Empire: World History - 5. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

In the latest episode of Empire, Willie and Anita dive into the story of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, alongside Professor Kim Wagner. Plus a discussion as to whether analysing the darker parts of a country’s history is the same as talking it down. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @EmpirePodUK Twitter: @EmpirePodUK goalhangerpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpirepoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. You leave this pregnant pause every week. It makes me so nervous. What do you do that? When you're surprised when you suddenly turn the spotlight on.

Honestly, I'm going to drive a truck through that pause. Yes, William is here. I'm here. And I think we just both of us want to start this podcast with a huge amount of thanks to the enormous amount of enthusiasm you've shown for this podcast. Willie, we've been completely blown away, haven't we? Yeah, I'm thrilled. I didn't expect anything like this. I mean, there's more response from this than I've had for the TV documentaries I've done,

certainly more than you get from books, which is a. lovely slow burner and you're still getting stuff 20 years later, but you certainly don't get hundreds of tweets of appreciation. So I'm thrilled. I'm sure you are too. Well, I'm a little bit tickled. It also puts us in a turf war with your friend, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell. I mean, you realize, we are the Jets and the Sharks now. I feel very bad about this because they were very sweet and Rory and Tom talked to some. And lovely Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. And honestly, their podcasts are, we are from the same stable and they are remarkable podcasts.

If you're not listening to them, listen to them as well as us, but not instead of us. I very, very nearly crossed with Alistair over the weekend at Troquare and the Scottish borders where we were both speaking. But he was a little late and I had to leave. So I missed a direct confrontation with Alastair, who's been a little bit defensive in his tweets.

I think it's fair. May I just say that if it did come to a face off between you and Alastair Campbell, with all the love I have for you, I put money on him. Seriously. I think I put money on him too. It's not even a contest.

Not really. I think we've all got all the different Goalhanger pods have to have a drink together. I think that's definitely going to have a bit. Be friends. But just on your responses, and we really do welcome your responses. So you know you can reach us on Twitter.

EmpirePod UK is where we are at EmpirePod UK. And we have now got a shiny new email address as well. So you can email us. It is EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. Empirepoduk at gmail.com. But, you know, through Twitter, we've been getting lovely feedback but also questions. Do you mind if I start with a question? Because it is, to me, as well, I want to know the answer as well.

Sure, go for it. And I think you are the person to answer this question. So it says on episode three of Empire, I was curious on this aspect of British retributions. It's from Lawrence Hooper. And he says, who actually gave the orders to close the gates of Delhi? and massacre the male population. And how much of the detail of this reached the UK at the time? I think, first of all, as a bit of general background,

the normal behaviour at this time, I think anywhere in the world, was that if cities surrendered on a campaign, then the city was not to be plundered and there were to be no massacres and no rapes. But if a city resisted, it was a free-for-all. and this, I think, was not just the understanding of the British. This was the general behaviour of the time in many different cultures. As for who gave the order to massacre, well, General Archdale Wilson was the British commander in charge of the siege of Delhi.

He led the siege, and then he led the assault in September 1857. and his orders were that no prisoners were to be taken. But for the sake of humanity and the honour of country, women and children were not to be hurt. In other words, that women and children were to be protected, but males were not to be considered friends, and they were therefore fair game. And this is not a unique situation to the capture of Delhi in 1857,

for example, in 1799, when Tepu Sultan's capital, St. Rang, is taken by force by the East India Company, another great massacre occurs. But in that situation, there was massive rape and the women and children were also considered fair game. Three Ranga Putnam was left more or less an empty ruin at the end of 1799. And the person who finally called a halt to the rapine and plunder, I think after five or six days, was the future Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley. And it was his job to go around and stop the looting in the rapine. I think they had four or five days when they were allowed to do more or less what they liked.

