Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919: Dyer, Rowlatt Act & Hunter Commission

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre took place on the afternoon of Baisakhi Day, 13 April 1919, when troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd of about 15,000 to 20,000 men, women, and children gathered in a walled garden at Amritsar in Punjab. The firing lasted ten minutes. Around 1,650 rounds were spent. Official British figures put the dead at 379. Indian counts, including the Congress inquiry led by Madan Mohan Malaviya and Motilal Nehru, put the dead at over 1,000 and the wounded at over 1,500. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre is the single most consequential act of state violence in the history of British India, and it is the moment at which Indian moderate opinion turned, in any large sense, against the legitimacy of British rule.

For the UPSC, this episode is examined as a chain: the Rowlatt Act of 1919 that provoked the protests; the satyagraha called by Gandhi; the events of 10 to 13 April in Amritsar; the actual firing and its consequences; the Hunter Commission report; Rabindranath Tagore’s renunciation of his knighthood; and the final, delayed revenge of Sardar Udham Singh in London in 1940. This article works through each.

Quick Facts

• Date: 13 April 1919, Baisakhi Day (afternoon, around 4:30 pm)
• Place: Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab
• Commander: Brigadier-General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer of the 45th Brigade
• Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab: Sir Michael O’Dwyer (note: O’Dwyer, not Dyer)
• Troops: 90 soldiers, mostly Gurkha and Baluchi infantry, armed with .303 Lee-Enfield rifles
• Crowd: Estimated 15,000 to 20,000 — Baisakhi pilgrims and protest meeting attendees
• Rounds Fired: Approximately 1,650
• Official Dead: 379 (British figure)
• Indian Inquiry Dead: Over 1,000 (Congress sub-committee under Madan Mohan Malaviya)
• Wounded: Over 1,500
• Exit Routes: Only one narrow lane, deliberately blocked by Dyer’s troops
• Curfew: Martial law declared the same evening; the “crawling order” issued in Kucha Kaurianwala lane
• Hunter Commission: Disorders Inquiry Committee, October 1919 to March 1920
• Tagore Knighthood Returned: 31 May 1919
• Dyer Death: July 1927, of natural causes, at his retirement home in Bristol
• O’Dwyer Killed: 13 March 1940, by Sardar Udham Singh at Caxton Hall, London

Background: The Rowlatt Act

The road to Jallianwala Bagh begins with the Rowlatt Act of 1919. The First World War had just ended. Indians had contributed about 1.4 million soldiers and very large sums of war loan money. The political expectation, voiced by every shade of Indian opinion from Tilak to Gandhi to the Moderates, was that Britain would respond with a real expansion of self-government.

The Sedition Committee

In December 1917 the Government of India appointed a committee under Justice Sidney Rowlatt to examine revolutionary terrorism. The Rowlatt Committee Report of April 1918 recommended that the wartime Defence of India Act powers — detention without trial, secret trials, in-camera judicial proceedings — be made permanent in peacetime. In March 1919, the Government of India pushed through two Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Acts, popularly called the Rowlatt Acts. The popular description was “no dalil, no vakil, no appeal” — no argument, no lawyer, no appeal.

Gandhi’s Satyagraha

Gandhi, then in the early phase of his Indian career, called for a nationwide hartal against the Rowlatt Acts. The hartal of 6 April 1919 was the first all-India political strike. In Punjab, where war recruitment had been heaviest and where Sir Michael O’Dwyer ruled with a notably harsh hand, the protest was intense. On 10 April 1919, two Congress leaders in Amritsar — Dr Satyapal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew — were arrested and deported without trial. Protesting crowds in the city were fired on by British troops. Around twenty people died. The same evening, an English missionary, Miss Marcella Sherwood, was attacked in Kucha Kaurianwala lane.

These were the immediate antecedents of 13 April.

The Massacre, 13 April 1919

Dyer entered Amritsar on the evening of 11 April with reinforcements. He banned all public meetings and processions in the city. The ban was not, however, communicated widely. Many of the people who gathered at Jallianwala Bagh on the afternoon of 13 April had come for Baisakhi, the spring harvest festival, with no political object at all.

The Garden

Jallianwala Bagh was a roughly rectangular open space of about six and a half acres, bounded on all four sides by the back walls of houses. There was one main entrance lane wide enough for two or three people to walk abreast. A handful of narrow side exits existed but were also constricted. In the centre of the garden was a single dry well.

The Firing

A meeting was in progress at the raised platform at the western end. Speakers were denouncing the Rowlatt Acts and the arrests of Satyapal and Kitchlew. Around 4:30 pm Dyer arrived with 90 soldiers and two armoured cars. The armoured cars were left outside the entrance because they could not fit through it. Dyer marched his troops to a raised platform within the garden, ordered them into a firing line, and gave the order to fire. He gave no warning. The crowd had no chance to disperse.

