title: 5. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
author: Empire
contenttype: podcast
publication: Empire
published: 2022-09-05T21:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR3784087434.mp3?updated=1703674375
word_count: 7956
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durimple. You leave this pregnant pause every week, it makes me so nervous. Welcome to the podcast. When you suddenly turn the spotlight on me. I'm going to try to truck through that pause. Yes, William is here. I'm here. And I think we just both of us want to start this podcast with a huge amount of thanks to the enormous amount of enthusiasm you've shown for this podcast. William, we've been completely blown away, haven't we? Yeah, I'm thrilled. I didn't expect anything like this. I mean, there's more response from this than I've had from the TV documentaries I've done, certainly more than you get from books, which is a lovely slow burner. And you're still getting stuff 20 years later, but you certainly don't get hundreds of tweets of appreciation. So I'm thrilled. Actually, you are too. Well, I'm a little bit tickled. It also puts us in a turf war with your friend Roy Stewart and Alistair Campbell. I mean, you realise we are the jets and the sharks now. I feel very bad about this because they were very sweet. And Rory and Tom talked to us. And lovely Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrick. And honestly, their podcasts are from the same stable and they are remarkable podcasts. If you're not listening to them, listen to them as well as us, but not instead of us. I very, very nearly crossed with Alistair over the weekend at Tricuer and the Scottish borders where we were speaking, but he was a little late and I had to leave. So I missed a direct confrontation with Alistair, who's been a little bit defensive in his tweets. I think it's fair. But may I just say that if it did come to a face off between you and Alistair Campbell, with all the love I have for you, I've got money on him. Seriously. I think I put money on him too. It's not even a content. Not really. I think we've all got all the different girl-hagger pods. We've got to have a drink together. I think that's definitely going to help you. It'd be friends. But just on your responses, and we really do welcome your responses. So you know you can reach us on Twitter, EmpirePod UK, is where we are at EmpirePod UK and we have now got a shiny new email address as well. So you can email us. It is EmpirePod UK at gmail.com, EmpirePod UK gmail.com. But you know through Twitter, we've been getting lovely feedback, but also questions. Do you mind if I start with a question? Because it is, to me, as well. I want to know the answer as well. I'll go through it. And I think you are the person to answer this question. So it says, on Episode 3 of Empire, I was curious on this aspect of British retributions from Lawrence Hooper. And he says, who actually gave the orders to close the gates of Delhi and massacre the male population? And how much of the detail of this reached the UK at the time? I think, first of all, as a bit of general background, the normal behaviour at this time, I think anywhere in the world, was that if cities surrendered on a campaign, then the city was not to be plundered and there were to be no massacres and no rapes. But if a city resisted, it was a free for all. And this I think was not just the understanding of the Britishness was the general behaviour of the time in many different cultures. As for who gave the order to massacre, well, General Archdele Wilson was the British commander in charge of the siege of Delhi. He led the siege and then he led the assault in September 1857. And his orders were that no prisoners were to be taken. But for the sake of humanity and the honour of country, women and children were not to be hurt. In other words, that women and children were to be protected, but males were not to be considered friends and they were therefore fair game. And this is not a unique situation to the capture of Delhi in 1857, for example, in 1799 when the Tupoussaltans capital, Sri Lanka, buttonham is taken by force by the East India Company. Another great massacre occurs. But in that situation, there was massive rape and the women and children were also considered fair game. And it was left more or less an empty ruin at the end of 1799. And the person who finally called a halt to the rape and plunder, I think, after five or six days, was the future Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley. And it was his job to go around and stop the looting and the rape and but I think they had four or five days when they were allowed to do more or less what they liked. And it's very shocking to us, but this I think was the normal behaviour. Okay. But the other part, which I think is incredibly important and interesting, is how much of this was known back in Blighty. There is wall to wall coverage of the uprising of 1857. The mutiny is it's known in Britain. And every newspaper is publishing a lot of very bloodthirsty and nasty stuff. And you're getting the people of Britain reacting with absolute horror about the news they're getting about atrocities to British women and children. And the general opinion seems to be the mutiny has got it coming, whatever, whatever they're caught, they should be killed and justice should be