Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Dalrymple. So what are we talking about today? We are taking things on from 1857, where we left the last podcast. And 1857 left this unbelievable scar across the whole of North India. There were the most disgusting war crimes ever committed, probably by the British anywhere.
in particularly three main cities: Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur. Certainly tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are bayoneted, hung, blown from cannons.
And anyone who thinks that the British Empire was benign should read the letters of this period because even figures like Dickens are writing, delete Delhi, wipe it out, scratch it from the face of the earth. Because what the people in Britain were being fed was this propaganda that... Child-eating monstrous natives. Particularly women raping monstrous natives. And there's this idea that the mutineers, when they rose up, raped every British woman in India. And...
and performed unimaginable atrocities. And it's certainly true that there were atrocities at the beginning of the uprising, but they were fractional compared to the unbelievable retribution, men having to lick up the blood in the Bibigar, sewn into pigskins and blown from the mouths of cannon. And this went on for months. I mean, there were very organized manhunts. My book, The Last Mogul, was written from a group of papers called the Mutiny Papers, which
are very carefully preserved in the National Archives of India because they were the evidence used by the lawyers and the prosecutors in 1857 to round up anyone in the royal court, anyone in the mutineer's camp, anyone whose name appears in those documents.
had a price on their head. And there was bounty being obviously... It was literally Wild West bounty hunters type of stuff. Where are you? And then rounding up families of people. If you don't find the person, you find the family. And there were stories of princes who were disguised as fakirs living in courts like Udaipur, technically beyond the reach of the Raj.
who were being caught and brought back to Delhi for bounty 20 years later. So this is a really important moment in the changing of the psyche of two countries. So first of all, Britain now does not see that the time of Oktoloni and the white Mughals is dead. You do not trust the natives. That is now the message that is loud and clear going across Great Britain, Westminster in particular. And in particular, the school which churns out
the Indian civil service because now of course the other thing that changes is this is now no longer a company that is taking care of business in India it is a country it is now state intervention the East India Company Navy is sold off the East India Company Army is integrated into the British Army the East India Company civil service is integrated into the Indian civil service as it now becomes uh
And you get this transformation of company rule into state rule. By 1870, Disraeli makes Queen Victoria the Empress of India. And it's a time when you have a complete realignment also of the elite.
of India. For the last 600 years, there's been a large Muslim elite in North India. And that doesn't just mean that there's rulers and civil servants and cavalrymen and military men.
Culturally, Persianate culture has been the dominant thing. So the kind of poetry that's being written in towns like Lucknow, Hyderabad and Delhi is Indian versions of Hafiz or Fardawzi. Persian is the language of high culture in a way that Sanskrit had been in ancient India.
But now everyone wants to speak English. It has to be English. English in documents, English in court, English in any kind of civil society. And all civil society is now under the control of the British. We've also got, I mean, the reason we're here today, this podcast is largely about another turning point. So if you think that the mutiny, which we, by the way, if you've missed it, go back and listen. There's a podcast on that.
But this is now another major turning point in the relationship between Britain and India. So if 1857 soured a relationship,
1919 marks the beginning of the end of the British Raj, even though they're going to stick around for decades longer. There is something that happens in 1919 which flicks a switch in Indian minds. So if you think that the uprising or the mutiny was the thing that flicks the switches in British minds, that now we come and we take it all and we're not even pretending that we're trading, we are in control, this is now ours.
Then 1919 does it to the Indian minds and the Indian psyche. So just, I mean, just a bit of background on the lead up to 1919. After the rout is declared in 1858 and India becomes a colony of Britain rather than a possession of the East India Company.
You have a massive change, particularly in the military system in India. Previously, there was a tiny white officer elite and all the fighting men were Indian sepoys recruited in North India. Now, large numbers of British soldiers start coming in, particularly Irish and Scots. And so you have large barracks full of white soldiers. And
Following the unbelievably violent reprisals to 1857, there is virtually no resistance in India for the next 20, 30 years. There is such memories of the unbelievable bloodshedding. The devil's wind. The devil's wind, that no one dares protest. So you have this sort of high Victorian period here.
when British rule and the English language is imposed on India, when there is virtually no resistance because people are so scared, because the unbelievable bloodshed which had happened in 1857.
