by Anita Anand
The pleaders at the bridge found themselves pushed forward by the growing crowds pressing from behind. Irving ordered his picquet to withdraw by about 100 yards, but the horses, pawing the air with their hooves, were clearly distressed by the building noise and numbers.
Irving’s refusal to speak to the delegation only exacerbated the anger behind them. Nobody knows who threw the first stone, but a hail of objects followed. Almost simultaneously, a party of reinforcements arrived at the bridge, led by a Lieutenant Dickie. One of the pleaders, a High Court lawyer named Maqbool Mahmood, and his friend Mr Salaria turned to the crowd and begged them to drop their stones and stay calm: ‘Salaria and I shouted out to the deputy commissioner and the officers to get back and not to fire, as we still hoped to take the crowd back.’10
Dickie either did not hear, or was not listening: ‘Oh, for God’s sake send reinforcements,’11 he cried, as he ordered his men to open fire, straight into the body of the crowd. Rounds hit the protestors in quick succession. Maqbool Mahmood later described the scene from his vantage point near the front; he was extremely lucky not to be hit in those first few seconds: ‘The soldiers at once opened a volley of fire without any warning or intimation. Bullets whistled to my right and left.’12
When the firing finally stopped, Maqbool stood up from where he had thrown himself on the ground, pushed his way forward and begged the soldiers to let the medics past. There were none to send. In desperation, Maqbool pushed his way back across the bridge, stepping over the dead and dying, intent on reaching the nearest hospital so he could get help, but soldiers prevented him from reaching the hospital. Maqbool would always remember the sight of Irving watching everything in silence. This was a man he had trusted. A reasonable man. A civilised man, ‘The Deputy Commissioner himself was present when the fire was opened,’ Maqbool recalled. ‘He knew that Salaria and I were members of the Bar and were trying to get the people back to the city . . . I still believe, if the authorities had a little more patience, we would have succeeded.’13
Between twenty to thirty people were shot at the bridge; fifteen of them would die from their injuries. Maqbool was heartbroken; he had devoted his life to British due process. What he had just seen felt like summary execution: ‘I believe some of the wounded might have been saved, if timely medical assistance had been forthcoming. After the first few shots, the crowd rushed back, but the firing was continued even after they began running away.’14
The pattern of firing told Maqbool all he needed to know about the British intent at the bridge: ‘Most of the wounded were hit above the belt, or on the head.’15 Word spread – the British had learned nothing from the Delhi shootings. They were doing it again. Amritsar erupted in response.
The terrified manager of Amritsar’s National Bank, a man named Stewart, was stabbed and battered to death and his body was burned along with his office furniture. Stewart’s deputy manager, a man called Scott, was overpowered next and brutally murdered. The city was falling into violent chaos and nobody seemed able to stop it.
At the Alliance Bank, the manager there, Thompson, was able to get to the pistol he kept in his drawer, but he too was murdered. As men ransacked his offices, trying to force their way into the safe, others peeled off and made towards the town hall and post office. In no time at all, it felt like the whole city was on fire. Some of the rage was political, driven by the scenes on the bridge, but lawless opportunists inevitably also took advantage. The situation was made worse when the telegraph wires connecting the city were cut. Now nobody outside had any idea what was going on in Amritsar, although those nearby could see the smoke.
A troop train of 270 Gurkha soldiers, just passing through Amritsar, was flagged down by the district superintendent and ordered to defend the railway line. Other soldiers were ordered to keep the mob from Civil Lines at all costs. White families were trapped there. This was not going to be another Cawnpore. Wives and children would never be subject to the violent slaughter of 1857.
Within the cantonment, the British could hear the guns and screaming from their homes. Finally, an armed convoy arrived to pick them up and take them to the safety of Amritsar fort. Those British scattered about the city could not be reached in time, because nobody was quite sure where they were.
