Return to Jallianwala Bagh

IT IS NOW MORE than a year since the gentle but firm David Davidar took away the manuscript of the novel that I had worked on for the better part of a decade. Over time I have understood—if not fully accepted—that if one’s work has to be presented to the larger world—as this one was as Crimson Spring—there must come that wrenching moment of parting. The moment when the protagonists of one’s story, along with the imagined worlds they inhabit, just walk away, almost like children leaving home, and one waits for a lingering last look over the shoulder, a parting wave. For a day or two after handing over the manuscript, the house seemed strangely empty, the desk bereft, the author at a loss, time hanging heavy on his hands.

Now the novel is last year’s book, having gone through that heady first cycle, fuelled by enthusiasm and hope. It has been launched and read, reviewed and criticised, applauded and tolerated. Gradually, it is being pushed to the back shelves by newer books, in the manner of the old giving way to the young in any walk of life; perennials are few and far between. The wrench of the parting too has eased; it is possible to look calmly at what is left behind.

A grey metal cupboard, essentially. On which random patches of rust have appeared unnoticed down the years, like brown ageing spots on a once smooth skin. The cupboard does not even open silently; its arthritic hinges groan in protest. But it has served its purpose well. On its shelves, in spiral-bound volumes, lie the ingredients that went into the writing of a historical novel: thousands of facts and details, biographies and reports, newspaper articles and letters, photographs and gazetteers, oral histories, thick-nibbed colonial scribblings on files and punctilious, if unpoetic, war diaries. All collected over the years with only a vague idea of any ultimate utility but with the fond hope that somewhere they might help flesh out the historical bare bones of a lost century, somewhere they would create the right context to the beating of ordinary human hearts, somewhere they would spark off the genesis of a character.

I had set out with a somewhat vague intention of writing a story around the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in time for the centenary in 2019. But, as I soon realised, you cannot write stories—human stories, that is—simply about events or places, however iconic. Moreover, everything that is likely to be known about the tragic event that changed the direction of India’s freedom struggle is, in all probability, already known, and has been written about. The reports of both the Hunter Committee and the Congress Punjab Inquiry, along with recorded testimonies, have all already been mined for their facts and interpretations: at least half-a-dozen good books that examine every aspect of the massacre find place on my window sill.

The Bagh itself no longer lends itself to inspiration. Over the years the once forlorn patch with its lone samadhi, a well and a handful of trees, has lost its grim solemnity; its sense of untold misery has evaporated under the urgings of banal tourism; like much else, it too has become a victim of a collective vapid imagination. The tragedy, the heart-wrenching helplessness of a hundred years ago has been dressed up, beautified in every unedifying way. There are now pathways and flowering bushes, covered corridors and glass cases; the incriminating bullet holes on the surrounding walls are not safe from being gouged out, erased. The narrow exit that once symbolised the claustrophobic desperation of the dying is no longer frightening; an unreal mural of people celebrating the festival of Baisakhi further distorts history. Someone forgot to tell the designers that the people of Amritsar were not celebrating the harvest festival in 1919; the city was sunk in sullen silence after the shooting on the bridges three days earlier; the jackboot and the gun had crushed all joy. As a result, what we have at the heart of Amritsar now is not a plaintive paean to the dead but a picnic spot; crassness has scored another victory.

When memorials that should be eloquently solemn are instead trivialised, the new generations cannot be blamed for forgetting the past. There is too much of the present about us anyway, too much of the immediate crowds our existence. The point was driven home when no one outside Jallianwala Bagh could direct me to what should have been the next logical destination for any visitor: Kucha Kaurianwala, the narrow lane whose residents had been made to crawl on their bellies in the dust by Brigadier General Dyer, an act which Mahatma Gandhi had found more reprehensible than the massacre itself. It was only with the help of rickshaw-wallahs that I finally fumbled upon the lane; what should have been a well-visited historical landmark is no longer considered important enough to be properly marked, protected, publicised. As a people we do not seem to realise that a special effort is needed to keep the past alive; memories need constant tending, on their own they shrivel away. Life cannot only be about the future.

I knew then that the story had to be not about a place but about people. About those whose lives had been changed forever by the shameful display of colonial inequity and wanton cruelty at Jallianwala Bagh. And I needed that story to sound true, both in its real and imagined aspects, from its geography to its political idiom. The search for that truth also showed that the past is possessive about its secrets, its nuances, its flavours. It does not reveal itself easily; it taunts and teases. It tests the seeker’s patience, his loyalty and dedication, and finally, his true intention. If it finds these lacking, it can pass off a convincing counterfeit version of itself as the truth. The past also has aspects that change, and those that are eternal. Human concerns, fears, ambitions, desires do not change. The changing light of the seasons, the chill of a winter night, the freshness of a summer dawn, the throbbing of young blood, all remain the same. But the context changes, landscapes vanish, manners of speech and interaction evolve, streets expand, rivers change course, buildings are torn down and rebuilt; the changing and the eternal have to find a perfect fit.

THE FIRST ESSENTIAL step towards verisimilitude was to find the protagonists their vanished home, the land of Punjab, which has since been bifurcated, nay trifurcated. As I began to write, I made myself forget that a vicious cut has been made across this land; that millions have trudged across that line, their broken lives on their heads, traumatised for years by the howling mob; that the rivers have been divided. In my story the trains run without let or hindrance across the five rivers. I refused to let myself think that three decades later these trains would be waylaid by religious frenzy and only piles of dead bodies would reach the destination. My Punjab was still intact, even if tortured to the extreme by the colonial marauder. It was a Punjab whose people had taken the early leap towards freedom, even if that freedom would cleave them in two and blood would colour forever the five rivers. I made myself blind to the reality that as this freedom’s dubious gift, the places where the stories of some of my protagonists play out—the canal colony carved out of the bush and thorn of the legend-filled Sandal Bar across the Ravi, or the village of Parhi surrounded by rushing mountain nullahs that lies beyond the Jhelum—would suddenly become part of another country.

