1The Part With No Battles
For fourteen parts this book has been about armies. This one has almost none, and it is the part where more happened to the Punjab than in any of them.
After March 1849 there is no Punjabi state, no Punjabi army and nobody left to fight anybody.
What replaces them is a different kind of history and it needs a different kind of chapter. The events in
this part are a land settlement, an irrigation scheme, a recruitment policy, a law about who may buy a
field, a movement of a million people from the east of the province to the west — and, at the end, ten
minutes of rifle fire in an enclosed garden.
None of that is a war in the sense the previous fourteen parts have used the word. All of it did more to
determine what the Punjab is today than Tarain, Panipat or Sobraon.
Four things to hold on to
- The province that was conquered in 1849 was fighting for the conquerors by 1857. Eight years. This book is going to explain why without either celebrating it or pretending it did not happen, because both are easier than the truth.
- The Punjab became the empire’s army. By 1914 a province with about seven or eight per cent of India’s population was supplying somewhere around half the Indian Army. That was a deliberate policy, it was justified by a theory that was nonsense, and it reshaped who owned land, who got pensions, and who thought of themselves as what.
- The western Punjab was rebuilt from nothing. The canal colonies turned scrub grazing into the largest irrigated tract on earth and moved hundreds of thousands of people west into it. In 1947 every one of them had to move back, or die.
- And the categories were invented here. “Agricultural tribes,” “martial races,” separate electorates — administrative boxes drawn between 1857 and 1919, which hardened into the identities that tore the province apart in Part Sixteen.
Two events here are used as arguments by people who are not really interested in the seventeenth or the nineteenth
century, and this book will handle both the same way it handled Parts Nine and Fourteen.
1857 is not a moral failure and it is not a triumph. The Punjab did not rise, and the reasons are specific, local and
mostly obvious once stated. Some of them do the province credit and some do not, and the holding of the province
involved a level of state terror that is usually left out. All of it is on the page.
Jallianwala Bagh will be stated and not dramatised. The facts are appalling enough without assistance, and the
single most damning source is the testimony the officer responsible gave in his own defence. This part quotes
him rather than describing the dead.
The labels work as before. CERTAIN, LIKELY, STORY — though in this part almost everything is
CERTAIN, because there are census returns, revenue records, court transcripts, commissions of inquiry,
newspapers and photographs.
2The Board of Administration, 1849–1857 CERTAIN
The first thing they did was take away the weapons. The second was to build roads. Both were the same policy.
- 1849–1857.
- The whole province, run from Lahore.
- Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence and a small group of officers who became famous as the “Punjab School.”
- Revenue records, settlement reports and administration reports. CERTAIN throughout.
What they did
1. Disarmament. The first and largest operation. Weapons were collected across the province in enormous
- quantities — the figures run well over a hundred thousand pieces in the first years — and possession was restricted. A province that had been under arms for a century and a half was stripped of them in about three.
- The army was pensioned rather than persecuted. Officers of the old Khalsa army were given allowances; some sardars kept estates; and many soldiers were re-enlisted into new British-officered Punjabi regiments almost immediately.
- A land settlement. Revenue was assessed district by district, generally at rates lower than the Durbar had demanded in its last years, and — crucially — proprietary right was recorded in the names of the men who actually cultivated.
- Public works. The Grand Trunk Road was metalled and bridged. The Bari Doab Canal was begun. The railway reached Lahore and then Multan.
- And a style of government. District officers with very wide personal discretion, riding their districts, settling disputes on the spot, keeping the paperwork minimal. It was called the non-regulation system, and its practitioners were proud of it.
The Board that ran the Punjab from 1849 contained two brothers who disagreed about everything that mattered, and
the disagreement is worth understanding because both sides of it turn up again in Part Sixteen.
Henry Lawrence wanted to conciliate the old order. Keep the sardars, leave them their estates and their standing, and
govern through them — on the view that a landed aristocracy is what holds a countryside quiet and that the men who
had fought at Sobraon were worth having on your side.
John Lawrence wanted to govern the peasantry directly. Cut out the intermediaries, assess the cultivator, record his
right, take his revenue, and let the sardars find their own level — on the view that a contented smallholder is worth
more than a resentful nobleman and considerably cheaper.
John won. The Board was dissolved in 1853, Henry was sent to Rajputana, and John became Chief Commissioner. He
was still there in 1857.
The consequence runs through the rest of this part. The British in the Punjab dealt with the peasantry, and the
peasantry is what they recruited, irrigated, protected by law and eventually depended on. Everything from the
Land Alienation Act to the martial-races doctrine to the recruitment machinery of 1914 follows from a decision taken
about administrative method in 1853.
Henry Lawrence died at Lucknow in July 1857, in the Residency, under siege.
- It was cheap and light at the point of contact. Fewer officials, less paper, quicker decisions.
- The revenue demand was moderate after a decade of a bankrupt Durbar squeezing the districts.
- It recorded rights. A cultivator with a document has something to lose and something to defend.
- And it absorbed the old army instead of leaving twenty thousand trained and hungry men in the villages.
- Pacification. Every item on the list is a security measure wearing the clothes of good government.
- The paternalism was real and so was the arbitrariness. A district officer with wide discretion is benevolent or not depending entirely on which officer you get.
- It removed the province’s capacity to resist — that was the point of the disarmament, and it worked.
- And within eight years the province was being used to reconquer India.
Between 1849 and about 1852 the new government collected weapons across the Punjab, and the returns
are among the most eloquent documents of the period.
Muskets, matchlocks, swords, spears, shields, pistols, and — from the fort at Lahore and the arsenals — the
artillery. The gun foundry that Ranjit Singh had built was closed. The pieces that had been cast in
it were taken away.
The totals run to well over a hundred thousand items, and that is only what was surrendered.
Now consider what this book has spent five parts describing. The Punjab between 1710 and 1849 was
the most heavily armed society in India — a province where the peasantry rode, where a village kept its
own weapons, where twelve independent governments maintained cavalry, and where a movement had
survived thirty years of persecution because the men in the forests had horses and swords.
In three years all of it was on a pile.
And the second half of the policy is the part that makes it interesting rather than merely brutal. The
government that had disarmed the province immediately began re-arming a selected part of it, in
uniform, under British officers, for its own purposes. Punjabi regiments were being raised almost
before the surrendered weapons had been counted.
That is the arrangement of the next seventy years in a sentence: no arms for the province, and a
rifle for anybody willing to carry it for the empire.
Eight years later it was tested, and it held.
31857 — The Province That Held CERTAIN
Eight years after being conquered, the Punjab supplied the troops that retook Delhi. The reasons are specific and some of them are ugly.
When: May 1857 to September 1857.
Where: The Punjab cantonments — Mian Mir, Ferozepur, Peshawar — and then Delhi.
Who: John Lawrence, Herbert Edwardes, John Nicholson, and roughly thirty-four thousand newly raised Punjabi troops.
The evidence: Extensive on both sides; the Punjab administration’s own records are unusually candid.
Why the Punjab did not rise — six reasons, all real
1. The rebels were the men who had conquered the Punjab. The Bengal Army sepoys who mutinied were
- largely Purbias — high-caste Hindus from Awadh and Bihar. They were the infantry at Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon eleven years earlier. To a Punjabi village, they were not liberators; they were the occupying garrison.
- Delhi was not a symbol worth fighting for. The rebellion made the Mughal emperor its figurehead. This book has spent six parts describing what the Punjab’s relationship with Mughal Delhi had been, and Part Twelve described Sikh armies occupying the Red Fort in 1783 and going home.
- The disarming was immediate and ruthless. The Bengal regiments in the Punjab were disarmed within days — at Lahore on 13 May, at Ferozepur, at Peshawar on 22 May — before they could act.
- The Cis-Sutlej chiefs backed the British. Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Kapurthala supplied troops and secured the Grand Trunk Road. They had been British protectorates since 1809 — Part Thirteen’s Treaty of Amritsar, paying out forty-eight years later.
- There was money in it. Recruitment was open, immediate and paid, into a province with twenty thousand disbanded soldiers and no employment for them.
- And the province had been governed reasonably for eight years. A moderate revenue settlement and a recorded title are not affection, but they are a reason not to gamble.
