The
Amritsar Massacre
The Untold Story of One Fateful Day
Nick
Lloyd
London: I.B. Tauris, 2011
Hardcover. xxxiii-264 p. ISBN 978-1848857230.
£22.50
Reviewed by Mélanie Torrent
Université Paris-Diderot
Jallianwala Bagh,
Amritsar, 13 April 1919—Following a ban on public gatherings, proclaimed in the
city earlier that day, and on the order of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer,
British troops fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition over a period of almost 10
minutes, leaving at least 1,200 wounded and countless dead in the Indian crowd:
379 according to the official report, while the Indian National Congress
inquiry put the estimate at 1,000 and the current plaque at Amritsar
commemorates 2,000 martyrs. As unrest mounted, martial law was declared on 16
April 1919 and remained in force until August. A fateful marker in Indian and
imperial history, the Amritsar
massacre remains a potent memory in contemporary Anglo-Indian relations, as
shown by the debates surrounding the first visit to the site by a British Prime
Minister, David Cameron in 2013. While Nick Lloyd acknowledges that Amritsar
was a “deeply sad and tragic event”, and indeed a “massacre”, he contends that
it was “not an example of premeditated imperial murder, but rather the result
of a series of unfortunate and unexpected events that came together one
afternoon with devastating results” [203]. In The Amritsar Massacre : The Untold Story of One Fateful Day,
Lloyd sets out to prove this very point, taking a clear stand against the
history and politics that have turned Amritsar into the epitome of a
systematically brutal British rule which, he contends, did not exist. Central
to this is the assessment of what lay behind Dyer’s order to open fire on 13
April—and, therefore, the re-investigation of the inquiries into Amritsar in
1919-1920 as well as the re-assessment of subsequent historical
interpretations.
Prominent in
the history of India’s
struggle for independence, Dyer’s actions were scrutinised and criticised at
the time. He was the object of fierce debates in the British press and the
British Parliament, and eventually dismissed from office in March 1920. The
report of the Hunter Committee, published in May 1920, stated that strong
action had been required against what was perceived as an Indian rebellion in
the Punjab in 1919. But it criticised military
behaviour under martial law and considered that on the particular issue of the
Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer should have given the crowd more warning before the
firing began and that the firing should have been stopped earlier. A “gross
betrayal of British officials” in the eyes of most die-hards, the Hunter Report
was no more than “official whitewash” for the Indian National Congress, who had
published its own, far more damning report in March, after a ten-month inquiry
by a specially appointed sub-committee. Dyer, as Gandhi put it, had simply
tried to “kill the soul of a nation” [132]. Lloyd’s re-interpretation, in The Amritsar Massacre, focuses on three
elements: whether there was a rebellion in the Punjab;
whether there is evidence that Dyer premeditated his action; and who the crowd
really was.
As Lloyd
emphasises, “the speakers in the Jallianwala Bagh do not seem to have been
inciting the crowd to armed revolt or urging them to rush towards the railway
station and cantonment and finish off the British” [168]; they did not have
firearms; there were “no hardened terrorist cells behind the violence” [127] in
the Punjab. The events of 1919 were not a rebellion or mutiny, as the Sepoy
rising of 1857 had been. But this, he argues, does not mean that the British
response, i.e. the decision to open
fire, was “unjustified and disproportionate” [127]. The political context in
the province, Lloyd argues, shows that strong action was seen to be necessary. In
post-war Punjab, which had provided the bulk of India’s troops during the world
conflict, agitation had mounted on a number of counts: rising prices, anger at
the fate of Turkey among the Muslim community, and the Rowlatt Act of March
1919, which extended the provisions of the Defence of India Act (1915) into
peacetime, allowing for the arrest and detention without trial of political
suspects. Even before 6 April, a “Black Sunday” of strikes in protest at the
Rowlatt Act, Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha, non-violent non-cooperation, had
resonated profoundly in the province. On 11 April, Dyer had arrived in Amritsar in a fraught
situation, after the arrest of two of the most respected local leaders of the
Satyagraha movement, Dr Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, and as British troops had
already used firearms against protesters. In the province, the fact that
strikers focused on transport and communication, coupled with the arrival of
Amanullah Khan to power in Afghanistan,
triggering the third Afghan War in May 1919, reinforced the sense of a
generalised rebellion and external anti-British support. The broader context
provided by Lloyd, however, also demonstrates numerous instances of the use of
force by British troops. On 30 March in Delhi,
British troops had already fired on a crowd of young men who were gathering
support for a strike at the station and the Queen’s Gardens. In Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the confrontation between British troops and
popular mobilisation had left 28 Indians dead and 123 wounded. In Lahore on 11
April, British troops had killed one man and wounded another 28 when dispersing
the meeting held at the Hira Mandi near the Badshahi Mosque to discuss the
formation of a People’s Committee, which was seen as a distinct threat, as was
the creation of a danda fauj (“stick
army”) of Muslim artisans. Lloyd’s conclusions, in part, derive from his
assessment of the Indian nationalist movement in the late 1910s. He thus stresses
“the great amount of violence and brutality that [Gandhi’s Satyagraha] produced
and which was directed against the European population” [xxx] and states that
“Gandhi must take his share of responsibility” [36], even though he was never
the direct cause of the violence itself. Confused tactics and the violence of
non-violence, LLoyd argues, were key causes of unrest. Among historians, Lloyd is certainly
not alone in taking a critical approach to the politics of Gandhi. But in The Amritsar Massacre, these politics
are primarily analysed as one of the factors influencing the management of
empire—the rights to self-determination, liberty and freedom that agitated
peoples around the empires in 1919 remain peripheral in the investigation of
law and order.
