ON THIS DAY ·
Jallianwala Bagh massacre
13 Apr 1919 — An unarmed Baisakhi crowd had gathered in a walled garden in Amritsar. Brigadier Dyer’s fifty rifles fired 1,650 rounds into it, stopping when ammunition ran low. The official count recorded 379 dead; Indian estimates were near a thousand. The Raj’s claim to rule by consent died here. Remember them.
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The moment in context
India had helped Britain fight a war presented as a defence of liberty. Peace brought an unsettling answer to those who expected that service to earn greater freedom. The Rowlatt Act carried wartime emergency powers into peacetime, permitting detention without trial and trial without jury in political cases. Gandhi called the first all-India satyagraha, a general strike known as a hartal. Cities from Lahore to Madras shut down. The protest brought the subcontinent into common action on a scale it had not seen before.
From Amritsar massacre, chapter 6 of Indian Independence & Partition, 1857–1964 (APR 1919).
The place: Jallianwala Bagh massacre — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Rowlatt: the insult of permanence. No one was ever prosecuted under the Rowlatt Act, but Indians did not have to wait for its application to see what it meant. After a war said to…
- The turn — Jallianwala Bagh, 13 April 1919. At Jallianwala Bagh, ten minutes of fire into a walled garden became a test of Britain’s claim to rule by law. The Raj might conceivably have…
- What it changed — Gandhi captures the national movement. Gandhi could now make a moral as well as a strategic case for non-cooperation. If the Raj was force presented as law, Indians who cooperated helped…
Then ask the room: The Hunter Commission censured Dyer and he was retired from active command. Why was that punishment worse than none at all? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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