Amritsar 1919 Read online

  The fact was that the reforms were never really intended to initiate a gradual transfer of power, but rather to secure the political power of the Raj for many years to come. While the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms were the most far-reaching in British India to date, they ultimately constituted little more than an adjustment of power, without any real question as to the sovereignty of colonial rule. Any future devolution of British power was specifically made conditional on the ‘improvement’ of India, which was to be determined at the convenience of the British Government. The notion of ‘responsible government’ was actually very similar to the objectives adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1907, calling for India to be granted something like Dominion status. But over a decade and one world war later, the limited concessions offered by the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms seemed blatantly inadequate and even disingenuous.20 Indian nationalists, who had expected a substantive transfer of power, if not outright independence, to be imminently achievable, were bitterly disappointed. And, although ‘Indianisation’ would entail greater participation of Indians in the everyday administration of the Raj, entrenched attitudes of racial and cultural bias could not be so easily overcome. ‘What is the use of all these reforms,’ Forster’s protagonist Dr Aziz put it, if ‘the English sneer at our skins?’21

  More than just a literary trope, what Aziz expressed was a salient aspect of social life in the Raj in the early twentieth century. An English visitor to India described something of the unwritten rules governing the interaction between memsahibs and their Indian servants:

  Mrs. Montgomery told me that once she nearly trod upon a krait – one of the most venomous snakes in India. She had been ill at the time, suffering from acute facial neuralgia, ‘so that I didn’t care if I trod on fifty kraits. I was quite stupid with pain, and was going back in the evening to my bungalow, preceded by a servant who was carrying a lamp. Suddenly he stopped and said “Krait, Mem-sahib!” – but I was far too ill to notice what he was saying, and went straight on, and the krait was lying right in the middle of the path! Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India – he touched me! – he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course if he hadn’t done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn’t like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.’22

  The same class of Anglo-Indians who had so vociferously opposed the infamous Ilbert Bill in the 1880s, which would have allowed Indian judges to preside over cases involving Europeans, was no more prepared to support reforms and ‘Indianisation’ in 1919.23 Not nearly far-reaching enough for Indian politicians, whose expectations had been raised by their support for the war effort, the new policy was also far too progressive for the acceptance of the old guard of colonial administrators. Any accommodation of liberal attitudes or concessions to Indian nationalists were anathema to the likes of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor-General of Punjab, who embodied the traditional Punjab school of colonial governance.24

  Most officials within the colonial administration of Punjab believed that only British rule prevented the subcontinent from drifting into the kind of chaos and cruelty that had prevailed before the East India Company assumed control at the end of the eighteenth century. Indians were still bound by caste and superstition, and Hindus and Muslims bound to get at each other’s throats were it not for the calming and civilising influence of the Raj. Deeply invested in a style of colonial rule referred to as ‘despotic paternalism’, O’Dwyer and his supporters believed it to be their duty to protect the peasants of Punjab, whom they regarded as the ‘real India’, from the self-serving and corrupting influences of educated nationalists and urban elites. Any attempt at loosening the reins of colonial rule was thus met with an almost instinctive wave of protest by British officials with nothing but scorn for those liberals, who might be well-meaning, as one administrator put it, but who have ultimately ‘helped to weaken our rule in India’.25 O’Dwyer accordingly described the reforms as ‘diabolical’ and asserted that the masses, whom he claimed to understand and to speak for, did not actually want political change, let alone ‘self-determination’.26 O’Dwyer’s views were well known, and even notorious, among the very class of educated Indians that he despised. ‘In private talks,’ Dr Satyapal remembered, ‘in garden parties, etc., he vehemently decried the political awakening and literally gnashed his teeth at the so-called “political agitators”.’27

