An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor
When Dyer learned of this meeting he did not seek to find out what it was about, whether the attendees were there in open defiance or merely in ignorance of his orders. He promptly took a detachment of soldiers in armoured cars and equipped with machine guns, and parked his vehicles in front of the gate to the Bagh. Without ordering the crowd to disperse or issuing so much as a warning—and though it was apparent it was a peaceful assembly of unarmed civilians—Dyer ordered his troops, standing behind the brick walls surrounding the Bagh, to open fire from some 150 yards away. The crowd, of thousands of unarmed and non-violent men, women and children gathered peacefully in a confined space, started screaming and pressing in panic against the closed gate, but Dyer ordered his men to keep firing till all their ammunition was exhausted. When the troops had finished firing, they had used 1,650 rounds, killed at least 379 people (the number the British were prepared to admit to) and wounded 1,137.* Barely a bullet was wasted, Dyer noted with satisfaction.
There was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal and had to disperse, no instruction to leave peacefully: nothing. Dyer did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenceless crowd.
History knows the event as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The label connotes the heat and fire of slaughter, the butchery by bloodthirsty fighters of an outgunned opposition. But there was nothing of this at Jallianwala Bagh. Dyer’s soldiers were lined up calmly, almost routinely; they were neither threatened nor attacked by the crowd; it was just another day’s work, but one unlike any other. They loaded and fired their rifles coldly, clinically, without haste or passion or sweat or anger, emptying their magazines into the shrieking, wailing, then stampeding crowd with trained precision. As people sought to flee the horror towards the single exit, they were trapped in a murderous fusillade. Sixteen hundred and fifty bullets were fired that day into the unarmed throng, and when the job was finished, just ten minutes later, hundreds of people lay dead and several thousand more lay injured, many grotesquely maimed for life.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will. Dyer was an efficient killer rather than a crazed maniac; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the brutality of the military bureaucrat. But his action that Baisakhi day came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was acting. In the horrified realization of this truth by Indians of all walks of life lay the true importance of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It represented the worst that colonialism could become, and by letting it occur, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men—that point which, in any unequal relationship, both master and subject must instinctively respect if their relationship is to survive.
The massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously of their political identity before that grim Sunday. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into agitators, led the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore to return his knighthood to the king and a host of Indian appointees to British offices to turn in their commissions. And above all it entrenched in Mahatma Gandhi a firm and unshakable faith in the moral righteousness of the cause of Indian independence. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth, and he never wavered in his commitment to ridding India of an empire he saw as irremediably evil, even satanic. The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’. No other ‘punishment’ in the name of law and order had similar casualties: ‘The Peterloo massacre had claimed about 11 lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Commons had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, the British had executed sixteen Irishmen.’ Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives.
In describing his own actions to the official Hunter Commission enquiry, Dyer never showed the slightest remorse or self-doubt. This was a ‘rebel meeting’, he claimed, an act of defiance of his authority that had to be punished. ‘It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd’ but one of producing a ‘moral effect’ that would ensure the Indians’ submission. Merely shooting in the air to disperse the crowd would not have been enough, because the people ‘would all come back and laugh at me’. He noted that he had personally directed the firing towards the exits (the main gate and the five narrow passageways) because that was where the crowd was most dense: ‘the targets,’ he declared, ‘were good’. The massacre lasted for ten minutes, and the toll amounted to an extraordinary kill-rate, akin to a turkey-shoot. When it was over and the dead and wounded lay in pools of blood, moaning on the ground, Dyer forbade his soldiers to give any aid to the injured. He ordered all Indians to stay off the streets of Amritsar for twenty-four hours, preventing relatives or friends from bringing even a cup of water to the wounded, who were writhing in agony on the ground calling for help.
A reign of colonial terror followed. Salman Rushdie has suggested that, after the assault on the lady missionary, ‘the calumny…that frail English roses were in constant sexual danger from lust-crazed wogs’ may also have played a part in General Dyer’s mind. Be that as it may, and since it is impossible for an Indian to write objectively about the massacre and its aftermath, let me turn to the American Will Durant to provide the gruesome details:
General Dyer issued an order that Hindus using the street in which the woman missionary had been beaten should crawl on their bellies; if they tried to rise to all fours, they were struck by the butts of soldiers’ guns. He arrested 500 professors and students and compelled all students to present themselves daily for roll-calls, though this required that many of them should walk sixteen miles a day. He had hundreds of citizens, and some schoolboys, quite innocent of any crime, flogged in the public square. He built an open cage, unprotected from the sun, for the confinement of arrested persons; other prisoners he bound together with ropes, and kept in open trucks for fifteen hours. He had lime poured upon the naked bodies of Sadhus (saints), and then exposed them to the sun’s rays that the lime might harden and crack their skin. He cut off the electric and water supplies from Indian houses and ordered all electric fans possessed by [Indians] to be surrendered, and given gratis to the British. Finally he sent airplanes to drop bombs upon men and women working in the fields.
While the official commission of enquiry largely whitewashed Dyer’s conduct, Motilal Nehru was appointed by the Congress to head a public enquiry into the atrocity, and he sent his son Jawaharlal to Amritsar to look into the facts. Jawaharlal Nehru’s diary meticulously records his findings; at one point he counted sixty-seven bullet marks on one part of a wall. He visited the lane where Indians had been ordered by the British to crawl on their bellies and pointed out in the press that the crawling had not even been on hands and knees but fully on the ground, in ‘the manner of snakes and worms’. On his return journey to Delhi by train he found himself sharing a compartment with Dyer and a group of British military officers. Dyer boasted, in Nehru’s own account, that ‘he had [had] the whole town at his mercy and he had felt like reducing the rebellious city to a heap of ashes, but he took pity on it and refrained… I was greatly shocked to hear his conversation and to observe his callous manner’.
