How the Rowlatt Act brought blood and mayhem to the Punjab
The seeds of the horrific Amritsar Massacre were sown by a draconian and punishing piece of legislation that united, disunited and ultimately inspired.
If you bring up the Rowlatt Report in any discussion in India most individuals will know what you are talking about, especially in Bengal or the Punjab. Awareness about the mass movement that Mahatma Gandhi led against the enactment of the Rowlatt Act, upon acceptance of the recommendations of the Rowlatt Report by the colonial state, is widespread and acknowledged.
This is also applicable to the protests against the draconian law, designed to crush the demand for freedom, which led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 which is the subject for my commemorative book to mark its centenary next year.
But if you delve a little deeper and ask more pertinent questions, such as who was Rowlatt, what was the subject of the Report or its terms of reference, or what compelling evidence it produced to lead to the creation and implementation of the Act itself, then such acknowledgement is not necessarily forthcoming.
If you read between the lines you’ll then understand how since 1947 there has been a deliberate effort to downplay the role of revolutionary armed action in India’s freedom struggle. In India, standard history text books reference the Rowlatt Report but in an unclear fashion, as if the revolutionary movements around it were blips on the radar. Pushing the Gandhian phase of the independence movement gets all the headlines.
But this is exactly why the Jallianwala Bagh massacre had to happen the way it did in the eyes of the British rulers. General Dyer, Sir Michael O’Dwyer and their supporters all felt that Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal was transformed into a revolutionary freedom movement across the country as different groups in Maharashtra, Bengal, Punjab and elsewhere coordinated their violent activities with the object of overthrowing British Rule.
Revolution was indeed in the air and so the revolutionaries of the Ghadar group in Punjab, some in Madras, the Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti of Bengal, Abhinav Bharat Society in Maharashtra, did not use just action behind their words but even went to the extent to forge links with Germany during the World War I. The Government termed these activities as “revolutionary and anarchical”, which according to its assessment posed “the gravest threat since 1857.” Concerns such as these kept the likes of General Dyer up at night and informed his stance when entering Amritsar during that fateful April.
Of course with so many Indian troops, widespread sedition was a major concern for the British, hence the need to “investigate and report on the nature and extent of the criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India” was the first task of the committee appointed on 10 December 1917 under the chairmanship of Justice SAT Rowlatt of the King’s Bench Division. The other term of reference was to examine the difficulties in dealing with such conspiracies and “to advise as to the legislation if any, necessary to enable the Government to effectively deal with them”.
JDV Hodge, a Bengal civilian, was member secretary and must have played a key role in preparation of the Report. The “Sedition Committee” submitted its report on 15 April 1918 exactly a year before the Amritsar massacre.
The first part of the Report had 15 chapters covering the growth of the revolutionary movement in different provinces and looked at how it began in Maharashtra the activities of the Chapekar brothers — Balkrishna and Damodar, Tilak and Savarkar. The next chapters then record how the movement spread to Bengal; struck deep roots during the anti-Partition agitation and intensified with German intervention.
It mentioned the influence of Swami Vivekananda, the work of Aurobindo and his brother, Barindra, Jatin Mukherjee and Pulin Behari Das, in spreading the message of freedom. The impact of the movement in the United Provinces, Orissa, Central Provinces and Bihar was detailed in chapters eight to ten and viewed mainly as a fall out of the Bengal upsurge where the activities of Sachindranath Sanyal and Rashbehari Bose in UP were noted.
The report identified the Chitavan Brahmins of Maharashtra and the “Bhadralok” class of Bengal as the social base of the revolutionary movements. Chapter 11 detailed “the dangerous situation”, the revolutionary movement created in Punjab due to the activities of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Paramanand and Sikh leaders of the Ghadar movement. At the dinner tables of the powers that be, one consistent topic was the panic fostered around the possibility of a repeat of 1857 as Punjab was the main source of recruitment of the Army.
It is a sad commentary on our sense of history that the state, media and even academia have ignored the historical significance of the Rowlatt Report in the centenary year of its submission. It paved the way for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and much of the rage, alacrity, sorrow and pain amongst innocents in the above areas who found themselves ensnared within the web of this draconian legislation.
Saurav Dutt is the author of a forthcoming commemorative book to mark the centenar of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre which will be marked in April 2019. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (otherwise known as the Amritsar Massacre) was a major turning point in the Indian struggle for self-determination and independence from the British Raj,
