The massacre shamed Britain and helped India win independence.
It has been a century to the day since 1,650 bullets were fired non-stop on unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh, a bloody result of the imperial fear of the natives. The questions of what led to the dreadful killings of hundreds of innocents and how the mass slaughter was dealt with afterwards have pushed researchers and historians to explore the colonial psyche and come up with fresh insights on understanding the dynamics of colonial brutality.
In his rigorously-researched Jallianwala Bagh, historian Kim Wagner, whose earlier work includes The Skull of Alam Begh, situates the massacre in the Empire’s mindset of retribution and the need to silence growing native discontent. The other book being reviewed here, Kishwar Desai’s Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story wades through official and counter-narratives to provide a nuanced account of the shocking incident. Both books – among the first to be released in time for the centenary; other notable titles include a translation of Khooni Vaisakhi by Nanak Singh, Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin and Rakshanda Jalil’s Jallianwala Bagh; Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry – help us gain a better understanding of this seminal moment in India’s history.
While Wagner maintains the historian’s carefully detached tone as he notes the unjustifiable use of brute power to stop purported sedition from spreading to the countryside, Desai provides a passionate reconstruction of the events leading to the dreadful day, including the deep-rooted racism of the rulers.
What is the value of revisiting something that happened 100 years ago other than to cause emotional discomfort leading to nationalistic posturing, the reader might ask. No amount of denouncing and condemnation of the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone-faced Brigadier General Reginald Dyer can erase this incident which continues to make little sense even in the context of the brutal violence of the imperialism prevalent today. The Lieutenant Governor of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer was in favour of exemplary terror to silence discontent among the natives against the dysfunctional state and that Brigadier General Dyer deliberately picked Gurkha and Baluch soldiers to shoot into the crowd, thus demonstrating that the Empire would persist ruthlessly with its divide-and-rule policy to retain power and subjugate the colonised.
It is difficult to be objective while drawing lessons from the incident. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre offers a two-way learning process, however, by promoting a profound understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them. Following the archival grain, Wagner reconstructs events not simply as they happened, but as they were experienced by different people at that time. Jallianwala Bagh reveals how different experiences were treated differently and in the process, helps the reader to understand how violence worked, or was thought to work. In the end, it resulted in a mistrust of the colonial state.
Desai imagines the cries of men, women and children who lay dying at the Bagh. “History belongs primarily to the victor, but only as long as we allow it,” she writes. She believes the massacre was not spontaneous as has often been made out. It was carefully planned. If this had not been the case, Miss Sherwood’s near-death experience at the hands of native rioters on April 10 would not have been brutally reprimanded, and Mrs Ratan Devi would not have had to spend the night of April 13 grieving over the dead body of her husband.
In the centenary year of the massacre, both books pay tribute to thousands of those who were humiliated, tortured and killed under the pretext of martial law. As the memories of the dastardly act are revoked, the call for a public apology by the British has resurfaced once more. Did the British do enough to detoxify the issue? Winston Churchill called it “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation”. David Cameron, who was the first British prime minister to visit the monument, denounced the massacre and called it a deeply shameful incident in British history, as Churchill did, while shying away from apologizing for the event. He said, instead, that the UK “stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world”.
Addressing this lingering concern, Wagner wonders if an apology will do any good as both those who suffered, and those who perpetuated the crime are no longer alive. Such a take on the massacre may not appeal to everyone but it also goes without saying that the sacrifice of thousands at Jallianwala Bagh was not a waste. The massacre shamed Britain and helped India win independence.
But the ways of colonial justice were perverted indeed: while Udham Singh was hanged for his revenge killing of the former lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, General Dyer, the chief perpetrator of the crime, was never convicted. He got away with genocide.
It has been a century to the day since 1,650 bullets were fired non-stop on unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh, a bloody result of the imperial fear of the natives. The questions of what led to the dreadful killings of hundreds of innocents and how the mass slaughter was dealt with afterwards have pushed researchers and historians to explore the colonial psyche and come up with fresh insights on understanding the dynamics of colonial brutality.
 |
| Jallianwala Bagh by Kim Wagner Penguin/Viking, New Delhi Extent: 323, Price. Rs 599. |
While Wagner maintains the historian’s carefully detached tone as he notes the unjustifiable use of brute power to stop purported sedition from spreading to the countryside, Desai provides a passionate reconstruction of the events leading to the dreadful day, including the deep-rooted racism of the rulers.
What is the value of revisiting something that happened 100 years ago other than to cause emotional discomfort leading to nationalistic posturing, the reader might ask. No amount of denouncing and condemnation of the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone-faced Brigadier General Reginald Dyer can erase this incident which continues to make little sense even in the context of the brutal violence of the imperialism prevalent today. The Lieutenant Governor of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer was in favour of exemplary terror to silence discontent among the natives against the dysfunctional state and that Brigadier General Dyer deliberately picked Gurkha and Baluch soldiers to shoot into the crowd, thus demonstrating that the Empire would persist ruthlessly with its divide-and-rule policy to retain power and subjugate the colonised.
 |
| Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 by Kishwar Desai Context/Westland, New Delhi Extent: 257, Price. Rs 699. |
Desai imagines the cries of men, women and children who lay dying at the Bagh. “History belongs primarily to the victor, but only as long as we allow it,” she writes. She believes the massacre was not spontaneous as has often been made out. It was carefully planned. If this had not been the case, Miss Sherwood’s near-death experience at the hands of native rioters on April 10 would not have been brutally reprimanded, and Mrs Ratan Devi would not have had to spend the night of April 13 grieving over the dead body of her husband.
In the centenary year of the massacre, both books pay tribute to thousands of those who were humiliated, tortured and killed under the pretext of martial law. As the memories of the dastardly act are revoked, the call for a public apology by the British has resurfaced once more. Did the British do enough to detoxify the issue? Winston Churchill called it “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation”. David Cameron, who was the first British prime minister to visit the monument, denounced the massacre and called it a deeply shameful incident in British history, as Churchill did, while shying away from apologizing for the event. He said, instead, that the UK “stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world”.
Addressing this lingering concern, Wagner wonders if an apology will do any good as both those who suffered, and those who perpetuated the crime are no longer alive. Such a take on the massacre may not appeal to everyone but it also goes without saying that the sacrifice of thousands at Jallianwala Bagh was not a waste. The massacre shamed Britain and helped India win independence.
But the ways of colonial justice were perverted indeed: while Udham Singh was hanged for his revenge killing of the former lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, General Dyer, the chief perpetrator of the crime, was never convicted. He got away with genocide.
First published in The Hindustan Times, issue dated April 13, 2019.
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