BIOGRAPHY
How he lost it
BERNARD POTTER
|
We have little personal evidence about Dyer... Collett compensates with well-researched reconstructions of the milieux.
|
The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer, Hambledon and London, p.575, £25. 1 85285 457 X
THE Amritsar massacre of April 13, 1919, is the most notorious atrocity in British Imperial History. Lord Birkenhead — himself no bleeding-heart anti-imperialist — believed the episode was unique "in all our long, anxious and entirely honourable dealings with native populations". Birkenhead's friend, Churchill, thought it stood "in sinister isolation". Confronted with a large crowd of peaceful Indian protestors in the Jallianwala Bagh, General Reginald "Rex" Dyer ordered his ("native") troops to fire into it, and didn't stop them until their ammunition ran out. He gave no warning. The people were already fleeing as he opened fire, scrambling to get out through the narrow exits; most of the casualties were shot in the back. Afterwards, Dyer made no effort to aid the wounded, and forbade the Indians to return to the square to help their own.
Hundreds lay there until the next day. At least 379 died, including children, one a baby of six weeks. That was followed by wholesale floggings of suspected malefactors, and an infamous "crawling order", whereby Indians were forced to shuffle on their bellies along a narrow street. Sometimes this penalty was imposed by Dyer for not "salaaming" him as he drove through the town: there is a grainy picture of that in this book.
Immediately afterwards, Dyer claimed he had opened fire because, in the heat of the moment, he feared an attack by the crowd. That might furnish some kind of excuse for him: like many soldiers in such situations, he panicked. Later on, however, he modified this line. He could have dispersed the crowd peaceably, he admitted; or even prevented the meeting. (It was illegal.) But he didn't want to. He wanted the demonstration to go on, in order to be able to fire at it, and kill as many people as he could. If he'd had more ammunition, he said, he would have killed more. So it was all premeditated.
It was meant as a "lesson", to "nip in the bud" what Dyer was convinced was an incipient rerun of the 1857 Mutiny. This extraordinary admission ruined him. It set the Government of India against him; every member of the British Cabinet; the House of Commons; all the native Indian papers (of course), and most of the metropolitan press. He was drummed out of the Army, and only escaped court martial for homicide because of a technicality. Unfortunately he also had some vociferous supporters: most of the Anglo-Indian community, especially women and Christian ministers; the Morning Post and Daily Telegraph (later to merge); most of the Army, including many of his own "sepoys", especially Sikhs; the usual right-wing reactionaries in Britain; and the House of Lords — who were generally more pro-Dyer the more lordly they were. These seem in retrospect a pretty unrepresentative bunch of people, but their blimpish defence of Dyer had a drastic effect on opinion in India. This whole affair turned Gandhi, for example, from an imperial reformer, content to work for Dominion status, into an out-and-out enemy of the British connection. It is arguable that it was the turning point against the British Raj.
Nigel Collett doesn't go this far in The Butcher of Amritsar, but he believes that when the time came to hand over power in 1947, Amritsar made it impossible for Britain to do it "with honour and with the affection or respect" of the Indians. That would have tortured Dyer, whose main motive, he claimed (surely sincerely), was to save the Empire for Britain; and whose underlying personal insecurity, as Collett paints it, made him crave "affection and respect". We have little personal evidence about Dyer, who left no papers: hence the "must haves" and "probablys" on almost every page of this biography. Collett compensates with well-researched reconstructions of the milieux in which Dyer lived and worked, in which he is considerably helped by his own background as a commander of Gurkhas.
Dyer was clearly a problematical character: the son of a brewer, and so without social status; sent away to a very minor school in Ireland when he was 11; not seeing his parents again for 12 years; awkward and unsocial, "a fish out of almost every water" he swam in; hot-tempered; probably rather stupid; with a Boy's Own Paper approach to soldiering and the Empire; dangerously chivalric (the "crawling order" was to avenge an assault on a woman missionary); impatient of orders; loathing politicians; depressed at the signs of Imperial decline all around him (in Ireland as well as India). He was also — on the positive side — strong, hardworking, brave, loved by his "men" (they cheered him as he left India for disgrace in Britain), racially tolerant in a paternalistic kind of way (he resigned from a club that refused to admit "native" officers), a bit of an inventor (a new range-finder), and with some real military achievements to his credit (though his annexation of eastern Baluchistan, which he wrote an adventure-story book about, was against orders, and had to be undone). All this tells us an enormous amount about the man, and, by extension, the event; and Collett tells it superbly well.
Perhaps the key factor, however, was Dyer's total immersion in the Anglo-Indian community from birth. He was born and brought up in India, and mainly served there: initially, as it happens, on stations with powerful Mutiny resonances. His occasional trips to England, on furlough or for training, were when he felt most out of water. One person who met him there noticed that there were some ordinary English words he didn't know. He certainly imbibed all the authoritarian prejudices of the Anglos in India.
It was probably to this gallery that he was playing when he made all those damaging admissions about his motives at Amritsar. He knew his own people would approve of his "terrorist" methods (the word used at the time). None of this, of course, was bound to lead to atrocity. But it may explain why General Dyer's atrocity was, in Churchill's opinion — it was his reason for regarding Amritsar as sui generis — so essentially "un-British".
The Times Literary Supplement
Every week The Times Literary Supplement provides intelligent, thoughtful criticism of literature, culture and the visual and the performing arts.
Take out a subscription to the TLS and you will not only receive your copy of the paper delivered direct every week, but will gain free, exclusive access to our online archive. The archive contains the TLS in full from October 1994 updated to six months before the current issue. The archive is fully searchable. This means that you can use it to find reviews, comment, poetry and listings, using the criteria of your choice. It is certain to be an invaluable search tool and is available online only to subscribers.
Simply call our credit card hotline on +44 (0) 1858 438 805 or write to TLS Subscriptions, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE 16 9EF, U.K.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
