Amritsar 1919 Read online

  In spring 1919, ‘there was war weariness’, as Dr Satyapal put it, and Amritsar was in political ferment.92 The end of the war had brought no relief for the population, who still suffered from the aftershocks of deadly epidemics, rising food prices, economic distress and, most significantly, a range of political grievances. One of the municipal commissioners described the anger and frustration, much of which was aimed at the British Government, and especially how people were ‘discontented on account of high prices and also on account of Turkish affairs’.93 Local grievances, and global concerns, were further exacerbated by the transformation of the political landscape and especially the impending reforms. Rather than putting British rule in India on a firm trajectory during tumultuous times, the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms simply introduced an acute sense of uncertainty, and even resentment, among colonisers and colonised alike. Where Indian nationalists saw their aspirations of ‘self-determination’ indefinitely postponed, men like O’Dwyer lamented what they perceived simply as the imminent loss of the Jewel in the Crown. It was indeed no coincidence that Edmund Candler’s 1922 novel about the changing nature of British rule in India was entitled Abdication.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROWLATT SATYAGRAHA

  Just outside Amritsar, 2 miles west of the train station along the Grand Trunk Road en route to Lahore, one would come across an immense palatial building in an opulent faux-orientalist style with a protuberance of spires and cupolas. Established in 1892, the Khalsa College had 700 students, most of whom were the sons of wealthy Sikhs. It occupied an area of several acres, replete with sprawling gardens and gymnastics buildings as well as the obligatory cricket pitch.1 Right next to the road on the northern side of the campus stood a large single-storey bungalow in a moderately less ostentatious style, surrounded by a large flower garden and a small grove of trees. This was the principal’s house.

  It was the home of Melicent Wathen, also known as Mel, her husband Gerard and their three young children.2 The Wathens first came out to India in 1909 and Gerard had previously taught at Government College in Lahore, before taking up the position as Principal of Khalsa College in 1915. Gerard was of a liberal paternalist inclination, and counted the likes of Edmund Candler among his friend; before the war, he had also been part of the circle around Malcolm Darling and E.M. Forster.3 Forster had even given a lecture to Gerard’s class at Government College back in 1912, and Cyril Fielding, arguably the main protagonist of A Passage to India, was supposedly based on Gerard.4 The principal’s involvement in Khalsa College and his interaction with the Indian students and their parents was certainly progressive for the time.5

  Much like the fictional Fielding, however, the Wathens were not considered quite pukka, or proper, by their fellow Anglo-Indians.6 Privately, Melicent admitted that she and Gerard only attended the club at Amritsar ‘to be polite’.7 Interestingly, Malcolm Darling, who knew the Wathens at Lahore before they moved to Amritsar, had severe misgivings about the nature of Gerard and Melicent’s relationship – especially the manner in which he seemed to completely neglect her in favour of his work. By this account, Melicent stood in the shadow of, and was utterly dedicated to, her absent-minded husband.8 Gerard’s responsibilities did indeed leave Melicent on her own much of the time and, when she was not looking after the children, she occupied herself, like so many other memsahibs, with her race-horses, her painting or writing her diaries.9 Melicent wrote intermittently throughout the decade preceding 1919 and the diaries were full of memorabilia taped to the pages, including locks of her children’s hair or the colourful feathers of birds. They also contained numerous small watercolour sketches of ruins, palm trees and sunsets of the type beloved by so many amateur artists of the Raj. There were also numerous photographs of her three children, usually in the company of their ayah, and various Indian servants.

  Until 1919, the lives of the Wathens could have been pulled from the pages of Kipling: the hot seasons were spent at the picturesque hill station of Gulmarg in Kashmir; back at the Khalsa College acquaintances would frequently visit; weddings of young friends had to be arranged; and polo horses submitted for the annual show at Lahore. Just beyond the wall of their garden at Khalsa College, the constant traffic of the Grand Trunk Road also presented a colourful spectacle to occupy the kids. As the middle child, Mark, later described it:

  Caravans of camels used to come through on their long journeys, carrying goods and spices; each camel would have a large bell round its neck and one could hear the resonant tones of their bells from far away, and then trailing off in the stillness of the night. On one occasion when we were watching the cavalcade with my mother, she spoke to the syce of one of the camels, and he gave her a bell – which I still have.10

  Nevertheless, the war loomed large in the background of the Wathen family’s carefree colonial existence. News of the declaration of the Armistice in November 1918 was received with a sense of patriotic glee, and Melicent wished she could have witnessed for herself the ‘ignominious’ surrender of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. As the Wathens attended a masked ball in Delhi around new year, however, she found herself in the very same room where she had last danced in March 1914, ‘which rather haunted one with memories of all those one knew now dead’ as she noted.11 With the war over, preparations could nevertheless be made for the children to return to England to attend school – much like the young Kipling and countless others had done for generations.12