The Punjab was also held by terror, and the record of it is in the administration’s own files.
Disarmed sepoys who tried to escape were hunted down and killed in large numbers. Villages that sheltered
them were punished. Executions were public and were conducted by blowing men from the mouths of guns — a
method chosen because of what it did to a watching crowd.
At Ajnala, near Amritsar, in the summer of 1857, a deputy commissioner named Frederic Cooper captured a
body of some hundreds of sepoys of a disarmed regiment and had them killed without trial. A large number
were shot in batches; others died of suffocation in the building where they had been confined overnight. The bodies
were put down a dry well. Cooper published his own account of it and was not ashamed of it, and the figure he
gives is two hundred and eighty-two.
The well was located and excavated in 2014 and the remains were recovered.
That is what “the Punjab remained quiet” means when you look underneath it, and any account of 1857 in this
province that does not include it is not describing the same event.
- Manpower. Some thirty-four thousand new levies raised during 1857 — Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans and Dogras.
- The Movable Column under John Nicholson, which policed the province and then marched on Delhi.
- The siege train. The heavy guns that finally breached Delhi came down from the Punjab in September.
- And the Grand Trunk Road, held open the whole way, which is the whole campaign.
- A reputation that became a cage. After 1857 the Punjab was the loyal province, and everything that followed was built on that assumption.
- The executions. Ajnala is the worst-documented case and it was not the only one.
- And Delhi. The sack of the city in September 1857, the executions, the expulsion of the population — Punjabi troops were part of an operation that gutted the capital.
In February 1846, at Sobraon, the Bengal Native Infantry went into the Sikh entrenchments and killed
several thousand men in a bridgehead against a river.
In September 1857, at Delhi, Punjabi troops raised in the villages of those dead men went up the breach
beside British regiments to retake the capital from the Bengal Native Infantry.
Eleven years and seven months.
It is tempting to make this a story about betrayal and it is not one. The men who enlisted in 1857
were not betraying anybody, because there was nobody left to betray. The Sikh state had been dead for eight
years, its Maharaja was a schoolboy in England, and the alternative on offer was a restored Mughal empire
at Delhi run by the army that had conquered them.
What they were doing was what soldiers without a country have always done, in every part of this book.
Part Five described Hindu Shahi troops in the armies of Ghazni. Part Seven described Punjabi
contingents in every Delhi army that came through. Part Nine described Pathan mercenaries in
the pay of a Guru.
An army is a livelihood before it is anything else, and a province that has just been disarmed and
has twenty thousand unemployed veterans in it will sell that livelihood to whoever is buying.
What is worth noticing is what the British concluded from it — because they concluded the wrong thing,
deliberately, and built seventy years of policy on it.
They did not conclude that the Punjab had made a calculation. They concluded that Punjabis were
naturally loyal and naturally martial, that this was a fact about their blood, and that the empire’s
armies should henceforth be recruited from here.
That is War Six, and it is the most consequential mistake anybody makes in this part.
4The Frontier, 1849–1898 CERTAIN
Fifty years, more than sixty punitive expeditions, two invasions of Afghanistan and one line drawn on a map that is still causing trouble.
When: 1849–1898, continuously.
Where: The hills west of the Indus — Swat, Buner, Tirah, the Khyber, Waziristan.
Who: The Punjab Frontier Force, largely recruited in the Punjab, against the Pashtun tribes.
The evidence: Campaign records and despatches for every one of them.
What happened, for fifty years
1. A force was raised for the job. The Punjab Frontier Force — known as the Piffers — was created in 1849,
- recruited heavily in the Punjab, and spent half a century on the same ground.
- The expeditions never stopped. More than sixty punitive operations between 1849 and 1900: burn the villages, destroy the towers, take the hostages, extract the fine, withdraw before winter. Then do it again.
- Ambela, 1863, was the worst of the early ones — a campaign that was supposed to take a fortnight and turned into two months of hard fighting for a rock outcrop that changed hands repeatedly.
- The Second Afghan War, 1878–1881, was launched from the Punjab. It produced Maiwand, the march from Kabul to Kandahar, and — like the first — a British withdrawal from a country nobody could hold.
- The Durand Line, 1893. A boundary was agreed between British India and the Amir of Afghanistan and drawn across the map. It ran straight through the Pashtun tribal country, dividing it.
- And in 1897 the whole frontier rose at once — Malakand, the Khyber, Tirah — in the largest operation the British had yet mounted there, involving tens of thousands of troops.
Set this beside what this book has already recorded about the same country.
Part Eight, 1586: a Mughal column is destroyed in the Karakar Pass and eight thousand die, including Akbar’s closest
friend. Akbar’s answer afterwards is roads, forts and subsidies.
Part Nine, 1672: a Mughal army is destroyed in the Khapash Pass. Aurangzeb comes to Hasan Abdal for eighteen
months. His answer is roads, forts and subsidies.
Part Thirteen, 1823–1837: Ranjit Singh takes Peshawar, garrisons the mouth of the Khyber at Jamrud, and never
attempts to occupy the hills.
Part Fifteen, 1849–1898: the British spend fifty years, sixty expeditions and an unquantifiable amount of money, and
arrive at roads, forts and subsidies.
Four empires. Three centuries. The same answer, reached independently each time after losing men to learn
it.
And there is a fifth entry that this book will note and not elaborate on, because it is not history yet. Two more great
powers went into that country in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and came out again, and the
Durand Line drawn in 1893 is still disputed.
- The ground. Defiles, no capital, no army to destroy, nothing to besiege — every reason this book has given since Part Five.
- Punitive expeditions punish and do not govern. Burning a village creates a grievance and removes nothing.
- The Durand Line made it worse by giving every tribe a border to cross and two governments to play off.
- And the tribes only had to still be there, which is the oldest rule in this book.
- Fifty years of employment. The Frontier Force was a career, and it ran on Punjabi recruits.
- A permanent military establishment in the province, which is a large economy.
- And a reputation, reinforced annually, that fed directly into the martial-races policy of War Six.
In November 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand and the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan signed an agreement at Kabul
fixing the boundary between Afghanistan and British India.
The document is short. The line runs some two and a half thousand kilometres, from the Wakhan corridor
to the Persian border, and it was drawn to define spheres of influence rather than to divide a people.
What it actually did was cut the Pashtun tribal country in half. Villages, valleys, clans and grazing grounds
ended up on opposite sides of a boundary that meant nothing on the ground and a great deal on paper.
The British used it as an administrative convenience and never wholly controlled the territory on their own
side of it. Afghanistan has never fully accepted it. It is still the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan, it is still disputed, and it is still the reason for a large amount of what happens in
that region.
This book has spent fifteen parts on a province defined by a frontier it did not draw, and here is that
process at its most literal. Two men signed a paper in Kabul in 1893, and a hundred and thirty years
later people are still being killed along the line they drew.
The same thing is going to happen to the Punjab itself in Part Sixteen, in 1947, and the man who does it will
have five weeks and a set of out-of-date census maps.
5The Kukas, 1872 CERTAIN
The first organised resistance in the annexed Punjab was a religious reform movement that boycotted the government forty-five years before anybody called it non-cooperation — and it ended with sixty-six men blown from guns without a trial.
When: 17–18 January 1872.
Where: Malerkotla, in the Malwa — and the movement’s centre at Bhaini Sahib near Ludhiana.
Who: The Namdharis or Kukas, followers of Satguru Ram Singh, and L. Cowan, Deputy Commissioner of Ludhiana.
The evidence: Government records — including the inquiry that ended Cowan’s career.
What the Namdharis were
1. A reform movement inside the Sikh tradition, led from 1857 by Ram Singh at Bhaini Sahib. The name Kuka comes from the cry raised in their worship.
2. Their social programme was radical for 1860. They rejected caste, opposed female infanticide, dowry and
- child marriage, promoted widow remarriage, and performed inter-caste marriages at a cost of a few paise — a direct attack on the marriage economy of the Punjabi village.
- And their political programme was a boycott. They refused to use British courts, British schools, the British post, and imported cloth — which is non-cooperation and swadeshi, complete, in the 1860s. Gandhi launched the same programme in 1920.