And it's very shocking to us, but this I think was the normal behaviour. Okay. But the other part, the question, which I think is incredibly important and interesting, is how much of this was known back in Blighty? There is wall-to-wall coverage of the uprising of 1857, the Mutiny is it's known in Britain. And every newspaper is publishing a lot of very bloodthirsty and nasty stuff. and you're getting the people of Britain reacting with absolute horror about the news they're getting about atrocities to British women and children. And the general opinion seems to be the mutineers have got it coming,

whenever they're caught, they should be killed and justice should be done. You get very little reporting from the ground in a way that we are used to now, from our televisions and newspapers. And in fact, you have working for the time, times, a man called William Howard Russell, who is the world's first war correspondent. He covers the Crimea first, and then he goes to India, and he covers the aftermath of the mutiny. He arrives quite late, and he misses a lot of the key action. He arrives in Lucknow, and at the end, he goes to Delhi, after the massacres. He comes to the gutted city. And he is the only person giving an even

remotely nuanced view to what's going on. For example, he visits the fallen emperor, Bahadha Shah Zhafer, in his prison cell. And he's been led to believe by the propaganda of the British that this is the guy at the centre of this bloodthirsty monster of this bloodthirsty. And he's expecting to see some sort of bond villain, you know, stroking a white cat, some sort of evil mastermind. And instead he sees this pathetic old man being kept in the stables of his former palace, the Red Fort, sitting. on a poor man's chariot being sick when he walks into the room. And he gives this very nuanced picture. Was this really the man that ordered all this? So that, I mean, thank you. That's a really good insight into what people knew then. And a question that we've been getting a lot on

Twitter is, why don't we know about this now? And I want to sort of link both of those things. We often sort of lament that this is so recent and yet it's not taught in schools. And I always give this example of, you know, I know everything about a Roman viaduct and I know about the beam in a Tudor House, but I wasn't taught this either, and I was schooled here. And Liz Trust, I mean, in politics, a woman of the moment, but she very much took the stance that she was sick and tired of people doing Britain down. And I wonder what you think about those people who say, actually just doing these kind of podcasts is doing Britain down.

Well, I think, you know, the job of any historian is to find the truth, good or bad. You don't go out to write history to do Britain up, you know, or to do Britain down. And you go and you look at the archives and you read the letters of the people that were involved. And your job as a historian is to make sense of that and present your impression of that story in all its varying colors and in all its horrors and all its joys, whatever you find, you must report accurately. And so the idea that historians should be going out and covering 1857 and coming out with heart-improving stories or nice, warm tales to have over the Oval Tene of an evening is nonsense.

And I think if Liz Truss wants to know a bit more about Empire, which clearly she doesn't know much about, she should merely ask Quasi Quarteng, her colleague, who has written a fantastic book called Ghosts of Empire. You love this book. You've talked about this a lot. So, I mean, what does Quasi Quarteng say about Empire? Quasi Quarting does not share my views entirely,

but he's well aware of the complexity and the dark side of empire. And his book, Ghosts of Empire, is not a book that I would agree with everything in that book, but it's a deeply learned book. It's the product of his PhD down at Trinity College of Cambridge. He's Dr. Quasi Quarteng and a considerable scholar of empire. And he obviously takes a more right-wing view than I have,

but he also is someone that knows the African world and the African sources in the way that I don't. And what he covers in that book is some pretty chilling stuff as bad as anything we've heard on the Indian side of the story, if not worse. And certainly in terms of economic exploitation, much worse. Yeah, I mean, I'm just taking a line from the book, said book, much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policymaking. So he does in this book, which is, you know, well thought of. You know, he says these things are important because they shape where we are today. And on that

issue of sort of teaching it in schools, is there something that is debilitating? about knowing that there is perhaps a lot of darkness in the country's past. I mean, Germany's done it in a very different way. Germany just goes head on into it, doesn't it? I think the difference is that, you know, the Germans lost the war and had a massive soul-searching. We won the war and never had to. And I think if you look around the world, regimes in a sense that are still in power

tend not to have massive soul-searching exercises. One of my favourite documentaries is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, which goes around all the activists in Indonesia who massacred communists in the 1970s. Absolutely amazing documentary it is. It's just astonishing. Extraordinary documentary. These people, because that party is still in power, have in no sense had to repent or think about or really go over the acts of killing.

that they performed the massacre of communists, often in extremely brutal ways, often with piano wars, on a massive scale. And what Oppenheimer finds is that talking to these people and asking them to recreate what they did, which initially they're very proud and pleased to do, makes them think about it for the first time and makes them confront what they actually did. And in a sense, you know, that's what I think so much of our country needs to do. We naturally, like any people on earth, assume that our ancestors were good people. Well, I mean, every country, not just this country. I think what you're saying is any country. I mean, talking about documentaries, as you know, I was a she-she-do. I mean, I don't get out much. It doesn't honestly, don't feel jealous of my life.

