View: 'Regret' isn’t enough on Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Born in Britain, of proud Punjabi heritage, I have learned to live with a degree of cognitive dissonance.

At school, my classmates knew Bananarama and I knew Bhosle. Holiday picnics involved sand-peppered choley and bhature; white friends had sandwiches. In a Proustian way, an English seaside will always smell of vinegary chips and channa masaala to me.

I loved history at school and was good at it. I could still bore you to death with the details of a Roman hypocaust system. Yet at my desk, in what was once the epicentre of the British Empire, what I learned of the Raj was misty, slight and sepia-tinted.

Robert Clive and Henry Hardinge wafted past on drifts of nostalgia. The contribution of Indian soldiers during World War I and II was mentioned in passing, no context offered. Film and television merely thickened the fog. The Raj was all about polo matches, pith helmets, and sundowners with Maharajas. British sahibs were striding and valiant. They stopped railway lines being blown up by snarling ‘natives’, shot man-eating tigers and generally gleamed against the poverty and brutality of India, a mere background to their dramas.

The way history was and continues to be taught in Britain does a disservice to all, no matter what they pack in their seaside picnic. The ignorance has been thrown into sharp relief by the centenary anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Having written a book about the massacre and the revenge taken for it by Udham Singh, I have been on something of a publicity treadmill. I cannot tell you how many times interviewers have said the words: “I had no idea” both on and off the air.

There has been genuine shock and revulsion at the thought of the “crawling order” issued after the massacre, where Indians were forced to squirm on their bellies in the dirt. I have seen people, good people, struggle with the notion that British war planes strafed Indian civilians from the sky, or that schoolboys were torn from their classes and whipped, not for any offence committed, but to serve as an example to any who might defy the Sirkar. “This cannot be who we were. This cannot be what we did…” I recognise cognitive dissonance when I see it.

At times, the examples become too much for the interviewer; sometimes they become too much for me. I have found myself uncharacteristically moved to tears relating eyewitness testimony of those trapped in the Bagh by the long night of curfew, listening to the wails of their countrymen turn to whimpers and then to silence.

A grandfather I would never know left Jallianwala Bagh as my inheritance. I grew up with the story of the quirk of fate that saved him and us. Then a lanky teenager from Kala Bagh, visiting Amritsar for Baisakhi, my grandfather was late for an errand that day. He left the Amritsar garden minutes before Brigadier General Dyer and his soldiers entered and opened fire. His friends, with whom he had been sharing a picnic by the perimeter wall, were killed.

Lala-ji struggled to make sense of his survival. When he went blind later, he would tell any who came to sympathise: “Do not pity me, God gave me my life that day, it is only right he take the light from my eyes.”

There has been much talk of an apology here in Britain, and an impassioned debate in Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament. I was struck by the response of minister Mark Field, spokesman for the government at the debate. He praised the diaspora in the UK, and talked of generous visa allowances, but then came the rub: “At the back of one’s mind, there is always a sense — not just when one looks at the figures on trade and investment, although that is an aspect of it — that something is holding us back from fulfilling the full potential and a flourishing relationship. In all honesty, I would take a more orthodox and different view of our colonial past, but I accept that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre grates particularly strongly in the relationship between India and the UK”.

In other words, ‘I think the Raj was generally a good thing but if saying sorry or something like it makes trade easier in a post-Brexit world, we bally well ought to do something.’ In the end, there was no Willy Brandt moment, falling to his knees at the gates of the Warsaw ghetto. Instead, Theresa May talked of a “shameful scar” and expressed “regret”.

People will argue the toss between regret and remorse for years, not that this makes any difference to my grandfather or his friends, all long dead now. An honest appraisal of colonial history will, however, make all the difference in the world to my children and theirs. If there is any legacy from the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, please let it be that. It just has to be that.

Anand is a BBC journalist based in London and the author of ‘The Patient Assassin, a story of Massacre, Raj and Revenge’