- Cow protection was central to them, and it is what produced the crisis.
What happened
1. In 1871 Kukas killed butchers at Amritsar and Raikot over cow slaughter. Those responsible were tried
- and hanged. 2. In January 1872 a body of about a hundred and fifty Kukas attacked the fort at Malerkotla, against Ram Singh’s instructions. They were beaten off with losses on both sides and about sixty-eight were captured.
- Cowan, the Deputy Commissioner, did not wait for a trial, an order or a superior. On 17 January he had forty-nine of the prisoners blown from the mouths of guns at Malerkotla, in public. Sixteen more were killed the following day.
- A boy among the prisoners, Bishan Singh, seized Cowan’s beard and was cut down where he stood.
- Ram Singh was arrested and deported to Rangoon, where he remained until his death in 1885. The movement was placed under permanent surveillance.
The detail that makes this episode more interesting than a simple atrocity is what the government did afterwards.
Cowan was dismissed from the service. His superior, the Commissioner, was removed from his post. The
Government of India took the view that the executions had been carried out without trial, without authority, and
without any of the forms of law — and that this was unacceptable.
It was not squeamishness about the deaths. Blowing men from guns was an approved punishment and had been
used extensively in 1857. What was unacceptable was that an officer had done it on his own initiative.
Hold that judgement, because the contrast at the end of this part is exact. In 1872 an official who killed sixty-six
people without trial was dismissed. In 1919 an officer who killed several hundred without warning was
relieved of command, and a London newspaper raised a subscription of over twenty-six thousand pounds for
him.
Something changed in between, and the change is the subject of the last three sections.
- It was fifteen years after 1857 and any organised Sikh movement was read as a rising in embryo.
- The boycott was more alarming than the violence. A movement that tells people not to use the courts or the post is attacking the administration where it lives.
- Ram Singh had a large following in exactly the districts the army recruited from.
- And Cowan panicked, which is the honest explanation for the manner of it.
- They attacked a state with a monopoly of weapons. The disarmament of War One had worked.
- Their leader disowned the attack and was punished for it anyway.
- Cow protection narrowed them. A cause that sets one community against another cannot become a national movement, and this one was already close to the fault line that opens in Part Sixteen.
- And it was forty years early. Everything the Kukas did in 1870 became mainstream Indian politics in 1920 and nobody in 1870 was ready for it.
Of all the places in the Punjab where sixty-six men could have been executed without trial in January 1872,
it happened at Malerkotla.
Part Eleven told the story of that town. In December 1704 at Sirhind, when sentence was passed on the two
younger sons of Guru Gobind Singh, the Nawab of Malerkotla is recorded as having spoken against it
— the haah da naara, the cry of protest, made by a Muslim nobleman on behalf of two children who were
not of his community.
It did not save them. It saved his town. For two centuries afterwards, while Sikh armies took and in some
cases destroyed every Afghan-held place in the Malwa — Sirhind twice — Malerkotla was spared, and
the reason given was always the protest of 1704.
And in 1872 that town was where a British deputy commissioner executed sixty-six Sikhs at the mouths of
guns.
This book is not going to draw a lesson out of that, because there isn’t a clean one. The Nawab of
1872 had nothing to do with the executions; the Kukas had attacked his fort; Cowan brought his guns to the
nearest convenient place. It is a coincidence of geography and not a judgement on anybody.
But it is the kind of coincidence this book has learned to notice. The Punjab is not a large place, and the
same fifty or sixty towns keep appearing in it across five thousand years — Sirhind nine times,
Multan ten, Panipat three, Attock in five separate parts.
Malerkotla appears twice, a hundred and sixty-eight years apart, for opposite reasons. And in 1947, when
the districts around it were consumed, it came through comparatively unharmed — and the explanation
offered locally was still a protest made in a courtroom in 1704.
6The Canal Colonies, 1885–1920 CERTAIN
The largest irrigation works in the world were built in the western Punjab, and several hundred thousand people were moved into them. In 1947 all of them had to move back.
- Major works from 1885; the colonies settled through to the 1920s.
- The bars — the high scrub plains between the western rivers: the Sandal Bar, the Ganji Bar, the Neeli Bar.
- The Punjab Irrigation Department, and colonists drawn from the crowded central districts.
- Settlement reports, canal records, census returns. CERTAIN and enormous.
What was built
1. The Lower Chenab Canal, from the 1890s, was the largest of them and created the Chenab Colony around a new town laid out in 1896 and named Lyallpur — now Faisalabad, and one of the biggest cities in Pakistan.
2. The Lower Jhelum Canal followed, then the Lower Bari Doab, and then the Triple Canals Project, which
- moved water between river basins on a scale nobody had attempted anywhere.
- By the 1920s something like fourteen million acres were under canal irrigation — the largest contiguous irrigated tract on earth, and it still is.
- The population was moved deliberately. Colonists were recruited from the congested central districts — Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Gurdaspur, Sialkot — and given land in the new colonies.
- And the grants were categorised. Peasant grants, yeoman grants, capitalist grants — and, critically, horse-breeding grants and grants reserved for army pensioners and serving soldiers.
Three groups paid, and only one of them is usually mentioned.
The people who already lived there. The bars were not empty. They were grazing country, used by pastoral
communities — the Janglis — who had lived there for generations and who had no documented title of the kind the
new administration recognised. They were largely dispossessed, and where they were compensated it was on
terms that assumed grazing land was waste.
The rivers. The Indus system was re-engineered to a degree that changed the hydrology of the whole basin, and the
consequences — waterlogging, salinity, the exhaustion of groundwater — arrived within decades and are still being
managed.
And the colonists themselves, eventually. Every family that moved west between 1890 and 1920 was moving into
what became, in August 1947, the wrong country. The canal colonies are in Pakistan. The colonists were
disproportionately Sikhs and Hindus from the eastern districts.
That is not hindsight being unfair to the engineers. It is a plain statement of what the policy produced: the most
valuable agricultural land in the province, developed at enormous cost, settled by people who would be
driven out of it inside fifty years.
Part Sixteen is largely about those roads, going the other way.
- Revenue. Irrigated land pays several times what scrub pays, and the canal colonies became the most profitable investment the Government of India ever made.
- Famine policy. After the famines of the 1870s and 1890s, guaranteed irrigated production was a strategic necessity.
- Relieving congestion in the central districts, where holdings had been subdivided to the point of unviability.
- And recruitment. Land grants tied to military service bound the recruiting base to the government with something more durable than pay.
- Where people lived. Hundreds of thousands moved west, and the religious composition of whole districts changed with them.
- Who owned land. Allocation by category hardened the administrative distinctions of War Six into facts on the ground.
- The relationship between land and the army, which is the subject of the next section.
- And it built the prize that made partition catastrophic in the west.
Lyallpur was founded in 1896 on empty scrub and named after a departing Lieutenant-Governor.
It was designed, not grown. The plan is a clock tower at the centre with eight bazaars radiating from it,
laid out to represent the Union Jack — the whole town a diagram of who had built it, drawn on ground
where there had been nothing but grazing five years earlier.
Within a generation it was one of the great agricultural markets of northern India: wheat, cotton, an
agricultural college, a railway junction, and a population drawn from a hundred and fifty miles away to the
east.
Today it is Faisalabad, the third-largest city in Pakistan, with several million people in it and a textile
industry that clothes a good part of the world. The clock tower is still there and the eight bazaars still
radiate from it.
Consider what that is, in a book that has spent fifteen parts describing this province.
Almost everything in these sixteen parts is about something being destroyed. Taxila is a ruin.
Sirhind was levelled twice and never rebuilt. The Harmandir Sahib was blown up twice. Multan’s walls
came down. Delhi was sacked four times by armies that came down this road.
The canal colonies are the one thing in this entire history that was built rather than knocked
down, and that is bigger now than when it was made.
They were built by a colonial government for its own purposes, on land taken from people who were not
consulted, and they were settled by families who lost everything in 1947.
All of that is true at once, and the wheat is still growing.
7The Martial Races and the Land Alienation Act CERTAIN
A theory about blood that was not true, and a law about who could buy a field — and between them they drew the lines that the Punjab was cut along in 1947.