But another thing has happened, which is that the elites have changed. So you've moved from the dominant Mughal elite with Persianic culture, and you've had the rise now of the different Hindu castes. You have, for example, the Delhi Banyas, the bankers, become the richest and by far the most
prosperous and powerful people in Delhi. And people no longer want to start writing Persian poetry. They want to be like Wordsworth. They no longer wear, for smart occasions, their traditional dress. Quite a lot of them adopt European suits and so on. So there is a fundamental sense that not only has British rule been imposed, but the whole
prestige associated with Mughal culture and Mughal dress and Mughal poetry has been wiped out. No one wants to, that's regarded as old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy by the end of it. And if you look at some of the letters from Indians at the time, I mean, they could have been written by Uriah Heep because the sign-offs of some of these letters of people who have, you know, actually, let's face it, quite newly learned English but embraced it. They've embraced high standards
British culture as if it's the best thing in the world. So, you know, I most humbly crave your pardon to be disturbing you, yours sincerely. The sign-offs of some of these letters at the time were extraordinary. And you get people like Ghalib, who's one of the last survivors from the Mughal elite. He hadn't joined the mutiny. He'd very clearly...
distance himself between him and the court in 1857 so he's not killed he survives when he's pulled before a British magistrate he says are you a Muslim and he says well I don't eat pork but I do drink wine and the magistrate laughs and he gets off
Ghalib dies finally the same year that Mahatma Gandhi is born. And now very clearly the way is not Indo-Persian culture. It's not the Mughal ways. It's not the Islamic. If you want to get on, you become a lawyer and you try to get to London and you want to embrace the whole British thing. And there's a whole generation that grows up
that begins to half believe the British propaganda that they are this race that brings justice and civilization. They're fair. They have laws, they have judges, they have order. And it's this that the event in 1919 that we're talking about today shakes. That moment in the late Victorian period between the memories of the reprisals of 1857
And the loss of faith in the British that happens in 1919 is that period that we're looking at now. We are. And you were talking about the birth of, you know, Gandhi and Galeb and these enormous figures. There's also, you know, not as...
doesn't loom as large here in Britain at all, but in the north of India, looms enormously. A man called Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who was born in 1864, he was an Irishman, as you were saying, sort of Irish and Scots beat a path to India after the mutiny, because that's where you make your name, it's where you make your fortune,
it's where you become part of the elite. Speaking as a Scot, the Scots always like to feel that, you know, they're with William Wallace and they're in the resistance, eternally downcrushed by the English. But the reality is that after the Jack Marriott, in 1745, after the second...
rebellion is crushed and body Prince Charlie disappears overseas the Scots embrace empire in a far more enthusiastic way than than the English and the Scots outnumber the English proportionately uh hugely uh in India you have whole towns and I've seen a picture of a Dundee high school reunion in Calcutta in about 1870 when there are about 400 people yeah well I mean likewise with the Irish I mean you know the the story that we're about to tell you is about a
man an Irishman very much in the center of all of this and when I did write a book about this the patient assassin and
To this day, I get apology letters from people in Ireland saying, "We had no idea. We had," and I will quote one, "This bastard was our bastard." So let me just tell you, let's tell you a little bit about Sir Michael. Michael O'Dwyer, as he was born, was born in Tipperary and he was an Irish Catholic. So unusual because the Catholics in Ireland at this time knew only too well how difficult British rule could be. You know, his neighbors and his father's neighbors
John O'Dwyer, they had suffered through the potato famine. They were on their knees. But John O'Dwyer's family were a little bit different because they had money still.
They had money, they had a bit of land, they had a bit of livestock. So they were comfortably off, you could say. He was part of a big Irish Catholic family and he absolutely worshipped his father. His father was everything and everything to him. But his father was really unusual among Irish Catholics because he believed in British order. Like you were saying about sort of Indians started to believe that order and civilization, inverted commas, came through British rule. That's exactly what Michael O'Dwyer's father thought.