No doubt some good Englishmen will say that Brigadier General Reginald Dyer was an aberration, one of those military sadists that every army throws up from time to time, and not typical of the enlightened men in uniform who normally served the Raj. The excuse will not wash. Not only was Dyer given a free hand to do as he pleased, but news of his barbarism was suppressed by the British for six months, and when outrage at reports of his excesses mounted, an attempt was made to whitewash his sins by the official commission of enquiry, Hunter Commission, which only found him guilty of ‘grave error
Even this did not strike his fellow Britons in India as adequate recompense for his glorious act of mass murder. They ran a public campaign for funds to honour his cruelty and collected the quite stupendous sum of £26,317 1s 10d, an astonishing sum for those days and worth over a quarter of a million pounds today. It was presented to him together with a jewelled sword of honour. In contrast, after many months of fighting for justice, the families of the victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre were given 500 rupees each in compensation by the government—at the prevailing exchange rate, approximately £37 (or some £1,450 in today’s money) for each human life.
For Jawaharlal Nehru, the English reaction to the massacre—and Dyer being publicly feted—was almost as bad as the massacre itself. ‘This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly,’ he later wrote. ‘It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public school language, it was the height of bad form. I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes.’
It was no longer possible to claim that Dyer did not represent the British in India: they had claimed him as one of their own—their saviour.
♦
Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened. But why should one be surprised? Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: ‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.’
In Dyer’s case, the sword was a bejewelled one; the yardstick measured the account books in the British treasury. One should never reproach a government for the candour of its high representatives.
* Lists vary. The Oriental Herald in February 1838 reported on fifteen famines in British India in the course of seven decades: ‘Famines prevailed in India, in 1766, 1770 (when half the inhabitants perished in Bengal), 1782, 1792, 1803, 1804, 1819, 1820, 1824, 1829, 1832, 1833, 1836, 1837, and now in 1838.’
*The unofficial Indian numbers are higher: most converge at a figure of 1,499 killed. However, the figures of 1,650 rounds used, and 1,137 injured, are not disputed. The truth of the deaths may lie somewhere in between; 379, the official figure, is the minimum. Even if the official figures are accurate, though, that makes for 1,516 casualties from 1,650 bullets, a measure of how simple, and how brutal, Dyer’s task was.
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THE REMAINING CASE FOR EMPIRE
British profits, Indian taxes – private enterprise and public risk – benefits to Britain – exploitation of Indian passengers – discrimination in employment – the Great Indian Railway Bizarre – economic distortions caused by railways – British education policy – destruction of Indian education – pathshalas, madrasas, maktabs – education and the English language – Macaulay’s Minute on Education – Mill’s Utilitarianism – Orientalists versus Anglicists – limitations of Indian universities – denationalizing Indians – textual harassment – British history – English literature – influence of Western ideas – caste and education – colonization of the Indian mind – Wodehouse, colonialism and the English language – tea without sympathy – exploitation of plantation workers – tea spreads to Indians – the Indian game of cricket – cricket and social status – Ranji – cricket and nationalism
What, then, remains of the case for the British empire in India?
Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: ‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.’
The British historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule ‘led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the sub-continent.’ We have dealt with the suggestion that it is to Britain that India owes its political unity and democracy; we have shown the severe limitations in the British application of rule of law in the country; we have laid bare the economic exploitation of India and the despoliation of its lands which give the lie to Roberts’s claims of ‘modernisation, development [and] agrarian advance’; and we have dispensed with the notion that there was something benign and enlightened about British despotism in India.
But the idea that such modernization could not have taken place without British imperial rule is particularly galling. Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilizations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so? As I have pointed out earlier in the book, the story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilizational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, a high overall standard of living, economic policies that imparted prosperity, and abundant prosperity—in short, all the markers of successful ‘modernity’ today—and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if it had had the resources to do so which were instead drained away by the British. An Englishman writing for European social democratic readers in 1907 put it clearly: ‘Wherever they are allowed a free outlet they [the Indians] display the highest faculties; and it is absurd to contend that great States which managed their own business capably for thousands of years, which outlived and recovered from invasions and disasters that might have crushed less vigorous countries, would be unable to control their own affairs successfully if a handful of unsympathetic foreigners were withdrawn, or driven out, from their midst.’
The clinching proof of this argument, after all, lies in the fact that despite having had to climb out of the deep socio-economic trough that colonialism had plunged the country into, and despite having made its own mistakes in the years after Independence, India has become the world’s third-largest economy in less than seven decades since the British left, and is currently its fastest-growing one; it has also piled up an impressive list of ‘modern’ distinctions including that of being the first country in the world to have successfully sent a spacecraft into Mars orbit at the first attempt (a feat even the US could not accomplish and one which China and Japan have failed trying to do). How much better would India have done if it hadn’t had the succubus that was the British empire fastened to it for twenty decades?
Apologists for Empire point to a number of other benefits they say the British left India with: the railways, above all; the English language; the education system and even organized sport, especially cricket, the one sport at which, in recent years, Indians have twice been world champions. Let us examine these in turn.
THE GREAT INDIAN RAIL
The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonized to do so. But the facts are even more damning.
The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial ‘to the commerce, government and military control of the country’. Ten years later, his successor Lord Dalhousie underscored ‘the important role that India could play as a market for British manufacturers and as a supplier of agricultural raw materials’. Indeed, the vast interior of India could be opened up as a market only by the railways, labourers could be transported to and from where they were needed by the new enterprises, and its fields and mines could be tapped to send material to feed the ‘satanic mills’ of England.