But I happened to be at a lovely West End premiere of another documentary, if you like that one, you'll like this one called Territory. And it's about this indigenous group trying to protect their homeland in the middle of the Amazon in the wake of Bolsonaro trying to recreate what Brazil should be about. That's an absolutely fascinating thing. Extraordinary rave reports of it this morning on Twitter and social media. What was interesting is I was bumping into a lot of people who listen to Empire. Do do, do, do, blowing our own trumpet again.

But I mean, I can't help it because what they were saying was that we just had no idea that whenever we are taught about these characters, they are so two-dimensional. So, you know, a lot of people said they didn't have any clue that Gandhi was once a cheerleader for the British Empire and was sort of like one of their greatest recruiters for World War I. These things are sort of shocking. People are complex. History is complex. We should try and do an entire podcast on Gandhi and we should try and get Ram Guha on the show. Oh, that's a good shout. He's the great expert, two volumes. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, because Gandhi is such a divisive figure in India today. And I don't think anyone has any notion

of that on this side of the planet. Here, he's still very much Ben Kingsley. There, he's he is, I mean, honestly, it's incendiary, the kind of discussions that go on about Garthi. Let's do it. Let's do a whole podcast on him. Absolutely. It was very interesting sitting in Delhi last April or May when Boris Johnson came visiting and his first stop was Gandhi's Ashram. And I suddenly said, you know, this was the first time I'd actually heard of Gandhi's Ashram on the Indian media for about two years. You know, he's not a figure that's any more at the centre of discussion, although he is someone on the banknotes still and that, you know, every city has an MG road, Mahatma Gandhi Road.

But seeing Boris Johnson go to the Ashram was a bit of a kind of flashback. You felt you were back in the same 1980s when Ben Kingsley was playing Gandhi, when Jalin Wallabag massacre I saw for the first time reenacted in that film. And then at the same time, we had Sama and Rashdi writing about it in Midnight's children.

This is what, mid-80s, 1984. And those I remember reading Midnight's children and seeing Gandhi, those are the first two times I came across Jeline Wollabberg as a child. Well, look, so you're very neatly leading us into where we left off in the last podcast. So the last podcast was a really quite huge sweep of history. We took you from the mutiny, which was a turning point in the history. First War of Independence, if you're an Indian listener.

So British and Indian colonial history, you get one turning point to the mutiny. And the second is going to be 1919, which is what we were leading you up to through the First World War. And Gandhi is pivotal in this. So where we left you off, if we haven't heard this, Amritsa has been British. peaceful. There are two Gandhian leaders called Satyabal and Kichaloo, who are managing to keep things under control where other cities are erupting in violence. They are not in Umritsa. And I still don't understand this decision, but the lieutenant governor of Punjab, a man called Sir Michael O'Dwyer, has decided that the best way to handle any kind of insurrection is to take the pressure

cook of Alv off and throw it away. So he has these two men picked up and taken out of Punjab. And it is also, sort of you dealing with that, he stopped Gandhi from arriving in Amritsa, and there are rumours rife of things that, you know, Gandhi may have been arrested, he may have been hanged, he may have been shot, and everything is in turmoil. So that's where we left you. And there's an information vacuum. That's a key thing, that people don't know what's happened to these two lawyers who've been taken away.

Have they been hung? Have they been shot? Have they been arrested? No one's completely clear what's happened to Gandhi. and then insurrection starts in Delhi and there's riots in Delhi, there's riots on the edges of Amritsa and there's rumours going around.

The British don't know what's going on. The Indians are hearing rumours that are different from what the British are hearing and there's chaos. What I'd like to do is introduce a special guest star. Is that all right? Because after the break, we're going to hear from a professor of global

and imperial history, a man called Professor Kim Wagner, who has been utterly forensic in retreading those stories. steps leading up to the massacre in the garden. And I mean, you were very impressed with the book that he wrote. I reviewed his book and your book together before we'd ever worked together. And I thought they were a perfect, complementary pair to each other. Kim's book is deeply forensic, very wide-angled and a very emotionless and calm look at this terrible event. It has no

shading of bias. It's like a detective going in analyzing the evidence. Your book is, your grandfather was there. And your book is passionate and it's focused very much

on your own family story, but also on this other figure who would in the years to come assassinate Michael O'Dwire. So join us after the break as we lead you through the very, very narrow entrance to Jali and Wala Barg.

