The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  Dyer knew what he was going to do even as he passed the skinny young man in the uncomfortable shoes. The natives were daring him just by being there: ‘My mind was made up as I came along in my motor car – if my orders were not obeyed, I would fire immediately.’5

  An estimated 15,000 to 20,0006 people were inside Jallianwala Bagh by the time the armoured column pulled up outside. Getting out of his vehicle, Dyer was met by a sight that irritated him greatly: the alleyway leading into the gardens was too narrow for his vehicles. Instructing his drivers to wait outside, blocking the main exit, Dyer ordered his riflemen to unsling their guns and quick march into the Bagh.

  The dramatic entrance of the soldiers had an immediate effect on those inside. Expecting an imminent order to disperse, some started to pack up their picnics as the soldiers spread out along the northern wall on a raised bank of earth. Others stood rooted to the spot, watching as the uniformed men dropped to one knee and took aim. Hans Raj stood on the podium and screamed at all who could hear him to sit down where they were. When they heard him, they believed, perhaps as he did, that the soldiers would not shoot.7

  It happened so fast it did not feel real. Dyer gave the order. His second in command, a man named Captain Crampton, repeated it, shouting out for all to hear. Whistles rang out from the line of uniformed men. They took aim, squeezed their triggers and fired.

  Sergeant Andrews, who was standing right at the side of Dyer, described the scene as if it unfurled before him in slow motion:

  The whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a flutter of white garments . . . I saw no sign of a rush towards the troops . . . After a bit, I noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in pain and was plucking at the General’s elbow . . . Dyer seemed quite calm and rational. Personally, I wasn’t afraid. I saw nothing to be afraid about. I’d no fear that the crowd would come at us.8

  Men and children fell clutching their faces and chests, tearing flesh and ripped organs, creating a red mist over the places where they lay. The sight of children having their limbs shattered by bullets and their eyes shot out before him9 was too much for Amritsar’s superintendent of police, John Rehill, who had been asked to show Dyer’s men the shortest route to the garden. After a few moments witnessing the scene he could stand it no more and walked out of the Bagh as the soldiers continued to swivel and fire. He would be so traumatised by what he had seen that he would never be able to speak of it.10 He would become a rampant alcoholic in the years that followed.

  From the Indian side, numerous eyewitnesses gave disturbingly similar accounts of what Rehill could not bear to watch: ‘At first the soldiers fired high, but the Sahib ordered them to fire straight and low. There was a short interval after the first firing. Then the second firing began. All fire was directed towards people who were running away. The second firing ceased; and soon after the third firing began.’11

  Troops swivelled, following swarms of terrified, screaming Indians, running for cover that did not exist. They shot, again and again, deliberately and methodically, into the thickest parts of the crowd. Parents wailed for their children, men cried out and fell, clasping at their backs. Bodies piled near the tiny gullies in the perimeter wall. Those who realised they had nowhere to run tried to shield the ones they loved. Some jumped into the well.

  Several retired Jat Sikh soldiers, who had served with the British during the Great War, shouted for people to lie down, but their voices were drowned out by gunfire and the screaming. No discrimination was made between targets. The son of the local doctor, a thirteen-year-old boy named Madan Mouhau, used to visit the garden every day to play with his friends. A bullet, aimed at his head, found its mark and shattered his skull.12

  Wherever there was hope, there was death. A fanning peepul, an indigenous tree with a broad trunk, became a shelter for dozens of screaming people. Dyer directed his men to aim at the tree. Splinters flew with blood and flesh. Nathu the dhobi, or laundry man, was in his eighties. Nathu Kamboj was an eight-year-old boy from the same peasant caste as Udham Singh. Both were killed instantly.

