Amritsar: Reviewing a Massacre

Was the massacre of April 1919 a symptom of British oppression, or an exceptional event?

A century on, it’s hard to say something entirely original about the Amritsar massacre. Kim Wagner pulls together the tragedy’s various threads and presents all the evidence, even that which counters his own ideological preference for seeing the massacre as symptomatic of British oppression, rather than as an exceptional event.

Wagner is not squeamish about describing anti-European rioting in the Punjab and elsewhere during the days leading up to Amritsar. Although Gandhi had issued a call for satyagraha, non-violent resistance, his request was not heeded. A poster on the clock tower next to the Golden Temple in Amritsar called on the people to be prepared to ‘die and kill’. There are graphic descriptions of Indian crowds pelting security forces with brickbats. The British found themselves fending off attempts to rush the Civil Lines where most of them lived. Wagner doesn’t shrink from detailing how three British bank clerks and two railwaymen were bludgeoned to death by the mob, while one Miss Sherwood, a missionary schoolteacher, was knocked off her bike, beaten and left for dead.

General Reginald Dyer, later dubbed ‘the Butcher of Amritsar’, was incensed by all this, most of all by the sight of Sherwood, hovering between life and death, and by the dormitories of British women and children herded into the old fort. Dyer was a loner, with a chip on his shoulder, though he was popular with his Indian troops. It is a shock to hear that he was felicitated by the Sikh priests of the Golden Temple just days after he had ordered the massacre next door.


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