Welcome back to Empire. Well, as promised, we're joined by Kim Wagner, who is, as I said, before professor of global and imperial history and something of authority on colonial, matters of colonial violence. And Kim, just before, on the last podcast,

I don't know whether you heard this, but we were talking about this seething mass of rage in Amritsa, which unleashes itself against this poor, innocent woman, Marcella Sherwood. who is a missionary, who is a good woman. So can we pick up that part of the story, please?

Because it really is pivotal, isn't it, in all the nightmares that then are realized? So she is this sort of quintessentially rash figure, so the elderly, you know, missionary-minded colonial who runs several orphanages inside the old Indian part of Amritsa. All Europeans have been told to evacuate because these riots are unfolding. And she's actually cycling around to shut down,

the different schools for which she has responsibility. And in the narrow alleys of old Amritsa, she cycles in, she comes across a crowd of young Indian boys who proceed to pursue her and beat her up. And we have quite both, you know, her own accounts, but also eyewitness descriptions. It's a brutal attack. They try and beat her to death.

I mean, there's no two ways around it. They are. They are, but they're beating her with their slippers as well. And they're pulling off her shoal. There's something sort of very demonstrative in the way that they are assaulting the sort of the respect, usually, you know, given to Saabs and Mem Saabs, you know, Europeans in an Indian context. They attack the statue of Queen Victoria and break one finger off. So there's also something very symbolic in this violence.

However, if you're at the receiving end, it is, of course, an extremely brutal attack. I mean, there is also something very interesting, which I just find an extraordinary. is that a lot of the pleaders or the lawyers who are Satyipal and Kitchenoo followers surround that statue of Queen Victoria and say don't touch her. Do not touch her. We don't touch the Queen. You know, we're living in an era of statues being pulled down, but there it is Indians who stop the mobs from going for Queen Victoria. They don't get to poor old Marcella Sherwood in time, but they do protect the statue. So the assault on Marcella Sherwood sets off every alarm bell in the British nerves. They've persuaded themselves that there were mass-raceous.

in 1857, which actually we now know never happened, but they think the same is happening again. So they over-out, they even send out, I think, the Royal Air Force. Yeah, I mean, they really pull out all the stops as a result of these riots. The riots, they end on the 10th of April. Several European-owned banks have gone up in flames. Five Europeans were killed. Something between 25 and 30 rioters have been shot and killed by the police and the soldiers. But really the sort of telegrams and messages that are sent out by the British authorities

were in complete disarray in Amritsa is that we are under attack. So Royal Air Force airplanes are sent, armor, trains, and military reinforcement. So in a matter of, you know, not days, but hours, there are hundreds of British colonial troops massing into Amritsa. And we really have this sort of siege mentality expressing itself. And then, very unfortunately, this all coincides with a major Punjabi festival, Baishaki. Vaisaki, yeah, which is a huge. I mean, every Punjabi, no matter whether you're a Hindu-seek or Muslim, you'll call it different things.

But it is of huge relevance. It's the harvest festival. It is a time to give thanks for the crops that have come in. It is a kite festival. It's a massive cattle fair and a horse fair. It's a time for people to get together, either to give thanks or just to get together and feast. It's kind of Christmas, Christmas for Punjab. And so when the British declare a curfew, they're coming across hundreds of villages who are just streaming in unaware that anything's going on.

Yeah, so after the 10th of April, Amritsa is peaceful, but the British are still operating under the assumption that some kind of insurgency is imminent. And so we have General Dyer turning up. He's actually the third military commander who ends up in Amritsa because there is, is pressure from above, not just with Odwai and Lahore, but also from the Indian government, that harsh measures are required to put an end to this. We have to remind ourselves, it's not just an Amritsa that there is unrest. Telegraph lines are being cut across the Punjab, railways are being disrupted. So for the British, this is really, you know, from their perspective, this is a replay of 1857 and they act accordingly regardless of what Amritsa actually looks like.

