For Jawaharlal Nehru, the English reaction to the massacre—and Dyer being publicly feted—was almost as bad as the massacre itself. ‘This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly,’ he later wrote. ‘It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public school language, it was the height of bad form. I realized 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.’ It was no longer possible to claim that Dyer did not represent the British in India: they had claimed him as one of their
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