Monsters of the Raj: R.E. Dyer

Since reading Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, I've found myself in the middle of a big Indian phase: eating curries and listening to Ravi Shankar, and moving on to another Rushdie book, Midnight's Children. It's actually the second time I've read this masterpiece, but there's so much going on that the first time through some of the events depicted in it washed straight over me. On my second reading I've been looking stuff up as I've gone along, and came across the horrific story of the British Indian Army Officer, R.E. Dyer.

After the end of the First World War, Indians were increasingly noisy about wanting the British to get out of their country and leave them to it, and Britain, desperately clinging to the remnants of their fading empire, were none too happy about the protests that were breaking out. In Amritsar, a few Brits had been injured after being attacked by a mob, causing Dyer, the man in charge of the area, to impose a rule on the street of the attack that anybody wanting to pass through the street would have to do so crawling on their belly, and impose a general curfew on the region. There was tension in the air.

On the 13th April, 1919, Dyer thought it fair, given that the offenders were breaking curfew, to command fifty officers to fire upon a crowd gathered peacefully to celebrate a religious festival. The Indians were in a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings, and Dyer ordered the few exits blocked, and then told his squadron to unload their weapons on the all-ages crowd. Around 1650 shots were fired, and even the British admitted to causing 350 deaths, although Indian estimates are closer to a thousand. The incident became known as the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. Perhaps most shocking is that when Dyer was removed from his position and sent back to England in a little bit of a disgrace he was seen as a hero for standing up to the 'rioters',and his commanding officers praised his actions. Living in Britain you don't hear too much about this kind of thing (the British doing nasty things), but the Empire must have been full of mad and ruthless thugs if they approved this kind of savagery. I guess there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the world that the media don't report. Scary!