Soon after Dyer’s arrival, on the afternoon of April 13, 1919, some 10,000 or more unarmed men, women, and children gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (bagh, “garden”; but before 1919 it had become a public square), despite a ban on public assemblies. It was a Sunday, and many neighbouring village peasants had also come to Amritsar to celebrate the spring Baisakhi festival. Dyer positioned his men at the sole, narrow passageway of the Bagh, which was otherwise entirely enclosed by the backs of abutted brick buildings. Giving no word of warning, he ordered 50 soldiers to fire into the gathering, and for 10 to 15 minutes about 1,650 rounds of ammunition were unloaded into the screaming, terrified crowd, some of whom were trampled by those desperately trying to escape. According to official estimates, nearly 400 civilians were killed, and another 1,200 were left wounded with no medical attention. Dyer, who argued his action was necessary to produce a “moral and widespread effect,” admitted that the firing would have continued had more ammunition been available.

The governor of the Punjab province supported the massacre at Amritsar and, on April 15, placed the entire province under martial law. Viceroy Chelmsford, however, characterized the action as “an error of judgment,” and, when Secretary of State Montagu learned of the slaughter, he appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Hunter. Although Dyer was subsequently relieved of his command, he returned a hero to many in Britain, especially conservatives, and in Parliament members of the House of Lords presented him with a jeweled sword inscribed “Saviour of the Punjab.”

The Massacre of Amritsar turned millions of moderate Indians from patient and loyal supporters of the British raj into nationalists who would never again place trust in British “fair play.” It thus marks the turning point for a majority of the Congress’s supporters from moderate cooperation with the raj and its promised reforms to revolutionary noncooperation. Liberal Anglophile leaders, such as Jinnah, were soon to be displaced by the followers of Gandhi, who would launch, a year after that dreadful massacre, the noncooperation movement, his first nationwide satyagraha (“holding on to truth”) nonviolent campaign as India’s revolutionary response.

Gandhi’s strategy

For Gandhi, there was no dichotomy between religion and politics, and his unique political power was in great measure attributable to the spiritual leadership he exerted over India’s masses, who viewed him as a sadhu (holy man) and worshipped him as a mahatma (which, in Sanskrit, means “great soul”). He chose satya (“truth”) and ahimsa (nonviolence, or love) as the polar stars of his political movement; the former was the ancient Vedic concept of the real, embodying the very essence of existence itself, while the latter, according to Hindu (as well as Jain) scripture, was the highest religion (dharma). With those two weapons, Gandhi assured his followers, unarmed India could bring the mightiest empire known to history to its knees. His mystic faith magnetized millions, and the sacrificial suffering (tapasya) that he took upon himself by the purity of his chaste life and prolonged fasting armed him with great powers. Gandhi’s strategy for bringing the giant machine of British rule to a halt was to call upon Indians to boycott all British-made goods, British schools and colleges, British courts of law, British titles and honours, British elections and elective offices, and, should the need arise if all other boycotts failed, British tax collectors as well. The total withdrawal of Indian support would thus stop the machine, and nonviolent noncooperation would achieve the national goal of swaraj.

The Muslim quarter of India’s population could hardly be expected to respond any more enthusiastically to Gandhi’s satyagraha call than they had to Tilak’s revivalism, but Gandhi laboured valiantly to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity by embracing the Ali brothers’ Khilāfat movement as the “premier plank” of his national program. Launched in response to news that the Treaty of Sèvres had dismembered the Ottoman Empire in 1920, the Khilāfat movement coincided with the inception of satyagraha, thus giving the illusion of unity to India’s nationalist agitation. Such unity, however, proved as chimerical as the Khilāfat movement’s hope of preserving the caliphate itself, and in December 1920 Mohammed Ali Jinnah, alienated by Gandhi’s mass following of Hindi-speaking Hindus, left the Congress Party session at Nagpur. The days of the Lucknow Pact were over, and by the start of 1921 the antipathetic forces of revivalist Hindu and Muslim agitation, destined to lead to the birth of the independent dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, were thus clearly set in motion in their separate directions.