  The writer Edmund Candler, an astute observer of Anglo-Indian society, described a typical (albeit fictional) example of the inveterate ‘old India hand’ named Hobbs, who could be found throughout the Empire and who:

  regarded the Englishman as divinely appointed to chasten and chastise the heathen in a land in which the Almighty had planted them in His inscrutable providence to aggravate the trials of a numerically inferior but God-fearing race [. . .] Any night of the week the retired cavalry officer might be found at the bar of the [. . .] Club inveighing against Government. Hobbs might have stepped straight out of ’57. To him Indians were still children to be meted out reward or punishment according to the convenience or inconvenience of their conduct as it affected British interests. He was convinced that the Reforms were part of some Hun-inspired Semitic intrigue to undermine the British Empire, for which sole purpose Mr. Montagu had been treacherously appointed Secretary of State.28

  The fact that Montagu was Jewish meant that the antipathy towards anything German, born from decades of imperial rivalry and the recent experience of the war, was combined with blatant anti-Semitism. Though clearly a caricature, the figure of Hobbs thus captured some of the post-war paranoia over international conspiracies, but also reflected the early onset of melancholia over the apparent decline of the Empire following the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms.

  Leaving the club, and the concerns of what the future portend for the British Raj, the Anglo-Indian officials and civil administrators of Amritsar would return to their own little enclaves of colonial idyll. Connecting the Ram Bagh park with the military cantonment, and running roughly parallel to the railway line, the Mall – the quintessentially colonial boulevard and main artery of Anglo-Indian social life – marked the northernmost limits of the Civil Lines. Most of the administrators lived with their families in bungalows along the Mall in large one-storied structures with a veranda and even larger gardens, where a dozen or more Indian servants might be at their beck and call. The Court and other administrative offices were located at the intersection of the Mall and the aptly named Court Road. There was also the obligatory church, dating back to the days of the ‘Mutiny’, as well as a meticulously kept small cemetery where generations of pale-faced sahibs, memsahibs and their children were buried, stricken down by illness or the climate. The golf course completed the picture, indicating that this was a part of India, where the British had made their permanent home. The Civil Lines at Amritsar were in truth largely indistinguishable from any number of the dozens of cantonment towns spread out across the subcontinent – an archetype poignantly described by Forster:

  As for the civil station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not, neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned with a red-brick club on its brow, and farther back a grocer’s and a cemetery and the bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing hideous in it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city except the overarching sky.29

  Crossing the railway lines by the Hall Bridge, one passed through the Hall Gate into the old walled city where most of Amritsar’s Indian population lived – a world apart from the Civil Lines, where even the smells were different. As Candler enthusiastically described it: ‘Driving through the city gate I entered a stratum of warm air, and I was met with the comfortable reek of wood and cow-dung fires.’30 Others found the olfactory character of the city less appealing, and the artist Walter Crane was duly appalled by the state of the open gutters when he visited Amritsar:

  Driv
ing through the city we had recourse to smelling-bottles, as owing to the open drains each side [of] the streets the odours which saluted our nostrils were rather trying. I had noticed these open gullies at Delhi and in the native quarters in other towns. They run close in front of the houses and open shops of the bazaars, and are crossed by slabs of stone across them at intervals to give access to the houses, and as all sorts of refuse finds its way into them it is not surprising they should be offensive sometimes, though it had not been nearly so noticeable elsewhere.31

  The kidney-shaped outline of the old walled city remained largely intact, although the British had replaced the twelve original city gates with new ones in an incongruous mock-medieval style. Amritsar in 1919 was a crowded and bustling city and, after Lahore, it was the largest in Punjab with a population of 151,830, of whom 87,828 were men and 64,002 women.32 Inside the city walls, the population density was even higher than Lahore’s, with more than 130,000 people living in extremely crammed conditions. The tall, ramshackle buildings for which Amritsar was noted were the result of this chronic lack of space, as new storeys were added to old houses to keep up with the rising population.33 Approximately 45 per cent of the city’s population were Muslims, 40 per cent Hindus, and 13 per cent Sikhs, while the remainder belonged to various other denominations, including Christians and Buddhists.34 The Muslims constituted the majority of the city’s population, but they were also among the poorest, and most of them were occupied as artisans and labourers. They lived primarily in neighbourhoods along the northern parts of the city wall, from the Lohgarh to Sultanwind Gate, and the biggest mosque was the Khair Ud Din mosque in Hall Bazaar. Most of the houses and land in the city, on the other hand, were owned by Hindu Marwaris, or traders, and old Sikh families who had lived in Amritsar for generations.

