Enduring scar

100 years later, Jallianwala Bagh pain lingers

British Prime Minister Theresa May came close but a long-awaited formal apology from the British establishment was not forthcoming. A few days before the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, she described the tragedy as a “shameful scar on British Indian history” in a statement in Parliament. She reminded MPs that the Queen had described the tragedy in 1997 as a “distressing example of our past history with India”. The British political establishment’s somewhat equivocal stance on Jallianwala Bagh is telling. Ms May’s predecessor David Cameron paid obeisance at the Golden Temple and described the tragedy as “deeply shameful”. He reminded us that no less than Winston Churchill, that obdurate champion of empire and unabashed racist, had described the incident as an “outrage”. But Mr Cameron declined a formal apology, saying it would not be the right thing to reach back into history and “seek out things you can apologise for”. In a way, he is right: Jallianwala Bagh is just one of the many, many atrocities that the British committed against the Indian people in the course of nearly 200 years.  

It is unclear whether Ms May’s April 10 statement made any impression on the British people, who are coping with the traumas of their own attempt to throw off the supposed colonial yoke of the European Union. Some 379 people were killed (including a six-month-old baby) and over a thousand injured — these are the official, probably understated, estimates — after Colonel Reginald Dyer had ordered a platoon of soldiers to fire 1,650 rounds into a peaceful crowd in a 150 x 200-yard piece of wasteland. Colonial history as taught in British schools tends to gloss over the true nature of British colonial rule. Small wonder, then, that tour guides say British tourists often learn of the tragedy when they visit Amritsar for the first time.

Dyer defended his actions to an enquiry committee, set up at Indian leaders’ insistence, as the product of his commitment to “duty”. What duty? Political unrest had erupted in India after the passage of the notorious Rowlatt Act, which extended war-time restrictions on civil liberties. Punjab was one of the epicentres of the often violent protests, and the provincial governor, Michael O’Dwyer, arch-imperialist to the core, imposed the Act with particular zeal, doubling down when a mob attacked a British woman. Fearing a reprise of the Revolt of 1857, he imposed the notorious “crawling order” and public whippings in Amritsar. Dyer proved a willing and blunt instrument of the governor’s oppression. He was eventually dismissed from the army on half pay. But many Raj hardliners sympathised with his argument and believed he had been a victim of injustice. Some £26,000 was raised in his support (no surprise Rudyard Kipling, that approving chronicler of empire, contributed £10). 

In India, Jallianwala Bagh is considered a turning point in the Indian national movement. Dyer's cold-blooded mass murder shattered trust in India's colonial masters. It underlined the basic truth that the many facets of modernity that the British introduced in the sub-continent — the judicial system, the railways, English education and so on — were but by-products of a vast institution of oppression. That realisation caused poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore to renounce his knighthood and turned the loyalist leaders of the Indian National Congress — especially Gandhi — into what author Nigel Collett, Dyer’s biographer, called “implacable nationalists”. Today, therefore, Jallianwalla Bagh stands as an unambiguous monument to colonial oppression. But a well-curated centenary exhibition at the nearby partition museum suggests other messages for modern, democratic India embedded in that tragedy. The most nuanced of them, possibly, is that development of the kind the British undoubtedly bequeathed to India can never be an alibi for the destruction of civil liberties.