Of Nair, Dyer, O'Dwyer and Empire

From William Cosby to Anil Ambani; Arun Jaitley to Melania Trump; Nusli Wadia to M J Akbar: The world of libel, slander and defamation has captivated and depleted people, depending on whether they are the audience witnessing the divulgence of lurid details or are plaintiffs and defendants trying to prove the other as infestations of moral turpitude, pedlars of malice and embodiments of villainy. Pre-independent India was witness to one such case, which is the subject of Raghu and Pushpa Palat’s book The Case That Shook the Empire. 

The book focuses on the famous 1924 O’Dwyer vs Nair libel case in which the lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, sued former president of the Indian National Congress Chettur Sankaran Nair for holding him responsible for atrocities in Punjab including the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The author is Nair’s great grandson. The book is Mr Palat’s first attempt at chronicling history. For an author who has written books on tax planning and investor strategies, this must have been a challenging task. But both Raghu and co-author Pushpa Palat manage to produce a book studded with anecdotes about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and other historical events of the time. It is a delectable compilation of titbits about Nair’s personal life and the events that unfolded inside and outside the London courtroom where the trial lasted for over two years.

Mr Palat depicts his great grandfather as a typical “Nair” from Kerala —trained in martial arts, a man of pride and occasional arrogance, a lawyer with an aversion to Gandhian notions of non-violence and an instinctive repugnance for the British sense of superiority over dark-skinned Indians. Mr Palat relates one noteworthy example of Nair’s disposition, which occurred at the residence of O’Dwyer’s — the very man who would drag him to court a few years later. O’Dwyer invited Nair for tea while the latter was visiting Lahore in 1916. O’Dwyer’s dog affectionately approached Nair but Nair made his displeasure apparent at the “intrusion”. This offended O’Dwyer’s wife who commented on the hypocrisy of Indian culture — propagating the concept of kindness to all living creatures but loving dogs half as much the British do. His great grandfather’s reaction to Lady O’Dwyer is described by Palat as follows: “Nair rudely and rather cruelly replied that this was because, while the English were nearer to dogs in their evolution, Indians had in their 5,000 year old history moved further away. British politeness, presumably, prevented the O’Dwyers from responding to such uncalled for, discourteous and ill-mannered behaviour on part of their guest.”

While much of the book describes Nair and British policies preceding the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre and its consequences, it is left to two chapters at the end of the book to do justice to its title of describing “the case that shook the Empire”. These chapters that cover O’Dwyer’s defamation suit against Nair and the actual trial are more riveting than other parts where Mr Palat reproduces portions of Indian history that could well be confined to middle school textbooks. Mr Palat writes that his great grandfather envisaged his book, Gandhi and Anarchy, as a dissenting dialogue between himself and Mahatama Gandhi where he would repudiate Gandhi’s idea of non-violence because “being a Nair, he could not accept a fight through non-violence.” In the book Nair implies that O’Dwyer was responsible for forceful military recruitments through torture, imposition of martial law, the Gujranwala bombings and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. 

O’Dwyer decided to sue Nair for defamation in London, asking for the book to be withdrawn from circulation in addition to damages of £1,000. A trial that is to decide whether Nair defamed O’Dwyer transforms into a vindication of General Reginald Dyer’s actions at Amritsar on the fateful Baisakhi day of 1919. The chapters describe the inherent bias of the presiding judge, Henry McCardie, whose pre-conceived notions of Dyer’s righteousness of acting to save the British Empire often lead him to argue in favour of O’Dwyer. In the end, Nair loses the case.

Mr Palat describes the prejudices of the British judiciary and the trial impeccably, but he stumbles in his conclusions by falling prey to the distinctively Malayali mindset of divine retribution (which was evident after the 2018 floods when many highly educated Malayalis attributed the natural disaster to the Sabarimala court case that they believed invoked the wrath of god). There was no connection between the case and the afterlives of those involved and invoked in it; yet Mr Palat goes on to attribute the deaths of Dyer, O’Dwyer and McCardie to the trial. The last parts attributing the deaths of people as divine revenge for the injustice meted to his great-grandfather suggest superstitious balderdash that would have riled Nair’s intelligence had he read this part of his great-grandson’s book.

The Case That Shook the Empire

Raghu Palat & Pushpa Palat

Bloomsbury, Rs 499, 187 pages