Writers and poets have always taken note of history. Some events shake the conscience of thinking men and women the world over, set off tremors across a nation, unspool unforeseen events, and echo not only in the literature of their age but for generations to come. The cold-blooded massacre at Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh on April 13, 1919, is among these. It marked a defining moment in the history of modern India and made the British presence morally untenable.
General REH Dyer’s decision to fire — 1,650 rounds in a matter of 10 minutes — at an unarmed gathering in the public park, leading to the death of hundreds, and the blocking of the exits, which prevented help reaching the wounded, were acts of unmitigated brutality.
My own interest as a literary historian is in the literature that springs from the intersection of history and literature. In the 100th year of the Jallianwala Bagh killings, I wanted to see how literature in the languages most affected by it — namely, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and English — offers ways to reflect and analyse this tragic event of historical import.
While the output is slender, I did find some remarkable writings such as Saadat Hasan Manto’s story 1919 Ka Ek Din (A Day in 1919). Popular accounts of the 1789 French Revolution note that the first bullet fired in that uprising had hit a prostitute. Taking this theme forward, Manto makes a ‘hero’ out of the good-for-nothing brother of the city’s two most famous prostitutes. Abdullah Hussein’s elegantly sprawling novel Udaas Naslein contains a chapter about a citizens’ inquiry committee meeting an old fisherman who claims to have witnessed the murder of five Europeans and the assault on Miss Sherwood, an English missionary, during the unrest on the city’s streets in the days leading up to the firing in the park.
In Krishan Chander’s Amritsar Azadi Se Pehle, Amritsar Azadi ke Baad , the real heroes of Jallianwala Bagh are the valiant women — Begum, Zainab, Paro and Sham Kaur — who defied General Dyer’s completely illegal and humiliating ‘crawling order’. Anyone who wished to pass through the alley where Miss Sherwood had been attacked would have to crawl on their belly. In the story, all four women pay with their lives while resisting the order and become martyrs.
Dyer’s ‘crawling order’ is taken up for closer examination in Ghulam Abbas’s short story Raingneywale (Those Who Crawled). Amritsar-born Abbas would have been a mere lad of 10 at the time of the incident, but surely anyone with any links to the city would have carried the effect of that trauma to some degree. A 100 years later, the humiliation that a depraved mind can heap upon those it considers inferior continues to horrify.
Bhisham Sahni, the conscience-keeper of an entire generation of Hindi writers, brings together several well-known facts about the events that occurred in the lead-up to the massacre, in his play Rang De Basanti Chola . The Amritsar of 1919, innocent, untouched by tragedy, buoyant, lively and filled with political energy, is brought to life by Sahni. Jallianwala Bagh is Alive , a short story by the Punjabi writer Navtej Singh, tells us that the past never dies or goes away; we carry some part of it inside us and people are repositories of history. Understanding history, then, holds the key to understanding the human mind.
Coming to poetry, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, famous for her rousing poem on the Rani of Jhansi, urges those who come to offer their respects to do so with the solemnity the sacred space of the Jallianwala Bagh deserves. Sarojini Naidu reaches out to Punjab in her hour of grief with this poem in 1919:
‘O mournful queen! O martyred Draupadi!/Endure thou still, unconquered, undismayed!/ The sacred rivers of thy stricken blood/ Shall prove the five-fold stream of Freedom’s flood,/ To guard the watch-towers of our Liberty’
Four excellent poems in Punjabi — The Bullet Marks (Sikke da Daag) by Sohan Singh Misha, The Blood of Hindu and Muslim (Raliya Khoon Hindu Musalman Ethe) by Babu Firoz Din Sharaf, Vaisakhi of the Jallianwala Bagh (Jallianwale Bagh di Vaisakhi) by Giani Hira Singh Dard, and an excerpt from the book-length poem Bloody Baisakhi(Khooni Baisakhi) by Nanak Singh — take us back to a Punjab redolent with syncretism. They remind us that the blood spilt was human and not that of any one community. And for that reason, the lessons of Jallianwala Bagh are for all of humanity.
The poems in Urdu include Jallianwala Bagh by Muhammad Iqbal, The Hunter’s Complaint (Shikwa-e Saiyyad) by Tirlok Chand Mahroom, The Tyrannies in the Punjab (Mazalim-e Punjab) by Zafar Ali Khan, To the Children of the East India Company (East India Company ke Farzandon Se) by Josh Malihabadi, and, lastly, If You Wish to Learn Mercy... (Agar Seekhni ho Rehmat) by Ahmaq Phaphoondvi. Taken together they reflect the anguish and horror evoked by the incident even in those outside Punjab. These lines from Phaphoondvi are emblematic of a rising nationalistic consciousness that was a direct outcome of the barbaric action in Punjab:
‘If you wish to learn Mercy, learn it from Dyer/ And learn the principles of Justice from O’Dwyer /And how best to flatter the masters/ Learn the technique from the Khan Bahadur/ And how to earn your daily bread honestly/ Learn it from any officer in the Secret Police’
Rakhshanda Jalil is the editor of Jallianwala Bagh: Literary Responses in Prose & Poetry