Gandhi and the Punjab in 1919: Jallianwala Bagh Massacre & Beyond

Before the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh tragedy, Gandhi had never visited Punjab. The massacre, however, changed him forever. It transformed him from an Empire loyalist to an implacable opponent of British rule. The author of a forthcoming commemorative book on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre digs deeper…

The first major national campaign organized by Mahatma Gandhi was against the Rowlatt Act, which severely limited civil liberties. This movement began with an all-India hartal, observed on Sunday the 6th of April 1919.

Gandhi had decided to lead the hartal in Bombay himself. He arrived at the Chowpatty beach by 6.30 a.m. People bathed in the sea and then came and sat around him. By 8 o’clock a ‘huge mass of people’ had assembled. One reporter estimated that 150,000 were present — ‘Mahomedans, Hindus, Parsis, etc., and one Englishman’. Similar gatherings were held in cities and towns across India. An Urdu weekly termed the hartal against the Rowlatt Act a ‘splendid success’. The British Government’’s repressive measures had ‘united the Hindus and the Musalmans like sugar and water, although these two communities once stood apart from one another owing to the long-standing differences between them.’ This was a genuine mass upsurge, wrote the weekly, and ‘it is wrong to suppose that Mahatma Gandhi or any other person is the originator of the movement. Hundreds of Gandhis will be produced from the soil of India.

Gandhi was now very keen to travel to the Punjab. He had not previously visited that politically conscious province, which had taken an active part in the Swadeshi movement of 1905–7. More recently, it was the centre of the Ghadar movement, where Sikhs who had migrated to North America returned to the Punjab to mobilize the peasantry. Many Punjabis had also served in the World War, often forcibly recruited by the British.

Gandhi was quite well known in the Punjab. As the Chief Secretary of the Province later recalled, in one speech ‘the coming of Mr. Gandhi was compared to the coming of Christ, to the coming of Muhammad and the coming of Krishna. Now that was the man who, if I should use the words of a speaker at Amritsar, was to break the power of the bureaucracy, that was the man around whom the whole of the agitation centred; that was the man who by his new device of passive resistance was to relieve the people of the burden with which they were threatened.’

On the 8th of April, 1919, Gandhi boarded a train to Delhi, from where he hoped to proceed to the Punjab. When the Government of India heard of his plans, they consulted the Chief Commissioner of Delhi and the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, both of whom said ‘it would be most dangerous to allow Mr. Gandhi to enter their jurisdictions’. If he came he would have to be arrested, since ‘his avowed intention was to break the law of the land’.

The Government now decided to stop Gandhi. At the station of Muhammad (about sixty miles short of his immediate destination), the police served him an order prohibiting him from entering Delhi and Punjab, and restricting his movements to the Bombay Presidency.

Gandhi now returned to Ahmedabad. Meanwhile, events were moving swiftly in the Punjab. Three days after the hartal of 6th April was Ram Navami, the festival celebrating the birth of Lord Ram. This was normally observed by Hindus alone. But on this day in Amritsar, ‘contrary to previous practice, the festival was very largely participated in by Muhammadans, and along with the usual shouts political cries were freely raised “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai”, “Hindu-Mussalman ki jai”’.

On the evening of the 9th of April, orders were issued for the deportation of two prominent local Congressmen, Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew. One was Hindu, the other, Muslim. When news of Gandhi’s arrest reached Amritsar on the 10th, a large and angry crowd collected on the streets. British banks were set on fire and three bank managers murdered. A lady missionary was beaten up and left for dead.

The violence continued through the 10th and 11th. With the police unable to control the crowds, the city was placed under de facto martial law. The Collector handed over charge to Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, who had come with a contingent of Gurkha and Pathan troops.

The Martial Law regime in the Punjab was extremely harsh. The mail was censored. Temples and mosques were closed to worshippers. Water and electricity was cut off from homes of those whose political affiliations were suspect. Worse still were public floggings of select rebels; and most incredible was an order making it mandatory for all Indians to crawl along the street that had witnessed the attack on the woman missionary.

The protesters remained defiant. They called for a meeting to be held at one of the town’s public parks, Jallianwala Bagh, on the afternoon of the 13th of April. General Dyer issued a proclamation banning the meeting, sending soldiers with megaphones into the streets to warn people against attending. A crowd of several thousand gathered nonetheless. Enraged that his proclamation was disregarded, Dyer proceeded to the meeting place with some 50 soldiers and two armoured cars.