done. You get very little reporting from the ground in a way that we, you know, are used to now from our televisions and newspapers. And in fact, you have working for the Times, a man called William Howard Russell, who is the world's first war correspondent. He covers the Crimea first. And then he goes to India and he covers the aftermath of the mutiny. He arrives quite late and he misses a lot of the key action. He arrives in Lucknow and at the end he goes to Delhi after the massacres. He comes to the gutted city. And he is the only person giving an even remotely nuanced view to what's going on. For example, he visits the fallen emperor, Bahadur Shazafa in his prison cell. And he's been led to believe by the propaganda of the British that this is the guy at the centre of this... ...the first-demand. ...of his bloodthirsty. ...of his bloodthirsty. And he's expecting to see some sort of bond villain, you know, stroking a white cat, some sort of evil mastermind. And instead he sees this pathetic old man being kept in the stables of his former palace, the Red Fort sitting on a poor man's charpoid, being sick when he walks into the room. And he gives this very nuanced picture. Was this really the man that ordered all this? So that, I mean, that, thank you. That's a really good insight into what people knew then. And a question that we've been getting a lot on Twitter is, why don't we know about this now? And I want to sort of link both of these things. We often sort of lament that this is so recent and yet it's not taught in schools. And I always give this example of, you know, I know everything about a Roman vied up, and I know about the beams and a due to house. But I wasn't taught this either. And I was schooled here. And at least trust, I mean, in politics, a woman of moment, that she very much took the stance that she was second-tiered of people doing Britain down. And I wonder what you think about those people who say, actually just doing these kind of podcasts is doing Britain down. Well, I think, you know, the job of any historian is to find the truth good or bad. You don't go out to write history to do Britain up, you know, or to do Britain down. You go and you look at the archives and you read the letters of the people that were involved and your job as a historian is to make sense of that and present your impression of that story and all its varying colors in all its horrors and all its joys, whatever you find. You must report accurately. And so the idea that, you know, historians should be going out, going and covering 1857 and coming out with heart-improving stories or nice warm tales to have over the oval teen of an evening is nonsense. And I think if Liz Truss wants to know a bit more about Empire, which clearly she doesn't know much about, she should merely ask Quasi Quarting, her colleague who is written a fantastic book called Ghost of Empire. You love this book. You've talked about this a lot. Yes, I mean, what does Quasi Quarting say about Empire? Quasi Quarting does not share my views entirely, but he's well aware of the complexity and the dark side of Empire. And his book Ghost of Empire, I say, is not a book that I would agree with everything in that book, but it's a deeply-learned book. It's a product of his PhD, Donald Trinity College Cambridge. He's Dr Quasi Quarting and a considerable scholar of Empire. And he, I mean, he obviously takes some more right-wing view than I have, but he also hears someone that knows the African world and the African sources in the way that I don't. And what he covers in that book is some pretty chilling stuff as bad as anything. We've heard on the Indian side of the story, if not worse, and certainly in terms of economic exploitation much worse. Yeah, I mean, I'm just taking a line from the book, said book, much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policy making. So he does in this book, which is, you know, well thought of, you know, he says these things are important because they shape where we are today. And on that issue of sort of teaching it in schools, is there something that is debilitating about knowing that there is perhaps a lot of darkness in the country's past? I mean, Germany's done it in a very different way. Germany just goes head on into it, doesn't it? Really, the difference is that, you know, the Germans lost the war and had a massive cell searching. We won the war and never had to. And I think if you look around the world regimes in a sense that are still in power tend not to have massive cell searching exercises. One of my favorite documentaries is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, which goes around all the activists in Indonesia who massacred Communists in the 19th century. Absolutely, an amazing documentary. It is. It's just a story. Ordinary documentary. These people, because that party is still in power, having no sense had to repent or think about or really go over the acts of killing that they performed. The massacre of communists, often in extremely brutal ways, often with piano wires, on a massive scale. And what Oppenheimer finds is that talking to these people and asking them to recreate what they did, which initially they're very proud and pleased to do, makes them think about it for the first time and makes them confront what they actually did. And in a sense, that's what I think so much of our