So Daya, when he reaches, and he's, as you say, the third man on the ground. And, you know, there is a question mark as to whether he was ordered to go there or just took it upon himself to turn up. But he issues something called the drum proclamation. Tell us about the drum proclamation and what he was expecting from the natives of Amritsa. So that's on the morning of the 13th of April that there is a procession that marches through Amritsa and really, so it's

almost sort of like a medieval sort of drum roll declaration. There is a drama there and there's processions of soldiers to say that all public meetings are banned. No more than five people can gather together.

And really you know, this is this is the one way that the authorities can communicate with the local population. It's a heagie here. It is Literally, you know, like when you imagine just one man with a bell. And for those people who don't know the old city of Amritser, and Kim, you know it, I know it very well. Particularly the old city is a, it's a sprawl of narrow alleyways with some of the noisiest people who are ever going to meet on planet Earth.

You cannot be heard, you know, two meters beyond where you're standing. So the expectation that this drum proclamation, Kim, is going to be heard and obeyed by everybody in the city is, I mean, to me just feels barking mad. It's a demonstration of power, right? And yes, it's not heard by that many people. And even those who hear it are not clear what it actually is. But from, you know, from from from Dyer's perspective, he has now warned the local population not to gather and that all meetings are will be illegal. And it's even in some of the versions of proclamation, you know, they might be fired upon. So he feels that he has sent this warning.

But unfortunately, there is the festival going on, and there is a political meeting being organized for that very evening. So what happens in the Jolly and Wallabar Garden? Where is it? Yeah, well, describe the setup of it. Because you know, you say garden, people are assuming it's green and pleasant. It's not. It's just dusty.

It's surrounded by tenement buildings and walls. Kim, I mean, take it up from there. Just describe what the bug is. because it hadn't changed when I last saw it, and now they've turned it into some sort of Disney-fied version of itself. But before that happened, Kim, what did it look like? It was kind of a waste ground. I mean, there were buffaloes grazing there.

People would throw their trash there. But it's also kind of a public space, much as the way it used to be, not that many years ago, where people, they do their morning exercise, or you might meet up with friends, people go there for picnics. And during the Vaisaki Festival, It's crammed full of visitors, both locals and people from the countryside.

So you have a... Yeah, it's about eight minutes walk from the Golden Temple. So it's really convenient. So, you know, you want to get out of the hubbub and get out of the narrow streets. You go to the barg. So all these people think they're just meeting for a nice chin wag doing by Saki. But there is a political meeting going on as well. That's important, isn't it, Kim?

Because that's the thing that puts Dyers back up and makes him feel he's justified in doing what he does. So there is a counterproclamation, as it were, that there will be a political. meeting in Jalien Wallabakh. Now Jalien Wallabag is far inside the sort of labyrinth of narrow streets of Amrits. It's as far as away from the European lines as you can possibly get. And it's not the first time that have been these political meetings at this particular spot. It's clearly a place where locals, they feel they can meet away from the prying eyes of the authorities to some extent. And the moment that Dyer, he hears that there is a meeting taking place right after his ban. meetings it's it's a red rack and he sees oh this is this is a challenge and if again if we

follow the colonial logic the one thing you can't do is appear weak in in the face of any kind of challenge or unrest amongst the you know subject colonial population dire doesn't really care about the composition of the crowd so what happens is that he the moment he hears that there's a meeting going ahead despite his ban he mobilizes sort of a special sort of task force and what's really interesting about that is you can see by the calculations the strategic calculations he makes he believes he's entering enemy territory he brings two armored cars and he brings gherka soldiers and belucci troops he has hundreds of british troops available he posts them at the city gates around all the way of around Amritsa, not to cut off people, but to be able to extricate

him because he believes if he goes into Amritsa, even with armored cars and well-armed troops, they can be ambushed in the narrow alleys. Who is actually, yeah, but who is in the, how many people in the garden and who are, you know, who are the people in the garden? Are they, are they the army that Dyer feels he's driving into? No, certainly not. We'll never know, exactly how many there are. Dyer himself claims he was told there were 6,000. There's somewhere between 15 and 25,000. Mostly men. There's a significant number of small children and boys and a few women as well. Women don't really participate in public life and political gatherings at this point in time. But there's a sweetmeat sellers there, all sorts of vendors, friends meeting up. And then there is

