麻豆社

Good morning.

This weekend, Sikhs are celebrating Vaisakhi, marking the birth of the Khalsa or the inner core of the faith over three centuries ago. It鈥檚 a time of great celebration, but this year鈥檚 festivities are taking on a different tone due to another anniversary. Tomorrow is the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, something Churchill described as 鈥渁n event which stands in singular and sinister isolation鈥�.

On 13th April 1919, people had gathered just a stone鈥檚 throw away from the Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. Some were resting on the grass after praying at the Gurdwara. Others had travelled from across Punjab to attend Vaisakhi fairs and were at a loose end. Many were listening to speeches from activists protesting against the draconian laws of the Raj, whilst some had simply turned up for the spectacle. This peaceful crowd of 15 to 20 thousand people, a mixture of tourists and locals, was packed into a space roughly the size of Trafalgar Square.

That was the scene General Dyer saw when he arrived at Jallianwala Bagh. With him were 50 riflemen from the British Army. What happened next was truly shocking. With cold and calculated precision, they shot at that dense crowd non-stop for 10 minutes and only stopped when they ran out of bullets. Hundreds of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were brutally killed. There were officially 379 casualties, but Indian estimates are between 500 to 1,000 dead.

It鈥檚 easy to view this appalling tragedy as Churchill did, as an aberration, a one-off, or a terrible mistake in the benevolence of Empire, but in General Dyer鈥檚 own words, he 鈥渟hot to save the British Raj 鈥� to preserve India for the Empire鈥�. If that was the aim, it failed, but his view was shared by many in Britain at that time, and supporters raised the equivalent of 拢1million in today鈥檚 money to thank him for his service to King and Country. For them, the deaths of a few nameless brown people were a price worth paying to continue basking in the glory of the sun that never sets. Yet this mindset was a catalyst for the fight for independence, and as the 10th Guru himself told the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb some 300 years earlier when the Guru鈥檚 sons were murdered, 鈥淲hat type of bravery it is to extinguish a few sparks of fire. You have made the fire brighter and more furious.鈥�

As someone proud of my British and Punjabi identity, I still struggle to understand how the Jallianwala Bagh massacre could have taken place, let alone on the day of Vaisakhi. And yet I continue to hear countless people evoking the spirit of Empire, when Britannia ruled the waves. Of course, the British Empire is a complex period of global history, but I think we would do well to take a small step back and consider the true nature of this horrendous massacre in all of its detail.

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