Shunpiking Online Vo.3 No.2 Britain's Butcher of Amritsar

The Butcher of Amritsar – Brigadier General Reginald Dyer
By Nigel Collett
Hambledon & London
540 pages 24 illus 13 April 2005
US $39.95
ISBN 1-85285-4457-X
June 2005
Published: 01 May 2005

ON 13 APRIL 1919, General Reginald Dyer dismissed his middle ranking officers and took personal charge of a body of men. He chose from the troops at his disposal those he thought would harbour the least compunctions in shooting unarmed Punjabi civilians: the Nepalese Gurkhas and the Baluch from the fringes of far-off Sind. Before leading them into the city of Amritsar, he remarked to his Brigade Major: "I shall be cashiered for this probably, but I've got to do it." His "horrible, bloody duty", as he called it, consisted of ordering his soldiers to open fire without warning on a peaceful crowd in an enclosed public square. The General directed proceedings from the front, pointing out targets his troops had missed, and they kept shooting until they had only enough ammunition left to defend themselves on their way back to base. While Dyer made his escape, a curfew ensured that the wounded were left to linger until the following morning without treatment. In an act of what the appalled Winston Churchill termed "frightfulness" and what today would be called state terrorism, nearly 400 had been killed, including 41 children and a six-week-old baby, and around 1,000 injured.

Nigel Collett's biography is a thorough reconstruction of the events and a convincing study of their perpetrator. For all its premeditation, the Amritsar massacre was the result of a man's inability to control himself. Like other stories of "True Crime", Collett's begins with a shy, insecure boy who later finds a capacity for violence and a dangerous temper. Dyer declines to hunt for pleasure in sympathy with the prey, yet he is ruthless in man-to-man combat. Defending his Burmese bearer from a beating on board a steamer, he ends up laying out most of the crew with his fists. He gained the love and respect of many of the colonial troops under his command, especially the Sikhs, and resigned from his officers' club when it refused to end racial segregation. However, Brigadier-General Villiers-Stuart, the Inspector of Infantry in India, described him as "an excitable lunatic" who did little during his time as a garrison commander except that "he used to drive about the mountain roads around Abbottabad with a car full of ladies of the station, his great delight being to frighten them by dangerous driving at which he was an expert. The man was insane."

{Of the fate of the injured, who had lain 10 deep in places, he remarked "the hospitals were open... The wounded only had to apply for help."}

Collett's is a heavily detailed treatment and serious to the point of dryness, but the material means he cannot help Dyer coming across like Stephen Fry's General Melchett. At the official inquiry, he explained: "I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and [the Indians] would realise that they were not to be wicked." Of the fate of the injured, who had lain 10 deep in places, he remarked "the hospitals were open... The wounded only had to apply for help."

Dyer - and many of his contemporaries - believed that he had nipped a second Indian Mutiny in the bud and prevented far more suffering than he had caused. He had seen service in the Third Burma War of the 1880s, in which villages were shelled from naval launches and civilians who aided the enemy risked summary execution. During the Great War he was charged with policing the Afghan frontier for German spies, though his fury at the local tribes led him to an unauthorised annexation of part of Persia that was hastily reversed upon his departure. The horrors of the Burma War came from treating a political opponent as a common criminal. The defining error of the frontier conflict was the reverse in a region where banditry and raiding were a way of life and not an act of agitation that could be countered by diplomacy. Dyer, like his Empire, learned his political lessons a cycle too late - just as our own government once denied political status to IRA members and now refuses to withdraw it from a rump of drug dealers and bank robbers. In the Punjab of 1919, sedition laws were causing the problem they were designed to prevent. In April a campaign of civil disobedience in Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple, turned into riots in which several Europeans, including women, were pursued through the streets and beaten to death or burned alive. However, the city was calm when Dyer formed his plan of punishment.

{'When fire was opened, the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a flutter of white garments, with however a spreading out towards the main gateway, and some individuals could be seen climbing the high wall ... I saw no sign of a rush towards the troops'. SERGEANT ANDERSON}

After Dyer was pensioned out of the army, the Morning Post newspaper began an appeal for their "hero" that eventually raised over Ł26,000 from a grateful public. The news of the crime was received very differently among Indians, who were also incensed by the General's notorious "crawling order". In the street where a female missionary had been left for dead, Dyer decreed that between 6am and 8pm Indians could only proceed on their bellies and elbows and were to be beaten if they raised a buttock. This effectively placed the street's inhabitants under house arrest. When informed of this Dyer harrumphed and said that they could go out at night - forgetting that his curfew order meant that they faced far more severe punishment should they try to.

In this way was the goodwill of the Indians squandered, by a series of outrages that ensured that the indigenous elite would seek fulfilment in a government of their own race rather than the administration of the invader. With its close commentary on the inquiry that followed the massacre, this biography functions as an appeal hearing for its subject. However, the verdict remains unchanged and helps retire the notion that the end of the Raj was anything but a good thing.

Source: The Independent

The Butcher of Amritsar; national arrogance and blatant racism

Review by DAVID MCKIRDY*

NIGEL COLLETT is ideally placed to write the biography of General Reginald Dyer, the man who perpetrated "one of the most infamous events in Indian and British history", where troops under his command and in response to his direct orders opened fire on a peaceful crowd in a public square and continued firing until most of their ammunition was spent -- for Collett himself attended Sandhurst military academy, was an officer in the British army, and commanded a Gurkha regiment (arguably one of the last remnants of a British military presence in India and the Far East) so is better placed than most to understand military procedures and obligations and perhaps even to empathise with Dyer's mindset and predicament.