  But the end of the war did not bring peace. When the Wathens returned from the new year holiday in early 1919, Gerard found for the first time that the Indian students at the college were preoccupied by politics. In light of the fact that the Indian National Congress was to hold its next annual meeting at Amritsar in December, the principal went out of his way to talk to his students and ‘explain’ the recent colonial legislation – especially the much-maligned Rowlatt Act which, according to Melicent, was ‘the present cry taken up by the Seditionists’.13 The Wathens were certainly not the only ones to become aware of a heightened sense of tension, and Rosamond Napier, the wife of the Governor of Sindh, Henry Staveley Lawrence, noted how:

  A vague uneasiness is troubling everything, and underground unrest, a communal tension. Talk of the Rowlatt Bill still haunts the Club, the Gymkhana; it is on everybody’s tongue, whether they have the first idea about it or not. The Rowlatt Bill is in the air. It appears to be quite innocuous, but Indians have suddenly discovered the value of propaganda. They are spreading abroad that meetings of more than two or three people are forbidden by Government, and other things like that, equally untrue. Henry calls meetings, makes speeches, and pamphlets are issued from the printing press in our grounds . . . but there is general uneasiness, unrest . . .14

  While the British were introducing the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms in the aftermath of the war, they were at the same time preparing parallel legislation, which, for all intents and purposes, was completely contradictory and incompatible with the spirit of reform. This was partly due to the necessary political compromises between the British Government in Whitehall and the Government of India in Delhi. While Montagu and other liberals in the imper--ial metropole were working towards the implementation of reforms, much of the British administration in India was deeply concerned about safeguarding the status and security of the Raj.15

  The received wisdom among colonial officials was that the threat posed by Indian revolutionaries during the First World War had only been defeated through emergency legislation. Despite the proclaimed centrality of rule of law in British colonial governance, the British in India made extensive use of special legislation for policing and surveillance – including the ‘Thuggee’ legislation of the 1830s and the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.16 A spate of piecemeal legislation followed the rise of revolutionary violence after 1907, but it was the outbreak of the First World War that provided the authorities with the opportunity and justification to enact additional emergency laws. Since Indian revolutionaries, in India and abroad, we
re actively colluding with the Germans, these measures focused in the first instance on migrants.17

  The cornerstone of the British war-time legislation was, however, the Defence of India Act of 1915.18 Similar to the Defence of the Realm Act passed in England, the Defence of India Act essentially entailed the suspension of the rule of law as a matter of emergency: colonial authorities were granted sweeping powers to crack down on any political activities that might be deemed dangerous, and suspects could be detained without trial or indefinitely imprisoned by special tribunals without juries. The freedom of the press was curtailed, and the scope for political activities, more generally, was significantly limited. The Punjab Government, and O’Dwyer personally, had lobbied the Government to pass the Defence of India Act by exaggerating the threat posed by the Ghadar movement and sensationalising ordinary rural crime, exacerbated by war-time food shortages, as revolutionary in nature.19 The British had, furthermore, kept the century-old Regulation III of 1818 on the statute book as a final resort: this allowed for the preventive deportation of people whose presence in India was deemed to pose a risk to the peace, again without trial. Although the regulation proved useful against revolutionaries and nationalists, the Government was wary of deploying a piece of legislation so evidently outdated and draconian.

  With the end of the war, however, the Defence of India Act – the emergency law which had supposedly saved the Raj – was set to expire. Six months after peace had been declared, all prisoners and internees held under its provisions would have to be released. Thousands of demobilised Indian soldiers would furthermore be returning from the fighting in Europe and elsewhere, and it was feared that they would make easy targets for agitators seeking to spread discontent. The British were accordingly faced by the prospect of India being flooded with political prisoners and disbanded soldiers, thus providing the perfect scenario for a revival of the revolutionary moment and conspiracies that had only just been suppressed. Having spent the previous four years armed with an extensive arsenal of emergency legislation that allowed not just for the internment of revolutionaries, but also the restriction of movement of troublesome politicians and checks against the ‘seditious’ press, the provincial governments and local officials were reluctant to relinquish these powers. Preparing for the end of the war became even more urgent in light of the imminent reforms, which promised to further weaken the ability of the Raj to govern through coercion. As one British official put it, ‘The more democratic the Government becomes the more fatal disorder is likely to be.’20 The Government of India already had an impressive array of emergency laws at its disposal, but these were deemed patchy, piecemeal, and ultimately unsatisfactory. Among those officials who opposed reforms, putting the executive branch of government on a stronger footing thus became essential and there was strong pressure to replace the war-time legislation with more permanent yet equally powerful tools of governance.21

