Amritsar Massacre: Response to the Gandhi and Indian Nationalist Movement

However, the situation in India is still not convincing enough to justify Dyer’s actions. The prevailing ideas of paternalism and racial attitudes in British India shaped Dyer’s actions should be self-evident, which could be said about the policies and practices within the empire and therefore lacks explanatory purchase. The causes of violence cannot be located in the circumstances of its enactment, and describing the sequence of events leaves an inaccurate impression that the massacre was in response to the Gandhi and Indian nationalist movement which was viewed as a threat.

The simple narrative of events which culminated in the rioting of 10 April has frequently served as justification for the massacre. An article, “By an Englishwoman” in Blackwood’s Magazine for April 1920, serves as an eye-witness account of the riots of 10 April and the crowded, insanitary, and serverless conditions suffered by the European women and children and concluded that ‘General Dyer’s action alone saved them’. There is no explanation, yet it is perceived to be self-evident by the author. Author Alfred Draper achieves the same effect by his liberal use of elaborate prose: the ‘mobs’ were ‘frenzied’ and ‘half-crazed’, their cries ‘like the howling of wolves’. However, it was the actions of the British, from the disregard of ‘due process’ in Rowlatt to the arrest and deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal and the initial British firing at the bridges which had provoked Indian retaliation, where far more Indians than Europeans were killed or wounded on 10 and 13 April. Violence by British and Indians is not equivalent as India is represented as a different moral universe. Fein has pointed out the social distancing fundamental to British life and rule of India which has been used for the legitimation of the actions of Dyer, enabling their crimes into moral acts. According to the mutual obligation between rulers and ruled, Dyer’s actions were defended by contemporaries just because he had acted morally or dutifully. However, morality in the context of governance and colonialism rested firmly on both moral relations and bullets. This is what permitted the moral defense of Dyer’s action.

The inability to make adequate sense of the violence at Amritsar is based on the assumption that Dyer reacted to the situation in front of him. Yet, while considering the primary material, the British threat assessment and Dyer’s own accounts of the situation bears hardly any resemblance to the real circumstances in Amritsar on 13 April. It might have been expected that Dyer and his fellow officers would have referred to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland or the unrest in Egypt, which were occurring at the same time as the unrest in Punjab, described as the ‘crisis of empire’- defined by the anti-colonial nationalism, the ‘Wilsonian Moment and the spread of pan-Islamism and Bolshevism.

To Dyer there seemed to be an imminent danger of revolt, as his force was being steadily and deliberately cut off from the outside world; rail and wires had been torn up overnight all around Amritsar, and more railway track was destroyed on the line to Lahore during the day, which derailed a goods train and forced communications with Lahore to be maintained by airplane. As he later put it:

I thought they were trying to isolate me and forces. Everything pointed out to the fact that there was a widespread movement, and that it was not confined to Amritsar alone. I look upon these men as rebels who were trying to isolate my forces and cut me off from other supplies.

Dyer believed it was his task to restore order. He arrived at Amritsar on 11 April determined to take charge and then spent two days patrolling the city reading out a proclamation banning all large gatherings. Dyer did not go to the Jallianwala Bagh, which there was no need to since it is just an empty space, but it should have been obvious that they needed to make an announcement near the Golden Temple where the maximum numbers were. Perhaps it was felt too sensitive a site to approach. To excuse these omissions Dyer later pleaded ignorance of the geography of the city:

I thought we had gone a long way. We went to many places. I do not know Amritsar very well. We did a great deal in the way of reading out the Proclamation, and I understood that, after I had finished, perhaps a little more was going to be done in that way. I thought I had done quite enough. I confess I do not know how far we had penetrated into the city. I do not know the city very well.

Yet Dyer had visited the city before and seen its many sights, so he must have realized that he had missed the Golden Temple. The excuse was not available to the Deputy Commissioner and the local police, whilst making this plea was open to him. The Minority Hunter Report estimated that only between 8 000 and 10 000 people could have heard it, less than 10 percent of the population, not counting the outsiders who were then in the city for the Baisakhi fair. Sunday 13 April was Baisakhi Day and marked the beginning of one of the most important religious festivals in Punjab. The roads approaching the city were thronged with thousands of pilgrims from outlying districts, who descended on the city to bathe in ‘the pool of immortality’ and worship in the Golden Temple. Equally larger numbers came in for the horse and cattle fairs which figured prominently in the festival which lasted for several days.

Historian Raja Ram suggests that the Amritsar massacre was a premeditated plan that was carefully designed in advance and executed on the appointed day, by the British bureaucracy and not the result of a decision taken by an individual (General Dyer) on the spur of the moment. Although historian Andrew Roberts argues that if Dyer premeditated a massacre, he would have brought more than 50 riflemen with him. Yet the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh had no firearms, but instead, few had lathis which Dyer’s staff officer Captain Tommy Briggs feared that it could have spelled disaster. It is revealed by Dyer’s detailed preparations that he believed in the possibility of the meeting from the time he was first told of it, and acted on that belief. As he later said: ‘I personally had ample time to consider the nature of the painful duty I might be faced with.’ Therefore, Dyer’s plans were not made on the spur of the moment. His perception of the purpose of his operations in Amritsar had not changed since the day before. On the contrary, it is likely that the encounter with the defiant crowds in the streets, had reinforced his view. The nature of his opponents made them difficult to distinguish and attack, but Dyer was sure he would be destroying and punishing a rebellion. As Annie Dyer, who had heard this from her husband, explained it later.