Amritsar was in the hands of rumours and rage: a British female doctor named Ms Easdon was said to have laughed in the faces of wounded Indians who had been dragged, bleeding, from the bridge. She supposedly looked at their bullet-riddled bodies and refused to treat them. Whether it was true or not, the mob came for her, but by the time they reached the hospital, Ms Easdon was nowhere to be found. She had been hidden by brave hospital colleagues who told the mob she had already run away. In reality, Ms Easdon would remain in the hospital till later, fleeing the city dressed in a burqa.
Still on their crazed mission to hunt down and punish the ‘heartless woman’ Ms Easdon, a gang of thugs happened upon a missionary school teacher instead. Miss Marcella Sherwood was making her way innocently through a narrow Amritsar street near the hospital when they found her. They dragged her from her bicycle, beat her savagely, and left her for dead in the dirt.
Miraculously Miss Sherwood survived, and after her assailants moved off looking for more victims, she managed to drag her barely conscious body across the threshold of a house. News that they had not managed to kill her eventually reached the mob and they returned to finish her off.
Miss Sherwood would have been murdered that day had it not been for the courage of an Indian family into whose house she had crawled and collapsed. At great risk they refused to give her up when the lynch mob came back, telling them that she had dragged herself to a neighbouring area, sending them racing off on a wild goose chase.
Sir Michael, trying miserably to get up-to-date reports from his cut-off city, believed Lahore would be next. He would later write in his memoirs that he was convinced Amritsar’s banks would burst and trouble would flow directly towards him and his own family: ‘We in Lahore, who knew what had happened at Amritsar a few hours before and what was likely to happen on an infinitely greater scale in Lahore if military aid was delayed, went through some hours of the most terrible suspense.’16
As news of what had happened in Amritsar spread to Lahore, by around 6.30 p.m. crowds began to gather in the city. As far as the authorities were concerned, this gathering was the precursor to a riot, and it was dealt with accordingly: ‘A crowd collected in the bazaar. It rapidly grew and started coming down Anarkali. Thence the mob, which had assumed an ugly aspect and equally ugly proportions, proceeded down the Mall. By this time the police were out in force and a party of them stopped the demonstrators, now surging along the road, near the O’Dwyer Soldiers’ Home.’17
Sir Michael could hear the sound of unrest building from his doorstep:
From my veranda I could hear their ominous cries, one and a half miles off, and there was only a small body of armed police to block their way . . . I ascertained that the police were armed with buckshot, and I said that if they had to fire there was to be no firing in the air. We could afford to take no risks with the safety of thousands of women and children at stake.18
The Easter holidays had brought his children home to Lahore. He had saved his daughter from tigers once; he was not about to let the mob take her now.
In Amritsar, Miles Irving felt like he was staring into an abyss. Before the last of the telephone lines went down, his staff managed to get a call out to Lahore. The message was short but unequivocal: send infantry and gunners. Send an aeroplane, too, if you have one. Send them now or all will be lost.
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer had only recently taken command of armed forces in Jullundur. Though he would later tell his son that he had expected to deal with trouble, he had not expected it to come so soon. He had also noticed the increasing camaraderie between Hindus and Muslims, and it left him bristling. It was proof, as if he needed it, that they were planning something. Dyer waited to see what would happen. He was
a man who hated waiting. The call from Lahore must have been almost a relief. Dyer was to send troops to Amritsar immediately. He was also to reinforce his own city.
Immediately he set to work, calculating how many men he could send without leaving Jullundur unprotected. While briefing his staff in Lahore’s divisional headquarters, Dyer received another worrying situation report. Trains were on fire; routes in and out of Amritsar were blocked and burning. Lahore would be sending a special train to Jullundur to push his reinforcements through the smouldering barricades and into the city.
Dyer was advised to send a company comprising ‘100 British and 100 Muhammadan troops’,19 the assumption perhaps being that Hindus and Sikhs, who together made up 60 per cent of Amritsar’s population, would be less likely to open fire on their own kind.