The 13th of April was Baisakhi, Sikh New Year’s Day. From the morning, pilgrims had filed into the Golden Temple. After visiting the shrine, many worshippers walked over to the nearby Jallianawala Bagh, to rest and chat in the park before returning home. By the time Dyer reached the park, this mixed crowd of protesters and worshippers was several thousand strong.

The armoured cars could not negotiate the narrow lanes of the old town, so Dyer and his men disembarked and proceeded on foot. Having deployed his troops, the General at once gave orders to open fire on the crowd facing him in the enclosure. In panic the crowd dispersed, towards the park’s single entrance, now blocked by the troops. Dyer shouted to his men to continue shooting. Asking them to reload their magazines, he personally directed the fire at the densest parts of the crowd. Some 1,650 rounds were fired. Almost four hundred people died in the carnage.

The drama, intensity, and brutality of the week’s events are all captured in the diary of J. P. Thompson, the Chief Secretary of Punjab at the time. On the 6th of April, Thompson noted down the popular rumours about the Rowlatt Bills. ‘Few understand what it is. One story is that police permission will be required for weddings and funerals. Another that anyone who does not salaam a policeman will be arrested.’ The hartal called by Gandhi for the 6th was ‘complete’ in Amritsar and in ‘most towns of importance’.

On the 8th, the Chief Secretary confided to his diary that ‘the situation is serious. Gandhi and company have started hawking prescribed pamphlets in the streets of Bombay.’ On the 9th, he noted Gandhi’s departure for Delhi: ‘We have sent an order directing him not to enter the Punjab’. The next day was described as ‘memorable’; with a crowd of 5,000 rushing the civil station in Amritsar, and burning the Town Hall. ‘Troops fired — 30 casualties’.

Thompson seems to have ignored his diary on the 11th of April. The entry for the 12th deals with Lahore, where troops marched through the city, closing the magnificent Badshahi Mosque to worshippers. ‘Temper of mob very bad’, noted the Chief Secretary grimly. Portraits of the King and Queen were smashed, and at least two railway stations looted.

The entry for the 13th of April reads: ‘Late at night mutilated wire came through from Amritsar. … Meeting held in spite of prohibition — 200 killed!’. On the 14th, at a party at the Governor’s House, Thompson met G.A.Wathen, Principal of Amritsar’s Khalsa College, who told him that in Jallianawala Bagh the troops ‘shot men down like rabbits as they ran’, adding, ‘in an excited state’, that ‘only thing that can save the situation was that LG [the Lieutenant Governor] should disown action taken’. Thompson’s own view was that while it ‘seems to have been a bloody business-200–300 killed in a garden’, ‘probably it will be justified by [the] result’.

Under martial law, there was strict press and postal censorship in the Punjab. The facts of the Jallianawala Bagh incident were largely unknown to the outside world. But rumours and counter-rumours were rife.

A month after the massacre in Amritsar, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy’s Private Secretary: ‘I have not said a word about the events in the Punjab, not because I have up to now not thought or felt over them, but because I have not known what to believe and what not to believe’.

In early June, the first reports on the Amritsar massacre began appearing in the Indian press. Gandhi now broke his public silence on the Punjab, with an article criticizing the imprisonment of Kalinath Ray, editor of the province’s leading English paper, The Tribune. Ray had been tried and jailed for sedition, when in fact his writings were marked by ‘sobriety’ and ‘self-restraint’. Gandhi next took up the case of Radha Krishna, editor of the Pratap, likewise sent to jail by the Punjab Government for allegedly inflammatory articles. He urged that he be released too.

Gandhi urged the Government to allow him to visit Punjab. Several requests were denied, but in October the authorities relented. He left Ahmedabad on the 22nd, reaching Lahore two days later. The crowd at the station to receive him was so large that it took Gandhi forty minutes to get from the platform to the car.

In Lahore, Gandhi was staying at the home of Saraladevi Chaudhrani. Born in 1872, the daughter of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s sisters, Saraladevi was a gifted singer and writer herself. She was also striking looking, with a lush head of hair that hung down to her shoulders. She liked dressing up; pearls were among her favourite jewels. She was what Bengalis call a bhadramahila: a well-born, well-dressed, well-spoken lady. Sarala’s husband Rambhuj had been active in the anti-Rowlatt Act protests of 1919, and made many fiery speeches.

These landed him in jail, so when Gandhi reached their home he was received by the wife alone.

Gandhi had briefly met Saraladevi in 1901, when she sang the opening song at the Calcutta Congress which he had attended. One does not know what impression she made then. But staying under her roof, with both their spouses absent, meant that they spoke long and often. In a ‘Punjab Letter’ for his Gujarati readers, Gandhi observed:

In Lahore I am the guest of Smt. Sarladevi Choudhrani and have been bathing in her deep affection. I first met Sarladevi in 1901. She comes from the famous Tagore family. Of her learning and sincerity, too, I get evidence in ever so many ways.