  Knots of people were massed in the corners of the garden, desperately trying to clamber over the high walls. Dyer ordered his men to aim at them too. Dozens fell with bullet wounds to the face, head and chest. Most were shot in the back as they tried to run away. Many were trampled in the panic: ‘There was not a corner left of the garden facing the firing line where people did not die in large numbers . . . Blood was pouring in profusion.’13

  ‘The worst part of the whole thing was that the firing was directed towards the exit gates through which the people were running out. There were three or four small outlets in all and bullets were actually rained over the people at all these places.’14

  Bharpur Singh was only four years old on 13 April 1919 but would remember events vividly for the rest of his life, relating them to anyone who cared to listen well into his old age. He had been taken to the Bagh by his grandfather, and when the firing started, the old man picked him up and ran towards the wall furthest from the soldiers. Realising there was no way out, Bharpur’s grandfather threw him over a seven-foot wall, breaking his arm in the process. Fear of further ‘punishment’ prevented either of them from getting medical aid for days.15

  Watching the carnage from his roof, Mohamed Ismail knew some of his family was down in the Bagh below, and he could do nothing to help them. Later, he would have to sift through corpses looking for his cousin. The dead were once his friends and neighbours: ‘At several places, the corpses were ten or twelve thick. I saw some children lying dead. Khair-Ud-Din Teli of Mandi had his child, six or seven months old, in his arms.’16

  The shooting lasted for ten long minutes, during which time the soldiers managed to fire 1,650 rounds of ammunition. The death toll would have been so much higher if the entrance to the Bagh had been wide enough for machine-gun-mounted cars.

  When the order to cease fire finally came, the soldiers left as suddenly as they had come. Dyer jumped back into his car and was driven off towards the Ram Bagh, his men following at a trot. No medical aid would be allowed in that night; nor would people be permitted to carry their dead and wounded out. In those ten minutes of sustained gunfire, between 500 and 600 people were most likely killed. Three times that number are estimated to have been wounded.17

  Children identified among the dead included: Sohan Lal (9), Gian Chand (15), Mohammed Shariff (12), Abdulla Baksh (15), Nand Lala (12), Mohan Lal (12), Harnam Singh (15), Guru Brahman (15), Nikmu Mal Girdhari (14), Sundar Singh (15), Sohan Singh (15), Tara Singh (15), Labhu Ram (14) and Murli Mal (12).18

  There were certainly more fatalities than we have names of the dead. Any attempt to collate names would only be made much later, by which time Amritsaris were too scared to admit that they, or anybody they had loved, had been anywhere near the Bagh.

  Ishwar Das was still deep in the bazaar, on his hands and knees looking at the underside of half-mangled machinery, haggling with the salesman, when the sound of wailing reached him in waves. ‘Jallianwala Bagh.’ ‘Guns.’ ‘Soldiers.’ The words pounded in his head as he raced back, hoping to find his friends among the living. He never made it as far as the Bagh. He was greeted by an armed policeman who lowered his gun muzzle and screamed at him: ‘Get off the streets! Now!’

  Terrified, the teenager ran as fast as he could to his guest house. He thought of his mother. He thought of his father. He thought he was going to die. Then he thought of the friends still in the garden. He wept. He prayed. He wept again. He was ashamed. Ishwar Das would have to wait till morning to find out what had happened to his friends. As he would tell his own sons, years later, it would be the longest night of his life.

  Ratan Devi’s home was close enough to the Bagh that she heard the firing from her bedroom. She, like many that day, had escaped the heat for a siesta: ‘I got up at once as I was anxious, because my husband had gone to the Bagh. I began to cry and went to the place accompanied by two women to help me.’19

&nb
sp; Ratan Devi found a place filled with twisted corpses and the outstretched hands of the wounded and dying. There was so much blood in the dust: ‘I saw heaps of dead bodies and I began to search for my husband.’20

  Pulling bodies off other bodies, she finally found him beneath a pile of corpses: ‘The way towards it was full of blood and of dead bodies. After a short time both the sons of Lala Sunder came there; and I asked them to bring a charpai [wicker bed] to carry the dead body of my husband home.’21

  Though they promised to help her, the young men never came back. Perhaps armed patrols similar to the one that had terrified Ishwar Das off the streets prevented their return. As Ratan Devi waited in vain, she tried to drag her husband out of the carnage herself. Everywhere she looked she saw people, some of them familiar, riddled with bullets: ‘I entreated a Sikh gentleman to help me in removing my husband’s body to a dry place, for that place was overflowing with blood. He caught the body by the head and I by the legs and we carried it to a dry place and laid it down on a wooden block. I waited till ten o’clock but nobody came.’22