- The doctrine from the 1860s, at its height under Lord Roberts in the 1880s; the Act in 1900.
- The recruiting districts of the central and western Punjab.
- The Indian Army, the Punjab administration, and the categories they invented.
- Recruiting handbooks, census reports and the text of the Act. CERTAIN.
The doctrine
1. After 1857 the Indian Army was rebuilt from the ground up. The Bengal Army had mutinied and was largely dismantled. Recruitment shifted decisively north-west.
2. The justification offered was racial. Certain “races” — Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Dogras, Gurkhas,
- some Rajput and Jat groups — were held to be inherently warlike. Others — Bengalis, Madrasis, Marathas — were held not to be. Recruiting handbooks were published describing the physical and moral characteristics of each.
- It was nonsense. The Marathas had fought the British for fifty years. The Bengal Army had conquered the Punjab. The men who had beaten every European army sent against them in the eighteenth century were Marathas and Mysoreans. The theory was constructed after the fact to justify recruiting from the province that had stayed quiet in 1857.
- And it had a second purpose that was never stated in the handbooks. Regiments were organised in class companies and class regiments — by caste and community — so that the pan-Indian solidarity that produced 1857 could not form again.
- By 1914 the Punjab supplied something close to half the Indian Army from around seven or eight per cent of India’s population.
The Act
1. The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 prohibited the permanent transfer of agricultural land from
- members of “agricultural tribes” to anybody outside them.
- The stated purpose was to protect the peasantry from the moneylender. Debt was real, foreclosure was real, and land was passing from cultivators to urban creditors across the province.
- The unstated purpose was to protect the recruiting base. A dispossessed peasantry does not enlist and does not stay loyal, and the government knew exactly which districts its soldiers came from.
- And it required the government to define who was an agricultural tribe. Lists were drawn up, district by district, of which castes and communities qualified.
Because of what the lists did.
Before 1900, “Jat” and “Arain” and “Khatri” and “Arora” were social facts — real, but fluid, local, and
negotiable. Families moved between occupations. Categories blurred at the edges.
After 1900 they were legal categories with property rights attached. Whether you could buy a field depended on
which box the government had put your community in. Every subsequent census, every land record, every recruiting
return reinforced it.
And the boxes correlated with religion. The “agricultural tribes” of the central and western Punjab were
overwhelmingly Muslim and Sikh peasant communities. The excluded moneylending and trading
communities were overwhelmingly Hindu.
So a law intended to keep peasants on their land put a legal boundary between rural Muslims and Sikhs on one
side and urban Hindus on the other, and made it a matter of property.
Add separate electorates from 1909 — communal rolls, communal seats — and the Punjab entered the twentieth
century with its population sorted, counted, listed and legally distinguished by community in every department of
government.
This book is not saying the British invented Hindu, Muslim and Sikh identity in the Punjab. It is saying that
between 1857 and 1919 those identities were converted from things people were into boxes with rights
attached — and that when the province was divided in 1947, the lines were already drawn and the lists already existed.
- Money, on a very large scale. Army pay, pensions and remittances were the largest cash income in the rural Punjab for seventy years.
- Land. Grants in the canal colonies to soldiers and pensioners transferred serious wealth into the recruiting districts.
- Protection from foreclosure, which was a real and widespread danger and which the Act genuinely reduced.
- And a political weight that the province had not had since 1849, because the government could not afford to alienate it.
- The province became a garrison. Its prosperity, its politics and its land tenure all ran through the recruiting office.
- The categories hardened, permanently, and were reinforced by every instrument of the state.
- Communal arithmetic became the basis of politics from 1909 onwards, which is where Part Sixteen begins.
- And a theory about blood was taught to the people it was about, some of whom believed it.
The recruiting handbooks of the Indian Army are among the strangest documents produced by the British
in India, and they are worth reading because of what they reveal about the people who wrote them.
Each one covers a community — Sikhs, Punjabi Musalmans, Dogras, Pathans — and each describes its
subject’s history, religion, customs, physique and character, with recommendations about which clans and
districts produce the best recruits and which should be avoided.
They are careful, detailed, respectful in their way, and completely wrong about the thing they exist to
establish. There is no such thing as a martial race. There are populations with military traditions,
economies that make soldiering attractive, and governments that recruit where it suits them.
What makes the handbooks worth a page in this book is the second-order effect. They were not only read
by British officers. They were read by the communities they described.
A theory that says your people are natural soldiers, published by the government, taught to your officers,
and backed by land grants and pensions, is a flattering thing to be told — and it was told to the Punjab, in
print, for sixty years.
This book has spent fifteen parts arguing that the winner is whoever gets written about. Here is a
variation on it that is harder to see and worse in its effects.
The conqueror also gets to write down what the conquered are, and if he does it long enough and
pays for it, they may start quoting it back to him.
81907 — Pagri Sambhal Jatta CERTAIN
The colonists of the canal colonies discovered what their tenancies actually said, and for the first time since 1849 the government was frightened.
When: Spring 1907; the leaders deported in May and released in November.
Where: The canal colonies, Lyallpur, Rawalpindi and Lahore.
Who: Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Ajit Singh, with the colonists and the urban press.
The evidence: Government records, newspapers, and the text of the bill that was withdrawn.
What caused it
1. The Punjab Colonization of Land Bill, 1906. It tightened the terms on which canal-colony land was held —
- restricting the colonists’ rights to sell, sublet or bequeath as they chose, imposing conditions and fees, and giving the government wide powers to resume grants.
- An increase in water rates on the Bari Doab Canal at the same moment.
- And a rise in the land revenue assessment in several districts.
- Together they told the colonists something they had not fully understood: that after fifteen years of breaking scrub into wheat land, they were tenants of the government rather than proprietors, on terms the government could change.
What happened
1. The colonies organised. Meetings, petitions, refusal to pay, and an alliance between the rural colonists and
- the urban politicians of Lahore that had not existed before.
- Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh led it. Lajpat Rai was an Arya Samaj lawyer and one of the leading nationalists of the period; Ajit Singh was a young radical from Khatkar Kalan whose nephew, Bhagat Singh, was born in that year.
- There were riots at Rawalpindi in April. 4. Both men were deported without trial in May 1907 — to Mandalay, in Burma — under a regulation of 1818.
- And the government backed down. The bill was vetoed by the Viceroy; the water rates were revisited; and the two men were released in November.
The Government of India did not withdraw legislation because of petitions. It did here, and the reason is stated plainly
in its own correspondence.
The agitation was in the recruiting districts, and 1907 was the fiftieth anniversary of 1857.
The colonies were full of army pensioners and serving soldiers’ families — because War Five’s grants had put them
there deliberately. Meetings were being attended by men in uniform on leave. Reports reached Simla that
discontent was spreading into the regiments.
And the whole structure of Indian military power since 1857 rested on the Punjab being reliable. A province that
supplied half the army and was also the centre of an agrarian agitation was an unacceptable combination,
and the government paid whatever it cost to break the connection.
The lesson everybody drew was correct and it shaped the next forty years. The Punjab’s leverage was the army, and
the moment the countryside and the barracks started talking to each other, Delhi had to listen.
It is also the reason the reaction in 1919 was as violent as it was. Michael O’Dwyer had been in the Punjab in 1907, and
he had learned exactly the opposite lesson from it.
- It was economic, specific and winnable. Not a demand for independence — a demand about tenancy terms and water rates.
- It united town and country, which colonial administration in the Punjab had been designed to keep apart.
- It touched the army. The single fact that made the government move.
- And the deportations backfired. Removing two men without trial made them national figures and the case a cause.
- The colonies stayed government land on government terms, with the worst clauses removed.
- The recruiting machine was untouched and seven years later delivered half a million men.
- And it taught the administration to watch for exactly this — which is why 1919 was met with maximum force.
The agitation of 1907 produced a song, and the song outlived everything else about it.
It was written by Banke Dayal, the editor of a small paper at Jhang, and first sung at a meeting in Lyallpur.
Its refrain is three words of Punjabi:
Pagri sambhal, jatta.
Look after your turban, farmer.
The turban is honour, standing and self-respect, and the phrase means: hold on to what you have, because
they are taking it. It was aimed at a specific bill about specific tenancies in a specific set of districts, and it
became the name of the whole movement.
