Amritsar

A sensitive and thoughtful look at the lasting effects on everyday people of the 1947 partition of India.

On 13 April 1919, General Reginald Dyer marched a squad of Indian soldiers into the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, and opened fire without warning on a crowd gathered to hear political speeches. This is an account of the massacre set in the context of a biography of a man whose attitudes reflected many of the views common in the Raj.

A powerful reassessment of a seminal moment in the history of India and the British Empire--the Amritsar Massacre--to mark its 100th anniversary The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the British Empire, yet it remains poorly understood. In this dramatic account, Kim A. Wagner details the perspectives of ordinary people and argues that General Dyer's order to open fire at Jallianwalla Bagh was an act of fear. Situating the massacre within the "deep" context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.

On 13 April 1919, a fateful event took place which was to define the last decades of the British Raj in India. At 5:10pm on that day, Brigadier-General 'Rex' Dyer led a small party of soldiers through the centre of Amritsar into a walled garden known as the Jallianwala Bagh. He had been informed that an illegal political meeting was taking place and had come to disperse it. On entering the garden, Dyer's men immediately lined up in formation. Dyer then gave the order to open fire on the huge crowd that had gathered there. 379 people were killed and at least 1,000 more were wounded in what has became known as the Amritsar Massacre. Nick Lloyd here provides a highly readable, but detailed account of the most infamous British atrocity in the entire history of the Raj. He considers the massacre in its historical context, but also describes its impact in uniting the people of the sub-continent against their colonial rulers. The book dispels common myths and misconceptions surrounding the massacre and offers a new explanation of the decisions taken in 1919. Ultimately, it seeks to examine whether the massacre was an unfortunate and tragic mistake or a case of cold-blooded murder, and one which would fatally weaken the British position in India.

This book explores a traumatic event known throughout India as Operation Bluestar. During the Operation, the Indian army entered one of Sikhism’s most sacred shrines, the Darbar Sahib in the city of Amritsar, to dislodge militants who had taken shelter within. Among the many who died during Operation Bluestar was the militant leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who is now remembered and commemorated as a martyr. Sikhs revere their martyrs. Images and religious souvenirs of martyrs share space with posters and portraiture of the ten Sikh Gurus. The visual idiom is a key form of remembering the modern martyrs of Operation Bluestar. Despite the emotive imagery, a tension exists between the need to forget the violence of militancy and remembrance of martyrs. It is this tension that shapes accounts of “what happened” in the city of Amritsar in 1984 before and after Operation Bluestar. But “what happened” is an account that changes over time and between storytellers. Each account might have a little omission, a small part that is overlooked, ignored, or sometimes laid to rest. Memory has the quality of bringing the past into the present, but with deletions that suit the storyteller and audience. This book traverses the terrain of memory, hollowed out by little bits of forgetting.

Arguably, Amritsar is a very new city. While there are cities in India which have a history of a couple of millennia, Amritsar has a history of only five centuries. We cannot ignore the fact that in these many years, it has become one of the most important cities on the planet, fondly called the Vatican of Sikhism by many across the globe.

First published in 1963, Massacre at Amritsar recreates the terrible scene of the Jallianwala Bagh from the stories of eyewitnesses and survivors. General Dyer’s action at Amritsar on April 13, 1919 flared up into one of the most heated political and moral controversies of 20th century. Was he right in firing without warning on the group which had gathered in defiance of his orders? And in continuing to fire after they had started to disperse? Did he thereby save Punjab from worse bloodshed, and all India, perhaps, from a second Mutiny? Or did he commit a cold-blooded, purposeless massacre, for which no excuse was possible? The Army, which had condoned his act on his first explanation, could not stomach his arrogant replies at the enquiry. The Government of India described Dyer’s act as ‘monstrous.’ And perhaps more than any other single factor the massacre consolidated Indian opinion behind the campaign for independence. Yet a large section of the British public backed Dyer; a huge subscription was raised for him, and the House of Lords exonerated him. This book examines the circumstances that led up to the massacre and the deplorable actions that followed it and offers a new solution to the enigma of Dyer’s mind, making it an important read for students of history, South Asian studies, area studies and for the people of any erstwhile colonized nation.