Crimson Spring

Crimson Spring is a historical novel by Navtej Sarna, published by Aleph Book Company in 2022, set around the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 in Amritsar and its aftermath. Sarna tells the story through nine characters, British officials, Indian soldiers, revolutionaries and ordinary people, setting the day in Amritsar inside the wider history of Punjab, the First World War, the Ghadar movement and the Indian freedom struggle. The novel was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature and for the Dublin Literary Award, and it won the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2025.

About the book

The facts of the day at the novel's centre are set out on the JCB Prize page, and Sarna has said he kept the historical events and facts as they were while using fictional characters to portray the experience of people living through the period. On 13 April 1919 about twenty five thousand unarmed Indians had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, an open area enclosed by the high walls of flat roofed houses in a densely populated part of Amritsar. Many were listening to speakers denouncing the Rowlatt Act, which had recently been imposed on the country, while others, including several children, were there to rest and meet friends. A little after five in the evening a detachment of soldiers led by Brigadier General R. E. H. Dyer entered the Bagh and, without warning the crowd to disperse, Dyer ordered his troops to open fire. At least 1,650 rounds were fired. Several hundred died and several hundred more were injured, in an act condemned by Indians universally and shocking even to many Britons.

What is Crimson Spring about?

Crimson Spring is about how one afternoon in Amritsar changed the lives that touched it, and through them the future of Punjab. Its nine points of view include the men who ordered and defended the shooting, Lieutenant Governor Michael O'Dwyer and General Dyer himself; the soldier Kirpal Singh, who stands for the Indian ranks of the empire's army; and the revolutionary Udham Singh, whose own story runs forward from the Bagh to its famous aftermath. Through the character Sucha Singh the novel also deals with the Ghadar movement, the revolutionary network of Punjabis abroad, placing the events in Amritsar within the wider history of Punjab and the independence movement. No single character owns the truth of the day: the innocent and the guilty, the powerful and the powerless, each carry a part of it, and the novel's argument is built from the spaces between their accounts.

Themes: empire, memory and the cost of colonialism

The JCB citation calls the novel not just a powerful, unsettling look at a barbarous act but a wider meditation on the costs of colonialism and on the sacrifices and heroism of ordinary men and women at a time of great cruelty and injustice. The Tribune's review, summed up by Wikipedia, praised the way the historical account is combined with the grief, trauma and anger of the characters, and noted the novel's treatment of the changes then taking place in Punjab's political and social life, and of the Ghadar movement's place in the freedom struggle. Memory is the second theme. Jallianwala Bagh is remembered in Punjab not as a date but as a wound carried by families, and a novel that returns to it a century later, through invented lives laid carefully over documented fact, is an act of memory as much as of history. The crimson of the title is the spring of 1919 itself: Vaisakhi season in Amritsar, turned to blood.

The author

Navtej Sarna was born in 1957 in Jalandhar, the son of the Punjabi writer Mohinder Singh Sarna and the Punjabi poet and translator Surjit Sarna. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1980 and served for more than thirty six years, as the Foreign Ministry's longest serving spokesperson, as Ambassador to Israel, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and finally Ambassador to the United States, retiring at the end of 2018. His earlier novels are We Weren't Lovers Like That (2003) and The Exile (2008), on the last Maharaja, Duleep Singh, and his non fiction includes The Book of Nanak and Indians at Herod's Gate, alongside the translations Zafarnama and Savage Harvest, his English versions of his father's Partition stories. Punjab's history under empire is the subject that runs through the whole shelf, and Crimson Spring is its fullest statement. His life is told in his people entry in this Kosh, created together with this page.

Reception and legacy

Crimson Spring was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022, with the prize's citation praising the way it brings the early decades of twentieth century Punjab back to life, and it was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, whose nominating library made the same point in a sentence: the early decades of the 20th century in Punjab and its historical characters are brought back to vivid life. In 2025 the novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award for English, taking its place in the national record a century after the event it describes. For Punjabi readers its legacy is already clear: alongside Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan in this Kosh, it is one of the two novels through which most English readers now meet the defining traumas of modern Punjab, 1919 answering 1947.

Read it if

Read it if you want Jallianwala Bagh told as lived experience rather than as a paragraph in a history book; if you are following the Ghadar movement or the road from the Rowlatt Act to independence; or if you have read The Exile and want the second panel of Sarna's Punjab under empire. Read it slowly around 13 April, and then go and stand in the Bagh itself, where the memorial now keeps the silence the novel breaks.