Dyer arranged for twice as many troops as had been asked for.20 Despite Lahore’s concerns about the ethnic mix of his force, he had complete faith that his men, all his men – whoever they were and no matter what God they prayed to – would obey him without question. Dyer’s company comprised 100 rifles from A Company, the 1/25th London’s, 100 rifles from the 2/151st Infantry and 100 rifles from Frontier Force Regimental Depots in Jullundur.21
The special troop transport arrived in the small hours of the morning, as promised, and Dyer’s men boarded and were on their way. They would reach Amritsar within hours. He watched the train disappear into the distance. Rex Dyer would be joining them very soon. He was never a man who led from the back.
The next day, at around 6 p.m., after leaving orders that he believed would secure and defend Jullundur, Dyer packed his kit bag and prepared to leave for Amritsar – but not before he took his son to one side.
Twenty-four-year-old Ivon Dyer was a serving soldier like his father, and though the idea of fighting with his son beside him appealed, Dyer was relieved Ivon was going to stay back this time: ‘There is a very big show coming,’22 he warned his son gravely. ‘I must leave your mother and Alice in this house, although there is the same danger from Jullundur city. You will sleep under a tree beside the veranda near your mother and cousin.’23
With that, Dyer jumped into his waiting motorcar and sped off. Dyer’s biographer, Ian Colvin, writing shortly after his death, would claim that the brigadier general was ordered to Amritsar by his superiors in Lahore: ‘If the situation permitted, General Dyer should himself proceed to Amritsar and take charge,’24 but there is little in the way of hard evidence to suggest that such a call was placed. Either Colvin was right and the official record was changed in light of what was to follow, or Dyer had done what was in his nature. He had jumped into the fray.
CHAPTER 8
REX
Reginald Dyer, ‘Rex’ as he preferred to be known, had always been a soldier’s soldier. A man of action rather than letters, one of his colleagues had once said of him: ‘He does not know what fear means and is happiest when crawling over a Burmese stockade with a revolver hanging from his teeth.’1
Fifty-four years of age in 1919, he looked much younger. Tall, well-built and dapper, his face and neck were brick red thanks to hours in the sun. The steel grey creeping though his neatly side-parted hair and well-groomed moustache seemed to be his only concession to age. Dyer had a reputation as a vivacious man and a courageous soldier, striding among his troops with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He demanded, and got, absolute loyalty from his men. They talked about him with genuine affection.
Rex was Raj to his bone marrow. His grandfather, John Dyer, was first to leave his native Dorset in the 1820s, travelling thousands of miles to the eastern reaches of the empire to fight pirates for the East India Company. Life in India agreed with him so much, the buccaneer decided to stay.
Rex’s father, Edward Dyer, was born in Calcutta. Traditionally, Dyer men joined the army, but Edward saw opportunity in Kasauli, a snow-capped hill station in what is now called Himachal Pradesh. India was hot, the Raj was thirsty and Edward found the perfect climate in Kasauli to grow hops for beer. Dyer’s Breweries with their lion insignia did roaring trade, so much so that Rex’s father was able to open other breweries in Shimla, Murree, Rawalpindi, Quetta and Mandalay. His enterprising spirit made him a fairly wealthy man.
In the 1850s, John met and fell in love with a ‘back home girl’, Mary Passmore, who came from the village of Barnstaple in Devon. After they were married, he brought her out to India just in time for the 1857 mutiny/rebellion. Though they were far away from the bloodbath, safe in their hill station enclave, one of Mary’s first experiences of India was that of sheltering refugees, ‘English women escaping trembling and aghast, from the smoke and carnage of the Plains below to the safety of the Hills.’2
Born seven years later, Rex Dyer lived most of his childhood in Simla, one of the most fortified zones in all British India, yet his mother’s vivid memories of the mutiny were tightly woven into his own consciousness.
Rex started out as a particularly sensitive little boy, and, according to his family, was utterly at ease with the ‘natives’: ‘Hindustani was Rex’s nursery tongue.’3 An early experience, it was said, betrayed Dyer’s true nature: ‘An unhappy little accident gave him a lifelong distaste for killing in sport. Once when shooting at a bird, he heard a cry from the foliage beyond, and looking more closely saw a small monkey with drops of bright blood on her grey fur.’ Horrified that he had missed his mark and hit an innocent creature, Dyer was seized with grief as he looked at the female monkey he had just shot: ‘Tears streamed down her cheeks as she tried to wipe herself clean with a handful of leaves and catching sight of the boy she looked at him so reproachfully that her eyes haunted his dreams for months afterwards.’4
It is hard to reconcile the image of the grieving child with the incident which would later define Dyer. It does, however, suggest that Rex was a man who could be tortured by the consequences of his actions.
