Massacre and after

The image which lingered long after I closed Kishwar Desai’s book Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story was of Ratan Devi, the sorrowing wife of a man slain in the Jallianwala Bagh shooting. She sits silently by the body of her husband, hidden by the darkness. The night around her is alive with the moans of the dying and their cries for water.

“I saw three men writhing in agony, a buffalo in great pain; and a boy about twelve years old, in agony entreated me not to leave the place,” Devi narrates in the book. “I told him I could not go anywhere leaving the dead body of my husband. I asked him if he wanted any wrap, and if he was feeling cold, I could spread it over him. But he asked for water, and water could not be procured in that place”. She notes later: “Heaps of dead bodies lay there, some on their backs and some with their faces upturned. A number of them were poor, innocent children. I was all alone... in that solitary jungle ... amidst hundreds of corpses...What I experienced that night is known only to me and God.”

Devi’s testimony gives the lie to General REH Dyer’s statement that only men with mutiny on their minds had gathered in the garden.

He was, of course, the British officer who gave the order to fire at the unarmed gathering in Amritsar.

Desai’s Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 The Real Story is important. For one, it is well researched. She has delved into the UK Parliamentary Library and Archives, besides studying in-depth books on the massacre as well as on Dyer. She has compiled evidence from the Hunter Committee Report and the Indian National Congress’s report among other sources, to validate her narrative.

Desai bares a story that is even more horrifying than the events of April 1919. She reveals the workings of minds corrupted by power, warped by fear and focuses on a regime that conspired to hide its wrongdoings. Though there is little doubt that Dyer was the primary wrongdoer whose careful planning ensured the deaths of over a 1,000 people, the book puts together enough evidence to prove that almost everyone connected to Dyer was complicit in the event, through omission or commission.

Desai adopts a very tightly structured format where she details how the fear of an uprising spurred the officers of the British Army to inflict unmentionable cruelties on Indians. They whitewashed reality when they presented their case in England, and it has since been sanitised further to preserve the image of Britain as a nation that stands for fair play. A hundred years on, Britain is yet to tender an unconditional apology to India for that bloodshed, though UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently expressed “regret” at the suffering caused.

While the massacre can be seen as the action of a man possessed, the horrors of the days that followed — the dead lying untended and the injured withering away in hiding, afraid to seek medical help because of martial law — reflect a depravity that equals the one evidenced in Nazi Germany. The book takes into account the two conflicting tallies of the dead, adding the dire note that while the English recorded every British life lost, they did not record the names of the Indians killed, instead presented numbers that were at best arbitrary.

Perhaps the most chilling chapter of the book is the one titled The Fancy Punishments . Dyer imposed a ‘crawling order’ to avenge the assault on a British teacher as she tried to escape the escalating violence in Amritsar. The order required everyone passing through the lane, regardless of age and station, to crawl on their stomachs. The enforcement of this order and that of nine others, including a ‘salaming order’ makes for chilling reading. Even the perceived disobedience of these orders could result in public flogging.

It is not an easy book to read; Desai sometimes moves into stating her opinions, which takes away from the narrative. Yet, it is a book that must be suggested reading in schools.

Sathya Saran is a journalist and editor based in Mumbai

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