  The British Government was thus faced by a dilemma. The continuation of emergency legislation was widely considered necessary to maintain control and defend the Raj. Yet, at the same time the British could not risk alienating Indian nationalist leaders, so many of whom had proclaimed their loyalty and rallied around the war effort. The result was the establishment of the Rowlatt Committee in December 1917, the findings of which were first published in its eponymous report in August 1918. The putative aim of the Committee was to assess the extent of ‘criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India’ and, more importantly, to identify the difficulties in dealing with such threats in order to ‘advise as to the legislation, if any, necessary to enable Government to deal effectively with them’.22 Since the perceived necessity for legislation was the very rationale for setting up the Committee in the first place, any pretence of an open inquiry was entirely perfunctory.23 The British officials involved were quite clear about this, privately stating that the real purpose of the report was to ‘convince the sober-minded majority of the [Indian] public of the gravity of the danger from the revolutionary conspiracy’.24 Ensuring that the positive impact of the reforms would not be completely undermined by the coterminous passing of new coercive legislation was another crucial aim. The Rowlatt Report was, in other words, little more than an elaborate piece of political showmanship aimed at providing the justification for the continuation of war-time measures. In Punjab and the United Provinces, the report was even issued in vernacular translations to ensure it was disseminated among, and accessible to, the local population.25

  Just over 300 pages long, the report presented a carefully crafted narrative of the threat of revolutionary nationalism.26 Throughout the report, revolutionary nationalism was referred to in pathological terms, as either a ‘poison’ or a ‘virus’ which spread through contagion. Like an outbreak of the plague, conspiracies and insurgency were conventionally believed to spread within the healthy body of loyal subjects and had to be cut away for the colonial state to survive.27 In colonial India, the pathological terminology had a long genealogy and had been particularly prevalent in the context of the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. While one historian described the rebel leader Nana Sahib and his retainers as ‘the germs of a cruel conspiracy’, George Malleson’s book, published in 1897, included a chapter on the escalation of the uprising, entitled simply ‘The Spread of the Epidemic’.28 The resurgence of anti-colonial violence after 1907 gave further impetus to this language. The Rowlatt Report, for instance, cited the assessment of one British judge in Bengal before the war: ‘The danger of a conspiracy like this lies not so much in its prospect of success as in its fruition. When once the poison has entered the system, it is impossible to say where it will break out or how far-reaching will be its effects.’29

  It should be obvious that such an assessment of the causes behind revolutionary nationalism prevented the British from recognising the genuine grievances, let alone political legitimacy, of such movements. The report’s description of the first revolutionaries was particularly telling: ‘They had no definite political aims, but were daring in the achievement of any outrage which they conceived could prove their hatred of the British or satisfy their desire to punish supposed oppression.’30 Opposition to British rule, in other words, supposedly stemmed from an innate hatred, caused by religious prejudice and fanaticism, rather than anything else, and the actions of revolutionaries were furthermore seen to be devoid of political aims.31 If anti-colonial nationalism was both irrational and chronic, it followed that the only remedy was indeed suppression. As might be expected, the Rowlatt Report never considered the possibility that the very nature of British rule in India might in and of itself be one of the reasons for growing anti-colonial sentiment.

  If the Indian population had no genuine grievances against the British, it followed that the root cause of anti-colonial movements originated in the propaganda and agitation of educated nationalists who relied on the local press to spread their dangerous ideas. Within the analysis presented by the report, the role of nationalist agitators, or ‘ringleaders’ as they were often referred to, became increasingly central to any attempt at suppressing anti-colonial movements. Quoting former Viceroy Minto, it was noted how ‘The seeds of wickedness have been sown amongst a strangely impressionable and imitative people – seeds that have been daily nurtured by a system of seditious writing and seditious speaking of unparalleled violence, vociferating to beguiled youth that outrage is the evidence of patriotism and its reward a martyr’s crown.’32 Whether in the form of political speeches, pamphlets and newspaper articles, words were accordingly identified as the contagion of Indian nationalism, which enabled agitators to rile up the ‘guileless’ masses. Indians, it was believed, would act unthinkingly, and often violently, under the influence of political agitation, especially when this was directed against the British.

  Rather than acknowledging any political agenda or actual grievances, the central strategy advocated in the Rowlatt Report was thus to either contain or physically remove Indian agitators so that they c
ould no longer wield their insidious powers. The logic of defeating anti-colonial movements by cutting off the snake’s head, as it were, was thus deeply embedded in the official colonial mindset – particularly in Punjab. This also accounts for the ambivalent way the British Government in India regarded Regulation III of 1818, since it provided exactly the means by which to deport troublesome leaders, as had indeed been the case in 1872 or 1907. The provisions were thus considered indispensable and yet at the same time it was not advisable for the British to retain a century-old piece of legislation for much longer. The Rowlatt Report recognised this and noted how ‘in a province like the Punjab it may be absolutely necessary, in order to avert the gravest danger, to prevent the entry of certain persons coming even from peaceable provinces. Such persons are those whose presence within the province is calculated in the opinion of the Local Government to give rise to or encourage criminal conspiracy.’33 British fears of Indian nationalism were accordingly not merely about acts of violence but were as much about those who were perceived to be able to mobilise the Indian population and thus indirectly cause violence. The restriction of nationalist politics and the surveillance of sedition was virtually indistinguishable.