a political meeting. So there are people standing on platforms. And all they're asking for is really the release of their two leaders who have just been arrested. These are really mild and moderate speeches. They're not inflammatory calls for rebellion or anything like that. Well, Kimmer, you know this. And we're going to talk about this more in another podcast about the book that I wrote Patient Assassin. And the reason I wrote it was because my granddad was there that day. And he was just this lanky teen who had come to the market to do a deal on Vesaki Day for, you know, parts for sewing machines of all things. And, you know, he, he certainly wasn't political then. He became political afterwards, but he wasn't political then. Anyway, so there you

are. You say, Dyer now is at the gates, or I grandly call them the gates, but it is a narrow entry to this garden, which is, I mean, you'd be hard pushed for more than three men to walk through that entry side by side. It's narrow. What happens then? What does he do? He says, he saw in front of him the rebel camp that he had expected. And so he lines up his troops, 50 of them with rifles, the Gurk and Balucci troops. And within 30 seconds, according to himself, he opened fire on the crowd. And he thinks it's, I mean, Rebel Camp is another sort of 1857 phrase, isn't it?

He thinks he's at the heart of the mutiny. Absolutely. And the language is really crucial, right? There's all these descriptions of, yes, they may not have had any weapons, but they have their latties, they have their heavy wooden sticks, and they probably have, you know, knives hidden. So there's all this from the British perspective. They're really facing their worst nightmares. And unfortunately, of course, we now know it was an unarmed crowd. And how many rounds are fired in that very short period of time? One thousand six hundred and 50 rounds from 303, Le Enfield, which are fired over the course of 10 minutes by 50 men. So it's a quite

slow and carefully considered rate of fire. And there are accounts again, you know, for anyone who sort of disputes or wants to try and dispute, what happens from the British side? You know, there are people looking to Dyer saying, do you want us to fire again? And he just keeps ordering, reload, fire. No morning has been issued, no dispersal order has been given. But they very deliberately reload and fire. And Kim, it's the manner of firing as well. It isn't above people's heads. It's not below their knees. It's shooting to kill. And it's in the thickest parts of the crowd, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, Daya explicitly orders the troops to focus on these few narrow

exits where people are trying to hide. And of course, a lot of people are not just shot and killed or wounded. They're also trampled upon because there are thousands of people trying to get out from a very small enclosure under point blank fire. And Dyer himself is blocking the main exit. Well, he would have taken his armoured cars in, wouldn't he, Kim? You know, the machine gun mounted cars if it was a bit wider. He says this later on. Yeah, I mean, he has posted his troops in front of the main entrance.

So there are five other smaller exits, but these are like back doors to people's gardens or very, very narrow alleys. People are really trapped, you know, like fish in a barrel. And so the scene we have in the film Gandhi, is that pretty accurate where people are climbing over each other, trying to get down walls, jump over garden fences and so on? Describe the scene to us. Yes, that is a fairly accurate description. We have horrifying stories about fathers being there with a small children, trying to cover them with their bodies and being, you know, split up. There's one father who runs around. His clothes has been torn off and he is completely distraught.

And later when he returns home, his son has actually survived. But there are lots of others who then, you know, look for their lost relatives and have to literally pick through piles of bodies. And this is a real controversy. I mean, the real, as if there's only one. But dire, when he retreats, he does not offer any medical aid. And curfew has been called. So there are people literally bleeding to death during that.

long night. And my grandfather is one of those people has to wait till morning to find that his two mates are dead, among the dead. And people have jumped into a well? Well, this is, so Kim's done really good work, because there's a lot of fable building on this. You know, that hundreds, in the Gandhi film, you mentioned, hundreds are jumping into the well. But Kim, you found that not to be the case. Yeah. So at the Jalen Wallabagam memorial today, there's a sign that says 120 bodies were recovered from the well. And that is indeed one of the sort of recurring visual tropes around them, going by the Indian Congress investigation, not the British one, the Indian nationalist one, and the people who looked at it afterwards, they didn't find anybody's.

