Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story

About the book

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story is a work of history by Kishwar Desai, first published in 2018 by Westland. It is her first work of political non-fiction, written for the centenary of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Drawing on the reports of the Hunter Committee and the Indian National Congress, the archives of the United Kingdom Parliament, and earlier books on the massacre, Desai pieces together what actually happened on 13 April 1919, and in the weeks before and after it.

The book argues that the massacre was not the work of one deranged general, but part of a policy of oppression in Punjab under the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Michael O'Dwyer, and that the blame laid on General Dyer alone has hidden a much wider story. The idea for the book came to Desai when she chanced upon a photograph of Amritsar's Town Hall building, burnt down in April 1919.

What happened on 13 April 1919?

On the evening of Sunday 13 April 1919, the day of the Baisakhi festival, a crowd gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar, to protest against the Rowlatt Act, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, which gave the British government sweeping powers of arrest without trial. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who had arrived in Amritsar from Jullundur on the evening of 11 April, marched his troops into the garden and ordered them to fire on the peaceful crowd for ten minutes, continuing even as people tried to escape.

The official death figure was put at 379, with nearly 1,200 injured. The Indian National Congress report claimed that more than 1,000 innocent people were killed, a figure Desai herself uses in the book. Many of the dead fell into the garden's well while fleeing the shooting. Desai shows that the crowd was mostly local residents of Amritsar, no more than a quarter from outside, and that in all likelihood no women were present, correcting the common story that the gathering was a festival crowd of outsiders.

Dyer later told the Hunter Committee that he looked upon the people as enemies of the Crown, that he thought it was his duty, and that any reasonable being would see he was doing a merciful act. Most of his compatriots commended him for saving the Empire, and the massacre was thought essential to prevent another mutiny like that of 1857.

How Desai rebuilt the story

Desai begins her book around 11 April, when the civil administration had already declared Amritsar a war zone and regarded its residents as enemies, so that the reader understands the claustrophobic conditions in the city before the shooting. She draws on the words of survivors and recorded statements wherever she can, and she uses Indian sources and viewpoints as far as possible, because for too long, she writes, the story has been told by Western historians.

Her sources include the majority and minority reports of the Hunter Committee, the Congress report, and books such as Nigel Collett's The Butcher of Amritsar. She corrects several fallacies in the received story: the meeting was not a festival crowd, nobody jumped into the well, they fell in by accident because it had no rim, and the massacre was very likely carefully planned, not spontaneous.

The days after the massacre

The book's most chilling chapter is called The Fancy Punishments. After the shooting, martial law was imposed across Punjab, and the regime inflicted a reign of terror. Dyer imposed a crawling order, to avenge the assault on a British teacher, requiring everyone passing through a 150 yard lane, regardless of age and station, to crawl on their stomachs. There were nine other orders, including a salaming order, and even perceived disobedience could result in public flogging.

People were whipped in public, bombed, incarcerated, forced to crawl, starved, beaten, caged and even summarily executed. Aeroplanes were called in to bombard Amritsar and Gujranwala, and machine guns were turned on protesters. In Kasur, people were held in open cages. In Lahore, the officer commanding the city, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Johnson, imposed close to sixty four bizarre and racist orders of martial law.

Desai gives the night after the massacre its full weight through the testimony of Ratan Devi, whose husband was killed in the firing. She sat beside his body through the night, in the dark, among the dying crying for water. She told the inquiry that heaps of dead bodies lay around her, some on their backs and some with their faces upturned, and that she was all alone in that solitary jungle, amidst hundreds of corpses. Her account gives the lie to Dyer's claim that only men with mutiny on their minds had gathered in the garden.

ਲੇਖਕ

Kishwar Desai was born in Ambala in 1956 and worked in television as an anchor and producer for more than twenty years before becoming a writer. Her first novel, Witness the Night, won the Costa First Novel Award in 2010. She chairs the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, which set up the world's first Partition Museum at the Town Hall in Amritsar, and Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 is her first book of political non-fiction.

Reception and legacy

The book won critical acclaim on publication. The Hindu BusinessLine called it well researched and tightly structured, and said it must be suggested reading in schools. At the centenary of the massacre it inspired exhibitions on the massacre in India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

Desai's wider argument is that the massacre was a turning point in the freedom struggle, the moment that brought the anti-British forces together for the first time. Hindus and Muslims were seen joining hands against the British, drinking from the same cup and attending meetings in mosques and temples alike. She also argues that the seeds of Partition may have been sown during the months of martial law that followed, when the British worked to force the two communities apart. A hundred years on, Britain has yet to tender an unconditional apology for the bloodshed, though Prime Minister Theresa May expressed regret at the suffering caused.