Collett writes authoritatively on his subject and approaches his subject dispassionately and with academic rigor, but it comes through loud and clear that he views Dyer's actions in Amritsar as a notorious and shameful incident in British military history. This well-researched book begins with Dyer's background, his parent's circumstances and his childhood in boarding school in Ireland. There he witnessed a deteriorating and violent political situation and both as a student and as a young officer saw how rioting was best put down with a firm hand and from this "He drew a stark warning of the chaos that civil weakness could let slip".

The British army and indeed all branches of the British administration reinforced an attitude of superiority in everyone from raw recruits right up to the most senior officers. This same 'superiority complex' was inculcated in the public schools, colleges and universities from which the empire drew its 'new blood'. Collett notes that "the cadets trained at Sandhurst were sent out into Empire as the chivalric soldiers of a sacred mission, the spreading and maintenance of the blessings of the British civilization around the globe" -- 'blessings' that, in the third Burma war, included destroying whole villages, summary executions and other collective punishments without so much as a raised voice. Dyer fought and distinguished himself in this war: "He left Burma with his first campaign medal and two clasps, and with a reputation for bravery and dash which was quite exceptional for a subaltern of his years, and which was to remain with him throughout his service."

This war of aggression against the Burmese was undertaken for no other reason than to preempt the French who had a strong presence in Indo-China. The book contains a catalogue of armed aggression and oppression perpetrated by the British: "at one village twelve men were executed one by one to terrify the other villages. Those killed were decapitated and their heads exhibited on stakes."

{Their world was divided into two classes of people, the English and 'Johnny foreigner'}

Their world was divided into two classes of people, the English and 'Johnny foreigner'; even Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India during the enquiry into the Amritsar massacre, was singled out by his fellow MPs as somehow suspect because of his Jewish faith; in a letter from JL Maffey, the Viceroy's secretary. "There was plenty of excitement in the air and the old 'true blue' service section rallied in force,... To this body the only issues were: (a) Is it English to break a man who tried to do his duty? (b) Is a British general to be downed at the bidding of a crooked Jew?" In a letter from Austen Chamberlain, The Chancellor of the Exchequer "I think I have never seen the house so fiercely angry -- and he threw fuel on the flames. A Jew rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves -- that was the feeling."

It was in this atmosphere of national arrogance and blatant racism that Dyer grew up and served, although even in this climate of 'derring do' he was considered a bit of a loose cannon. Dyer was a man of great personal courage and led well in action, however he showed a distinct lack of judgment at times and a remarkable disregard for all authority except his own. He was not averse to taking matters into his own hands: during his tour of the Persian border area of Sistan he took advantage of poor communications and increasingly acted in an autonomous way, signing treaties and pursuing a campaign that was daring and foolhardy. He requested promotion to General in order to better fulfill his duties and supplemented his uniform with the relevant insignia (copied locally) before any appointment had been made.

Dyer publicly claimed that he never doubted that he had done the right thing in Amritsar and sufficient numbers of the British public agreed to contribute the huge sum of over 26,000 pounds sterling to a fund set up by a popular newspaper that had taken up his cause during the parliamentary enquiry into the incident.

In an appendix, Collett shows by reference to the military rules and regulations of the day -- rules that Dyer, having taught for a number of years at the staff college, must have been aware of -- that Dyer broke military codes of conduct and the law. Winston Churchill laid a charge of 'frightfulness' at his feet, but this book shows he was guilty of much more and well deserved the name The Butcher of Amritsar.

The Butcher of Amritsar is a comprehensively referenced addition to the numerous books about this period in history, most of which reminisce about the glory days of the Raj. Nigel Collett shows the face of colonialism as it appeared to the millions of oppressed.

*David McKirdy is a Hong Kong-based poet and an organiser of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. His work appears in the collection Accidental Occidental.

Source: http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article.php?article=552

On the web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amritsar_Massacre
Well-linked account of the massacre

A stranger to the English

Book extracts:

The man who perpetrated this disaster was made a hero by his British supporters, who idolised him as the ‘Saviour of India’. To almost all Indians, then and now, Dyer was a monster. Yet this was a man, born in India, who was more of a stranger to the English than he ever was to the Indians amongst whom he lived almost all his life. He was a man upon whom was conferred the unheard of honour of being made a Sikh in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. He was an officer revered, even loved, by his Indian troops.

The firing continued between ten and fifteen minutes. The noise in the Bagh was a cacophony of rifle crack, bullets thumping into flesh and walls, ricochets screeching off the brickwork, the screams of 25,000 people in terror and the cries of the wounded.

Dyer was later to explain that his action at the Jallianwala Bagh stopped the spread of insurrection in the Punjab.

Once, a white-haired old lady, carried a wreath with a card, which read: “To the great, gallant, splendid, noble soldier, General Dyer, from a Major’s daughter”.

In India, the British Indian press continued its self-defeating campaign of rubbing salt in Indian wounds. The Civil and Military Gazette had a front page devoted to Dyer and quoted Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s words: “General Dyer was the last man in the world to use force recklessly or until it was absolutely necessary.”

It was his misfortune that, on that April evening in Amritsar, he unleashed the forces that were to destroy the India he had spent his life trying to preserve.