The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: What Really Happened at Amritsar in 1919
Updated: Oct 27
A little after five o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday 13 April 1919, a British officer marched 90 soldiers into a walled garden in the city of Amritsar. He lined 50 of them up with their rifles facing a crowd of thousands, and without a single word of warning, told them to fire.
They kept shooting for about ten minutes. When they stopped, it was only because they were running out of ammunition. Hundreds of people lay dead or dying, and the officer marched his men back out, leaving the wounded where they'd fallen.
The officer was Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, and the garden was Jallianwala Bagh. What happened there became one of the most notorious atrocities in the history of the British Empire. It turned a generation of loyal Indians against British rule, and over a century later it's still a raw wound.
Quick Answers
What happened at Jallianwala Bagh? On 13 April 1919, troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired without warning into a crowd of thousands in a walled garden in Amritsar, Punjab, for about ten minutes.
How many people died? The official British figure was 379 dead and around 1,200 wounded. Indian estimates put the death toll at around 1,000, and many historians think the real number was at least 500 to 600.
Why did Dyer open fire? He said he wanted to produce a moral effect across Punjab and stop a feared uprising. The crowd was unarmed, and many had no idea a ban on meetings had been announced.
Was Dyer punished? He was censured, relieved of his command and forced to retire, but he was never prosecuted. Supporters in Britain raised a fund of around £26,000 for him.
Has Britain apologised? No. David Cameron called it deeply shameful in 2013, and Theresa May expressed deep regret in 2019, but neither made a formal apology.
India After the First World War
To understand why Amritsar was such a powder keg in April 1919, you need to go back a bit. Britain had been the dominant power in India since the days of the East India Company, and the British Crown took over direct rule in 1858, after the great rebellion of 1857. That uprising left a deep scar on the British establishment. For the next 60 years, a lot of officials lived with a nagging fear that another mutiny could break out at any moment.
By the early 20th century, Indians were organising. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In 1916 the two signed the Lucknow Pact, a rare agreement to work together for self-government.
Then came the First World War. Well over a million Indian soldiers served overseas, in France, the Middle East and East Africa, and India poured money and supplies into Britain's war effort. Many Indians expected something in return, perhaps something close to the self-rule enjoyed by Canada or Australia. Instead, Britain extended its wartime emergency powers.
The Rowlatt Act
In March 1919 the Rowlatt Act became law. It allowed the authorities to lock up people suspected of political activity without trial and to try them without juries. Indians called it the Black Act, and the outrage was enormous.
Mohandas Gandhi, who'd recently returned from South Africa, called for a nationwide hartal, a day when people would stop work and close their shops in peaceful protest. Across India, huge numbers took part. In Punjab, where feelings ran especially high, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Michael O'Dwyer, was determined to stamp out anything that looked like trouble.
In Amritsar, the protests were led by two popular local figures, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal. On 10 April they were arrested and secretly deported from the city. When a crowd marched to demand their release, troops fired on it and several protesters were killed. The city exploded. Banks and government buildings were set on fire, and five Europeans were murdered. An English missionary named Marcella Sherwood was knocked off her bicycle and badly beaten in a narrow lane, and was only saved when local people took her in and hid her.
Enter General Dyer
Reginald Dyer was born in 1864 in Murree, in what's now Pakistan, the son of a brewer. He'd spent his whole career in the Indian Army and was 54 years old, commanding the 45th Infantry Brigade at Jullundur. He'd been in plenty of colonial campaigns, and like many British officers in India, he was haunted by the memory of 1857.
On the evening of 11 April he arrived in Amritsar and took control of the city. The civilian authorities had effectively handed it over to the army, and Dyer was convinced he was facing the start of a full-scale rebellion.
On the morning of 13 April, he marched through the streets with a drummer and announced that all public meetings were banned and a curfew was in force. But the proclamation was only read out in some parts of the city. And 13 April was Baisakhi, one of the biggest festivals in the Sikh calendar. Thousands of people had come in from surrounding villages to visit the Golden Temple, and many of them had no idea anything had been banned.
The Garden
Jallianwala Bagh wasn't really a garden at all. It was a patch of open, dusty ground of around six or seven acres, surrounded on all sides by the high walls of houses. There were only a few ways in or out, most of them narrow passages, and some of them locked. In the middle stood a well.
That afternoon, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people gathered there. Some had come to a political meeting to protest against the arrests and the Rowlatt Act. Others were pilgrims and families who'd drifted in from the festival to rest. There were children among them, and old men.
Dyer heard about the meeting and set off with 90 men: 25 Gurkha and 25 Baluchi riflemen, and 40 Gurkhas armed only with knives. He also brought two armoured cars with machine guns, but the entrance was too narrow for them to get through.