In parallel, Lloyd
argues that there was no premeditation on the part of Dyer, who had never been
to the Jallianwala Bagh, and that the disaster rather resulted from confusion:
the crowd was much larger than he had expected and essentially composed of
Hindu men. Lloyd, in other words, contests the notion that women and children
were present in any significant numbers. He also rejects the idea that many in
the crowd came from outside the city, and argues that unrest in the province would
have made travel more difficult. The majority of the crowd, he concludes, most
likely knew about Dyer’s proclamation against public gatherings—although quite
how Dyer was able to ascertain this “when he first saw the crowd, which
seemingly confirmed his worst suspicions; that a crowd had gathered in defiance
of his orders and to challenge his authority” [181] is less clear. Lloyd also
underlines that Dyer himself was obviously confused in the wake of the firing
and his worst enemy in the inquiries that followed. When his initial reports
stressed his fear of an attack against his troops, he emphasised the need to
produce “a moral and widespread effect” [173] on 25 August and replied to one
of the Indian members of the Hunter Committee, that he would probably have used
armoured cars had he been able to. And yet again later, he confided that he
“never knew there was no way out” [182] of the Jallianwala Bagh, preventing the
crowd from dispersing, and that he had not “had a night’s sleep since that
happened. I keep on seeing it all over again” [182]. Whatever conclusions one
may draw on Dyer’s motives, Lloyd’s study certainly heightens the sense that 13
April 1919 in Amritsar
was one, indeed, of the most desperately sad tragedies of contemporary history.
Finally, Lloyd
assesses the aftermath of Dyer’s action in the province. The “high-water mark
of the rebellion” [106]—in the words of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the
Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab—was 14 April but, Lloyd argues, this cannot
be taken as proof that violence had increased as a result of Dyer’s actions:
according to O’Dwyer, once “the news had penetrated over the Province, it was
not necessary to fire another shot” [107]. And yet, Lloyd concludes that there
was no overall attempt by the British “to ‘terrorise’ the civilian population” [xxx].
He argues that the use of aircraft to bomb parts of Gujranwala “was indicative of the desperation
and fear that gripped the British authorities” and “was not something that the
authorities had ever planned or wanted to do” [115]; the infamous “crawling
order” was “insensitive and misguided” but not “evidence of a brutal and
widespread policy of British repression” [136]; the “fancy punishments” that
accompanied martial law (the battery of humiliations imposed on the Indian
population) were often cancelled by the military hierarchy once they knew of
them. Martial law, he underlines, also involved more positive measures such as
those “that reduced prices and prevented the adulteration of milk” [148]. Lloyd
also reveals that O’Dwyer did attempt to mitigate some of the more brutal or
humiliating orders—including the crawling order—and his failure demonstrated to
the British Government the dangers of leaving the administration of martial law
entirely in the hands of the military. Lloyd’s choice of terms is rather
disconcerting at times, and his conclusions rather abrupt: Gandhi’s arrest is
presented as a “gentle” act [48]; in Delhi, “[t]he police and military
response”, he writes, “was not disproportionate and at least one volley was
fired into the air above the heads of the protestors (with little effect)
before the authorities resorted to controlled firing” [34]; the most “striking”
thing about the “crawling order”, he also adds, is “its insignificance. It was
in force along one lane for five days between the hours of 6 am and 8 pm and
only 50 people crawled along it” [136]. There was, certainly, “a fluid
situation in which the British Raj was introducing a variety of reforms” [xxviii].
But what reform there was fell short of the aspirations of large numbers of
Indian nationalists: there were immediate criticisms against the diarchy
introduced by the Government of India Act of 1919, while the Rowlatt Act itself
was only repealed in March 1922.
As compelling
new research argues that brutality was precisely at the heart of the empire, with
another massacre, at Hola Camp in Kenya in 1959, being re-assessed as far more
symptomatic of British practice than had previously been thought, Lloyd’s book
seems to be driving in the other direction. It is, as he puts it, a
re-interpretation of “the British response to the violence of 1919” [xxxiii],
which tries to uncover the intentions and motives behind British actions in the
Punjab in 1919. Doing so without appearing to
justify imperial repression or downplay its tragic outcomes is an arduous task.
The evidence presented by Lloyd may not lead his readers to believe thatAmritsar was but “one”
fateful day. But it certainly demonstrates the uncertainties facing all foreign
occupiers, the complexity of military / civilian relations, the dilemmas
of crowd control and, most importantly, the flawed evidence on which
life-and-death judgements can be made. Lloyd’s book, ultimately, shows that
beyond its complex history, the Amritsar massacre remains one of the most politically
charged events of the last century.