It is still sung. It has been recorded by every generation of Punjabi singers since, it is used at farmers’
demonstrations, and most of the people who know it could not tell you what the Punjab Colonization of
Land Bill was.
This book has spent fifteen parts complaining that ordinary Punjabis left no record. The exceptions have
been remarkably consistent in form: a coin legend, a hymn about an invasion, a couplet comparing a
governor to a sickle, a letter written to a governor by two men on a road.
Nearly all of them are short, most of them rhyme, and every one was made by somebody who owned
nothing.
The Punjab’s own voice in this history is almost entirely in verse, and it is almost entirely about
not being pushed off the land.
Ajit Singh went into exile in 1909 and spent thirty-eight years abroad. He came home in 1947 and died on
15 August, the day India became independent.
9Ghadar, 1913–1915 CERTAIN
Punjabi labourers on the Pacific coast of North America founded a revolutionary party, sailed home to raise a rising, and were betrayed by one man before it began.
When: Party founded 1913; the rising planned for 21 February 1915.
Where: California and British Columbia, and then the central Punjab.
Who: Sohan Singh Bhakna, Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha and several thousand returning emigrants.
The evidence: The party’s own newspaper, and the transcripts of the conspiracy trials. CERTAIN.
How it started
1. Punjabis went to the Pacific coast for work from about 1904 — sawmills in British Columbia, farms in
- California, railway construction. Most were Sikhs from the Doaba districts. By 1913 there were perhaps ten thousand.
- They met a wall of racial legislation. Canada’s “continuous journey” regulation of 1908 was designed to exclude Indians without saying so; there were riots against them in Washington state; and they could not vote, own property in some places, or bring their families.
- And they noticed the contradiction. They were British subjects, from the province that supplied half the Indian Army, being treated as unwanted aliens in another part of the same empire.
- In 1913 they founded a party at Astoria and named it after the word for mutiny or revolt: Ghadar. Its newspaper was printed in Urdu and Gurmukhi and mailed all over the Indian diaspora.
- Its programme was not reform. It was armed rebellion, and it said so on the front page every week.
The Komagata Maru
1. In 1914 a Sikh businessman, Gurdit Singh, chartered a Japanese steamer and sailed from Hong Kong to
- Vancouver with three hundred and seventy-six passengers, specifically to test the continuous-journey rule. 2. The ship was held in Vancouver harbour for two months and the passengers were not allowed to land. Almost all were eventually forced back.
- It reached Budge Budge near Calcutta on 29 September 1914. The authorities tried to put the passengers straight on a train to the Punjab; there was a confrontation; and about nineteen or twenty people were killed.
- The episode did more for the Ghadar party than anything it wrote.
When war broke out in 1914 the party called its members home, and several thousand went — the estimates run to
about eight thousand people returning to India in a few months, many of them intending to raise a rising.
The government knew they were coming. Ships were met at the ports; the Ingress into India Ordinance allowed
internment on arrival; hundreds were detained and hundreds more restricted to their villages.
The rising itself was betrayed. A date was fixed for 21 February 1915 — regiments were to be suborned, arsenals
seized, and the Punjab raised. An informer inside the conspiracy passed the plan to the police. The date was brought
forward and it made no difference; the arrests began before anything started.
What followed were the Lahore Conspiracy Case trials, under special tribunals with no appeal. Some two hundred
and ninety-one people were tried; more than forty were sentenced to death and over a hundred transported
for life.
And the honest assessment has to include the other reason it failed. The Punjab did not rise. The countryside in 1915
was recruiting, drawing pay and pensions, and about to send half a million men to France and Mesopotamia. A few
thousand returned emigrants with a newspaper could not move it.
- The government was ready. Surveillance of the party had been running since 1913 through consulates and informers.
- Wartime powers. The Defence of India Act of 1915 removed the ordinary protections of trial and appeal.
- They had no base in the villages. Returning emigrants were outsiders to the political networks that mattered.
- And the province was making money out of the war.
- It was secular and explicitly so. The party’s membership was Sikh, Muslim and Hindu and its literature attacked communal division directly — which almost nothing else in the Punjab of 1913 did.
- It was the first Punjabi movement to aim at independence rather than redress.
- It supplied the next generation with its heroes, which is the story below.
- And it convinced the government that the Punjab was dangerous, which shaped everything about 1919.
Kartar Singh Sarabha was born in a village near Ludhiana and went to California at about fifteen to
study. He was in Berkeley when the Ghadar party was founded, worked on its newspaper, learned to set type
and to fly, and came home in 1914 to raise a rebellion.
He travelled the Punjab for months trying to suborn regiments and organise the rising. When it collapsed
he was arrested, tried in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case, and refused to defend himself — telling the court
that he had done what he had done and would do it again.
He was hanged at Lahore Central Jail on 16 November 1915. He was nineteen years old.
Twelve years later a schoolboy from a village forty miles away, whose uncle had been deported in 1907 and
who was born in the year of that agitation, began carrying a photograph of Sarabha in his pocket.
His name was Bhagat Singh. He was hanged at the same jail in March 1931, aged twenty-three, and he is
the most famous revolutionary in modern Indian history.
Follow the chain and it is remarkably short. The canal colony agitation of 1907 produced Ajit Singh.
Ajit Singh’s deportation and exile produced a household in which his nephew grew up. The
Ghadar trials of 1915 produced Sarabha, and Sarabha’s photograph was in that nephew’s pocket.
Three movements, one district, twenty-four years.
This book has repeatedly observed that the Punjab is not a large place. Its politics in the twentieth
century came out of about four districts of the Doaba and the Majha, and a great many of the
people involved were related to each other.
10The First World War, 1914–1918 CERTAIN
Half a million men went from one province to fight in France, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli and East Africa, and the province was promised something for it.
When: 1914–1918.
Where: Flanders, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine, East Africa — and the recruiting offices of every Punjabi district.
Who: Roughly a third to a half of all Indian combatants, raised under Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor from 1913.
The evidence: Recruitment returns, casualty lists, war memorials. CERTAIN.
The numbers
1. India sent well over a million men overseas.
2. The Punjab supplied somewhere in the region of three hundred and fifty thousand to nearly half a
- million combatants — the figures vary with definitions, and every version of them puts the province at or near half the Indian total.
- Its share of India’s population was around seven or eight per cent.
- Indian troops were in France within months. The Lahore and Meerut Divisions were in the line in the winter of 1914–15 — men from the Punjab plains in Flanders mud, in the first winter, in tropical uniforms.
- They fought at Neuve Chapelle, Ypres and Loos; at Gallipoli; through the whole Mesopotamian campaign including the surrender at Kut; in Egypt, Palestine and East Africa.
- Indian dead across all theatres were around seventy-four thousand, and the Punjab’s share of that is proportionate to its share of the enlistment.
The recruitment of the Punjab in the First World War is often described as volunteering, and for the first two years that
is roughly what it was — a province with a military tradition, cash pay, land grants and pensions on offer.
By 1917 and 1918 it was something else.
Michael O’Dwyer ran recruitment as a quota system. Districts were given targets, and the targets were passed
down to the tehsildars, the zaildars and the village lambardars, whose own positions depended on meeting
them. Villages that fell short were pressed. Land grants, canal water, remissions and official favour were tied to
compliance. There are well-documented cases of coercion, of families with several sons being made to produce another,
and of quotas being met by methods nobody wrote down.
The province also supplied money, animals and grain — war loans raised under pressure, horses and mules
requisitioned, wheat taken at controlled prices — during a period of rising costs and, in 1918, an influenza epidemic
that killed a very large number of people across northern India.
So the picture is both things at once. Hundreds of thousands of Punjabis enlisted willingly, fought extremely
well, and were proud of it. And by the last two years the machinery producing them was closer to
conscription than to recruitment, and the province knew it.
What made 1919 explosive was not one of those facts. It was both of them together, plus what happened next.
- Sixty years of policy. Everything in War Six was designed to produce exactly this and it worked.
- Land and pensions. The canal colony grants tied service to property in a way pay alone never could.
- A genuine military tradition in families that had been soldiering for three generations.
- And an administration that could reach every village and apply pressure through people the village could not refuse.