  Ratan Devi could do nothing but wait for morning and the lifting of the curfew. With the head of her dead husband in her lap, she endured a night filled with unimaginable grief and horror:

  I found a bamboo stick which I kept in my hand, to keep off the dogs. I saw three men writhing in agony, a buffalo struggling in great pain; and a boy about twelve years old, in agony, entreated me not to leave the place . . . I asked him if he wanted any wrap, and if he was feeling cold, I could spread it over him. But he asked for water.23

  There was no water, and nothing she could do. Ratan Devi listened as his whimpers faded away. Distant chimes marked the passing of the night. Hundreds trapped within the same walls counted the bells with her.

  * * *

  * Sardar Himat Singh, one of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s generals in the early 1800s, had come from the village of Jalla and he and his family had simply been known locally as the Jalle-walleh – the people from Jalla. The garden was his legacy to the city.

  * Follower of Gandhi’s non-violent doctrine

  † Homespun white cotton. Khadi had been turned into a political statement by those, including Gandhi, who believed in swaraj – the notion that Indian goods should be produced for Indian people by Indian people. This was a direct attack on the more expensive textile imports from Britain. The flag of modern India has a spinning wheel at its centre.

  THE LEGEND OF UDHAM SINGH

  And he tried to help the dying, but could do nothing for them, his water all spilled in the dust, a bullet in his arm. He waited out the long night, trying to bring comfort to those whose lives seeped out in the darkness. Blood like water spilt in the dust . . . And with the first light of morning, he saw the truth. Piles of bodies, their silence harder to bear than their cries had been . . .

  He took a handful of blood-soaked earth in his hand, heavy and black, and rubbed it against his forehead . . . and he swore a terrible vow . . . No matter how long it took, no matter how far it took him . . . he would track down the dogs who did this to his people and he would kill them . . . with as little mercy as they had shown his countrymen.1

  Only Udham Singh knows the truth of where he was on the day of the massacre, and during his life he told so many people so many different versions of events that it is impossible to know which, if any of them, is true. Some say he swore he was there in the Bagh when the shooting began.2 Others say that he told them his ‘brothers and a sister were killed’3 and that the need to avenge them had almost driven him mad. Though we know Udham had only one real sibling, a brother who died in the orphanage, in the Indian tradition we often refer to close friends as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, so it is possible he knew some of the dead and cared for them deeply.

  Some in India, including local historians, have placed Udham at the side of Rattan Devi, insisting he was the ‘Sikh gentleman’ who helped her move his bloodsoaked corpse from a pile of bodies, although there is no evidence to support this.

  It has also been claimed that Udham was not even in India at the time of the massacre. That now often-repeated assertion can be traced to one author, the medal collector Roger Perkins, who first made the case in his 1989 book, The Amritsar Legacy.

  In it, Perkins writes: ‘I happened to purchase two medals which seemed to be related to each other. Both were of the India General Service series. The first bore the clasp Afghanistan NWF 1919 and the name impressed upon the rim was that of Lieutenant J. C. O’Dwyer, Indian Army Reserve of Officers. The other had the clasp Waziristan 1919–21 and was named to an Indian, Udham Singh Railways.’

  I have spoken to Roger Perkins, and whereas I have no doubt that he bought the medal pair in good faith, believing that they belonged to Udham Singh and John Chevalier O’Dwyer, the son of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a cursory search of the ‘Forces at War’ database yielded four Udham Singhs during the relevant period, and the National Archives more than thirty different medal cards for Udham Singhs in the same time frame. These records are far from exhaustive. So many service files were destroyed after independence, but even the few that survive raise question marks over Perkins’s assertion.