  Entering though the Hall Gate, the paved road of the Hall Bazaar would take one all the way to the landmark Town Hall, passing along the way the grandiose National Bank of India on the left. Two other European-managed banks were located in the city, the Chartered Bank adjacent to the Town Hall and the Alliance Bank just a few hundred yards to the south-east. The bazaar road was lined by tall balconied houses with flat roofs, all seemingly squeezed together and leaning upon each other, their crumbling facades garlanded with a protrusion of electric wires. In the spacious wings of the Town Hall building, the post office and kotwali, or local police station, were also to be found. The deep archway of the Town Hall complex led to a square with a statue of Queen Victoria, which by all accounts was far from regal:

  It is a caricature of a ghoulish old lady in a nursery rhyme, half witch, half zany. Her anatomy is all higgledy piggledy, and she is tottering forward without a stick, with the proclamation in her hands, held out as if it were a bunch of speciously advertised potent herbs. She is terrible. But for all that, or perhaps because of it, the country folk do obeisance, and rub their foreheads on the plinth.35

  Moving on from the unflattering rendering of the Empress, the imprint of the Raj soon abated, and, apart from a few smaller post offices and police stalls, the Town Hall marked the furthest limits of formal British penetration into the walled city. A couple of small schools and hospitals run by missionary societies were scattered throughout the city, isolated in the maze of local neighbourhoods, and outside the Ram Bagh Gate there was a small church.

  Not far beyond the Town Hall, before losing oneself in the alleys of old city, one would pass a small white and intricately carved gurdwara, or temple. This was no ancient shrine, however, but a memorial built by the British in 1902 in honour of the twenty-one soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment who fought to the last man at the battle of Saragahi, on 12 September 1897, during one of the innumerable campaigns on the North-West Frontier. The memorial stood as a testament to the enduring association between the British and the Sikhs, enshrined in the latter’s ascribed status as a ‘martial race’.36 Ever since the time of the East India Company, the British had established and cultivated close links to those Indian communities that they considered to be loyal and culturally predisposed to fighting. The distinct military traditions and professions that emerged among groups such as the Sikhs or the equally famous Gurkhas of Nepal were accordingly a product of colonial rule in India as much as they were based on pre-existing practices. For more than half a century, the British had relied on recruits from Punjab to serve throughout the Empire, as testified by the exotic battle honours of the regiments that had assisted in turning growing parts of the world map a crimson red. By 1919, however, cracks had begun to appear in the relationship between the British and their Punjabi allies.

  Ever since 1907, when rural discontent had led to widespread riots in Amritsar and the other cities of Punjab, anti-colonial movements had emerged among Punjabis. At the outbreak of the First World War, members of the revolutionary Ghadar party, especially among the Punjabi diaspora in North America, sought to seize the opportunity to overthrow British rule in India.37 Although the German-assisted conspiracies soon unravelled, and the haphazard attempts at instigating a revolt in Punjab were easily defeated, British faith in the very men whose martial virtues had been put to such great use in the service and defence of the Empire was shaken.38 India’s contribution to the British war effort was nevertheless essential and the entire Punjab administration, civilian and military, was mobilised to ensure a constant stream of young recruits destined for the battlefields of Europe or operations in Africa and the Middle East.39 As the conflict wore on and swallowed up men by the tens of thousands, the demand for recruits intensified dramatically. Some local officials and Indian middle-men resorted to coercive tactics to meet their quotas: young men from the countryside of Punjab were bought and sold while others were simply press-ganged into service.40

  Between 1914 and 1918, almost half a million soldiers had been recruited from Punjab, more than half of the Indian troops that participated in the war on the British side.41 The province also contributed financially to the war effort with 92 million rupees – the equivalent of £700,000 pounds at the time.42 Much of this stemmed from war loans, and in Amritsar alone a total of 4.1 million rupees was raised, mainly from the trading classes.43 The colonial state had invested much in Punjab and forged closer links with the landed elites and those tradesmen and communities who profited from the war. But the drain in manpower came at a cost and towards the end of the war the British authori-ties were themselves beginning to see signs of both weariness and tension due to the continuing pressures of recruitment.