country needs to do. We naturally, like any people on Earth, assume that our ancestors were good people. Well, I mean, every country, not just this country. I think what you're saying is any country. I mean, I'm talking about documentaries. You know I was a she-she-do. I mean, I don't get out much. It doesn't honestly don't feel like a jealous of my life. But I happened to be at a lovely West End premier of another documentary. If you like that one, you're like this one called Territory. And it's about this indigenous group trying to protect their homeland in the middle of the Amazon in the wake of Bolsonaro trying to recreate what Brazil should be about. That's absolutely fascinating thing. Extraordinary rave reports of it this morning on Twitter and social media. What was interesting is I was bumping into a lot of people who listened to Empire, blowing our own trumpet again, but I mean, I can't help it because what they were saying was that we just had no idea that whenever we are taught about these characters, they are so too dimensional. So a lot of people said they didn't have any clue that Gandhi was once a cheerleader further British Empire and was sort of like one of their greatest recruiters for World War One. These things are sort of shocking. People are complex. History is complex. We should try and do an entire podcast on Gandhi and we should try and get Ram Guha on the show. Oh, that's a good shot. He should expect two volumes. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right because Gandhi is it's such a divisive figure in India today. And I don't think anyone has any notion of that on this side of the planet here. He's still very much Ben Kingsley there. He is, I mean, you know, honestly, it's incendiary, the kind of discussions that go on about Gandhi. Let's do it. Let's do a whole podcast on him to absolutely. It was very interesting sitting in Delhi last April, May, when Boris Johnson came visiting and his first stop was Gandhi's Ashram. And I suddenly, you know, this is the first time I actually heard of Gandhi's Ashram on the Indian media for about two years. You know, he's not a figure that's anymore at the center of discussion, although he is someone on the bank note still in every city has an MG road, a Mahatma Gandhi road. But seeing Boris Johnson go to the Ashram has been a kind of flashback. He felt you back in the same 1980s when Ben Kingsley was playing Gandhi when Jolun Walebag Maskar, I saw for the first time, reenacted in that film. And then at the same time, we had someone rush to be writing about it in midnight's children. This is what mid-80s, 1984. And those I remember reading midnight's children and seeing Gandhi, those are the first two times I came across Jolun Walebag as a child. Well, look, look, you know, so you're very leading us into where we left off in the last podcast. So the last podcast was a really quite a huge sweep of history. We took you from the mutiny, which was a turning point in the history. First word of independence if you're an Indian, isn't it? So British and Indian colonial history, you get one turning point to the mutiny. And the second is going to be 1919, which is what we were leading you up to through the first World War. And Gandhi is pivotal in this. So where we left you off if we haven't heard this. Umritsa has been pretty peaceful. There are two Gandhi and leaders called Sethiabal and Kichaloo who are managing to keep things under control where other cities are erupting in violence. They are not in Umritsa. And I still don't understand this decision. But the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, a man called Seth Michael O'Dwyer, has decided that the best way to handle any kind of insurrection is to take the pressure cook of elf off and throw it away. So he has these two men picked up and taken out of Punjab. And it is also sort of a union with that. He stopped Gandhi from arriving in Umritsa. And there are rumors rife of things that you know, Gandhi may have been arrested, he may have been hanged, he may have been shot. And everything is in turmoil. That's where we left you. And there's an information vacuum. That's a key thing that people don't know what's happened to these two lawyers who've been taken away. Have they been hung? Have they been shot? Are they being arrested? No one's completely clear what's happened to Gandhi. And then insurrection starts in Delhi and there's riots in Delhi, there's riots on the edges of Umritsa. And there's rumors going around. The British don't know what's going on. The Indians are hearing rumors that are different from what the British are hearing. And there's chaos. What I'd like to do is introduce a special guest star. Is that all right? Because after the break we're going to hear from a professor of global and imperial history, a man called Professor Kim Wagner, who has been utterly forensic in retreading those steps leading up to the massacre in the garden. And I mean, you were very impressed with the book that he wrote. I reviewed his book and you all book together before we'd ever worked together. And I thought they were perfect, complimentary pair to each other. But Kim's book is deeply forensic, very wide angled, and a very emotionless and calm look at this terrible event. It has no shading of bias. It's complete. It's like a detective going in analyzing the evidence. Your book