In my vision of that yet unfractured land, I discovered the tiny village of Tibba, conspicuous by how the landscape around it carried the illusion of stripes painted on the earth by a thick heavenly brush. There was not too much else in the village: a small shrine of its founder with its single earthen lamp marked one end; at the other end, an ageing wrestler named Bhima ran an akhara, a natural lodestone for the village youth and the occasional traveller. Three youths would pass through this akhara and blessed by the genial Bhima, each would take the narrow path that led out of Tibba into the wider world. Each would meet head-on the struggle that awaited him and each would become a part of the skein of protest that was spreading across Punjab.

Down that path stepped Ralla, having narrowly escaped the trap of a drunken, wasted existence. Now committed to a life of spiritual service, he receives a bullet in the leg at Jallianwala Bagh and it is only by chance that he is carried to safety by his nephew Kirpal. Jolted into political activity, he joins the protests launched to free the Sikh gurudwaras from the degenerate clasp of the mahants, toadies of the British rulers, who had robbed the shrines not only of their land and wealth but also of their values, traditions and sanctity. The Gurudwara Reform movement, as the protests came to be known, was in consonance with the wider freedom struggle and was marked by its non-violent character and the raw courage with which the protesters faced the harsh reprisals by the authorities. It earned the admiration and support of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru; the ‘morchas’ at Guru Ka Bagh and Jaito, the struggle for the keys to the toshakhana of the Golden Temple as well as for freeing the historical gurudwara at Nankana—in which the fictional Ralla lays down his life—have becoming iconic events in India’s march to independence.

It was at the same akhara that Kirpal got his first lessons in wrestling that ultimately enable his recruitment for the Great War. He is one of the nearly million-and-a-half Indian soldiers who fought for the British in the war, with Punjab’s contribution being larger than any other province. These men fought in the hellish, water-logged, rat-infested trenches, in snowbound European battlefields and the burning vast tracts of Mesopotamia against an enemy who was not theirs in the first place. They fought because a steady salary, even eleven rupees a month, was attractive for a populace groaning under debt. They fought for izzat, or the honour of family and qaum. They fought for the prospect of a land grant or pension and sometimes they fought since there was no choice. The lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, determined to contribute the largest number of men, resorted to coercive recruitment, even setting quotas for local officials to meet. India’s contribution was of more than men. Grain and foodstuffs, cotton, jute, wool and minerals were exported in huge quantities from India, leading to sky-rocketing prices of essential goods at home. Besides that, a gift of an astounding amount, of a hundred million sterling, was presented by this poor country to the richest government in the world. When the soldiers returned, they were met not with political concessions but the Rowlatt Act, in essence a continuation of wartime curtailment of civil liberties; when Kirpal is caught unawares at Jallianwala Bagh, he is part of a crowd listening to speeches of protest against that very Act.

There were others, too, who had returned from faraway lands to India and to Punjab. These were the men of the Ghadar Party returning from the American west coast and Canada. Inspired farmers, former soldiers and even university students who gave up bright futures for an ideal: to free India from imperial shackles. Sucha, the orphan boy at Bhima’s akhara sees his own destiny in their fold and soon he is part of the shadowy conspirators plotting in the wintry Punjab nights. The conspiracy was ultimately betrayed and stamped out; the planned insurrections did not take place. Nearly fifty men were hanged after the Lahore Conspiracy Case and several others sentenced to transportation for life. Yet, they were a rousing inspiration for the revolutionary stream of India’s freedom fighters. Among those hanged was the 19-year-old student Kartar Singh Sarabha, whom Bhagat Singh would regard as his guru.

And Bhagat Singh in turn would be idolised by Udham Singh, without whom no story of the massacre is complete. This shadowy figure, the bearer of many identities: Udham, Ude Singh, Sher Singh, Frank Brazil, Bawa Sahib, Mohamed Singh Azad, fittingly occupies an entire shelf of my metal cupboard. His letters, books about him reconstructed from unreliable memories of his acquaintances, sketches of Caxton Hall in central London where he shot down Michael O’Dwyer, twenty-one years after the Amritsar massacre; the photographs of an unrepentant Udham from London newspapers, transcripts of his trial at the Old Bailey. There are my scribbled notes after a visit to London’s Pentonville Prison, a hurried attempt to capture details: the clanging metal doors of the prison corridors, the small room where he was hanged which now functions as an office, the room below where his lifeless body fell, the patch of land where he lay buried for thirty-four years before his remains were exhumed, even the rubber mat covering the metal stairs so that the condemned man does not hear the approaching steps of the hangman.

All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion: the Amritsar massacre, though unparalleled as a colonial excess in India, was not a discrete event. There was much else that was happening in Punjab at the same time; a defining political and social churn was underway and a host of deprivations, injustices and smouldering protests were coming together. There would be many paths, each no less patriotic than the other, that would lead ultimately to the gateway to freedom. Just like a million stitches make up a tapestry. Just like a thousand facts in a rusting metal cupboard make up a story.

Amritsar massacreFreedom Issue 2023freedom struggleIndian historyJallianwala BaghUdham Singh