festival – but this was, indeed, an illegal public demonstration in defiance
of the ban on public meetings. Dyer’s battalion got into firing positions
and fired 1,650 rounds into the surrounded crowd, without warning, and
without providing the opportunity to disperse. There was only one exit,
which was blocked by the army, and the only other shelter was a well
at the centre of the bagh, into which several men, women and children
dived in the hope of avoiding the hail of bullets; many died in the well.
Dyer’s men kept on firing until their ammunition was nearly exhausted
(leaving only enough to defend themselves should the need arise); and
then they left, leaving the wounded where they were. The official estimate
of the dead was 379, and of the injured 1,200, although it was widely
agreed that the actual figure was much higher. An armoured car with a
mounted machine gun had been left outside the bagh, because the passage
had been too narrow to drive it through. Both these last details became
known before the official commission of enquiry set up after the incident,
the Hunter Commission – the source was General Dyer himself, who
believed Indians had to be taught a lesson, and the firing had been
undertaken in order to ‘produce a moral effect’.
It did produce a moral effect, but not the one that Dyer had anticipated
or desired. The sense of outrage and revulsion against British rule that
followed the massacre effectively killed moderate opinion in India. Two
days after the publication of the Hunter Commission’s Report, on May
30, 1919, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had effectively renounced
direct political action following the Swadeshi movement, renounced his
knighthood in protest – it had been awarded to him in 1915, largely on
account of his having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Dyer
was reprimanded by the Hunter Commission and returned to England,
but it was widely felt in India that the Committee had not gone far
enough: Gandhi described its report as ‘page after page of thinly disguised
official whitewash’.^7 In England, the Morning Post raised £26,000
by public subscription for Dyer, a huge sum of money by any standards,
to ensure that he lived a comfortable life thereafter. General Sir Michael
O’Dwyer, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab in 1919,
had initiated several repressive measures during the Punjab ‘disturbances’
and had publicly backed Dyer after the massacre, was exonerated of
responsibility, and the House of Lords rejected the censure passed on Dyer
by the Hunter Commission. When, in March 1940, Udham Singh, a Sikh
orphan who had as a young boy survived Jallianwalla Bagh protected from38 THE YOUNG GANDHIAN