is, you know, your grandfather was there. Your book is passionate and it's focused very much on your own family story, but also on this other figure who would in the years to come assassinate Michael Odoin. So join us after the break as we lead you through the very, very narrow entrance to Julio Wallabargue. Welcome back to Empire. Well, as promised, we're joined by Kim Wagner, who is, as I said before, professor of global and imperial history and something of authority on colonial matters of colonial violence. And Kim, just before, on the last podcast, I don't know whether you heard this, but we were talking about this seething mass of rage in Umrezza, which unleashes itself against this poor innocent woman, Marcella Sherwood, who is a missionary, who is a good woman. So can we pick up that part of the story, please? Because it really is pivotal, is it, in all the nightmares that then are realized? So she is this sort of quintessentially rash figure. So the elderly, you know, missionary-minded colonial who runs several orphanages inside the old Indian part of Umrezza. All Europeans have been told to evacuate because these riots are unfolding. And she's actually cycling around to shut down the different schools for which she has responsibility. And in the narrow alleys of Umrezza, she cycles in, she comes across a crowd of young Indian boys who proceed to pursue her and beat her up. And we have quite both, you know, her own accounts, but also eyewitness descriptions. It's a brutal attack. They're trying to beat it to death. I mean, there's no two ways around it. They are. They are, but they're beating her with the slippers as well, and they're pulling off her shoulder. There's something sort of very demonstrative in the way that they are assaulting the sort of the respect, usually, you know, given to Sabs and Memsabs, you know, Europeans in an Indian context. They attack the Statue of Queen Victoria and break one finger off. So there's also something very symbolic in this violence. However, if you're at the receiving end, it is, of course, an extremely brutal attack. I mean, there is also something very interesting, which I just find extraordinary. It's a lot of the pleaders or the lawyers who are touchy-pulling kitcheny followers surround that Statue of Queen Victoria. And they don't touch her. Do not touch her. We don't touch the Queen. You know, we're in a living in an era of statues being pulled down, but there it is Indians who stop the mobs from going for Queen Victoria. They don't get to pour on Moussaid a show at an time, but they do protect the Statue. So the assault on Moussaid a show would set off every lamb bell in the British nerds. They've persuaded themselves that there were mass rapes in 1857, which actually we now know never happened, but they think the same is happening again. So they overact, they even send out, I think, Royal Air Force. Yeah. I mean, they really pull out all the stops as a result of these rise. The riots, they end on the 10th of April. Several European-owned banks have gone up in flames. Five Europeans were killed. I think between 25 and 30 rioters have been shot and killed by the police and the soldiers. But really the sort of telegrams and messages that are sent out by the British authorities were in complete sort of disarray in Amrits, is that we are under attack. So Royal Air Force airplanes are sent armour, trains and military reinforcements. So in a matter of, you know, not days, but hours, there are hundreds of British colonial troops massing into Amrits and we really have this sort of siege mentality expressing itself. And then very unfortunately this all coincides with the major Punjabi festival by Saki. Vassaki, yeah. Which is a huge, every Punjabi no matter whether you're a Hindu, a Hindu, a Muslim, you know, you'll call it different things, but it is a huge relevance. It's the harvest festival. It is a time to give thanks for the crops that have come in. It is a kite festival. It is a massive cattle fare and a horse fare. It's a time for people to get together either to give thanks or just to get together and and and feasts. It's kind of Christmas, Christmas for Punjabi. And so when the British declare a curfew, they're coming across hundreds of villages who are just streaming in unaware that anything's going on. Yeah. So after the 10th of April, Amrits is peaceful, but the British are still operating under the assumption that some kind of insurgency is imminent. And so we have General Dyer turning up. He's actually the third military commander who ends up in Amrits. Because there is pressure from above, not just with Oduay and Lahore, but also from the Indian government, that harsh measures are required to put an end to this. We have to remind ourselves it's not just in Amrits that there is unrest. Ref lines are being cut across the Punjab, railways are being disrupted. So for the British, this is really, you know, from their perspective, this is a replay of 1857 and they act accordingly regardless of what Amrits actually looks like. So Dyer, Dyer when he reaches and he's, as you say, the third man on the ground and, you know, there is a question mark as to whether he was ordered to go. They were all just took it upon himself to turn up. But he issues something called the drum proclamation. Tell us about the drum proclamation and what he was expecting from the