Ten Minutes
Dyer led his troops through the main entrance, deployed them on a raised bank, and immediately ordered them to fire. There was no warning and no order to disperse. The soldiers fired at the densest parts of the crowd and at people trying to escape, as thousands ran for the narrow exits or tried to scramble over the walls.
In about ten minutes the soldiers fired 1,650 rounds. Some people jumped into the well to escape the bullets, and around 120 bodies were later pulled out of it. Then Dyer led his men away. Because of the curfew, the wounded and dying lay in the garden all night, and families who tried to reach them risked being shot.
Nobody knows exactly how many people died. The official British figure was 379 dead and around 1,200 wounded. The Indian National Congress's own inquiry put the toll at around 1,000. The historian Kim Wagner, who's studied the records more closely than almost anyone, thinks 500 to 600 dead is a plausible estimate.
The Crawling Order
Dyer wasn't finished. Punjab was placed under martial law, and over the following weeks the authorities set out to terrify the population into submission. Suspects were flogged in public. Protesters in Gujranwala were bombed and machine-gunned from the air.
In Amritsar, Dyer issued what became known as the crawling order. Any Indian who wanted to walk down the lane where Marcella Sherwood had been attacked had to crawl along it on their belly. Soldiers stood guard to make sure they did. The lane was home to many families, who now had to crawl to get in and out of their own houses.
Dyer Explains Himself
At first, the authorities in India backed Dyer. O'Dwyer approved of his actions, and news of what had happened was kept quiet. But word spread, and in October 1919 the government set up an inquiry under Lord Hunter, a Scottish judge. Dyer gave evidence in November.
He didn't seem to think he'd done anything wrong. He told the committee he could probably have dispersed the crowd without firing, but that they'd have come back and laughed at him. He said that if he'd been able to get the armoured cars into the garden, he'd probably have used the machine guns. He hadn't helped the wounded, he said, because it wasn't his job. And he explained that he'd kept firing because he wanted to produce a moral effect, not just on the people in the garden but throughout Punjab.
The Hunter Committee's report, published in 1920, criticised Dyer for opening fire without warning and for carrying on far longer than necessary. He was relieved of his command and forced to retire. But he was never charged with anything.
Britain Takes Sides
In July 1920 the House of Commons debated the massacre. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and no great friend of Indian nationalism, condemned it in the strongest terms:
"It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation."
The Commons backed the government's decision to force Dyer out. But plenty of people in Britain thought he was a hero who'd saved India from another 1857. The House of Lords passed a motion that amounted to support for him. The Morning Post newspaper launched an appeal for Dyer that raised around £26,000, a huge sum at the time, with donations from people including Rudyard Kipling.
Dyer retired to England. He suffered a series of strokes and died in 1927, still insisting he'd done his duty.
How India Responded
In India, the massacre changed everything. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, gave back the knighthood he'd been awarded by the British, writing that the time had come when badges of honour only made the shame more glaring.
Gandhi, who'd been willing to work with the British during the war, now turned against the Raj completely, and in 1920 he launched his first great non-cooperation movement. A young lawyer called Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India's first prime minister, later described overhearing Dyer boasting about the massacre on a train. Nehru wrote of that moment:
"I realised then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes."
A 12-year-old boy named Bhagat Singh is said to have visited the garden the day after the massacre and taken home a bottle of blood-soaked earth. He grew up to become one of India's most famous revolutionaries, and was hanged by the British in 1931.
Revenge at Caxton Hall
Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who'd backed Dyer, retired to Britain and defended the massacre for the rest of his life. On 13 March 1940, more than 20 years later, he was speaking at a meeting at Caxton Hall in Westminster when a Punjabi revolutionary named Udham Singh stood up and shot him dead.
Udham Singh said he'd done it to avenge the massacre, and claimed he'd been in Amritsar on the day. He was hanged at Pentonville prison in July 1940. In India, he's remembered as a martyr.
A Wound That Hasn't Healed
India became independent in 1947, and in 1961 a memorial was opened at Jallianwala Bagh. Visitors can still see the bullet marks in the walls and the well where so many people died.
British leaders have visited and said they're sorry, without ever quite saying sorry. Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath there in 1997. In 2013 David Cameron became the first serving British prime minister to visit, and called the massacre deeply shameful. In April 2019, on the eve of the centenary, Theresa May told Parliament that the government deeply regretted what had happened and the suffering it caused. No formal apology has ever been made, and in India that still matters a great deal.
Massacres of unarmed civilians weren't unique to the British Empire, as the Tulsa race massacre in the United States showed just two years later. But Jallianwala Bagh stands out because of how deliberate it was, and because of what came after: a general who said he'd do it again, a nation that raised money to thank him, and an empire that never really recovered its moral authority in India.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the Amritsar massacre? These are worth a look.
Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim Wagner. A meticulously researched account of the massacre and the fears that drove it.
The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer by Nigel Collett. The definitive biography of the man who gave the order to fire.
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