He thought, actually, we should have loyalty to king and country. That is the only way. He didn't like the kind of disorder that he was seeing from the nascent Fenians who were springing up and setting fire to things around him. He found that disorderly, thuggish. He called them hotheads. He hated them. So it's in that environment that little Michael is born and brought up. And so he starts, you know, almost from the mother's teat, drinking this truth.
that British rule is order, nationalism is bad, it's dangerous.
And that really is, you know, that's his early wiring. And there's also a fear, very much, that he's brought up with that generation that 1857 could happen again, that you could again get this mass of Indians as he sees it rising up against the women, the British women in India in particular, are regarded as these sacred objects which must not be touched. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, it's reinforced by the...
Indian civil service. So the ICS, their training is predicated on how do you avoid 1857 again? And the message that is like a big militia beacon over every single classroom that is going on within the ICS service is do not trust the natives. Do not trust the natives. It is just, you turn your back on the natives and they will put a scimitar through your shoulder blades. So there's a real sort of fear and loathing, which is bred into this. And it's a small
cadre, never bigger than 1,200 people in the ICS who go over to India, who are going to control India, which to me, again, those numbers are astonishing. A massive population controlled by 1,200. You often see in pro-British writings about the Raj that we were clearly this...
Much loved imperial force goes the argument because how could so few Englishmen control so many? But the reality was that, you know, it was on the back of a pile of skulls that had been created in 1857. So, you know, it was possible for, as the legend went, you know, a single white man on a horse to walk through at night any place in India completely safely because everyone was so scared by the retribution they'd seen. But you begin to get the first impression
ripples of resistance in, is it 1905 when Curzon partitions Bengal? So yes, I mean, so just, you know, this is, Curzon is the Viceroy of India. He is an incredibly pompous individual. In fact, his school friends tease him relentlessly. They say, do you know the
the poem, the dog roar that comes from, is it Bailey? My name is- George Nathaniel Curzon. I am the most ridiculous person. Superior person. Superior person. So, you know, he is a man who wants, with shiny epaulets and gun salutes to put Indians in their place.
And he is the person who presides over the first Delhi Durbar, which is going to be a way in which very physically and visually you can show the natives that even their princes, the princes we have allowed to stay on their thrones, the Nawabs we have allowed to stay in their Havelis, they all come forward. We give them the number of gun salutes we think they deserve. So you have all these Indian princelings, ridiculous men fighting over how many pops of the gun they're going to get.
And they all bow before the King Emperor. The Maharajas, the princes who are left by this stage, are those who allied with the English in 1857. So all those, like the Rani of Jhansi, who rise up against the, what was then the company in 1857, have long been hung and sent off into exile. Mm. Uh,
or sent off into exile. Yes, I know. It's difficult to be in exile. It doesn't go well. So you have basically the quizlings left, the guys like the Sindhias or the Holkers or these forces that could have risen up against the British. And the ones that the Indian nationalists will call the sellouts is who are left. So...
And they're given rankings. So they have 100 gun salute, 50 gun salute, 25 gun salute. According to how useful the British might find them. But sort of the person who's watching all of this is young Tipperary boy, Michael O'Dwyer, who has come over to India in 1885. And he is, when he comes over to India, he is that lone white man on a horse. So he comes, first of all, into Lahore. He's been given the whisper that Punjab is going to be his place.
And Punjab is a problem. That Punjab, there are two centers of discontent in India. One is Punjab, one is Bengal. They're churning out
violent men and insurrectionists and they are the places that need to be squashed. So he sees Curzon when Curzon decides to partition Bengal, that that is a way of dealing with problems like this. Curzon decides that, you know, if I put a line through Bengal, I can turn Hindus against Muslims. That is the nationalist argument. He says it's to control this very large area and have a better civil society in this area. But Indians...