natives of Amrits. So that's on the morning of the 13th of April that there is a procession that marches through Amrits and really, it's almost sort of like a medieval sort of drum roll declaration. There is a drummer there and there's the processions of soldiers to say that all public meetings are banned. No more than five people can gather together. And really, you know, this is the one way that the authorities can communicate with the local population. It's a he, he, he, it's literally, you know, like when you imagine just one man with a bell and for those people who don't know the old city of Amrits and Kim, you know it, I know it very well. Particularly the old city is a, it's a sprawl of narrow alleyways with some of the noises people who are ever going to meet on planet Earth. You cannot be heard, you know, two meters beyond where you're standing. So the expectation that this drum proclamation Kim is going to be heard and obeyed by everybody in the city is, I mean, it just feels barking mad. It's a demonstration of power, right? And yes, it's not heard by that many people and even those who hear it are not clear what it actually is. But from, you know, from, from Dias perspective, he has now warned the local population not to gather and that all meetings are, will be illegal and it's even in some of the versions of proclamation, you know, they, they might be fired upon. So he feels that he has sent this warning. But unfortunately, there is the festival going on and there is a political meeting being organized for that very evening. So what happens in the Jolly and Wallabar garden? Where is it? Yeah, well, describe it to the setup of it because, you know, you say garden, people are assuming it's green and it's not. It's just dusty. It's surrounded by tenement buildings and walls. Kim, I mean, take it up from there, just describe what the bar goes. Because it hadn't changed when I last saw it and now they've turned it into some sort of disney fight version of itself. But before that happened, Kim, what, what did it look like? It was kind of a waste ground. I mean, there are buffaloes grazing that people would throw their trash there, but it's also kind of a public space much as the way it used to be, not that many years ago, where people they'd do their morning exercise or you might meet up with friends, people go there for picnics. And during the Vaisaki festival, it's crammed full of visitors, both locals and people from the countryside. So you have a, yeah, so about eight minutes walk from the garden temple. So it's really convenient. So you know, you want to get out of the hubbub and get out of the narrow streets, you go to the barg. So all these people think they're just meeting for a nice, a nice chin-way, good-bye, but there is a political meeting going on as well. And that's important, isn't it, Kim? Because that's the thing that puts dyers back up and makes him feel he's justified in doing what he does. So there is a counter-proclamation as it were, that there will be a political meeting in Jalianwala-Bagh. Now Jalianwala-Bagh is far inside the sort of labyrinth of narrow streets of Unreitz. As far as away from the European lines as you can possibly get. And it's not the first time there have been these political meetings at this particular spot. It's clearly a place where locals they feel they can meet away from the prying eyes of the authorities to some extent. And the moment that Dyer hears that there is a meeting taking place right after he has banned meetings, it's a red rack and he sees, oh, this is, this is a challenge. And again, if we follow the colonial logic, the one thing you can't do is appear weak in the face of any kind of challenge or unrest amongst the subject colonial population. Dyer doesn't really care about the composition of the crowd. So what happens is that he, the moment he hears that there's a meeting going ahead, despite his ban, he mobilizes sort of a special task force. And what's really interesting about that is you can see by the calculations, the strategic calculations he makes, he believes he's entering enemy territory. He brings two armored cars and he brings gyrka soldiers and bellucci troops. He has hundreds of British troops available. He posts them at the city gates all the way around Amritz. Not to cut off people, but to be able to extricate him because he believes, if he goes into Amritz, even with armored cars and well armed troops, they can be ambushed in the narrow alley. Who is actually, yeah, but who is in the, how many people in the garden and who are, you know, who are the people in the garden? Are they, are they the army that Dyer feels he's driving into? No, certainly not. We'll never know exactly how many there are. Dyer himself claimed he was told there were 6,000. There are somewhere between 15 and 25,000. Mostly men, there's a significant number of small children and boys and a few women as well. Women don't really participate in public life and political gatherings at this point in time. But there's a sweet meat seller there, all sorts of vendors, friends meeting up and then there is a political meeting. So there are people standing on platforms and all they're asking for is really the release of the two leaders who have just been arrested. These are really mild and moderate speeches. They're not inflammatory calls for rebellion or anything like