Why Jallianwala took place

Jagdish Chander Joshi, a trained historian and experienced researcher of Punjab’s freedom movement, brings both scholarship and sensitivity to this study. His earlier work on biographical sketches of Punjab’s freedom fighters has made him conversant with the region’s political struggles, and in this book, he addresses the enduring question: why did the savagery of Jallianwala Bagh occur?

As Harish Puri notes in his introduction, this is not a question of recounting the massacre itself — too well known to every Indian — but of probing its historical philosophy. Were the killings the outcome of deep structural forces or the rash decision of one individual? Joshi explores the interplay between historical context, institutional failure, and personal character.

Historians have long debated whether history is driven by vast impersonal currents, as Tolstoy suggested, or by decisive individuals, as Carlyle believed. As per Joshi, both dimensions converged in Amritsar. Punjab was already a cauldron of political discontent, yet General Reginald Dyer’s fateful decision to order firing at a peaceful crowd on Baisakhi day in 1919 was not an inevitable unfolding of events. It was a brutal personal choice. His actions reflected rigidity, racial arrogance and a warped belief in fear as a governing tool. It was not military necessity but prejudice, psychology, and rashness magnified into atrocity.

Yet Joshi refuses to reduce the episode to Dyer’s madness alone. The district administration had already created chaos by arresting local leaders without reason. Miles Irving, the Deputy Commissioner, panicked and abandoned responsibility, leaving authority in the hands of Dyer, a junior officer acting without sanction from either civil or military command.

By any reckoning, his conduct was ultra vires, beyond his authority, and should have led to court martial and dismissal. Instead, his action was endorsed by Michael O’Dwyer, the Governor of Punjab.

Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, and his Executive Council bore the ultimate duty to uphold constitutional norms and ensure accountability. They failed. Fearful that punishing Dyer would “encourage sedition”, and bound by an unwritten colonial code of closing ranks around their own, they chose evasion. The Hunter Commission was appointed, but its report diffused responsibility. Even Winston Churchill, while calling it “a monstrous event”, stopped short of demanding a criminal trial. Dyer was quietly removed, not prosecuted.

As Gandhi rightly wrote in ‘Young India’: “It is not General Dyer who is guilty of Amritsar. It is the whole system, the Government that stands condemned.” Joshi’s analysis underscores this: Jallianwala Bagh was not an aberration but a revelation of the colonial state’s logic. Preserving imperial prestige outweighed justice. The Raj exposed itself as incapable of accountability to its subjects.

The aftermath made the wound permanent. Nationalism hardened, moderate faith in British justice collapsed, and the myth of imperial benevolence was shattered. Tagore renounced his knighthood; Gandhi called it “government terrorism”; Bhagat Singh invoked the atrocity in his writings and courtroom statements; and Udham Singh sought vengeance against O’Dwyer. Yet justice itself never came, leaving the wound open.

The book is a meticulous excavation of this tragedy and its meanings. Except for minor slips — such as the dating of the Lyallpur meeting where Banke Dayal sang ‘Pagri Sambhal Jatta’ (correctly March 22-23, 1907, not March 31) — the work is valuable both as a narrative and reference text.

More than a study of one atrocity, the book is a meditation on how individual prejudice, bureaucratic failure, and systemic injustice converged to create a civilisational rupture. It reminds us that the bullets fired in 1919 still echo — not only in Indian memory but in the conscience of history.

— The reviewer is a Chandigarh-based author and publisher