Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

Vaisakhi at Amritsar

The Rowlatt Act of 1919 extended wartime emergency powers — detention without trial — into peacetime, and the Punjab responded with protest. Two Congress leaders were deported from Amritsar on 10 April; the crowd that marched to demand their release was fired on; rioting followed, and several Europeans were killed. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived to take command and banned public gatherings.^1,4

On 13 April — Vaisakhi, the day pilgrims come to Amritsar in numbers — several thousand people gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed piece of waste ground surrounded by buildings with a handful of narrow exits. Many had come for the festival and had not heard the proclamation.¹

Ten minutes

Dyer arrived with about fifty riflemen, positioned them at the main entrance, and gave no warning to disperse. He ordered them to fire into the densest part of the crowd, and directed the fire toward the exits as people tried to escape. The shooting lasted roughly ten minutes, until the ammunition was nearly exhausted — some 1,650 rounds.^1,2

He had brought armoured cars with machine guns and left them outside because the entrance was too narrow to admit them. Asked at the inquiry what he would have done had they fit, he said he would have used them.²

What Dyer said afterwards

The testimony is the reason this event occupies the place it does. Before the Hunter Commission on 19 November 1919, Dyer did not plead panic or misjudgement. He stated that he had continued firing deliberately, and that his object was not to disperse the crowd in front of him but to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab.²

The Commission censured him for failing to give warning and for firing longer than necessary; it upheld the wider imposition of martial law. He was relieved of command and retired. He was also publicly celebrated in Britain, where a fund raised for him by Morning Post readers collected a sum comparable to a substantial fortune.¹

What is disputed — the count. The official British figure was 379 dead and around 1,200 wounded, arrived at through a process that relied on families coming forward under martial law. The Indian National Congress’s own inquiry, chaired by Madan Mohan Malaviya, put the dead at over a thousand.^1,3 No reconciliation of the two has ever been possible; the plaque at the site gives the higher order of magnitude, and the official figure is generally regarded as an undercount rather than a neutral estimate.

What it changed

Jallianwala Bagh converted a great many moderate Indians into opponents of British rule, and it is conventionally treated as a turning point toward mass non-cooperation. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood over it.

For Sikhs specifically it had a further edge. When Dyer was afterwards honoured with a siropa at the Golden Temple by the sarbrah — the government-appointed custodian — the outrage fed directly into the Gurdwara Reform Movement, the campaign to take control of Sikh shrines out of hereditary and government-friendly hands, which culminated in the Gurdwaras Act of 1925.^4,5

The Bagh is a memorial garden today, a few hundred metres from the Harmandir Sahib. The bullet marks in the brick have been left as they are.