of travellers and over-eager porters, one would head for the exit through the main hall, dutifully producing a ticket to show the officious collector at the gate. The observant traveller might notice, amid the hustle and bustle, the eagle-eyed inspection of platform tickets required by Indians who came to send off or welcome passengers – a result of the widespread protests that only a few months before had descended upon the train station. While Europeans had unhindered access to any platform at all times, Indians had to purchase a platform ticket and, earlier that year, the railway administration had stopped issuing these altogether to avoid overcrowding on the platforms. This specifically applied to mail trains, which were the express service on which most Europeans travelled, and the measure thus seemed to be intended to minimise the discomfort of the ruling class – and ruling race.
Far from being a minor inconvenience that prevented Indians from meeting their friends and relatives on the platform, many locals saw the platform-ticket issue in purely political terms, as yet another expression of the racial divides that shaped every aspect of life under the Raj. Protest meetings were held and Dr Satyapal, a Cambridge-educated medical practitioner and member of the Indian National Congress, had emerged as a local leader, arguing that such a blatantly discriminatory policy would never be tolerated if India had Home Rule.3 At this point in time, the notion of Home Rule invoked the status of white dependencies of the Empire, such as Canada or Australia, rather than outright independence. And so, what began as a seemingly harmless rule to manage the number of people who could access the train platforms gradually turned into a nationalist protest, which eventually forced the authorities to withdraw the prohibition on sales of platform tickets. That such an apparently trivial issue could become a source of intense popular protest reflected the tension within colonial India at the end of the First World War – and was a sign of the growing political awareness and mobilisation among the local population.4
Emerging from the capa
cious pillared hall of the train station and stepping into the blinding sunlight outside, one would instantly be hit by a wave of oven-like dry heat. April marked the onset of the hot season in Punjab and between 11am and 4pm the temperature easily exceeded 40 degrees Celsius. This was the time of year when British women and children were sent off to the cooler climate of the hill stations, and between April and September the British Government moved to its summer headquarters at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas. For those left behind to endure the stifling heat of the plains, the official workday began well before sunrise, with an extended break during the torpor of midday, and then often dragged on into the evening. Yet even the setting of the sun brought little respite, and, while Europeans would sleep under mosquito nets on camp-beds in their gardens, the local residents retreated with their charpoys, or wooden bedsteads, on to the flat roofs of their houses or simply spent the night outside on the street.
By 1919, automobiles were commonplace throughout India and at Amritsar railway station travellers of means might be collected by a chauffeur, or, more commonly, take a tonga – the local version of a hansom cab. Following the Grand Trunk Road, the railway line cut diagonally across Amritsar, neatly separating the Civil Lines in the north, where the Europeans resided, from the old city in the south, where most of the Indian population lived. More of a threshold than a barrier, one could move from one part to the other only by a few bridges – most notably an iron footbridge some 500 yards east of the train station, and the main passage, the two-lane Hall Bridge, a few hundred yards further to the east.5
In the Civil Lines, scattered bungalows with immense gardens lined the ruler-straight roads planned by the British, flanked by the square chequered shape of the cantonment to the west and the equally symmetric layout of the Ram Bagh park to the east. Ram Bagh had been the summer palace of the once illustrious Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, and the garden still retained some of its past glory at the beginning of the twentieth century, including stone-carved gate-buildings, elaborately decorated pavilions and fountains. The Mughal-style garden, however, had long since been taken over by the emblematic institutions of the Raj: offices, tennis courts and, most importantly, the club. ‘In any town in India’, as George Orwell put it, ‘the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.’6 Apart from the liveried servants, Indians were not allowed in these clubs, which were meant to be safe havens for Europeans who never felt quite at home on the subcontinent.7 One British officer provided a poignant description of the pervasive sense of being out of place and estranged from the local population – a particularly colonial malaise for which the only remedy appeared to be the cultural entrenchment of the club:
I liked to finish my day at the club, in a world whose limits were known and where people answered my beck. An incandescent lamp coughed its light over shrivelled grass and dusty shrubbery; in its circle of illumination exiled heads were bent over English newspapers, their thoughts far away, but close to mine. Outside, people prayed and plotted and mated and died on a scale unimaginable and uncomfortable. We English were a caste. White overlords or white monkeys – it was all the same. The Brahmins made a circle within which they cooked their food. So did we. We were a caste: pariahs to them, princes in our own estimation.8