Brigadier General Dyer reached Amritsar around 9 p.m. on the night of 11 April. Miles Irving gave him a situation report of a city now quiet but still taut with tension. In Dyer’s opinion, the civil administration had allowed a bad situation to spiral out of control. It could no longer be trusted.
Rex was most unimpressed at the administration’s decision to allow funerals to take place for those killed at the bridge. Mourners had come out en masse and Irving allowed them to do so on condition that all civilians vacated the streets by 2 p.m. If anything, the local population had been more than compliant, returning to their homes a full hour before he had asked. The silent streets were a testament to their desire for peace.5 Nevertheless, on the night of 11 April, Irving still felt the need, or was persuaded, to hand his city over to the military.
Funerals had already been planned and given permission to take place on 12 April; there was little the brigadier general could do to stop them. The next day, when Dyer stepped on the thick carpet of petals left in their wake, he thought it insane that so many people had been allowed to congregate so soon after the disturbances.
He was not alone. The day before Dyer’s arrival, Sir Michael had despatched a trusted colleague from Lahore, a senior ICS man named A. J. W. Kitchin, commissioner of police, to travel to Amritsar in order to appraise him of the situation.
Kitchin described a city on the edge of a precipice. Writing to Major-General Sir William Beynon, the divisional commander in Lahore, Kitchin requested the immediate despatch of a man ‘who is not afraid to act’. Beynon had sent Lieutenant-Colonel M. H. L. Morgan, but Dyer arrived hours later. Eclipsed in rank and personality, Morgan now faded into the background.
Dyer established his own command centre at the Ram Bagh gardens in the north of the city. Choosing to sit far from the offices of civilian administration, he had established de facto martial law.
At best Dyer’s was an act of extraordinary hubris, at worst it was downright illegal. When Sir Michael heard about the confusion in Amritsar, instead of issuing precise instructions to clear
up the mess, he chose to say nothing, letting the situation unfold on its own. His civilian government had been benched and Dyer was now unarguably calling the shots. Nevertheless, Sir Michael allowed him to carry on as he saw fit.6
Rex rolled up his sleeves and unrolled maps of Amritsar. He would bring this city to heel. This was a war. And he knew how to win wars.
Why was Sir Michael content to leave both Amritsar and Rex Dyer in legal limbo, caught between civil and martial law? It could be that Dyer was precisely Sir Michael’s kind of man: a creature created in the Lawrence, piano-smashing mould; a man who had little truck with courts and committees. This brigadier general would get things done while others sank in quagmires of bureaucracy.
Amritsar, as far as Dyer was concerned, was a disaster. For a start, the natives here no longer stopped and salaamed* British superiors. Some even had the temerity to spit at the feet of his men. Such insolence was intolerable.
When he encountered a noisy knot of demonstrators at the Sultanwind Gate, shouting ‘Hindu-Mussalman ki Jai!’, extolling the unity between the two faiths, Dyer was torn over whether he should open fire or merely arrest the ringleaders. In the end, he somewhat grudgingly opted for the latter.7
He needed to shake up this rebel nest. Issuing orders to limit the supply of water and electricity, Dyer reasoned that if the natives struggled with day-to-day existence, they would think twice about making trouble. Amritsar had forgotten its place. He was there to remind them.
Most history books about this period dwell on the plight of the Europeans in Amritsar during the riots and their aftermath. They fail to acknowledge the experience of Indians caught up in the violence. Most Amritsaris were as terrified as those white women and children who had cowered in Civil Lines at the height of the disorder. They, too, had families caught in the crossfire, but no troops came to ferry them to safety.