The India of 1919 was conservative and deeply patriarchal. The women’s place was in the home, as Gandhi’s own wife Kasturba knew only too well.

There were few women in India as variously gifted as Saraladevi, so active in so many public causes. And perhaps none so widely travelled. Those long conversations, possible only because the husband was away, left a profound impression on Gandhi. He would be back for more.

After a week in Lahore Gandhi left for Amritsar. With him was C. F. Andrews. The Englishman knew Amritsar well, but this was his friend’s first visit to the holy city of the Sikhs, the city where the massacre took place in April. To his Gujarati readers, Gandhi described his arrival thus:

The entire area outside the station was packed with the citizens of Amritsar. Their cheers and shouts almost overwhelmed me. This huge procession proceeded towards the city. The people filled the car with flowers. I was taken to the mosque, which was thronged with Hindus and Muslims. With great difficulty I made my way from the mosque back to the car, and it was a long time before it reached the Golden Temple of the Sikhs.

Gandhi’s account of the spectacular reception he got is confirmed by a reporter on the spot. ‘Monday was a veritable Gandhi day for the whole of Amritsar’, wrote the Bombay Chronicle, adding:

Business houses and shops were decked with rich clothes and tapestries and every street and shop had laid its store of rose petals and garlands to shower on the distinguished guest of the city. Hours before the time, streams of humanity were moving to the railway station. Hindus, Mahommaddans and Sikhs had suspended business in honour of the event. In their determination to honour Mahatma Gandhi, women lined the roadsides, crowded windows and balconies and thousands of rupees worth [of] flowers were purchased and carried in cartfuls to the station and stocked en route.

It was, of course, not merely, in the Punjab that Gandhi now had admirers. The satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act made him an all-India figure, known in the major towns and cities of the sub-continent.

The Government had set up a Committee to enquire into the Punjab disturbances. Chaired by Lord Hunter, an ex Solicitor-General of Scotland, it had seven other members, four British and three Indian. Meanwhile, the Congress set up an Enquiry Committee of its own, with five members, among them Gandhi and the Allahabad lawyer Motilal Nehru.

Through most of November and December, Gandhi travelled through the Punjab countryside, taking statements from people about martial law, the Jallianawala firing, and other instances of state repression. He stayed on in Punjab until the end of 1919, so as to attend the annual Congress meeting. This year it was being held, for both symbolic and political reasons, in Amritsar. The stars of the show were the Ali Brothers, who had recently been released as part of a general amnesty. They arrived in Amritsar ‘amid cheers, tears, embraces, and a veritable mountain of garlands’. The highlight of the Congress session was ‘an impromptu oration by Muhammad Ali, during which he proclaimed that he and all the other released leaders would rather return to prison indefinitely than see India in chains’.

Gandhi, for his part, struck a more conciliatory note. After Tilak and the Bengal leader C. R. Das had characterized the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms as ‘disappointing’, Gandhi argued that ‘these reforms can be used as a stepping-stone to full responsible government’. Besides, ‘Indian culture demands that we shall trust the man who extends the hand of fellowship. The King-Emperor has extended the hand of fellowship’. Therefore, the Congress should offer co-operation under such conditions as it may see fit to lay down. Gandhi went on to say:

If I get a sour loaf, I reject it; I do not take it. But if I get a loaf which is not enough or which does not contain sufficient condiments in it, I shall see to it that I get condiments too at a later stage, but I take a bite; then it is not disappointing.

The metaphor that Gandhi used was much favoured by his one-time mentor, the English vegetarian Henry Salt, who likewise believed that ‘improvements never come in the mass, but always by instalment; and it is only reactionaries who deny that half a loaf is better than no bread’.

Gandhi was at this stage both an incrementalist and an Empire loyalist. His faith in British justice was shaken but not broken. Perhaps the Hunter Committee would properly punish those responsible for the Punjab atrocities; perhaps the Rowlatt Act would be withdrawn; perhaps the Caliphate, so important to Indian Muslims, would be safeguarded. So long as these possibilities existed, the Congress could, he felt, work with the Government in a spirit of constructive co-operation.

In January 1920, Gandhi returned to Lahore, continuing his investigations into the Punjab atrocities, and incidentally also furthering his friendship with Saraladevi Chaudhrani. The day he reached Lahore, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Maganlal that ‘Saraladevi has been showering her love on me in every possible way.’ In return, Gandhi hoped to convert her to his ways. He asked Maganlal to send a good spinning instructor for Saraladevi.

