The Amritsar Massacre of 1919

The Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919 was the most infamous single act of British rule in India. Brigadier General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, commanding a small British-Indian force, ordered his troops to fire on a peaceful political gathering in the enclosed garden of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing perhaps 400 people and wounding perhaps 1,200. The massacre was not a battle; it was a one-sided killing of unarmed civilians. The international outcry was substantial, and the British response — a partial official apology, a debated reprimand of Dyer, a continuing defence of the action by significant elements of the British public — was the beginning of a serious rupture in the relationship between Britain and India. The massacre, in this respect, marked the moment when the British claim to be governing India for the benefit of the Indians ceased to be credible, even for many of those who had previously been willing to accept it.

The Context

The massacre occurred in the context of the Rowlatt Act of March 1919. The Act, which authorised the British Indian government to try political cases without juries and to detain political prisoners without trial, was a continuation of the wartime emergency powers. The Indian political class, including the Indian National Congress, regarded the Act as a betrayal of the British promises of post-war reform, and a serious political agitation was launched in response. The principal form of protest was the hartal, a general strike accompanied by a closure of shops and businesses.

The political situation in the Punjab, the principal Muslim-majority province of British India, was particularly tense. The Punjab had been the principal recruiting ground for the British Indian Army during the First World War, and the province had contributed disproportionately to the British war effort. The end of the war had brought a return of the soldiers to the province, and the political climate was charged with the grievances of the returned soldiers and the broader political agitation. The British Indian government, alarmed by the political agitation and the unrest in the Punjab, appointed Sir Michael O’Dwyer as the lieutenant-governor of the province. O’Dwyer was a determined and energetic administrator, and he was prepared to use force to suppress the agitation.

The Day of the Massacre

On 13 April 1919, a large crowd gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed garden in the heart of Amritsar, for a political meeting. The crowd, which may have numbered 10,000 or more, had come to attend a meeting to protest the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of the two local Congress leaders, Satya Pal and Saifuddin Kitchlew. The British-Indian authorities, alarmed by the gathering, ordered Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, the officer commanding the local infantry brigade, to disperse the crowd.

Dyer, with a force of some 50 soldiers of the 9th Gurkha Rifles and the 59th Sindh Rifles and two armoured cars, took up position at the single narrow entrance to the garden. Without warning, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd, continuing to fire for perhaps ten minutes. The soldiers fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition into the crowd. The crowd, trapped in the enclosed garden, was unable to escape, and the only exit was partially blocked by Dyer’s force. The official figure of 379 dead, announced by the British Indian government, was widely considered to be a substantial underestimate. The Indian National Congress estimated perhaps 1,000 dead; the modern work of the historian Kim Wagner, drawing on careful archival research, has suggested a figure in the range of 400 to 500. The wounded, by any reckoning, numbered more than 1,000.

Dyer’s decision to fire was deliberate. In his statement to the Hunter Commission, the official inquiry into the massacre, Dyer said that he had considered using smaller force first, but had decided that “a lot of lives would be saved” by a strong initial action. He admitted in his statement that he had not tried to give the crowd a chance to disperse, and that he had not provided first aid to the wounded. The decision to use the armoured cars to seal the exit of the garden, in case the crowd tried to escape, was particularly chilling. Dyer’s own account of the event, given in his statement to the Hunter Commission, was the principal basis for the British official response.

The Aftermath

The massacre produced a political crisis in Britain. The Labour MP Clement Attlee, the future prime minister, led the criticism in Parliament. The American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, who was in Britain at the time, drew the parallel between the Amritsar massacre and the lynching of African Americans in the American South. The British government appointed the Hunter Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Hunter, a Scottish judge, to inquire into the massacre.

The Hunter Commission report, published in March 1920, was a substantial document. The Commission concluded that the firing had been “unquestionably” in excess of the requirement, and that Dyer had committed a “grave error.” The Commission recommended that Dyer be dismissed from the service, and that O’Dwyer be removed from his position. The British government accepted the report, and Dyer was forced to retire.

The British public reaction, however, was more divided. The Morning Post, the Daily Mail, and other right-wing newspapers launched a campaign in support of Dyer, and a fund was established that eventually raised some £26,000 for him. The “Dyer fund” was a measure of the British imperial sentiment that still existed in the post-war period, and the public response to the massacre was a serious embarrassment to the British government. The Conservative politician and colonial secretary Lord Milner, who had been a viceroy of India, was one of the principal defenders of the British action.

The Impact

The impact of the Amritsar massacre on the Indian independence movement was substantial. The massacre was a turning point in the relationship between the British and the Indian political class, and it produced a serious radicalisation of Indian politics. The Indian National Congress, which had been prepared to work within the British system in the early years of the post-war period, was now increasingly drawn to the Gandhian programme of non-cooperation. The Indian National Congress also withdrew its support for the British war effort, and the political crisis in India deepened. As Nehru wrote in his Autobiography (1936), “the story of Amritsar was a turning-point in Indian history” and it was “the culmination of a series of incidents which had produced a feeling of deep resentment among Indians.”

The massacre was also a turning point in the international reputation of the British Empire. The American, European, and global response to the massacre was critical, and the British government was forced to acknowledge that the massacre had been a serious error. The British response, however, was also marked by a substantial defence of the action by elements of the British public, and the massacre remained a source of controversy for decades. The most famous account of the massacre is Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946), which was a major work of Indian nationalist history and which placed the massacre in the broader context of the British exploitation of India. The modern work of the historian Kim Wagner, in Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019), has produced the most thorough and nuanced account of the event, drawing on careful archival research in British and Indian sources.

The Massacre in the Longer View

The Amritsar massacre, in the longer view, was a defining moment in the history of the British Empire in India. The massacre, together with the Rowlatt Act and the broader political repression of 1919, marked the end of the British claim to be governing India for the benefit of the Indians. The Gandhian movement, which emerged in the years after 1919, was, in that sense, a direct response to the political crisis that the massacre had produced. The Indian independence movement, which had previously been a constitutional and moderate body, was now a mass political movement with a serious radicalisation. The British, in the end, were forced to acknowledge that the political situation in India required a new beginning. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919, which were the principal British response to the political crisis, were a major step in the direction of Indian self-government, but they were also too little, too late.

The Amritsar massacre, in this context, is the most important single event in the history of the British Raj in the twentieth century. The massacre is the central fact of the Indian independence movement, and it is the central fact of the British Empire in India. The relationship between Britain and India was never the same after 13 April 1919. The massacre, in the words of the British historian David Reynolds, “marked the moment when the moral authority of the British Raj finally cracked.”

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Amritsar massacre has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older tradition, of which the work of Michael O’Dwyer’s India As I Knew It (1925) is representative, treated the massacre as a regrettable but necessary response to a serious political crisis. The Indian nationalist tradition, of which the work of the Indian National Congress and the early Congress historians is representative, treated the massacre as a fundamental injustice. The more recent scholarship, of which Kim Wagner’s Amritsar 1919 (2019) and the work of the British historian Jonathan Guinness are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more nuanced picture. The massacre, on this more recent view, was the consequence of a complex set of political, military, and psychological pressures, and the British response was, in important ways, a consequence of the British state’s failure to understand the political situation in India. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Kim Wagner, Yasmin Khan, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more integrated picture. The massacre, on this most recent view, is the central fact of the British Empire in India, and it is the moment when the British claim to be governing India for the benefit of the Indians ceased to be credible.

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