The ‘Jallianwala Bagh Centenary Commemoration Exhibition’ sheds light on the fateful massacre

Kishwar Desai

Many similar photographs, text data from newspapers and reports, objects and art installations together form the crux of the exhibition, being presented by the IGNCA and The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT) to commemorate a century since the incident.

Using the help of unknown facts and intimate details of what happened before and after the massacre, it examines whether the fateful event was a well-planned conspiracy by Dyer to confine those gathered inside the premises, which was devoid of any escape route. Having researched the subject extensively, Kishwar Desai, Chairperson of TAACHT, says, “People of Punjab were unhappy due to forced recruitment of soldiers for the First World War. In fact people made payments so that their children wouldn’t go for the war as soldiers, and somebody else could take their place.”

Alongside photos of Indian soldiers marching from the Imperial War Museum, are portraits of Kartar Singh Sarabha, one of the founding members of the Ghadar Party, hung at the age of 19 for propagating the Ghadar rebellion, and party President Sohan Singh Bhakna, imprisoned for 16 years for the same reason. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, then the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, ruthless in putting thousands behind bars, tried his best to suppress the movement.

Bullet marks from the firing Picture Street

“This was a movement that was based out of San Francisco. Indians would come back and realise that there was a lot of freedom abroad. The same happened to the Indian soldiers who felt that although they had been fighting for the British abroad, they didn’t have any independence when they returned home,” says Desai, who began researching on the subject when she saw Town Hall in Amritsar destroyed in a photograph dated April 10, 1919, while researching for her book Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story.

Extracts from the report of the committee appointed by the government of India to investigate the disturbances in Punjab reveal Dyer’s responses to the necessity of that day’s firing. “I could disperse them for sometime, then they would all come back and laugh at me. I considered I would be making myself a fool,” he’d said. On being asked if his idea in taking the action was to strike terror, Dyer answered, “Call it what you like?… My idea from the military point of view was to make a wide impression. I wanted to reduce their morale, the morale of the rebels.”
A profile photograph of Udham Singh crops up. Born in Sunam, Punjab, he went to London to avenge the massacre and shot O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of Punjab then. Singh was hung after a swift trial the same year.

While most official records list the number of dead people at 379, TAACHT, through its research, lists it at 547. Desai says, “There must have been at least a thousand killed. A lot of people ran home and they were too scared to report that they were at the Bagh, and died at home and their families never reported to avoid trouble. The British would just come and pick up the male members of the family because they felt the Jallianwala Bagh meeting was a meeting to overthrow the British. In reality, it was actually a satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act, which had been called by Mahatma Gandhi and it was a meeting to request the release of leaders behind bars. It was a very peaceful meeting. They had no guns.”