The firing went on for about ten minutes. Soldiers were directed by Dyer to aim at the densest portions of the crowd, and when people tried to climb the walls they were shot off them. People who tried to escape down the entrance lane were shot in the back. About 120 bodies were later recovered from the dry well into which people had jumped to escape. The firing only stopped when ammunition ran low.

The Crawling Order

Two days later, on 15 April, Dyer issued the infamous “crawling order” in Kucha Kaurianwala lane, the lane where Miss Sherwood had been attacked. For five days, any Indian who entered this lane was forced to crawl on hands and knees from one end to the other. Public floggings of suspected agitators were carried out at the same time.

Public Inquiry and Hunter Commission

Public pressure forced the Government of India to set up the Disorders Inquiry Committee, popularly called the Hunter Commission, under Lord William Hunter, in October 1919. The Commission had three Indian members — Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, Pandit Jagat Narayan, and Sahibzada Sultan Ahmed Khan.

Dyer’s Testimony

Dyer’s testimony to the Hunter Commission is one of the most extraordinary documents of the colonial period. He admitted, without prompting, that he had fired without warning, that he had continued firing after the crowd began to disperse, that he wanted to “produce a moral effect,” that he would have used the machine guns mounted on his armoured cars if he could have got them inside the garden, and that he had given no thought to the wounded after the firing stopped.

The Commission Report

The Hunter Commission’s majority report, published in March 1920, censured Dyer’s actions as “an error of judgement” and stated that he had “acted beyond the necessity of the case.” The three Indian members issued a minority report condemning the firing far more strongly and rejecting the “error of judgement” formulation. Dyer was relieved of his command. He was not court-martialled. He was not prosecuted. He retired to Bristol on a comfortable pension.

The Morning Post Fund

In Britain, the Morning Post newspaper raised a public subscription of over £26,000 for Dyer as “the man who saved India.” The House of Commons censured Dyer; the House of Lords passed a motion of support. The split in British opinion is itself a defining moment in the political history of the empire.

Indian Inquiry

The Indian National Congress, refusing to accept the Hunter findings, set up its own inquiry under Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, Chittaranjan Das, Abbas Tyabji, and M. R. Jayakar. The Congress inquiry put the dead at over 1,000 and conclusively rejected the “error of judgement” framing. It described the firing as a deliberate massacre.

Tagore Renounces the Knighthood

On 31 May 1919, Rabindranath Tagore — Nobel laureate and the most internationally celebrated Indian of his generation — wrote a letter to the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford renouncing the knighthood that had been conferred on him in 1915. The letter is short, controlled, and devastating. He wrote that “the time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen, who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”

The renunciation was the single most powerful Indian moral response to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. It detached the Indian elite from the British honours system in a way no political resolution had managed.

Udham Singh’s Revenge, 1940

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre had a long tail. On the afternoon of 13 March 1940, twenty-one years after the firing, Sardar Udham Singh attended a meeting of the East India Association and the Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall, Westminster, London. The speaker was Sir Michael O’Dwyer, by then long retired, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab in 1919 and had publicly approved Dyer’s actions.

Udham Singh had been at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 as a young man. He had spent two decades preparing his revenge. He carried a revolver concealed in a hollowed-out book. When O’Dwyer finished speaking, Udham Singh fired six shots, killing O’Dwyer and wounding two others. Udham Singh was arrested at the scene, tried at the Old Bailey, and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940. He gave his name in court as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad — a deliberate combining of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh identity. His remains were returned to India in 1974 and rest at Sunam, his birthplace, in Punjab.

The Udham Singh action is celebrated in Indian memory as a delayed but decisive act of justice and is part of the same revolutionary tradition that runs from Khudiram Bose through Bhagat Singh.

Long-Term Consequences

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre had four enduring consequences for the freedom movement.

First, it shattered Indian moderate trust in British justice. Gandhi, who had previously supported British war recruitment in 1918, returned his Kaiser-i-Hind medal in 1920 and launched the Non-Cooperation Movement. The chain from the Rowlatt Act through the Massacre through the Hunter Commission whitewash through the Morning Post fund made constitutional collaboration politically untenable.

Second, it produced the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22, the first nationwide mass mobilisation under Gandhi’s leadership, ending only with the Chauri Chaura incident.

Third, it produced the revolutionary surge of the 1920s. Bhagat Singh visited Jallianwala Bagh as a twelve-year-old and famously carried back soil from the site. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the assassination of Saunders, the Lahore Conspiracy Case, and the Subhas Chandra Bose wing of the Congress all draw, in part, from the political shock of 13 April 1919.

Fourth, it changed the moral architecture of empire. The British defence of Dyer in the House of Lords and the Morning Post subscription forced even sympathetic Indians and British liberals to accept that the rule of law in India was conditional. After 1919, the constitutional argument for British rule could not be made in the old voice.

For UPSC mains, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre should be analysed as the moment at which the legitimacy of the Raj collapsed in the Indian mainstream. Every later movement, from Non-Cooperation through Quit India, builds on the moral capital that 13 April 1919 produced.

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