And eyewitnesses themselves describe one or two corpses floating in the well. In some ways, it's a minor detail. But what is really interesting is that it speaks to the motif of people jumping into a well, which both harks back to 1847, but of course also to the partition of Indian Pakistan. So no medical aid is given to the survivors, but on top of that, there are punitive measures taken by the police all over Amritsa. Yes, in the days following the massacre itself, in the alley where Ms. Sherwood was attacked, there is British troops positioned, and all local residents there and anybody else who pass that street are forced to crawl literally at the point of bayonets. and the British troops are soiling the local wells, harassing the women there, and they take photographs of this.

And there's a number of public floggings that take place throughout the city as well. And the Royal Air Force bombing? Actually, it would appear that just before Daya arrived, there was almost an order for the Golden Temple to be bombed by the air, which is averted at the very last moment. But the Royal Air Force does bomb villages elsewhere in the Punjab. Just very briefly, because we will go into this in the next podcast, but what is the effect when this news spreads throughout India?

What do people like Tagore and Neru and Gandhi do when they hear this? Initially, they don't do anything because the British are very good at shutting down all information. So it actually takes weeks and months before the truth and the enormity of what happened begins seeping out. Tagore, Rabindranah Tagore Nobel laureate is one of the first. first people to take a public stand and returning the knighthood he had been awarded by the British. And that's before we even get to sort of all the grim details to emerge.

There is an Indian nationalist unofficial inquiry and then later also the official Hunter Committee. They said, as late as early 1920, Gandhi is still on the fence. He's not quite willing to abandon hope that a. future in collaboration rather than without the British is possible. But as the evidence emerge, not least General Dyer's own accounts, where he openly admits what he was doing, is when, for a lot of even moderate Indian nationalists, that is really the final straw. And how does Nero react? Well, the young Nero is actually part of the investigation that takes place and is in Amritsa talking to survivors as the Indian National Congress tries to get some kind of overview and understanding of

what has happened, not just in Emirates, but throughout the Punjab. And he is radicalized. He and his father both think that they can no longer work closely with the British in the way they had before. Yes, not least because of the violence of what happened, but also in the way that the British really want to sweep it under the carpet. So the way that it is dealt with substantive. is as important as the event itself. And there is a whiprand. Money is raised to reward Dyer for this in some quarters. Dyer is not, as opposed to what a lot of people would like to think.

He's not punished. He's not sacked. He's forced to go to take permanent sick leave as it were. And for the right-wing conservative press in the UK, that's an absolute betrayal of a brave colonial hero. We have this sort of armchair liberals stabbing our brave troops in the back. That's very much the narrative. And so 26,000 pounds are collected on behalf of Dyer back in England in 1920, which gives total lie to the notion that the British were horrified by what had happened.

There was actually widespread support for Dyer's actions. We're going to look at the aftermaths and the effects of this massacre in subsequent podcasts. But thanks to the amazing Kim Wagner for coming on as our first guest. and I would certainly like to recommend his amazing book, Amritser in 2019, which I think is the most balanced and forensic and detailed account of the day-to-day progress of the lead-up to the massacre and the massacre itself that is in print anywhere. It's a wonderful book and a very important book. And Anita, your book, The Patient Assassin also opens here, doesn't it? I mean, for me, you know, this is just history and, you know, this is stuff that I've read in history books and so on.

How does it feel to you as a British passport holder? Well, born in Britain, not as a passport holder, Essex girl, let's face it. As less his girl. As an Essex girl. When you realise that the British state still cannot apologise for this, we've had the, not only the Queen and Prince Philip, but also more recently, David Cameron going to Jeline Wallabagg and not apologising. Well, there was a vote. I mean, so there's, you know, also I've got three hats in this ring, I suppose. So there's one which is as a political journalist.

It's very interesting how much expectation there was on the centenary in India that this will be the time that there will be an apology. And it seems very important to a great number of Indians, particularly in the north that there should be an acknowledgement and an apology of what happened in April 1919. And it sort of got brought to the brink. I don't know sort of diplomatically. It seems to have been a real mess in the background,

because it was so much of an indication, such a strong back channel indication, that there would be the official apology to mark the centenary. We heard people, even in the sort of year run up before, I think there was a trade minister who said, you know, it just seemed to be very important to the Indians, so we might just have to do it and do the apology, just so to make things easier to do trade even. So, you know, there was every expectation it would happen,

and then it didn't. So you've never had a state apology. You've had the Archbishop of Canterbury prostrating himself in front of the memorial. in a personal basis. Which some people hate. But not representing the state. And some people hate it.