In his first two weeks in Punjab, Gandhi visited Gujrat, Sargodha and other districts in the interior. ‘Saraladevi Chowdhrani accompanied me on this journey’, wrote Gandhi, but it is not clear whether her husband did. The peasants of Punjab were much taken with the lady, for, as her companion noted, ‘many men and women address Saraladevi as Mataji or Mother.’

Gandhi and his associates had now recorded the testimonies of some 1,700 witnesses to the happenings of March-April 1919. With this mountain of material, he proceeded, alone, to Banaras, where he stayed in Madan Mohan Malaviya’s house and hammered out a first draft of the Congress Report on the Punjab. Here Gandhi recommended that both General Dyer, the butcher of Amristar, and the Lieutenant-Governor at the time, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, be relieved from ‘any responsible office under the Crown’. The Congress report also called for the recall of the Viceroy, the refund of fines collected from the people, and an end to the corrupt practices of local officials.

On the other hand, the official report was far milder. It acknowledged the excesses under Martial Law, and chastised General Dyer for not thinking before he acted. However, it shied away from punishing errant officials. The Viceroy, forwarding the report to London, euphemized Dyer’s action, saying ‘in the face of a great crisis an officer may be thrown temporarily off the balance of his judgement’. He also gave the much-hated Michael O’Dwyer a resounding certificate of character, praising his ‘experience and courage’ as well as his ‘decision and vigour’, which, in the Viceroy’s view, ‘was largely responsible for quelling a dangerous rising which might have had widespread and disastrous effects on the rest of India’.

This whitewashing of the egregious behaviour of the Punjab Government put an enormous strain on Gandhi’s once fervent faith in British justice. He now decided that the only way to make the rulers see reason was to launch a fresh movement of protest. He outlined in print a programme of ‘non-co-operation’, to unfold in four stages. The first entailed the giving up of titles; the second the resignation from government service of select officials; the third stage — a ‘distant goal’ — the resignation of policemen and soldiers; the fourth stage, ‘still more remote’, the non-payment of taxes. He added that ‘non-co-operation as a voluntary movement can only succeed if the feeling is genuine and strong enough to make people suffer to the utmost’.

In July 1920, Gandhi toured the Punjab and Sindh, speaking on the importance of non-co-operation. If the programme was implemented, it would consist of the renouncing of titles, the boycotting of legislatures, the withdrawal of children from Government schools, the giving up of practice by lawyers, and the refusal of invitations to all Government functions. Gandhi expressed his ‘firm belief’ that the British could be made to yield under the pressure of a non-violent struggle. For ‘no European nation is more amenable to the pressure of moral force than the British’.

Before 1919, Gandhi had never visited the Punjab. But what he did and saw in the province that year changed him forever. On the political front, it transformed him from an Empire loyalist to an implacable opponent of British rule. On the personal front, he forged an intimate relationship with Saraladevi Chaudhrani; which he then withdrew from fearing it might violate his vow of celibacy, brahmacharya.

In subsequent years, Gandhi visited Punjab only occasionally. One trip of consequence was to Lahore in December 1929, when he helped anoint Jawaharlal Nehru as the President of the Indian National Congress in a session which committed the party to Purna Swaraj, Full Independence. He also acquired a devoted core of disciples from the Punjab; they included his secretaries Pyarelal Nayar and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, his physician Dr Sushila Nayar, and that doughty proponent of Hindu-Muslim harmony, Bibi Amtus Salam. These four Punjabis worked with him for many decades, consolidating his connection with the province.

Gandhi was born and raised in Gujarat, in an orthodox Bania family. He was always most comfortable speaking and writing in Gujarati. And yet in his life and work Gandhi was conspicuously free of any form of provincialism. In his years in South Africa he worked alongside Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Jews and Christians, who spoke Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati (among other tongues). After his return to India Gandhi travelled relentlessly across the subcontinent, so much so that the railway compartment became a sort of second home. He developed deep and intimate connections with all the major provinces and linguistic groups of India. Bengal and Maharashtra played a major part in Gandhi’s career; as did Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Andhra, and, of course, Gujarat. But in that crucial year 1919, it was the province of Punjab that meant most to him.

This essay is reproduced with amendments from an original contribution in The Tribune, Chandigarh.

Saurav Dutt is the author of a forthcoming book to commemorate the centenary of the infamous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. It will be released in April 2019 to mark the centenary. To keep up with updates please visit Saurav Dutt