see it as the first example with a line in a map of divide and rule in India. And to this day, Bengalis still rankle about it. It's considered one of the worst things done by the British. Well, when Michael arrives in Punjab, and I'll call him Michael just because there are names which conflate here. In this massacre story, there is a man who you will meet in a minute called Rex Dyer and Sir Michael O'Dwyer. And in Indian minds, these two are often conflated into one joint little devil.
called Michael Dyer or Rex O'Dwyer. I mean, you'll see Google searches on this. So I'm going to just call them sort of Michael and Sir Michael for our man who will inevitably be in control of Punjab at the time of the 1919 episode. Anita, tell me about the First World War because that obviously is a major turning point for the British Empire. And what's the response in India? Well, so Sir Michael has risen through the ranks and he has now become Lieutenant Governor of Punjab.
And he's done that through having very little interaction with Indians. He doesn't like them. He doesn't trust them. He thinks they're backstabbing snakes. He very famously and proudly writes in his own memoirs about how when he's invited to picnics with Maharajas, he takes his own sandwiches and he eats them. He won't eat anything that's prepared. Even a Maharaja prepares food with his own hands and he won't eat that. He'll eat what he's brought, which is sort of spam sandwiches with him.
So he has that kind of disdain. But in the run-up to the First World War, he is very keen to establish that he is in control. So when the call goes out,
that they need soldiers to fight in World War I. So Michael's right on it. He's decided that actually it's going to be a competitive sport and he's going to send more men to fight in World War I than any of the other lieutenant governors of any of the provinces in India. And he's got a head start, hasn't he? Because the British have, by this stage, begun to identify what they call martial races.
of which the Punjabis are one. And so they get sort of prior access to the British army on a sort of ethnic sort of hierarchy almost. - And Sir Michael exploits every fissure that he possibly can. So he refers to Punjab, his province, as the sword hand of India. He says, you know, I've got all of the fighters, the natural born savage fighters are all in my constituency. But what he does is he goes around to different parts of Punjab
And he'll say in Amritsar, he'll say, you Sikhs, you're effeminate and you're useless. Look at all the Muslims who have been provided in this village here. He'll go to a Muslim area and say, you think you're warriors? You think you're strong? Look at the Hindus that have been conscripted or who've joined up. It's not...
This is part of a sort of ethnic ranking of India that the British have sort of developed by this time. We tend to think of sort of racial hierarchies as something that the Germans invented in the Nazi ideology, the Jews at the bottom of the pile. But you find books written at this period in the 1870s in India. There's a large, I think, three volume photographic book of the peoples and tribes of India's.
And they have these sort of caustic little comments, like sort of a degenerate tribe full of criminals. Oh, so Michael does his own version. I mean, he writes his own little version, his own little pocket guide to the savages, where he does these sort of sweeping generalisations about ethnic groups. You know, the Beals, you never meet one who's sober. You know, the Sikhs, they're quite thick, but quite useful. You know, he's got these really disparaging remarks in his own words.
But, you know, whatever he does, it works. And there are also reports in Punjab about men being press ganged into fighting. You know, sometimes a man, a recruiter, will turn up into a village and everyone will have disappeared overnight because the rumor is going around that they're forcing people out to fight. That is a good place for us to just pause for a moment and take a short break. ♪
Welcome back to Empire. So Indian troops are being shuttled to the battlefields of France. And just remember, these are people, some of whom have never been out of their own villages, and they are chronically under-equipped. They don't have the right boots, the right coats. So they're being shuttled to the battlefields of France.
So many die from the cold. It is as much an enemy as the Germans. And the biggest destination for most of the Indian troops is the back end of the Ottoman Empire. Indian troops get sent into a place called Qat, which is now in Iraq, where there's initially a complete fiasco. And there's a siege, and many, many Indian troops are either captured as prisoners of war or killed or die of starvation in the siege.