- Political advance. In August 1917 the British government publicly declared that its policy was the progressive realisation of responsible government in India. Everybody read it as a promise.
- An end to wartime emergency powers, which had been accepted as temporary.
- Recognition. A province that had supplied half an army expected to be treated as something other than a district.
- And what it got in March 1919 was the Rowlatt Acts.
The Lahore and Meerut Divisions reached France in the autumn of 1914 and went into the line almost at
once, in the first winter of the war.
Consider what that involved for a man from a village near Jalandhar or Rawalpindi. He had never seen
Europe. He had never seen that kind of cold, or that kind of rain, or a landscape without sun in it for weeks.
The kit issued was for a different climate. The trenches filled with water. The artillery was on a scale
nothing in Asia had prepared anybody for.
They held sections of the line through that winter when the British Expeditionary Force had been shot to
pieces and there was very little else available, and they attacked at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915.
Letters home were censored, and the censors’ summaries survive, which is how we know some of what the
men were saying. They are among the very few first-person Punjabi voices in this entire book —
dictated by men who could not write, to scribes, read by censors, and preserved in a file because somebody
was checking for morale problems.
They are mostly about the cold, the noise, and money for home.
There is a memorial at Neuve Chapelle to the Indian dead of that winter. There are Commonwealth war
cemeteries in France, Belgium, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Tanzania with Punjabi names on the stones.
This province has been a corridor for other people’s armies since Part One of this book. In 1914 it
stopped being a corridor and became a source — and the men went to the other end of the world to fight in
a war that had nothing to do with them, for a government that put the Rowlatt Acts on the statute book
four months after the armistice.
11The Rowlatt Acts and April 1919 CERTAIN
Four months after the armistice, the government made its wartime emergency powers permanent, and every elected Indian in the legislature voted against it.
When: The Act passed March 1919; the arrests at Amritsar on 10 April.
Where: Delhi, and then Amritsar.
Who: The Government of India; Gandhi; and at Amritsar, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal.
The evidence: Legislative records, the Hunter Committee evidence, and contemporary newspapers.
What the Act did
1. It extended the wartime emergency powers into peacetime. Trial of political offences without a jury;
- detention without trial; restricted appeal.
- Every elected Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council voted against it. It passed on the official bloc.
- That is the fact that mattered. Not the content — the demonstration that Indian representation, such as it was, could be simply outvoted on a question of civil liberty, four months after the war those representatives’ constituents had fought.
- Gandhi called a satyagraha — a nationwide suspension of business — for early April 1919. It was his first all-India campaign and it worked far better than anybody expected.
Amritsar, 10 April
1. The two local leaders were popular and they were a Muslim and a Hindu working together, which the
- administration found more alarming than either of them separately.
- On 10 April they were arrested and deported from the city without notice.
- A crowd marched to the Civil Lines to petition for their release and was fired on at a railway bridge. Numbers were killed. 4. The city then rioted. Banks were attacked and burned; five Europeans were killed; and a woman missionary, Miss Marcella Sherwood, was pulled from her bicycle and badly beaten in a narrow lane. She was rescued and hidden by Indian neighbours.
- By 11 April the civil authorities had lost control and handed the city to the military.
- Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived that night.
This book has been consistent about this for fifteen parts and will not stop now.
Five Europeans were murdered in Amritsar on 10 April 1919 — bank employees and a railway guard, killed by a
mob. Marcella Sherwood was assaulted in a lane and left for dead. These were real crimes committed against
people who had done nothing, and they are part of the record.
They are also the reason the city was placed under military control, and they are the justification that was offered
afterwards for everything that followed.
What has to be held alongside them is proportion. The riot of 10 April was a day of mob violence in a city, following
the firing on a peaceful procession, following the arrest without notice of two popular leaders, following an Act that
every elected Indian had voted against.
What happened three days later, in response, was not policing and was not a riot.
The man responsible said in his own testimony that it was intended to produce an effect throughout the
Punjab, and that is the whole difference.
- It had just supplied half an army and the sense of a debt unpaid was strongest there.
- Wartime recruitment had been coercive in the last two years and the resentment was fresh.
- The 1918 influenza epidemic and wartime inflation had hit the province hard.
- And it had a Lieutenant-Governor who had spent six years believing the province was permanently on the edge of revolt and governing accordingly.
- 1857 was the reference point. Every senior official in India read a disturbance in the recruiting province through that lens.
- Ghadar was four years old and the administration believed, wrongly, that it was still live.
- O’Dwyer’s doctrine was pre-emption. He had said publicly and often that firmness at the outset prevented worse later.
- And the city had been handed to a soldier with instructions to restore order and no instructions about how.
In August 1917 the Secretary of State for India stood up in the House of Commons and announced that the
policy of His Majesty’s Government was the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the
administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the
progressive realisation of responsible government in India.
It was the most explicit commitment any British government had ever made, and it was made in the fourth
year of a war in which India had supplied over a million men.
The Punjab had supplied around half the combatants.
The armistice was in November 1918. In March 1919 the Rowlatt Act became law over the votes of
every elected Indian in the legislature.
Four months.
It is possible to explain the Act. The government was frightened of revolutionary violence, the wartime
powers had been useful, the Rowlatt Committee had recommended it, and the officials who pushed it
believed they were preventing bloodshed.
None of that mattered, and none of it was the point. The point was the sequence. A promise of self-
government in 1917; a million men and seventy-four thousand dead; and then, before the war memorials
were built, a law that let the government imprison people without trial.
Gandhi had spent the war recruiting for the British in Gujarat. The Rowlatt Act is what turned him into
the leader of a mass movement against them, and what happened at Amritsar three weeks later is
what made that movement unstoppable.
12Jallianwala Bagh, 13 April 1919 CERTAIN
Ten minutes. One thousand six hundred and fifty rounds. No warning was given, and the officer who gave the order explained why in his own words, under oath, and was not ashamed of any of it.
When: 13 April 1919, about a quarter past five in the afternoon. It was Baisakhi.
Where: Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar — a walled enclosure of about six or seven acres, a few minutes’ walk from the Harmandir Sahib.
Who: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, with fifty riflemen — Gurkhas and Baluchis — and two armoured cars.
The evidence: Dyer’s own sworn testimony to the Hunter Committee. CERTAIN.
What happened
1. Dyer issued a proclamation that morning banning gatherings. It was read out by drum in parts of the city. It did not reach most of it, and Amritsar was full of people who had come in from the villages for
- Baisakhi and for the horse fair, and who knew nothing about any of it.
- A meeting was called in the Bagh for the afternoon. The Bagh was not a garden in any ordinary sense — it was a piece of enclosed waste ground, surrounded on all sides by the backs of buildings, with a handful of narrow exits and one main entrance down a lane.
- Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people were in it. Some had come for the meeting. A great many were there because it was a festival day and the Bagh was where people sat.
- Dyer marched in with fifty riflemen and took up position on raised ground inside the entrance. The two armoured cars with machine guns could not follow, because the lane was too narrow.
- He gave no warning and no order to disperse.
- He ordered his men to fire, and directed the fire — including towards the exits where people were trying to get out. 7. The firing lasted about ten minutes and stopped when the ammunition was nearly exhausted. One thousand six hundred and fifty rounds were expended.
- He then marched his men out and did not arrange for the wounded. A curfew was in force that night; the wounded lay where they were.
The official figure, arrived at by the Hunter Committee, was three hundred and seventy-nine dead and
something over a thousand wounded.
The Indian National Congress inquiry put the dead at over a thousand.
The gap exists for a specific and discreditable reason. No count was made at the time. The bodies were removed by
families under curfew, over subsequent days, without any official process. The government’s figure was assembled
afterwards from claims submitted by relatives — which requires a family to come forward, to a government under
martial law, and identify a dead man as having been at a banned meeting.
The true number is not knowable and it is almost certainly higher than the official one.
This book has interrogated casualty figures in every part since the first, usually to argue that a chronicler’s number is
too high. This is the one case in sixteen parts where the official figure is the floor rather than the ceiling, and
where the reason it is too low is that nobody in authority wanted to count.
- He said he had made up his mind before he arrived that if he found a crowd assembled he would fire on it.