While the officer recognised that the British were perennial outsiders, his allusion to the local population as a barely human multitude was redolent of the essentially racist outlook of many Europeans. The apparent impossibility of a genuine, let alone equal, relationship between Europeans and Indians was, of course, at the very heart of A Passage to India, and was later echoed by Orwell in Burmese Days: ‘With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love – yes. Englishmen do often love Indians – native officers, forest rangers, hunters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moment. But alliance, partisanship, never!’9 Times were changing, however, and in the club at Amritsar, and everywhere else throughout British India, the talk during the spring of 1919 concerned the dreaded Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, and their promise to increase Indian participation in the governance of the Raj.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the very nature of British rule in India underwent a dramatic transformation – one that was neither smooth nor deliberate.10 Instead, change was forced by the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism and the contingencies of global conflict, and further shaped by the unresolved tension between liberal and conservative impulses in colonial governance. Since the turn of the century, Indian nationalists either called for outright independence, or swaraj, a standpoint the British labelled as ‘extremist’, or, like the Indian National Congress, for reforms within the framework of the Raj that allowed greater political participation for Indian men. The latter stance was considered ‘moderate’ by the British.11 British colonial governance during this period thus vacillated between liberal attempts to co-opt and conciliate Western-educated Indians and those nationalists working within a constitutional framework, and draconian repression of revolutionary nationalists who sought to overthrow the Raj by violent means. This balancing act was rarely successful, however, and the protection of the rights of the individual and the rule of law, supposedly the very cornerstones of the Empire, were repeatedly abrogated by the perceived need to protect the Raj at all costs.12
With a Government headed by the Liberal David Lloyd George coming into power in Britain in 1916, the piecemeal and limited reforms already under way to allow Indians minor roles within the colonial administration received new momentum. It was becoming increasingly untenable for the British in India to rule like despots and, especially after the First World War, they could no longer be seen to ignore the legitimate calls for greater influence mounted by Indian leaders and politicians educated in places like Oxford or Cambridge. There were also more pressing, and more practical, needs for reform. Although many Indian nationalist politicians were supportive of the war effort and, like Gandhi, actively contributed to the recruitment effort, they did so with the explicit expectation that India’s contribution would be rewarded at the end of the war. In 1916, the major Indian political organisations agitating for reforms, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, came together in the so-called Lucknow Pact.13 This unprecedented unity, however short-lived, between the biggest political organisations representing the religious interest of both Hindus and Muslims, enabled nationalists to put more pressure on the Raj. Indian nationalist politics, which had hitherto been the prerogative only of a small educated and wealthy elite, were now beginning to engage with a greater section of the general population. The newly established Indian Home Rule Leagues, under the leadership of more radical nationalists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the Irish Theosophist Annie Besant, had a far broader base and popular involvement compared to the Indian National Congress. As a burgeoning mass movement, Indian nationalism was becoming a force to be reckoned with.14
Maintaining India’s vital contribution to the war effort required the British to monitor the political situation closely and keeping India quiet and compliant was a key priority during the war years. With India denuded of British troops needed in Europe, the authorities feared that any large-scale unrest might necessitate troops having to be diverted from the main theatres of war in order to protect the proverbial Jewel in the Crown. From the British perspective, the reforms would therefore not merely be a reward for Indian loyalty and service during the war, but were also a means of forestalling nationalist agitation.15 The military disaster of the Mesopotamia campaign, for which the Government of India had been responsible, further highlighted the urgent need for a reorganisation of the administration to make the Indian contribution to the war more efficient.16 The war, in other words, accelerated the necessity for reform.
Named after the two men responsible for introducing them, Secretary of Sta
te for India Edwin Samuel Montagu and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, the essence of the reforms was first announced in August 1917.17 The reforms themselves were only to be officially implemented by the Government of India Act of 1919, effective from the end of that year. The carefully worded announcement described the aim of British policy in India towards ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’.18 At the more immediate and practical level, the reforms introduced a system known as ‘dyarchy’, which divided the functions of government between the centre, in the newly established colonial capital in Delhi, and the provinces, where new legislative bodies were established for Indian electorates (though still less than 10 per cent of the male population). Greater responsibilities were devolved to the provinces, where Indian officials would play a greater role and have responsibility for raising local taxes and control over areas such as education and agriculture. The British Government at the centre nevertheless retained tight control over those areas considered vital to the safety of the Raj, and Indians would accordingly have no real say over state finances, law and order, or military matters – let alone foreign policy.19