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Peterloo, when Britain killed its own unarmed people

The UK premiere of the British Director Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo was held at Manchester on November 2.

Peterloo, when Britain killed its own unarmed people

Strike hard: A violent episode of British history that occurred on August 16, 1819.



JV Yakhmi 
Fellow, National Academy of Sciences

The UK premiere of the British Director Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo was held at Manchester on November 2. It portrays the Peterloo massacre, a violent episode of British history that occurred on August 16, 1819, when a sabre-wielding British cavalry charged into an unarmed pro-democracy rally of 60,000 men, women and children protesting peacefully against rising poverty and high price of bread, killing 15 of them and injuring 600 at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. 

Why did the British government act so ruthlessly against its own people at Peterloo, dubbed so after the recent gruesome Battle of Waterloo? Because, the conservative British government was paranoid of a revolutionary uprising like the one witnessed in France, and, therefore, decided to stamp out dissent and free speech. Sensing imminent protests, a public notice was issued on Saturday, July 31, 1819, by the magistrates of the local court warning the public not to participate in any protest meeting, declaring it illegal. But the public did assemble in large numbers.  

Compare this with the carnage at Amritsar, a hundred years later on April 13, 1919, when British Colonial Army troops commanded by Brig-Gen Reginald Dyer fired into a crowd of thousands of peaceful unarmed Indians gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed ground roughly 200 yards by 200 yards in size, surrounded by walls 10 feet high, with narrow entrances. The crowds had gathered to celebrate the annual harvest festival of Baisakhi and also to listen to their leaders, as was the custom. 

But, unlike at Peterloo, no prior warning was given to the crowds to disperse. Blocking the main entrance, the soldiers took up positions and fired on the crowd for a full 10 minutes. Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead, and about 1,100 wounded. Other sources put the number of dead to be much higher. At least 1,650 empty shells of bullets were collected. 

Dyer ‘explained’ later that this act ‘was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience’. And punish he did because several among the panicking crowds jumped into a well in the compound until it was filled with 120 of the bodies, which were removed later from the well.

Gandhi, the movie by Richard Attenborough, portrayed the repressive might of the British forces in South Africa, trampling defenceless Indians protesting non-violently under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi, under the hoofs of cavalry horses, in 1913. 

Generally known as a nation of sober, decent, suave citizens with etiquette, surprisingly, Britain has often reacted with brutal repression against protesting civilians, historically. Three glaring examples of massacres at the hands of British armed forces are: at Hexham, England in 1761, at Tranent in Scotland in 1797, and at Bogside in Northern Ireland, as late as in 1972. 

India was brutally impoverished by the British during the Raj days. The per capita foodgrain consumption in British India was squeezed progressively to nearly half, even if it starved the populace, to bolster exports, the earnings from which accrued to Britain. The Bengal famine of India during 1943-44 was largely caused by the diversion of foodgrains by Britain from India to its armed forces fighting the WWII. Upon being told that over three million people had died due to famine in Bengal in India, Churchill asked, callously, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’ The Colonial British rulers were arrogant and had scant consideration for loyalty of those who fought their wars.

Invoking the famed martial spirit of the Punjabis, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the then Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab province spearheaded large-scale recruitment of men as soldiers for fighting in WWI, won by Britain and its allies, in which tens of thousands of  Indian soldiers were killed, including several thousand Sikhs. However, the conscience of the British rulers did not tweak, when just five months after the closure of the WWI, the Jallianwala Bagh carnage was ‘ordered’. The ungrateful O'Dwyer actually defended Reginald Dyer's drastic military action at Jallianwala Bagh, stating that it scuttled a violent conspiracy to destabilise Punjab in the light of Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act. 

Currently, a campaign is under way in Britain to erect a memorial at Manchester, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, next year. 

Being a period movie, set in time a hundred years before the carnage at Jallianwala Bagh, the director of Peterloo, could obviously not have referred to the latter in it, but he could have used the opportunity to express repentance for  Jallianwala Bagh, in its credits, or in his speeches. There is no mention of the massacre in the reviews of this film published in major British newspapers either, although Peterloo has been referred to as a transformational moment in British history, shaking the moral conscience of the nation against  violent attacks on an unarmed crowd, even if the authorities disapproved the reasons of their assembly. That didn’t prevent the far more brutal Jallianwala Bagh carnage, a century later, a reference to which was called for by the director of Peterloo or by the British press, at its premiere.

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