And it's a real old-fashioned sort of grueling sort of medieval siege that goes on a cut. So when you wander around, in my local village on the outskirts of Delhi, Miroli,
um the the there's a plaque that i pass um on my daily walk and it says from the the zales of badapur and maroli i can't remember the figures but something like 250 men went off to the great war of whom uh 80 did not come back so so then that you know that's the really important thing because this doesn't happen in a vacuum you know you keep you've
sent all these boys off and they are boys a lot of them to fight who've just never been anywhere and their families need these boys to work the farms and look after their aged parents and when the news of deaths bodies don't come back it's just the missing news of the missing comes back so you know with very religious people who believe in cremating or
or burial before sunset. This is a double wound. Their children are dead on a field in Basra somewhere. They're never going to see them again. In Punjab, because so many of those casualties come from the north, there are waves of mourning which come sweeping back. And that creates a really fertile ground for insurrectionists. The thing that Sir Michael has always thought exists, he partially creates because of his sort of very enthusiastic attitude
rounding up of fighting men. So, you know, you have a situation in 1915 where an organisation is starting to gain a lot of momentum called the Guthar movement. You know, what is our credo? Revolution. They have a newspaper which revels in how you have to kill the British to get them out. They're never going to go. They're sending our boys to die, so we've got to kill them first. And it is a violent movement based on violence.
You know, there's no negotiating with these people. There's no power sharing. They're out to kill us. We've got to kill them first. So when these guys come back from the First World War, you've got thousands of Punjabis who survived. They come back and they're expecting a kind of reward, aren't they? They absolutely are. They're expecting a reward. And sort of just during the war, by the way, the Guthers are so, I should say, so successful that they try, they have enough power
at least confidence in themselves to try and start a second mutiny. So again, everything that Sir Michael thought would happen is kind of happening on his watch, and some may argue because of his actions. So there's a, it's called the Hindu-German conspiracy, where some of the Gutham movement get in touch with the Germans, who let's not forget are fighting World War I with the British saying, we will help you. We will start a revolution in the ranks.
just as they did in the mutiny will get our Indian soldiers to rise up. Now, the thing is Sir Michael is very, very good at one thing, intelligence. He understands that he needs to be on, because he's so paranoid and he's sort of, through his paranoia, he creates the problem but also is sort of all over the problem. He manages to infiltrate that plot, the Hindu-German conspiracy. I mean, to his... Where is that, in Flanders or...?
It's going to be that the Punjab cavalry is going to rise up and kill its masters and then it'll start an insurrection which will spread all through India. The British will be so diverted in India so then the Germans can make gains. And the conspiracy is taking place and orchestrated out of his reach because Sir Michael is very hang happy, if you can put it that way. He hangs more people in Punjab, in his province,
in a year than are hanged in all of Great Britain throughout the period of the war. So he's a person who is punitive and feared.
In India. But when these troops come back, the troops who are actually in the trenches do not mutiny. They are very loyal. They're very loyal because they're expecting, you know, the honour and the glory when they come back. And they also expect some sort of political reward, don't they? They do. There's talk about dominion status, such as New Zealand and Australia and Canada have.
But instead, what happens? An act is passed. An act is passed. So during the war, the British passed the Defense of India Act, which is...
Which is understandable in times of war, countries do this. No sedition, no criticising of the British, but they go further. They suspend habeas corpus. Anyone can be arrested at any time for acting against the state and against the war effort. Armistice happens on the 11th of November 1918. Everyone thinks that these acts are going to loosen up. And as you say, quite rightly, dominion, status and rewards will be ours for our loyalty. Do you know one of the most loyal people during this period?
He's a man called Gandhi. He is the chief recruiting officer for the British effort. He, like Sir Michael, bizarrely is travelling around India saying, if you are not strong enough to fight this war, you're not strong enough to have your own country. I mean, there are tracts of his speeches which could have come out of Sir Michael O'Dwyer's mouth.
He is more loyal than the king because he also believes in this promise that if we show ourselves to be good friends, then our friends will leave us and we will have a good relationship, a bilateral relationship. But, you know, we will end on good terms. So what year is it that this repressive act, the Rowlatt Act, is passed? It comes in straight after Armistice. So the Rowlatt Act is basically an extension of Armistice.
The Defence of India Act. It's a rolling legal situation, but it's just named something else. It's named after the judge Rowlett. So what happens? What's the effect? Gandhi's had it. Everyone is presuming they're going to be rewarded. Instead, they're given this repressive act. So what's the reaction on the ground? Gandhi is so incandescent at the betrayal because he too has sent men to die in this war. I mean, he said all sorts of ludicrous things. People have pointed out, you're meant to be non-violent. You're asking people to go fight. He said, well...
I will ask them to stand up when the time is right and just be shot by the Germans so our bodies form a dam that will stop the violence and the Germans will see how terrible it is. I mean, there's cuckoo stuff coming from Gandhi at this time. But his sense of betrayal is such that he says, you know what? These are black acts. They are so anti-legal. And he's a lawyer at the end of the day. He's a British-trained lawyer. He finds them so offensive. He says, right, we're going to fight back. We're going to have a prayer day because he doesn't believe in violence.
We're going to have a prayer day where everything stops. It is, in other words, going to be a strike. Where...
Because you can't strike because the Routes Act doesn't permit strikes. That is anti-state and therefore people can be picked up. But if you call it a prayer day, what are they going to do? So he marks the prayer day down for the 30th of March, 1919. That's where everybody's going to down tools. No trains will run. No letters will be posted. No telegrams will be sent. Everything will stop. The shops will be shuttered up. That's the plan. And you know what?
It's extraordinarily ambitious to try and unite a country. As you've very beautifully said in previous podcasts, this is a jigsaw country that's been united at times under things like Mughal law, then bits of it have been united under different empires. But for the first time, there's a jigsaw country that is under British rule. And he is trying to get every bit of that puzzle to stop on the 30th of March. And
He galvanizes it. It really works. So in the north of India, in Punjab, which is the place where our focus is going to be largely for this podcast, there are two men who are Gandhi devotees who marshal the peace. Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Kichlu. So one is a really chatty lawyer, Saifuddin Kichlu. Again, these are people. Saifuddin Kichlu went to Cambridge, went to Peterhouse, Cambridge.
and suffered a lot of racism actually while he was at Cambridge. So his whole world view was turned upside down by his loneliness at Cambridge and the way he was treated. He sort of comes as the brightest in his year and he's treated like a piece of dirt here. So he goes back
with this sense of the British really aren't our friends. And then Dr. Satyapal, who is a man who's received the viceroy's commission in the Indian Medical Service. So he's been a really loyal little soldier, but also through one reason or another has seen the way in which his countrymen are treated in India. So they become fully signed up Gandhians. They believe in the Gandhi peaceful way. They've got to leave.
But we'll do it peacefully, not violently. And in the part of the Punjab that we're focusing in, the Amritsar district, they are the leading Gandhis. They are. They're the ones. They are Gandhi's men. And you know, they hold that, they mark that 30th of March date where the prayer day is.
In peace. Not a shot is fired. Not a stick is hit. In Delhi nearby, it's a very different story. What goes on there? You have marauders who are going around trying to enforce the prayer. So you will have, in Sir Michael's words, hotheads everywhere. So they notice in the Delhi market that some of the shops haven't closed down.
They haven't locked up for this, what is ostensibly a strike. And they're not praying after that. So they start to come out and intimidate the shop owners. The British respond with overwhelming, and Gandhi argues, unreasonable force. And they fire volleys into these crowds of people indiscriminately. So some, you know, some...
say there were better ways of doing this, but people fall and people die. This is early 1919. This is on 30th of March, 1919. So these are the weeks leading up to the massacre. This is the backdrop. You've got to understand why everybody is so on edge.
So Gandhi's fed up because the British have let him down. Sir Michael is expecting an uprising. Gandhi has reacted with a day of prayer and there are outbreaks of violence in Delhi, not in Amritsar, not in Lahore, but in Delhi, miles away. And Sir Michael sees this as...
sign it's coming it's coming my way and the thing that you know you said a little while ago this this whole thing from the Time of the mutiny that the British narrative is that they're gonna come rape our women women He's got his wife and his daughter in India It's really really important that he's got his wife and his daughter at governor house in Lahore at this time so he is living with this anxious anxiety bolus in his stomach and
And I told you so feeling. Anyway, after this firing into the crowd, Gandhi is livid. He is absolutely livid. And he says this is reprehensible. We are going to respond to this. We are going to have, seven days later, a day called Black Sunday where nobody does anything all day. It is going to be the largest general strike the world has ever seen.
It's going to make prayer day look like, you know, a tiny blip in service. He's going to shut it all down. And everyone's very, very excited about this. There are handbills being printed in Amritsar. They're being spread throughout the city, you know, nothing, Black Sunday, Mark Black Sunday, all throughout India. This is going to take place. Now, Sir Michael knows about this. Every lieutenant governor and every governor of India knows that this is coming.
They also know that Gandhi has this idea that he's going to travel to Punjab for it.
So what he does is he bans him from coming to Punjab. He says, "Right, it's not going to happen. You're not coming. 6th of April, forget it. That's Black Sunday, but you're not coming anywhere near my province." So you get this sort of cascade of events where Satyapal and Khichlu want him to come because he can keep the peace in Punjab. You know, they've seen what's happened in Delhi. They also don't want that to happen in Amritsar at the time of this. They believe in non-violent resistance. They believe in absolutely a non-violent resistance.
But when Gandhi comes to Punjab, he's stopped at the outskirts by the British on Sir Michael's orders and he's turned back. He's come back on foot? He's in a train? He's on a train. He's stopped outside the city limits at a tiny little nowhere, no hope station. The train has stopped? The train has stopped. The British get on and they say, Mr. Gandhi, you're going back.
You're not coming into Punjab. And he says, I have every right to. I'm an Indian traveling in my own country. I am allowed to travel. Let me pass. And they say, no. And there's, you know, this whole in Gandhi's account, you know, a hand on his shoulder, the tap on the shoulder. Very gently, you're sent back. You're going. You're not going anywhere. You're going back to Bombay. We're putting you actually on the next train. You're going back to Bombay. The thing is, he's safe, but nobody knows that.
The news that goes out is that Gandhi's been stopped and he's been taken by the British. They also know these are the same British who fired on unarmed crowds in Delhi and people have died. So the rumor goes sweeping around India, particularly in Andhapur. You know, Gandhi is a Gujarati, so in Andhapur, one of the biggest cities in Gujarat. The rumor mill goes into nutty overdrive.
They're going to hang Gandhi. They've taken him. They've beaten him up. And so throughout Ahmedabad, this rumor like a wildfire, Gandhi's gone, Gandhi's gone, they've taken Gandhi. And Ahmedabad catches fire. And there is some dreadful, dreadful violence that takes place. You know, groups of men. And again, you know, when you have
political unrest, you have people who exploit it. So they go for the banks. They tear out bank managers from two of the banks, set one on fire, shoot another one, stab another. And where are Satya Pal and Kitchlu at this point? Well, they're in Amritsar keeping the peace. Nothing happens in Amritsar. Amritsar is completely peaceful. It's
It's quiet. And that is in itself a little bit of a discomfort to the man who's in charge. Because what the man in charge of Amritsar, a man called Miles Irving, sees is something that he's never seen before. He's been in India for a while. But what he sees is Hindus and Muslims united in a way that he...
thinks is deeply suspicious. Hindus and Muslims hand in hand marking the celebration. Hindus and Muslims eating and drinking together. There's a celebration that's going to take place three days after that called Ram Noomi. It's a Hindu festival where normally, you know, the Muslims will stand on the outskirts and the saffron parades will pass through and everybody sort of jostles along separate but together. But on Ram Noomi on the 9th, which is just three days after all of this trouble has taken place elsewhere in India,
You have Hindus and Muslims holding hands. You have them drinking from the same water vessels, which normally would put a Hindu out of caste. But Irving is seeing all this and he's wiring Sir Michael, who's in Lahore, going, something's coming. Something's coming. The Hindus and Muslims are ganging up together. Something is definitely coming. Send troops, send machine guns, send them now, because I can't guarantee what's going to happen.
So Michael now again in his whirlwind of paranoia with his wife and daughter in his house with all of these reports of violence and bloodshed from elsewhere in India is that it stops here. It's not going to happen here. So he issues an edict which is catastrophic for the city. The two men
Satya Pal and Kichlu, the doctor and the lawyer, the Gandhians, who have kept the peace in Amritsar this whole time. He orders them to be arrested. But they're arrested in such a really sneaky way. They're asked to report. Yeah. Come at 10 in the morning. Turn up. Come and have a cup of tea is what they think. They think they're going to discuss the stopping of Gandhi at the city limits.
That, you know, he should be allowed to travel to Punjab. We really need him. But instead they're bundled into a car. So they get bundled into a car and they're going to be sent to Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. It's far away, out of the way of Punjab. But the people who brought them there don't know what's happened. You know, they're sort of standing around on the veranda going, are they coming out yet? Are they coming out yet?
And when they don't come out, this little party that comes with Satyapal and Khichdi for these talks goes running back into the town and says, they've taken them. They've taken our leaders. Like they took Gandhi, they've taken them.
And again, the rumours go around that they've shot Satyapal and Khichdi, they've hanged Satyapal and Khichdi, they're going to hang Satyapal. In fact, they're both fine, but no one knows that. No one knows that because nobody's really communicated anything properly. It's just been a little bit of a sneaky trick that come to this meeting and then they've been arrested. And so immediately Amritsar and the Punjab, which have been completely peaceful and all the protests have been non-violent, suddenly you get violent.
You get violence and you get knots of violence. So, you know, if you read the Indian accounts, it starts off with an Indian delegation of pleaders, you know, barristers and lawyers going to Miles Irving saying, habeas corpus, could you please produce these two people? Or what are the charges? Or what's happened? And there are two choke points, you know, bridges in the city where...
Again, you read the British accounts, they say they are charged upon by mobs of Indians. You read the Indian accounts, they say, we were walking across the bridge to try and find out what happened. And volleys are fired into the crowd and people die. A lot of people die. Suddenly, the British and Amritsar, who've been living a perfectly normal life, going out riding, doing all the things that Brits in the Raj do,
suddenly feel that 1857 is upon them. So in Ahmedabad, they attack the mills, the British-owned mills. They try and drag out the two people who are in control of a man called Sagan and a man called Stuart from the mill. They want to kill them. It's actually an Indian policeman who protects them, and he gets killed instead. But in Ahmedabad, the whole place erupts. But you're right, plumes of smoke in Amritsar, they do, they attack the banks. They attack the Amritsar National Bank.
They drag out the manager, they stab him and then they batter him to death. They take another man, Scott. They set him on fire. Another man called Thompson is murdered. So there are Brits being attacked and it feels...
Like it could be the mutiny again. And then the moment that, in a sense, Sir Michael has been waiting for, a woman is attacked. A woman is attacked. So the people who are shot on the bridge, they are taken to the local hospital. And there is a report that a lady doctor called Miss Easton has refused to treat any of the natives, saying, you know, go away and bleed to death, you're all insurrectionists. She's laughed.
Who knows the truth of this, but that certainly is the rumor that goes out. So there are gangs of men wandering around Amritsar trying to find Mrs. Easton. What they find instead is a missionary called Marcella Sherwood who's on her bicycle riding through a narrow alleyway and they take her and they beat her. They think to death, but she just survives. And sort of, you know, the Indian story is that she survives. She's sort of left for dead, but she manages to crawl into one of the native homes and they...
when the mob comes back to find her, they direct them somewhere else. You know, that's the story from the Indian side. But Marcela Sherwood is certainly very, very badly beaten. And that's it. That's exactly what they, you know, that's the BB car. That's the massacre of the innocents. Every nerve that the British should be waiting for is now hit and touched. Every stereotype has been proved correct in the eyes of Dwyer. So it is at that point that Sir Michael is,
swings into action. There are going to have to be troops, more troops. So he commandeers men and he sends them into action. The resulting massacre at Jallianwala Bagh is one of the most infamous moments in colonial history. Do join us next week when we'll explain what happens next. Thank you for listening to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Darenpool.