A blot on the imperial escutcheon
Tony Gould
THE BUTCHER OF AMRITSAR: GENERAL REGINALD DYER by Nigel Collett Hambledon & London, £25, pp. 575, ISBN 185285457X The massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians and the wounding of over 1,000 others in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (a barren enclosure walled in by houses) on the unlucky 13 April 1919 has a far greater historical resonance than the incident would seem to merit. This is not to make light of what the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, called ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in sinister isolation’, accusing the perpetrator of the deed, Brigadier-General Dyer, of ‘frightfulness’ (a word then redolent of German atrocities in the first world war). It was a heinous crime, but on a much smaller scale than many of the massacres of the terrible 20th century, not least on the Indian subcontinent itself in the runup to Partition. What justifies Nigel Collett’s exhaustive account of it is its pivotal role in the struggle for Indian independence. It polarised the forces of change and reaction, largely along racial lines. On the Indian side, it turned reformers into revolutionaries; and on the British side, it solidified opposition to the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms aimed at the gradual ‘Indianisation’ of the administration.
Churchill went on to say:
What I mean by frightfulness is the inflict ing of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the inten tion of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or country. This was the nub of the matter. The role of the military in aid of civil power was to defuse rather than exacerbate tensions, and specifically to disperse unruly or threatening crowds with a minimum of force. Though Dyer gave contradictory accounts of his motives and actions, he quite deliberately and without giving any warning opened fire on the unarmed crowd and kept on firing when he knew perfectly well that the crowd was trapped and therefore unable to disperse.
Indeed, his aim was not dispersal but punishment. As Collett puts it:
He believed he was going to strike a blow at a conspiracy which he imagined stretched across India and of which one of the principal centres seemed to be Amritsar.
In taking such a role upon himself, Dyer was far exceeding his brief as military commander, and in making no provision for treatment of the wounded he compounded his crime.
Yet his superiors failed to condemn him and many of his compatriots hailed him as ‘the saviour of India’, the man who single-handedly prevented a second Mutiny. For though the Indian Mutiny had happened more than 60 years earlier it still loomed large in the consciousness of the British and in this respect Dyer was very much a man of his time — and place. When he went out to India as a young army officer, he wasn’t venturing into a foreign land but returning to the country of his birth and early upbringing; his father ran a successful brewery business in Simla. Behind the mask of the stiff soldier was a lonely individual who felt threatened by the prospect of radical change in what he saw as his homeland and lashed out accordingly.
Prior to Amritsar, Dyer’s record as an officer was patchy; he had the gift of inspiring loyalty among his subordinates, particularly the Sikhs in his regiment, the 29th Punjabis, with whom he developed a remarkable rapport; but he was awkward with his equals and a prickly and difficult subordinate himself. He was physically brave and had a good enough brain to get him into Staff College. But as Collett shows in a detailed account of his first independent command, on the borders of Persia, Baluchistan and Afghanistan during the first world war, he was dangerously ambitious. Instead of confining his activities to neutralising the German agents who were active in the region, in line with his orders, he started an expensive and inconclusive campaign against tribes he perceived as hostile and ended up doing more harm than good all out of vanity.
Collett has two major difficulties with his subject. One is a paucity of letters and diaries of the sort biographers usually rely on; the other is an understandable lack of sympathy for the man. As his title suggests, Dyer is no hero in his eyes. But he leans over backwards to be fair, praising what there is to praise in Dyer’s conduct and relationships, and pitying the broken man living out his days in sickness and isolation in the alien English countryside. While the need for a biography of Dyer on quite such a 19th-century scale as this may be questioned, Collett has produced a thoroughly researched, well-written and insightful account of his life and disproportionate influence on 20th-century Anglo-Indian relations.
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