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‘This damns us for all time.” So said Colonel J. C. Wedgwood MP in
the House of Commons in 1919 about the Amritsar Massacre when
Brigadier Dyer’s small force fired into the crowd in the Jallianwala
Bagh. How right he was. Indeed for many people it is the only event for
which the British Raj in India is known. Kim Wagner, an academic at
Queen Mary University of London, has produced one of the best
descriptions of what happened in Amritsar between 10th and 13th April
1919. It is narrated skilfully without allowing the detailed sourcing to
get in the way of a highly readable, indeed exciting, account of the
events. By initially focusing on the 10th of April when the civil
authorities lost control of a riot which threatened to overrun the Civil
Lines and during which several British nationals were killed, Wagner
reminds us that the events of the 13th April had a hinterland which
played a key role in the disastrous events three days later.
Wagner contends that historians have underestimated the importance of
the 1857 Mutiny in instilling a sense of paranoia amongst the British in
India and a conviction that anything less than firm action in the face of
civil unrest might result in a repeat of the Cawnpore Massacres. He
makes a valid point. One of the problems of the Mutiny is that the
British did not see it coming and never fully understood why it
happened. Over a century and a half later there is still much about the
Mutiny which we don’t comprehend. Was it just a sepoy mutiny or a
rebellion or a conspiracy or even a war of liberation? No wonder,
therefore, that a repeat of the Mutiny engendered such fear amongst the
tiny British population of India. However, stories of the Mutiny do not
justify Dyer’s behaviour when he led his small detachment of Indian
and Gurkha soldiers into the Bagh. Even if a volley over the heads of
the crowd had been justified (which was not the case) there was no
excuse for firing into the multitude for a full 10 minutes. 1650 high
velocity bullets wreaked terrible carnage. The imposition of a curfew
added to the misery and death-toll by denying the wounded access to
medical help. Ironically it is Dyer’s ‘crawling order,’ the least lethal of
his measures, which demonstrates the Brigadier’s lack of mental
balance. Wagner shows that Dyer himself was racked with self-doubt
before and after the massacre. Indeed he is quoted as saying ‘I’m for
the high jump.’ It was only when he was lionised by the right-wing
press and parliamentarians in London and interviewed by the Hunter
Commission that Dyer gave the impression of being sure of his actions.
He certainly had supporters in England and India but there will always
be advocates of extreme action; that does not indemnify a public
servant for losing his head in a crisis. Wagner tells us almost nothing
about Dyer the man. This is probably because he sees Dyer as merely a
tool of the ‘racialised violence’ by which he contends Britain ruled
India. He thinks it wrong to interpret Amritsar as an aberration but as
completely in character. This argument is only developed in the
Conclusion but one can detect his train of thought occasionally
emerging throughout the narrative. I question whether Wagner has got
this right.
Generations of colonial administrators and soldiers knew that the
vastness of India could not be ruled by force. It could only be managed
by consent, co-option and occasionally by divide-and-rule. Indeed most
Indians continued to be ruled by their local Princes, all of whom had a
modus vivendi with central government. The only time when unbridled
violence was employed was in response to the 1857 Mutiny when
Britons in northern India faced annihilation and when additional troops
were summoned. However the Mutiny was far more akin to war than
domestic law enforcement. Local unrest occurred throughout British
rule in India; riots appearing to get out of control; administrators
wondering whether to arrest, deport or co-opt the ringleaders; soldiers
advocating a ‘firm hand’ and ‘civilians’ arguing for more time to gather
intelligence and gauge the mood; and families feeling vulnerable.
What marks Amritsar out as different was that Dyer was given free rein
by incompetent civil administrators and then acted with criminal folly.
Patrick French writes of Amritsar that it was ‘not representative of the
imperial response to disorder but an aberration.’ (see Liberty or Death,
page 31.) More recently David Gilmour has written about the ‘doctrine
of minimum necessary force usually followed by British officers except
at Amritsar when it was notoriously ignored by Brigadier Dyer’. {The
British in India, page 262.)
Nonetheless Wagner does a good job of debunking some of the
misrepresentations of Amritsar. Although Richard Attenborough’s film
‘Gandhi’ stayed reasonably close to the facts, it portrayed Dyer as a
man who was completely sure of himself, rather than the troubled and
inadequate personality so clearly outlined on pages 420-423 of Nigel
Collett’s The Butcher o f Amritsar. Wagner says on page xix of his
Introduction about Shashi Tharoor that his ‘account of the Amritsar
Massacre....is completely inaccurate’ although, to be fair to Tharoor,
he would own to being more politician and polemicist than historian.
There are a few small blemishes. Given the multiplicity of
contemporary sources it seems odd that the author repeatedly relies on
comments by fictional Indian characters from E.M. Forster or
caricatures of British officials from George Orwell. However Wagner
has nonetheless produced the best narrative of Amritsar 1919.
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