that. Well, Kim, I mean, Kim, you know this and we're going to talk about this more in another podcast about the book that I wrote, Patient Assassin and the reason I wrote it was because my granddad was there that day. He was just this Lanky teen who had come to the market to do a deal on this Arquido for parts for sewing machines and all things. He certainly wasn't political then. He became political afterwards but he wasn't political then. Anyway, so there you are. You so Dyer now is at the gates or I grandly call them the gates but it is a narrow entry to this garden which is, I mean, you'd be hard pushed for more than three men to walk through that entry side by side. It's narrow. What happens then? What does he do? He says he saw in front of him the rebel camp that he had expected and so he lines up his troops, 50 of them with rifles, the Gorkhan Baluchit troops and within 30 seconds according to himself, he opened fire on the crowd. And he thinks it's, I mean, rebel camp is another sort of 1857 phrase, isn't it? He thinks he's at the heart of the mutiny. Absolutely and the language is really crucial, right? There's all these descriptions of yes, they may not have had any weapons but they have their latsies, they have their heavy wooden stakes and they probably have knives hidden. So there's all this from the British perspective, there's, they're really facing their worst nightmares and unfortunately, of course, we now know it was an unarmed crowd. And how many rounds are fired in that very short period of time? 1,650 rounds from a 303, Lee Enfield, which are fired over the course of 10 minutes by 50 men. So it's quite slow and carefully considered raid of fire. And there are accounts again, you know, for anyone who sort of disputes or wants to try and dispute, what happens from the British side? You know, there are people looking to die, I say, do you want us to fire again? And he just keeps ordering reload fire. No warning has been issued, no dispersal order has been given, but they're very deliberately reload and fire. And Kim, it's the manner of firing as well, it isn't above people's heads, it's not below their knees. It's shooting to get, and it's in the thickest parts of the crowd, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, he, I explicitly orders the troops to focus on these few narrow exits where people are trying to hide. And of course, a lot of people are not just shot and killed or wounded, they're also trampled upon because there are thousands of people trying to get out from a very small enclosure under point blank fire. And dire himself is blocking the main exit. He would have taken his armored cars and wouldn't he, Kim? You know, the machine gun mounted cars, if it was a bit wider, he says this later on. Yeah, I mean, he has, he has posted his troops in front of the main entrance. So there are five other smaller exits, but these are like back doors to people's gardens of very, very narrow alleys. People are really trapped, you know, like, like, fish in a barrel. And so the scene we have in the film Ghandi is, is that pretty accurate where people are climbing over each other, trying to get down walls, jump over garden fences and so on, describe the scene to us? Yes, that is a fairly accurate description. We have horrifying stories about fathers being there with a small children trying to cover them with their bodies and being, you know, split up. There's one father who runs around, his clothes has been torn off and he's completely distraught. And later when he returns home, his son has actually survived. But there are lots of others who then, you know, look for their lost relatives and have to literally pick through piles of bodies. And this is a real controversy, I mean, as if there's only one, but dire when he retreats, he does not offer any medical aid. And curfew has been called. So there are people literally bleeding to death during that long night. And my grandfather's one of those people has to wait till morning to find that his two mates are dead, among the dead. Are people have jumped into a well? Well, this is, so Kim's done really good work because there's a lot of fable building on this, you know, the hundreds in the Gandhi family mentioned hundreds are jumping into the well. But Kim, you found that not to be the case. Yeah, so I had the giant well about memorial today. There's a sign that says 120 bodies were recovered from the well. And that is indeed one of the sort of recurring visual tropes around the massacre going by the engine congress investigation, not the British one, the engine nationalist one and the people who looked at it afterwards. They didn't find anybody's and eyewitnesses themselves describe one or two corpses floating in the well. In some ways it's a minor detail. But what is really interesting is that it speaks to the motif of people jumping into a well, which both Harks back to 1847, but of course also to the partition of Indian Pakistan. So no medical aid is given to the survivors, but on top of that, there are punitive measures taken by the police all over Amritsa. Yes, in the days following the massacre itself in the alley where Mishrawood was attacked, there is British troops positioned and all local residents there and anybody else who pass that street a force to crawl literally at the point of Bayonets and the British troops are usiling the