  British intelligence documents4 from the 1930s state categorically that Udham Singh, the Kamboj orphan, served in Basra and Mesopotamia. They make no mention of Waziristan. Moreover, we cannot even be sure that Udham signed up for military service under his orphanage name. He frequently used his birth name, ‘Sher Singh’, for official documents, and a host of other aliases besides. If, as looks likely, the recruiters fudged his date of birth to allow him to sign up, not once but twice, it is entirely possible they changed his name, too, at least once.

  As we will later see, if the British service record could have proven that Udham was far from Jallianwala Bagh at the time of the massacre, the authorities would certainly have published the information in 1940. It was in their interest to do so. Perkins may have been indulging in understandable but wishful thinking to believe that both the O’Dwyer medal and Udham’s medal had come to him in a grisly coupling.

  One particular story told to me in the course of my research rings truer than most, purely because it is so mundane. It says that Udham was in Punjab at the time of the massacre, but he was not at Jallianwala Bagh, rather in neighbouring area of Majah, spreading seditious leaflets, just as he had done in Amritsar before Gandhi’s satyagraha.

  If that was true, it paints Udham’s obsession in hues of human frailty. He would have had to live with the fact that he had personally encouraged many of his countrymen to go to that doomed Baisakhi meeting. They died, but he had lived. It would haunt him.5 Survivor’s guilt can be a terrible thing.

  What we can say is that the massacre transformed Udham Singh. Vengeance took over his life, and for the next twenty years, though he would be given numerous chances to live a happy and fulfilling existence, he would continue his quest, travelling thousands of miles, meeting a variety of people, learning what he needed, trying to become the avenging angel for his people. A man born with so little, who wanted to be so much more.

  CHAPTER 10

  I REPENT, I REPENT, I REPENT

  The first news of the massacre reached Lahore in trickles. Miles Irving telephoned in a report at around midnight, but Sir Michael kept the information to himself, waiting for official written confirmation. That report arrived at 3 a.m. on 14 April, more than ten hours after the first shots had been fired. Though it made for alarming reading, still Sir Michael did not pass the report on to London:1

  At Amritsar yesterday, Brigadier-General Dyer and Deputy-Commissioner read proclamation in city forbidding all public meetings. Prohibition proclaimed by beat of drum and read and explained at several places in city. In spite of this, meeting attended by six thousand was held at 4-30 contrary to Deputy-Commissioner’s expectation. Troops present under command of General Dyer fired, killing about two hundred. Deputy-Commissioner not present. Military report not yet received. City quiet at ni
ght but political effect on Manjha (Sikh tract around Lahore and Amritsar) and troops uncertain. In view of possibilities General Officer Commanding is arranging to draft into Lahore more troops, British and Indian.2

  Irving’s report vastly underestimated both the number of people who had been in the Bagh and also how many had been hurt and killed. He warned Sir Michael that trouble was headed his way: ‘Early this morning large mob attacked railway station at Wagha (between Lahore and Amritsar); rail was removed by skilled hands and signaller bolted. Armoured train went out from Lahore and two cars were derailed and left on line under guard. Assistance being sent. Line cutting and attacks on trains becoming frequent.’3

  Brigadier General Dyer’s own account arrived after Irving’s, and when it did, it was surprisingly bloodless. It also dramatically under played the number in the Bagh and the results of the shooting: ‘I saw a dense crowd, estimated at about 5,000; a man on a raised platform addressing the audience and making gesticulations with his hands.’4

  ‘I realised that my force was small and to hesitate might induce attack. I immediately opened fire and dispersed the mob. I estimate that between 200 and 300 of the crowd were killed. My party fired 1,650 rounds.’5

  Rex Dyer, a man who prided himself on his straight talking, was either being obtuse or blind to what he had just done. His men had made no effort to survey the scene, count bodies or treat the wounded, so in truth he had no idea of casualty or fatality numbers when he wrote his report. For him to suggest that he had successfully ‘dispersed the mob’, when they had in truth trapped them and shot at them, was extraordinary. Dyer, a stranger to Amritsar, did not know if there were other exits to Jallianwala Bagh, or how narrow some of the channels between tenements were. He was well aware that he had turned his guns on knots of people at the wall. He also knew that he had left many seriously wounded in his wake.