  With its rapacious mobilisation of human and material resources, the impact of the war-time administration had given rise to widespread resentment against British rule throughout Punjab.44 The end of the war in November 1918, moreover, did not mean a return to normality: the conflict cast long shadows in Punjab, just as it did elsewhere across the world. Indian soldiers returned to their homeland, some disabled and many disillusioned, and the rewards that they received seemed a far cry from what they had been promised and for which they had sacrificed so much. ‘Here is the sepoy, back from France,’ Forster later wrote, ‘failing to see why the Tommy should have servants and punkahs when he has none.’45 Memorials such as the Saragarhi shrine were intended as a reminder of the special status accorded to the Sikhs of Punjab within the political economy of the Raj.

  A few hundred yards from the Saragarhi shrine, in the very heart of the old city, the Darbar Sahib, commonly known as the Golden Temple, annually attracted thousands of pilgrims and visitors.46 In 1919, the Darbar Sahib was not fully enclosed by buildings as it is today, and the square in front of the temple allowed the first glimpse of the temple everyone had come to see. The journalist G.W. Steevens described following the crowd from the city gate towards the temple, the last part of the way through winding alleys:

  Following the stalwart, bearded pilgrim, in the midst of the city of shopkeepers you suddenly break into a wide square: within it, bordered by a marble pavement – white, black, and umber – a green lake dances in the sunlight; an
d in the midst of that, mirrored in the pool – you look through your eyelashes, for the hot rays fling back sevenfold-heated, blinding – gleam walls and roofs and cupolas of sheer gold.47

  In the 1870s, the British authorities had built an imposing clock-tower smack in the middle of the square – a demonstratively incongruous example of Western architecture, which, according to Candler, was ‘a brand-new, red-brick, pepper-box clock-tower, which might perhaps assimilate with the architecture of Bolton or Huddersfield, but has no business on the brink of the Waters of Immortality’.48 Ignoring this blatant attempt at cultural one-upmanship, visitors would make their way through the crowd of the square towards the entry of the Golden Temple.

  Dating back to the sixteenth century, the Darbar Sahib was the holiest shrine of Sikhism, and a significant site for pilgrims of many faiths. Amritsar derived its name, the ‘Pool of Nectar’, from the large square lake in the middle of which the sanctum of the Darbar Sahib formed a small island. The temple itself was reached by a long narrow footbridge, which photographs from the time show to be lined by beggars and without any cover. Inside the temple, the holy scriptures of the Sikh faith were kept and, as is still the case, prayers were continually chanted, accompanied by music.49 The Darbar Sahib never failed to impress and the artist Alfred Hugh Fisher, who visited Amritsar just before the war, described spending a late afternoon sitting on the marble pavement at the water’s edge:

  About it sat many flower-sellers, men in white, red and black robes with baskets heaped with orange-coloured marigolds, blue cornflowers, pink roses and scarlet poppies. The silver doors stand open, and through the white marble gateway a constant stream of people come and go along the causeway with its rows of golden lamps on short marble standards leading to the Golden Shrine itself in the middle of the water [. . .] The sun has now set and a light that seems to cast no shadows spreads and grows, suffusing all the scene in soft effulgence. Most of the women are dressed in long trousers, close fitting from the ankles to the knees and then bagging out loosely. They all have long veils which they wear like a hood; some are white but others scarlet, crimson, or orange, and some of green silk tissue strewn with silver stars and bordered deeply with gold.50