- He said he did not give a warning because the crowd had defied his proclamation and warning would have been inconsistent with that.
- He said his object was not to disperse the meeting but to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab.
- And he was asked whether he would have used the machine guns had he been able to get the armoured cars in. He said he probably would have.
- It was not crowd control. He said so himself, twice, in terms.
- It was not a decision taken under pressure in a moment. He testified that he had decided in advance.
- The target was the Punjab, not the Bagh. The people in the enclosure were the means.
- And he volunteered all of this, to a committee of inquiry, believing it justified him.
This book is not going to describe the afternoon of 13 April 1919 in any more detail than it already has. The
facts are on the page and they do not need help.
What is worth saying is what the place is now.
Jallianwala Bagh is a memorial garden in the middle of Amritsar, a few minutes’ walk from the
Harmandir Sahib. The entrance is still the narrow lane. The walls of the surrounding houses are still
standing, and the bullet marks are still in them, and they are marked. The well into which people
jumped is still there and is enclosed.
Several million people visit every year. Most of them are Indian and many are Punjabi, and a great many of
them walk in from the Golden Temple as part of the same visit, which is exactly the walk that a large
number of the people in the Bagh had made that afternoon.
This book has spent fifteen parts complaining that the Punjab’s history has been destroyed, built over,
forgotten or written down by other people. Taxila is a ruin. Sirhind is a mound. There is nothing on
the ground at Chillianwala for anybody but the British dead. Nobody knows where Porus fought.
Jallianwala Bagh is the exception. It was preserved deliberately, bought by public subscription within a
few years, and it has been kept as it was on purpose — the lane, the walls, the marks.
Of everything that has happened on Punjabi soil in five thousand years, the one site that the province
decided it would not allow to be smoothed over is a piece of enclosed waste ground where several hundred
people were shot in ten minutes for being in it.
13Martial Law, April–June 1919 CERTAIN
What followed in the rest of the province is less known than the Bagh and is in some ways more revealing, because it went on for weeks and was administered.
When: 15 April to early June 1919.
Where: Amritsar, Lahore, Gujranwala, Gujrat and Lyallpur districts.
Who: The military authorities, under the general direction of Sir Michael O’Dwyer.
The evidence: The Hunter Committee’s own record.
What was done
1. Martial law was proclaimed across five districts and summary tribunals were set up, handing down death
- sentences and long terms of transportation.
- Public floggings were carried out, in the street, including of people convicted of nothing by any court.
- Indians were required to salaam to European officers and were punished for failing to.
- The crawling order. In the lane where Marcella Sherwood had been assaulted, Dyer ordered that any Indian passing along it must do so on his hands and knees. It was enforced for several days on people who lived in the lane and had no other way to reach their own front doors.
- And at Gujranwala, on 14 and 15 April, aircraft bombed and machine-gunned crowds and villages from the air. This is not a disputed allegation; it is in the official record.
Of everything done under martial law in the Punjab in 1919, the crawling order is the one that officials found hardest to
defend, and it is worth being precise about why.
It had no security purpose whatever. It prevented nothing, protected nobody and gathered no intelligence. Dyer’s
own explanation was that the lane was sacred because an Englishwoman had been assaulted in it, and that Indians
should approach it in a posture of humility.
The people it was actually applied to were the residents of that lane — including, on the record, elderly people and
people carrying things, who had to crawl to get home past a picket that enforced it.
Miss Sherwood herself, when she recovered, is recorded as having been distressed by it, and she had been
rescued and hidden by Indian neighbours in the first place.
The Hunter Committee could find no justification for it and said so. Dyer, giving evidence, did not really attempt one.
It belongs in this book because it is the clearest statement anybody made in 1919 of what the relationship
was understood to be. The Bagh can be argued about as a catastrophic misjudgement under pressure. The crawling
order was thought about, written down, ordered, posted and enforced by soldiers for several days, and its entire content
was humiliation.
- Deterrence, explicitly. O’Dwyer’s stated doctrine was that severity at the outset prevented worse later, and he applied it.
- The 1857 reflex. Every senior official read April 1919 as the beginning of a mutiny in the army’s home province.
- Fear. The European community in the Punjab in April 1919 was frightened, and frightened administrations do this.
- And nobody stopped it for six weeks.
- It was administered, not spontaneous. Orders, proclamations, pickets and paperwork — which meant it could not be blamed on one man’s panic.
- It was documented by the government’s own inquiry, in public, with the officers testifying.
- It humiliated in ways that could not be undone by compensation or explained by military necessity.
- And it happened in the loyal province, to the families of the men who had just fought in France.
On 14 and 15 April 1919, at Gujranwala and the villages around it, British aircraft bombed and machine-
gunned crowds on the ground.
It is one of the earliest uses of air power against a civilian population anywhere, and it happened in the
Punjab, and it is barely remembered even here.
The aircraft were operating in support of the civil power against what were reported as mobs damaging
railway property. They dropped small bombs and fired on groups of people in the open, including —
according to evidence given to the inquiry — on a gathering at a village and on people in fields.
The casualties were small compared with the Bagh. The significance is not the number.
This book has described the introduction of a great many military technologies to this province across five
thousand years. The war chariot in Part One. The elephant in Part Two. The stirrup and the
mounted archer in Part Five. The mangonel and the mine in Part Six. Gunpowder artillery at
Panipat in Part Seven. Drilled infantry and the volley in Part Twelve.
Every one of them arrived here from somewhere else, and every one of them was used on this ground before
most people here had seen it.
In April 1919 the Punjab was added to the very short list of places that had been attacked from
the sky, twenty-eight years before it had a government of its own.
14The Reckoning, 1919–1920 CERTAIN
The inquiry censured him, the army removed him, the House of Lords defended him, and a London newspaper raised him a fortune. That combination is what made independence inevitable.
Nobody in Britain — and everything after 1920 follows from how they handled WON BY
it
- The Hunter Committee sat October 1919 to March 1920; the Commons debate in July 1920.
- Lahore, Delhi, and Westminster.
- The Disorders Inquiry Committee, Parliament, the British press, and Indian opinion.
- The committee’s reports, Hansard, and the newspapers. CERTAIN.
What happened
1. The Hunter Committee took evidence in public, with Indian members on it, and Dyer testified at length.
- His testimony did more damage to the government’s position than any evidence against him.
- The majority report censured him — for firing without warning, for continuing after the crowd began to disperse, and for his stated intention to produce an effect beyond Amritsar.
- The Indian members went further in a separate minority report and called it inhuman.
- Dyer was relieved of his command and resigned. He was not prosecuted, not court-martialled, and lost no rank or pension.
- The House of Commons debated it in July 1920 and supported the government by a substantial majority. Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, spoke against Dyer and called the episode monstrous.
- The House of Lords passed a motion in Dyer’s favour.
- And the Morning Post opened a public subscription for him which raised something over twenty-six thousand pounds — an enormous sum, contributed by thousands of ordinary people in Britain, and presented to him as the man who had saved India.
Indian opinion in 1920 was watching to see what Britain would do, and it received a completely unambiguous answer.
The censure was real. A committee of inquiry found against him, a Secretary of State denounced him in the
Commons, and the government defeated a motion to restore him.
And the House of Lords voted for him, and the British public gave him a fortune.
Those two facts arrived in India together, and the second one destroyed the first. It demonstrated that a large part of
British society, including a chamber of its Parliament, regarded what had been done in the Punjab as
defensible.
Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in May 1919, in a letter that said he wished to stand beside his
countrymen who were being shot at.
Gandhi, who had recruited for the British army during the war, launched Non-Cooperation in 1920. He said
afterwards that the events in the Punjab and the response to them were what convinced him that cooperation with the
government was impossible.
Constitutional reforms were enacted in 1919 giving Indians more of a share in provincial government than they had
ever had. Almost nobody in India cared, because of what had happened at Amritsar in April and what had
been said about it in London in July.
- Order in the Punjab in the summer of 1919, which was what it wanted.
- Nothing else at all.
- The argument. After 1919 the case that British rule was benevolent could not be made in India by anybody who expected to be listened to.
- The moderates. Indians who had spent a generation working for reform within the system had their position destroyed underneath them.