Now, you know, to me, my grandfather is long dead. I can tell you sort of my personal resonance with this is when I was researching the book and I researched the book for years. But I took my children to the barg when it still looked very much like it did at the time of the massacre. What sort of age were they then? Oh, they were teeny. My littlest one would have been two, barely two. And the old one's seven.

And we had a picnic. You know, it was that time of day. It was really hot. It was dusty. There were tourists milling around. And they were just sitting and they, you know, it was all kind of above their heads. But just looking at them in that place, I was thinking, you may not have been here. You know, just for a quirk of fate, you would not have been here.

And there are so many like you who aren't here because of something that happened that day. And that really, I mean, there's nothing that can make that feeling go away. But that's a very personal feeling, isn't it? It's a very, very personal feeling. What breaks my heart is the fact that I think you put your finger on it earlier, that if there is an apology, the reason that the apology will be issued is for trade. Britain has cut itself off for its neighbours. We need new markets. And the same reason that the British, well, the same reason that the English in the aftermath of the Reformation had to look for new markets as they were cut off from trading with countries like Spain and Portugal, that was the reason that the East Indy Company founded. And in the same way, I think,

think this is where we'll see if an apology for Amritsa is ever issued. It'll be because it's seen to be important for relations with India for our own enrichment again. And I fear that it won't be for the reasons that the Archbishop Canterbury prostrated himself. But I mean, sort of as somebody whose family history is woven into this, I find it really peculiar when people sort of respond. Maybe we'll talk about this more in the podcast we do about the patient assassin and the retribution, what happens after 1919. And the response to it. But, you know, when people wrote to me after the book saying, I just want to say sorry, I didn't know what to do with that, because I was like, it's not you. You didn't do anything.

And I, you know, I've had people in queues and book signings, you know, sort of coming up and giving me a hug and crying. And I know it's a very lovely emotional contact, but I also think, you didn't do anything. You didn't do anything. So I don't know, you know, it means a lot, I know on sort of diplomatic levels. But to me, I always feel slightly, I don't know, I sort of shuffle around on my feet. I don't know what to do with it, you know. What's so clumsy at the moment is that this government has woken up to the fact that it needs to improve trade with India. And there's a lot of effort. You have these regular visits by First David Cameron, who had a number of visits with a lot of his businessman, JCB and all these sort of companies turning up and vice-chancellors turning up with

Theresa May. And then Boris, again, going to visit the JCB plant and so on. And in a sense, the connection hasn't been made that you can't, on one hand, say we've got to stop people talking Britain down. We've got to say that the empire is wonderful. We can't have historians digging around the dirt and finding all these massacres. And on the other hand, expecting that we can have wonderful relations with India if we don't face up to this. Well, it's like, you know, it's the one hand clapping. You can wish for what you want. But if on the other side, there is a need and a hunger and a desire for acknowledgement,

if not apology acknowledgement. So, you know, the one that, and we will do this in a future podcast because the whole reason that this beautiful, beautiful friendship exists between me and you, Willie, is because we wrote a book together about the Coenor Diamond. And that you find any time there is a high-level visit from Britain, particularly a royal visit, it is the first thing that comes up, which is when you're giving our diamond back. So as if you sort of don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But the other side really does still want to talk about it, and you can't make that go away.

It's a very live issue. And the same way that we've been surprised by the number of people who were listening to this podcast, by the number of people who felt this was stuff they just didn't know and weren't getting from anywhere else. You see this at an official level. I think, you know, the kind of ministers who are dealing with this and the relations with it, they don't realize how much this means to the Indians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it is quite a thing. Now, listen, just before we go, again, thank you for those of you who have been listening. getting in touch, we are very, very grateful and we don't take your interest for granted. In fact, so much so, Willie, I'm going to crowdsource what we're going to do next. Because, you know, what shall we do? What would you like to hear about? As listeners to the Empire podcast, what do you want to know about? Get in touch with this.

Let me just read that email again, because we've got just brand new. EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. If you want to email us at length, you can. Or you can tweet us, and I know you're doing that in enormous numbers. So yes, at EmpirePod UK is where we are. Thank you very much for listening. That's all from us this week. Goodbye for me.

And goodbye for me. He left a gap again. I remember to say my name.