Jallianwala Bagh massacre

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also called the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919 in Amritsar, in the Punjab province of British India. Troops of the British Indian Army under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire without warning on a large, unarmed crowd gathered in an enclosed public garden, the Jallianwala Bagh. Estimates of the dead range from the official figure of 379 to 1,000 or more. The killings turned many moderate Indians against British rule and became a lasting symbol of the independence struggle.

During the First World War India sent millions of soldiers and labourers to serve the British war effort, while revolutionary plots in Punjab and Bengal led the authorities to curb civil liberties under the Defence of India Act of 1915. After the war, inflation, heavy taxes and the 1918 influenza pandemic added to the hardship. In 1919 the Rowlatt Act extended the wartime emergency powers, provoking protests across the country in response to a call from Mahatma Gandhi.

On 10 April 1919 a crowd in Amritsar demanded the release of two local leaders, Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew, who had been arrested and taken to an undisclosed place. Soldiers fired on the protesters, killing several, and rioting followed: British banks were set on fire, several British people were killed, and an English missionary, Marcella Sherwood, was beaten by a mob before local residents rescued her. Dyer, the local army commander, later ordered Indian men using that street to crawl along it on their hands and knees.

On the morning of 13 April, the day of the Baisakhi festival, Dyer announced a curfew and a ban on public meetings, but the proclamation was not widely heard. That afternoon thousands of people were in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled ground of six or seven acres with only a few narrow entrances. Some had come to a protest meeting against the Rowlatt Act and the arrests; others were pilgrims from the nearby Golden Temple or visitors from a cattle fair that the police had closed. The official Hunter Commission later estimated the crowd at 10,000 to 20,000.

Dyer arrived with about 50 riflemen, Gurkhas and Sikhs, had them block the main exits and ordered them to fire on the crowd without giving any warning to disperse. The shooting lasted around ten minutes and was aimed largely at the people struggling to get out through the exits. Dyer reported that his men fired 1,650 rounds. Others died in the crush or in a well in the garden, and because of the curfew many of the wounded lay untreated overnight.

The number of victims has always been disputed. The Hunter Commission accepted 379 deaths, including 41 boys and a six-week-old baby, with perhaps three times as many wounded. The Indian National Congress conducted its own inquiry and put the number killed at about 1,000. Other estimates range from 700, by the historian Vishwa Nath Datta, to 1,500, the figure given by the nationalist Swami Shraddhanand.

The Hunter Commission, whose report appeared in March 1920, condemned Dyer's actions; he had told it that he could probably have dispersed the crowd without firing, but that the people would then have come back and laughed at him. Dyer was removed from his command and barred from further employment in India but was never prosecuted, and many in Britain regarded him as a hero. In the House of Commons Winston Churchill called the massacre "unutterably monstrous". The poet Rabindranath Tagore gave up his British knighthood in protest. The anger fed the non-cooperation movement of 1920 to 1922. In 1940 Udham Singh, who had been wounded at the Bagh, shot dead Michael O'Dwyer, Punjab's lieutenant-governor in 1919, in London.

A national memorial was inaugurated at the site on 13 April 1961. Britain has never formally apologised. Queen Elizabeth II referred to the events during a 1997 visit, David Cameron in 2013 called them "deeply shameful", and Theresa May called the shooting a "shameful scar" in 2019.

Our 1914 and 1920 maps show the British Raj, with Punjab in the north-west of India.