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By Root 1262 0

Hindu nationalist Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1917. He was right, for the war had shown Indians not only that there was nothing particularly special about a European culture which settled its differences by machine-gunning men as they floundered around in the mud, but had also revealed the extent of Britain’s dependence on India for the defence of its empire: by the closing stages of Allenby’s campaign in Palestine, one-third of his cavalry and two-thirds of his infantry were drawn from the Indian army. Indians held King’s Commissions in the army and had been told they were fighting for freedom against tyranny. Indian industries had grown to meet the war effort and Indians had filled jobs once performed by Europeans who had been sent to the front. The entire war had been presented as a valiant defence against the menacing power of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman alliance. Yet at its end Indians had had to watch as the victorious imperial powers blithely carved up the remnants of the enemy empires, while seeming to believe that India might remain a British possession for ever. (For diplomatic consumption, this approach was later dressed up by Lloyd George in the language of paternal protection: ‘if Britain withdrew her strong hand, nothing would ensue except division, strife, conflict and anarchy’.) Before the war, the Indian National Congress had been a cause for the Indian chattering classes. Soon it had a figurehead (in the intensely charismatic Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned to India from South Africa in 1915), an organization and an ideology. Indian labour was increasingly joining the first trades unions, and Islamic opposition looking for a focus for its disgruntlement. ‘The people are restless’, said a deputy commissioner in 1918, ‘and discontented and ripe for the revolution.’ The British attempted to buy off the discontent by ‘helping’ India towards the patently inadequate goal of ‘responsible government’ within the British Empire. It was never going to be enough.

And then came Amritsar.

In 1919, the city, near the border with present-day Pakistan (then part of British India), had a population of under 200,000 people – Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. On 13 April it was more crowded than usual because it was Baisakhi, the Sikh New Year, and the city contained the sacred site of the Golden Temple. Three days before the festival, rampaging mobs had murdered five Englishmen, set buildings on fire and left a female missionary for dead. According to official reports, the local Commissioner requested the army to ‘send an officer who is not afraid to act’. This turned out to be Reginald Dyer, a grey-haired, blue-eyed general, whose brick-red complexion testified to a lifetime military career in the subcontinent. Dyer took the train to Amritsar, where he issued a proclamation banning public meetings and imposing a curfew: anyone disobeying the rules risked being shot. In the days before efficient mass media, informing the population of their new conditions of life was an obvious problem. Dyer, meanwhile, worried that his forces in Amritsar were being steadily cut off from the world, as the railway line outside the town was sabotaged. So, on the morning of the 13th, he formed a column of soldiers and marched them about the city, stopping at nineteen public places and road junctions, where his proclamation was read out in various languages, with printed copies also being distributed. The order banned gatherings of more than four men in one place at one time and warned that anyone seen on the streets after eight in the evening was liable to be shot.

But that afternoon news reached the general of a public meeting to be held at the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed patch of ground about 200 yards long, close to the Sikh Golden Temple. It was surrounded by low walls and the backs of houses, and the main entrance was only wide enough for people to enter two abreast. During the afternoon it steadily filled with men, women and children, although there are no indications they were in an aggressive or even especially agitated mood.