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When the Queen visited India in 1997, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence, the Duke of Edinburgh put his foot in it in the customary way. Entering Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he saw a plaque that stated, “This ground is hallowed with the mingled blood of about 2,000 innocent Hindus, Sikhs, and Mussulmans who were shot by British bullets on 13 April, 1919.” The duke suggested that the figure was an exaggeration. There were protests in Delhi by Sikh organisations and an official banquet was cancelled.

As it happens, the duke had a point. About 379 people had been killed, and the figure of 2,000 refers ambiguously to the wounded. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh on the orders of General Reginald Dyer remains the most contentious aspect of British rule in India in the 20th century. The debacle was significant mainly for its singularity. It did more than anything else to undermine Britain’s moral legitimacy in India, and provoked the rapid rise of the nationalist movement.

In his biography of Dyer, Nigel Collett contends that the events in Amritsar reveal more about the character of the man than they do about empire, race, gender or class, and that only through a personal study can we make sense of this historical tipping-point. It is a reasonable claim, and Collett’s book is certainly precise and comprehensive, though his ambitions are limited by a lack of archival material. Dyer’s loyal wife, Annie, did her best to shape her husband’s reputation by making sure that little private information survived, if it ever existed.

Like many heroes of the British empire, Dyer had almost no experience of Britain. He was brought up in Simla, and his parents were unimaginative white colonials. When his father recounted a tale of lighting a cigarette from a Burmese girl’s cheroot during his travels, his wife proclaimed: “That sort of looseness is what has peopled Simla with 30,000 Eurasians.”

Dyer joined the army and fought in numerous small wars in Burma, the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan. He soon gained a reputation for violence, a short temper and disobeying the orders of his superiors. At staff college, his brother officers noticed that he was unable to pronounce English place names. “When we speak to Dyer he does not appear to grasp what we say,” one of them told the commandant, “and looks at his questioner with an uncomprehending eye: he does not appear to be all there.”

He had a particular aversion to political officers, even signing a disastrous treaty with a Baluch tribe in Persia against official advice, which later had to be repudiated. Collett sees this as “the first signs of the self-delusions which were increasingly to mar Dyer’s view of his duty”. Despite this, he was steadily promoted, although not without reservations from his contemporaries.

After the end of the first world war, there was substantial political unrest in northern India. The introduction of censorship and internment without trial as an anti-terrorism measure had provoked public demonstrations. When telegraph wires were pulled down and a goods train was derailed, Dyer took the view that a repeat of the mutiny of 1857 might be looming in the Punjab.

In Amritsar, he took over command of the city from the civil authorities in questionable circumstances, and decided that the “mutineers” would have to be taught a lesson. After a brief parade during which he proclaimed there were to be no more assemblies, he advanced on the enclosed heart of the city with his Gurkha and Pathan soldiers. He deliberately avoided bringing British officers with him for fear that his orders might be challenged. The firing at the large, unarmed crowd began without warning and lasted for 10 to 15 minutes. Dyer ordered his men to shoot at the places where the crowd was thickest. The wounded were left where they fell that night; because there was a curfew, they could not be tended.

During subsequent days, Dyer drove around Amritsar in his motorcar, ordering the arrest of anybody who failed to “salaam” him. On one street, where a white woman missionary had been beaten, Indians wishing to proceed were forced, regardless of their age, to advance “lying flat on their bellies and crawling exactly like reptiles”. Mohandas Gandhi thought this racial humiliation was as bad as the massacre, but it is notable that some activists crawled in order to make fun of Dyer: “One man was stopped after crawling through three times.”

Dyer’s actions were eventually repudiated by the government, but he became a hero among the British in India and in conservative circles at home. His supporters took the line that a brave army officer was being condemned for doing his duty. The Commander-in-Chief in India observed that “the semi-educated native . . . takes clemency as proof of weakness. Ninety-nine per cent of the natives of India are children and must be treated as children”. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Simla wrote that Dyer’s conduct “saved the Punjab, and, in the opinion of many, saved India”. It is a claim for which there is, in retrospect, scant evidence. When he died in 1927, Dyer was given something close to a full although unofficial military funeral in London.

The most interesting revelation in Collett’s book is what a sorry hero Dyer made for imperial enthusiasts. Pugnacious, stupid and dishonest, he told the commission of inquiry into the massacre that he had intended to shoot the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh even before he got there: “I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise that they were not to be wicked.”

This fatuous logic was soon defended in the letters pages of The Times by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a Tory MP, who suggested that Dyer was not really to blame for what he had said at the inquiry since he had been “cross-examined and tortured by three of the cleverest native lawyers”. Small wonder that, within three decades, the clever native lawyers were ruling India.

A LOW POINT

Almost as inflammatory as the Amritsar massacre was Dyer’s insistence a few days later that Indians using a street where an Englishwoman had been assaulted would have to crawl down it. The local press saw the order as a racial insult, and Gandhi viewed it as more serious than the massacre itself.

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websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amritsar_Massacre
Well-linked account of the massacre

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