local wells harassing the women there and they take photographs of this. And there's a number of public fluggings that take place throughout the city as well. And the role air force bombing? Actually, it would appear that just before Daya arrived, there was almost an order for the golden temple to be bombed by the air, which is averted at the very last moment. But the Royal Air Force does bombed villages elsewhere in the Punjab. Just very briefly because we will go into this in the next podcast, but what is the effect when this news spreads throughout India? What do people like Tagore and Nero and Gandhi do when they hear this? Initially, they don't do anything because the British are very good at shutting down all information. So it actually takes weeks and months before the truth and the enormity of what happened begins seeping out. Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Noble Lariat is one of the first people to take a public stand and returning the knighthood he had been awarded by the British. And that's before we even get to sort of all the dream details to emerge. There is an internationalist, unofficial inquiry, and then later also the official hunter committee, they said, as late as early 1920, Gandhi is still on the fence. He's not quite willing to abandon hope that a future in collaboration rather than without the British is possible. But as the evidence emerge, not least General Dyer's own account where he openly admits what he was doing is when for a lot of even moderate Indian nationalists, that is really the final straw. And how does Nero react? Well the young Nero is actually part of the investigation that takes place and is in Amritsa talking to survivors as the international congress tries to get some kind of overview and understanding of what has happened, not just in Amritsa but throughout the Punjab. And he is radicalized. He and his father both think that they can no longer work closely with the British the way they have before. Yes, not least because of the violence of what happened, but also in the way that the British really want to sweep it under the carpet. So the way that it is dealt with subsequently is as important as the event itself. And there is a weapon, money is raised to reward Dyer for this in some quarters. Dyer is not as opposed to what a lot of people would like to think, he's not punished, he's not sacked, he's forced to go to take permanent sick leave as it were. And for the right wing conservative press in the UK, that's an absolute betrayal of a brave colonial hero. We have this sort of armchair liberals stabbing our brave troops in the back, that's very much the narrative. And so 26,000 pounds are collected on behalf of Dyer back in England in 1920. Which gives total lie to the notion that the British were horrified by what had happened. There was actually widespread support for Dyer's actions. We're going to look at the aftermaths and the effects of this massacre in subsequent podcasts. But thanks to the amazing Convagna for coming on as our first guest. And I would certainly like to recommend his amazing book, Amrit Sir 1919, which I think is the most balanced and forensic and detailed account of the day-to-day progress of the lead up to the massacre in the massacre itself, that is in print anyway. It's a wonderful book and a very important book. And I need to, your book, The Patient Assassin, also opens here, doesn't it? I mean, for me, this is just history and this is stuff that I've read in history books. And so how does it feel to you as a British passport holder? Well, born in Britain, not in a passport holder, Essex girl, let's face it. And Essex girl. Yeah. Well, you realise that the British state still cannot apologise for this. We've had the, not only the Queen and Prince Philip, but also more recently, David Cameron going to Jolly Mollabug and not apologising. Well, there was a very, I mean, so there's also, you know, I've got three hats in this ring, I suppose. So there's one which is as a political journalist. It's very interesting how much expectation there was on the centenary in India, that this will be the time that there will be an apology. And it seems very important to a great number of Indians, particularly in the north, that there should be an acknowledgement and an apology of what happened in April 1919. And it sort of got brought to the brink. I don't know sort of diplomatically, it's, there seems to have been a real mess in the background because it was so much of an indication, such a strong back channel indication that there would be the official apology to mark the centenary. We heard people even in the sort of year run up before, I think there was a trade minister who said, you know, it just seemed to be very important to the Indian, so we might just have to do it and do the apology, just said to make things easier to do trade even. So you know, there was, there was every expectation it would happen and then it didn't. So you've never had a state apology. You've had the Archbishop of Canterbury prostrating himself in front of the memorial. In a personal base. Which some people hate. But not representing the state. And some people hate it. Now, you know, to me, my grandfather is long dead. I can tell you sort of my personal resonance with this is when I was researching the book and I researched the book for years. But I took my