Place · massacre site · India

Jallianwala Bagh

Periods

British Colonial Age

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

31.620, 74.880

Worth knowing

Dyer told the Hunter Commission afterwards that he would have used machine guns had the lane admitted his armoured cars, and that his object was to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab. He was relieved of command and a public subscription in Britain raised him £26,000. Tagore returned his knighthood.

Connections (5)

• Succession in timeRabindranath Tagore

  Tagore renounced his knighthood in a letter to the Viceroy at the end of May 1919, six weeks after Jallianwala Bagh, saying he wished to stand beside his countrymen stripped of all special distinctions. It was the most conspicuous single protest by an Indian of standing, and it cost him the relationship he had with the British establishment that had lionised him after the Nobel.

• Succession in timeB. R. Ambedkar

  The massacre and the martial law that followed in Punjab — public floggings, the crawling order, aircraft firing on crowds at Gujranwala — did more than any other single episode to end Indian confidence in British justice, and it is where Gandhi's non-cooperation and the whole mass phase of the movement begin. Ambedkar drew a different conclusion from the same decade: that a national movement which did not first address caste would simply transfer power within it.

• CampaignNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  The Rowlatt Acts of 1919, passed in Delhi over the unanimous opposition of the Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council, extended wartime detention into peace and produced the hartal that Amritsar's crowd had gathered after. The Hunter Committee censured Dyer and he was retired; the Commons and the Lords argued about him for a decade. Non-cooperation began the following year.

• AnalogueQissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar

  Two colonial massacres in the Punjab and the frontier, eleven years apart, with opposite afterlives. At Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919 Dyer's troops fired on a penned crowd and the killing became the central atrocity of the nationalist case. At Qissa Khwāni in April 1930 troops fired on unarmed Khudai Khidmatgar demonstrators, and what was remembered as much as the dead was that two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused the order and were court-martialled — the first serious sign that the army might not hold.

• Site withinAmritsar

  Jallianwala Bagh, the walled public garden where General Dyer ordered the firing of 13 April 1919, lies inside the old walled city of Amritsar immediately next to Harmandir Sāhib. It is one of the layered sites of Amritsar's urban fabric — massacre memorial, Sikh centre, Durgiana Temple, Ram Bagh, the old katras — and belongs properly to the city rather than inside the Golden Temple precinct.

On these journeys

• British India — 1600 to 1947
• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
• The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Jallianwala Bagh”. Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab (Hunter Committee, 1920) and the Indian National Congress Punjab Inquiry (1920); Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919.

• Wikipedia — Jallianwala Bagh