- Gandhi, who had been a loyal subject and a recruiting sergeant, and who was thereafter the leader of a mass movement to end British rule.
- And the loyal province. The arrangement of seventy years — land, pensions, recruitment, obedience — was shown to be worth nothing, in the plainest way available.
On 13 March 1940, at a meeting of the East India Association at Caxton Hall in Westminster, a man in the
audience stood up and shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer dead.
O’Dwyer had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab in 1919. He had approved of Dyer’s action at the time,
defended it for the rest of his life, sued a critic for libel and won, and was in that hall to hear a lecture about
Afghanistan.
The man who shot him was Udham Singh, an orphan from Sunam who had been in Amritsar in 1919. He
gave his name in court as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad — deliberately combining a Hindu, a Muslim and a
Sikh name, with azad, free, on the end.
He was tried at the Old Bailey, convicted, and hanged at Pentonville on 31 July 1940. He was about forty.
His remains were returned to India in 1974 and he was cremated at Sunam.
This book is not going to present a political assassination as a happy ending, and it is not one.
Udham Singh killed a retired official at a public meeting twenty-one years after the event, and O’Dwyer was
not the man who gave the order at the Bagh.
What it is worth ending on is the name he gave the court.
In 1940 the Punjab was seven years from being cut in half along exactly the line that name refuses. Part
Sixteen is about that, and about the fact that within a decade of Udham Singh standing up in an English
courtroom and calling himself Hindu, Muslim and Sikh at once, the province he came from killed
several hundred thousand of its own people over the difference.
Seventy years of loyalty, and the categories the loyalty was organised into, and the walled garden where the
arrangement ended — all of it leads there.
15The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Sixteen
1. The categories were built here, and they are what the province is cut along. “Agricultural tribes” in 1900,
- “martial races” from the 1860s, separate electorates from 1909 — administrative boxes, backed by property law, recruitment policy and the census, applied for sixty years. This book is not saying the British invented Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. It is saying they turned them into legal categories with things attached, and that in 1947 the lists already existed.
- The Punjab was made into an army and then shot by it. Half the Indian Army from one province; land grants tied to service; a whole rural economy running through the recruiting office. And in April 1919 the troops who fired in the Bagh were Gurkhas and Baluchis, and the man who ordered it said his target was the province.
- The one thing that was built is in the wrong country. The canal colonies are the only large constructive achievement in these sixteen parts — and they were settled from the east by people who had to run for their lives in 1947. Part Sixteen is those roads, in reverse.
- The province’s own voice is still almost entirely in verse. A coin legend, a hymn about an invasion, a couplet about a sickle, a letter written on a road — and now a three-word refrain from a meeting at Lyallpur that is still sung at demonstrations. Fifteen parts, and everything ordinary Punjabis left behind rhymes and is about not being pushed off the land.
- And after 1919 the argument was over. The censure and the subscription arrived in India together, and the second cancelled the first. What follows is not a debate about whether the British should leave, but a fight about who gets what when they do — and that fight is conducted in the categories described above.
The Line, 1919–1947. Non-cooperation and the Akali movement for the gurdwaras — Nankana Sahib in 1921, Guru ka
Bagh, Jaito. Bhagat Singh, the Lahore Conspiracy Case and the gallows in March 1931. The Unionist Party and the
twenty years in which Punjabi Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs governed the province together, and why it collapsed. The
Lahore Resolution of 1940; the elections of 1946; Direct Action Day; and the Rawalpindi massacres of March 1947,
which is where the killing in the Punjab actually starts. Then Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India, given five
weeks and out-of-date census maps, drawing a line through the most integrated province in the subcontinent. Between
ten and fifteen million people moved. Nobody knows how many died; the estimates run from several
hundred thousand to two million. It is the largest forced migration in human history and it happened here, in about
ten weeks. And then a short accounting of what came after — 1965, 1971, 1984, 1999 — because the wars did not stop,
and because this book promised to cover every one of them.
16Words Used in This Part
The style of administration used in the annexed Punjab — district officers with wide personal discretion and minimal paperwork. Its practitioners were known as the “Punjab School.”
The Punjab Frontier Force, raised in 1849 and recruited largely in the Punjab, which policed the north-west frontier for half a century.
The boundary agreed at Kabul in 1893 between British India and Afghanistan, drawn through the Pashtun tribal country. Still the Afghanistan–Pakistan border and still disputed.
The reform movement led by Satguru Ram Singh from 1857 — anti-caste, anti-dowry, and boycotting British courts, schools, posts and cloth decades before non-cooperation.
The high scrub plain between two rivers in the western Punjab — the Sandal Bar, the Ganji Bar, the Neeli Bar — grazing country before the canals, and the site of the colonies afterwards.
A tract of newly irrigated land settled with colonists brought from elsewhere in the province. The largest was the Chenab Colony around Lyallpur, now Faisalabad.
The doctrine, constructed after 1857, that certain communities were inherently warlike and should supply the army. It was not true and it determined recruitment policy for eighty years.
A unit recruited from a single caste or community. Adopted deliberately after 1857 to prevent the pan-Indian solidarity that had produced the mutiny.
A community listed under the Land Alienation Act of 1900 as entitled to buy agricultural land. The lists made community a legal category with property rights attached.
“Look after your turban, farmer” — the song written by Banke Dayal for the canal colony agitation of 1907, and still sung.
“Mutiny” or “revolt” — the party founded by Punjabi emigrants in California in 1913, and its newspaper.
The steamer chartered in 1914 to test Canada’s exclusion of Indian immigrants, turned back from Vancouver, and fired on at Budge Budge near Calcutta.
The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of March 1919, extending wartime powers of detention and trial without jury into peacetime, passed over the votes of every elected Indian member.
Gandhi’s method of mass non-violent resistance. The Rowlatt satyagraha of April 1919 was his first all-India campaign.
Dyer’s order that any Indian passing along the lane where Marcella Sherwood was assaulted must do so on hands and knees. Enforced for several days; no security purpose was ever claimed for it.
The Disorders Inquiry Committee of 1919–20, which took Dyer’s evidence in public and censured him. Its Indian members issued a separate and harsher minority report.
Sources used for this part
- Punjab administration reports, settlement reports and district gazetteers, 1849–1919
- Census of India returns for the Punjab, 1881 onwards
- The text of the Punjab Land Alienation Act, 1900, and of the Colonization of Land Bill, 1906
- Indian Army recruiting handbooks and regimental records
- Frederic Cooper's own published account of the Ajnala executions of 1857
- Government files on the Kuka movement and the dismissal of Cowan
- Ghadar party publications and the transcripts of the Lahore Conspiracy Case trials
- Censored extracts from Indian soldiers’ letters from France, 1914–1918
- The Report of the Disorders Inquiry Committee (Hunter Committee), 1920, including Dyer’s evidence, and the Indian
- National Congress inquiry report
- Hansard for the Commons and Lords debates of July 1920, and contemporary British newspapers including the Morning Post
- Standard modern histories of colonial Punjab, the canal colonies, the Indian Army and the events of 1919
The open questions here include: the true number of dead at Jallianwala Bagh, which cannot now be established and is
almost certainly above the official 379; the exact number of Punjabi recruits in the First World War, which varies with
whether non-combatants are counted; the scale of coercion in wartime recruitment, which by its nature was not
documented; and the number killed at Ajnala in 1857, for which the main source is the man responsible.
Three things about method.
First, 1857 has been written without a verdict. The Punjab did not rise, for reasons that are specific and mostly
practical, and the province was also held down by executions that its administrators recorded and were not ashamed of.
Both halves are here. A version that celebrates the loyalty and a version that condemns it are equally incomplete.
Second, the account of Jallianwala Bagh rests on the perpetrator’s own testimony rather than on description.
Dyer told a public inquiry that he had decided to fire before he arrived, that he gave no warning deliberately, that his
object was an effect throughout the Punjab, and that he would have used machine guns if he could have brought them
in. Nothing this book could write would be more damning than that, and dwelling on the dead would add nothing.
Third, the argument that colonial categories hardened into communal identity is an argument, not a fact, and
it is contested. It is stated here as this book’s reading of the evidence rather than smuggled in as description — and Part
Sixteen depends on it.