children to the barg when it still looked very much like it did at the time of the last event. What sort of age were they then? Oh, they were teeny. My littlest one would have been two, barely two and the older one's seven. We had a picnic. You know, it was that time of day. It was really hot. It was dusty. There were a tourist milling around. And they were just sitting and they, you know, it was all kind of above their heads. But just looking at them in that place, I was thinking, you may not have been here. You know, just for a quirk of fate, you would not have been here. And there are so many like you who aren't here because of something that happened that day. And that really, I mean, there's nothing that can make that feeling go away. But that's a very personal feeling, isn't it? It's a very, very personal feeling. Well, breaks my heart is the fact that I think you put your finger on it earlier that if there isn't apology, the reason that the apology will be issued is for trade. Well, Britain has cut itself off for its neighbours. We need new markets and the same reason that the British, well, the same reason that the English in the aftermath of the reformation had to look for new markets as they were cut off from trading with countries like Spain and Portugal. That was the reason that these dindic company founded. And in the same way, I think this is where we'll see if an apology from Ritz or is that a issue? It'll be because it seemed to be important for relations within India for our own enrichment again. And I fear that it won't be for the reasons that the Archbishop of Canterbury prostrated himself. But I mean, as somebody whose family history is wavin into this, I find it really peculiar when people sort of respond and maybe we'll talk about this more in the podcast we do about the patient assassin and the retribution, what happens after 1919 and the response to it. But when people wrote to me after the book saying, I just want to say sorry, I didn't know what to do with that because I was like, it's not you. You didn't do anything. And I've had people in cues and book signings coming up and giving me a hug and crying. And I know it's a very lovely emotional contact, but I also think you didn't do anything. You didn't do anything. So I don't know. It means a lot. I know on sort of diplomatic levels. But to me, I always feel slightly, I don't know, I sort of shuffle around on my feet. I don't know what to do with it. What's so clumsy at the moment is that this government has worked up to the fact that it needs to improve trade within India. And there's a lot of effort you have with these regular visits by First David Cameron who had a number of visits with a lot of his businessmen, JCB and all these sort of companies turning up and vice-chancellor is turning up with Theresa May. And then Boris again going to visit the JCB plant and so on. And in a sense, the connection hasn't been made that you can't on one hand say we've got to stop people talking Britain down. We've got to say that the empire was wonderful. We can't have historians digging around the dirt and finding all these massacres. And on the other hand, expecting that we can have wonderful relations within India if we don't face up to this. So it's like, you know, it's the one hand clapping. You can wish for what you want, but if on the other side there is a need and a hunger and a desire for acknowledgment. If not apology acknowledgment. So, you know, the one that, and we will do this in a future podcast because the whole reason that this beautiful, beautiful friendship exists between me and you, Willie, is because we've written books together about the Coenaw Diamond. And that you find at any time there is a high level visit from Britain, particularly a royal visit, it is the first thing that comes up, which is when are you giving our diamond back? When you do it as if you sort of don't want, if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But the other side really does. Still want to talk about it. And you can't make that go away. It's a very live issue. And in the same way that we've been surprised by number of people who were listening to this podcast, by number of people who felt this was stuff they just didn't know and weren't getting from anywhere else. You see this at an official level. I think, you know, the kind of ministers who are dealing with this and the relations within it don't realize how much this means to the Indians. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it is quite a thing. Now listen, just before we go, again, thank you for those of you who have been listening and getting in touch. We are very, very grateful and we don't take your interest for granted. In fact, so much so, Willie, I'm going to crowdsource what we're going to do next because you know, what shall we do? What would you like to hear about as listeners to the Empire podcast? What do you want to know about? Get in touch with us. And I mean, just read that email again because we've got to just brand new. EmpirePod UK at Gmail.com, if you want to email us at length, you can, or you can tweet us and I know you're doing that in enormous numbers. So yes, at EmpirePod UK is where we are. Thank you very much for listening. That's all from us this week. Goodbye for me. And goodbye for me. In that room. Get up again. I can't remember to say my name.