An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

One instance of British colonial conduct from the twentieth century deserves detailed description to illustrate the larger point I am making. The incident took place just after the end of World War I (the war to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, in that ringing phrase of Woodrow Wilson’s). I refer, of course, to Jallianwala Bagh. It was 1919. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed; new nations were springing up from their ruins; talk of self-determination was in the air. India had just emerged from World War I having made enormous sacrifices, and a huge contribution in men and materiel, blood and treasure, to the British war effort, in the expectation that it would be rewarded with some measure of self-government. Those hopes were belied, as explained in Chapter 2; the dishonest Montagu–Chelmsford ‘reforms’ and the punitive Rowlatt Acts were India’s only reward. This is what happened next. In March and April 1919, Indians rallied across the Punjab to protest the Rowlatt Acts; they shut down normal commerce in many cities, including Amritsar, through hartals on 30 March and 6 April that demonstrated, through empty streets and shuttered shops, the dissatisfaction of the people at the British betrayal. This was a form of Gandhian non-violent non-cooperation; no violence or disorder was reported during the hartals. But on 9 April, with no provocation, the British government in the Punjab arrested two nationalist leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal...