Jallianwala Bagh

Dying they raised slogans for change

Nirupama Dutt

Popular patriotic singer Pradeep sang to the refrain of Vande Matram showing children the famous sites of the country's freedom movement. At Amritsar in Punjab, the song soared with: ``Jallianwala Bagh yeh dekho, Yahan chali thhi goliyan, Marane waale bol rahe thhe, Inquilab ki boliyan. (Look here is Jallianwala Bagh where bullets rained; Dying, the people raised slogans for change).''
An outsider may just miss the spot in Amritsar, located close to the Golden Temple, for the narrow entrance is sandwiched between tall commercial buildings. Down the narrow lane is a sign saying this was the passage through which General Dyer led his troops and the guns.
It was on the sacred day of the Baisakhi festival, April 13, 1919, that some 25,000 men, women and children gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh, then a debris-littered compound.
The occasion was a peaceful public meeting held to assert the right of the people to assemble and protest which was curbed by the martial law imposed by then Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, Michael O' Dwyer. Many just came in after offering their prayers at the Golden Temple.
Soon after the meeting started, General Dyer and his troops arrived with the guns. As the machine guns started raining bullets, the dead piled upon the dead. There were tall buildings on four sides of the enclosure and the only exit was blocked by guns. The result was a stampede.
Women and children were crushed under the feet of those trying to escape the firing. Many jumped into the well and a few sought shelter behind the small temple in the enclosure. As many as 379 people were killed on the spot and three times more wounded to die later. As many as 120 bodies were recovered from the well into which people jumped to escape the bullets.
General Dyer in his report to the General Staff Division on August 25, 1919, stated: ``I fired and continued to fire till the crowd dispersed...if more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect....''
This was not all. Amritsar was put under curfew. The water and electricity supplies were cut off. People were flogged in public and made to crawl at the spot where two British women had been assaulted during the uprising against the Rowlatt Act.
The events which led to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh began with the imposition of the repressive Rowlatt Act. The Act pronounced all trials in camera and consideration of evidence was not admissible. The provincial governments were delegated extraordinary powers to search, arrest and demand security among other things.
Mahatma Gandhi who had assumed the leadership of the Congress Party drafted a pledge asking the people to resort to civil disobedience of these laws. He called for a hartal throughout the country on April 6, 1919. The complete success of the hartal in Lahore and Amritsar unnerved O' Dwyer.
The movement in Amritsar was led by Dr Saiffudin Kitchlew and Dr Satya Pal. They were arrested and deported, Gandhi who was on the way to Punjab was also arrested. Infuriated the people of Amritsar came out on the streets and clashed with military pickets. On April 11, O'Dwyer issued a proclamation prohibiting meetings and processions in the town.
The city was handed over to General Dyer. An article in The Tribune recorded how the tide turned against the British following this: ``The holocaust at Jallianwala Bagh showed off the Britishers at their worst.
They made us crawl on our bellies and shot us down as wild pariah dogs. That incidentally put a nail in the coffin of the British Empire in India. We had indeed come to the parting of ways.''
The whole world was shocked by this massacre of innocent people. Renouncing his knighthood, Rabindranath Tagore stated in a letter of protest to the Viceroy on May 31, 1919: ``The time has come when the the badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings...''
The result of the bloodbath was soon evident. Horrified by the presentation of a siropa (robe of honour) to General Dyer by the priest of the Golden Temple, the Akalis launched the Gurdwara Reform Movement to guard the sanctity of the religious places.
The Bharat Naujawan Sabha which was to produce revolutionary patriots like Chandra Shekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh was also launched then. And Gandhi was accepted as a leader by all Indians. Percinol Landol writing for The Daily Telegraph of London put it very succinctly: ``It must not be forgotten that when at Amritsar General Dyer crushed a rebellion, he paved the way for the undisputed supremacy of Gandhi.''
Dyer was unrepentant when strictures were passed against him by the British Parliament, but he died a lonely man in 1928. Revenge was to come some 21 years later when Micheal O' Dwyer who had imposed the martial law in Punjab was shot dead in Caxton Hall in London by Udham Singh.
At the time of the holocaust Udham Singh was 20. Udham Singh came under the influence of the Ghadar movement and on March 13, 1940, under the assumed name of Mohammad Singh Azad shot dead O' Dwyer. Udham Singh was sentenced to death and executed on July 31, 1940.
The Martyrs' Gallery at Jallianwala Bagh displays with honour a portrait of Udham Singh with his famous lines from the trial in England: ``What greater honour can be bestowed on me than death for the sake of my motherland?'' The outrage which was felt by every Indian was thus expressed by Udham Singh whose assumed name suggested that he was representing the secular tradition.
Freedom struggle revisited
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919 Jallianwala Bagh is the worst memory of the British rule. Almost eight decades after it shocked the world, Nirupama Dutt travels to the spot to reconstruct the massacre which mirrored British brutality and the undying spirit of freedom.
From the files
*The Congress boycotted the Inquiry Committee appointed by the Government. It set up its own committee comprising Mahatma Gandhi, M.R.Jayakar, C.R.Das and Abbas Tyabji. The findings showed that there was no conspiracy to overthrow the government in Punjab, no reasonable cause to justify the imposition of the martial law and the Jallianwala massacre was a calculated piece of inhumanity towards innocent and unarmed people.
* The British Government in India was keen to turn the Jallianwala Bagh into a cloth market so that all traces of the incident were wiped out. Nationalist leaders, however, formed a committee headed by Madan Mohan Malviya. The land was purchased from the Jallewala Sardars at a very hiked up price of Rs 5.65 lakh. The money was gathered by an international appeal for a memorial issued by Mahatma Gandhi.
* The upkeep of Jallianwala has been with a Mukherjee family of Bengal. S.C. Mukherjee, an associate of Malviya, was appointed the first secretary of the Trust. It subsequently went to his son and now to his grandson S. Mukherjee. ``It is a close emotional bond. We belong to this place,'' says Mukherjee.
Indian Express, April 1997