The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh: In the Mirror of Urdu

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre saw a growing political consciousness that began reflecting in Indian literature.

Writers and poets have always taken note of history. Sometimes, when history is exceptionally brutal and bloody, the poet may fall silent, but the prose writer is compelled to pick up the pen, and sometimes, it is the other way round. Some events shake the conscience of thinking men and women the world over, send seismic tremors across the length and breadth of a nation, unspool events of unforeseen consequences and find reflection not only in the literature of their age but for generations to come.

The cold-blooded massacre at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 is one such incident. It marked a defining moment in the history of modern India. It is significant from a purely literary perspective too: the spurt in overtly political activities and a growing political consciousness that began to find reflection in Indian literature can be traced directly to it.

While a great deal of scholarly work has been done on the Jallianwala Bagh by professional historians, its reflection in Indian literature in the different baashas and in Urdu in particular has been overlooked. An incident that stirred the conscience of millions, one that had far-reaching implications for the national freedom struggle, that made British colonial interests in India morally untenable, found its way through pen and paper to reach the nooks and crannies of the popular imagination filtered through the mind of the creative writer.

Let us see how.

‘Bloodiest Chapter in the History of British Rule in India’: Manto

To begin with, there is Saadat Hasan Manto, who chronicled his age with all its darkness and imperfections and looked at people and events with a consciousness uncoloured by notions of nationalism, religion, morality, least of all sentimentality.

Manto’s take on contemporary politics in 1919 ka Ek Din (‘A Day in 1919’) is a recasting of the terrible slaughter visited upon the poor benighted city of Amritsar (Manto, incidentally, was from this city) in the wake of the Jallianwala Bagh. Drawing upon popular accounts of the French Revolution which ascribe the first bullet fired in the Revolution hitting a prostitute, here Manto makes a ‘hero’ out of the good-for-nothing brother of the city’s two most famous prostitutes.

Remembering those days in this story, written some time in the late 1930s, he writes about real historical events with the deftness of a master storyteller:

‘It is about those days in 1919, Brother, when agitations against the Rowlatt                  Act had sprung up all across the Punjab. I am talking about Amritsar. Sir Michael O’Dwyer had forbidden Mahatma Gandhi from entering the Punjab under the Defence of India Rules. Gandhi ji was on his way when he had been stopped near Palwal, arrested and sent back to Bombay. As far as I can understand, Brother, had the English not committed this grave mistake, the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, which is the bloodiest chapter in the history of British rule in India, would never have occurred.’

Abdullah Hussein’s elegantly sprawling novel, Udaas Naslein cuts a long swathe from the years 1913 till 1947; his protagonist Naim visits the Jallianwala Bagh as part of a citizens’ inquiry committee and meets an old fisherman who tells him an incredible tale: it is he, the hunch-backed old fisherman, who inadvertently sets in motion a chain of events leading to the bloodbath.

He also claims to have witnessed the murder of the Europeans on the city streets and of the assault on the missionary woman (Marcella Sherwood); however, his testimony of a ‘gora’ officer in uniform who opens firing upon the crowd is a classic instance of magic realism, one that is all the more remarkable since it predates Salman Rushdie and his Midnight’s Children.

An active member of the powerful literary grouping, the Progressive Writers’ Association and a leading light among the ‘Bombay Progressives’, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas had a remarkable felicity for blending fact with fiction and writing stories based on real-life incidents. His Inqilab, with its sub-title ‘First Great Novel about the Indian Revolution’, is a semi-autobiographical novel of a young man’s tryst with his destiny as he and his country move towards independence. Painting virtually a portrait gallery of the who’s who of all the important political leaders of his age, Abbas recasts the story of the national freedom struggle through the eyes of Anwar, his alter-ego and his friend Ratan.

‘Death as the Consequence of Deliberate, Wilful Defiance’

Krishan Chander’s essay-like short story ‘Amritsar: Before Independence, and After Independence’ (‘Amritsar: Azadi se Pehle, Azadi ke Baad’) contains moving accounts of two young men, not friends but neighbours: Siddiq and Om Prakash, who risk their lives for each other as bullets whizz past and death is as sudden as it is random.

At moments such as this, bravery does not lie in either facing the bullets or surviving them; true bravery lies in facing death as the consequence of deliberate, wilful defiance. In Krishan Chander’s telling, the real heroes of the story are the valiant women of Amritsar: Begum, Zainab, Paro and Sham Kaur, who defy General Dyer’s completely illegal and humiliating ‘crawling order’ whereby anyone who wishes to walk down the alley where the Englishwoman named Miss Sherwood had been attacked by a mob would have to crawl on their belly. All four women paid with their lives while resisting the order and became martyrs.

Dyer’s infamous ‘crawling order’ is also the subject of Ghulam Abbas’s short story ‘Raingneywale’ (‘Those Who Crawled’). Born in Amritsar, Abbas would have been a mere lad of 10 years of age at the time of the incident but surely anyone with any links to the city would have carried the effect of that trauma in some way or to some degree. A hundred years late,r the humiliation that a depraved mind can heap upon those it considers inferior beings continues to horrify. At the same time, stories such as ‘Those Who Crawled’ need to be read and revisited so that we learn from the misdeeds of the past.

There was a time when poetry was considered the most suitable form for passing down history. Some of our greatest epics came to us in verse. There was a long lull when poetry was thought to be about the softer emotions of life, about love and romance and fantastical adventures in magical lands realms of the imagination. However it took events of great magnitude, such as the Great Uprising of 1857 to release a burst of political consciousness that left no one untouched – not the creative writer or even the poet.

With something as soul-stirring as the Jallianwala Bagh incident, the poets of the age were compelled to take note. In fact, 1919 marks a turning point in the literary history of India as poets in the different bhashas begin to take up newer, more immediate concerns like never before.

No longer were they content to sing of the gul-o-bulbul (the rose and the nightingale that are traditional motifs in conventional Urdu poetry) and shama-parwana (the moth and the candle as metaphors for love and the lover) or traipse around in the magic gardens of the dastans and fasanas. This literary ‘adventurism’ required a new diction, and a new vocabulary.

For these ‘new age’ poets language became a means, not an end of a creative exercise. No longer was it necessary to revive the debates on whether – or the extent to which – literature should reflect contemporary realities. Realism had crept into the poetry of even those who shied away from labels or chose not to belong to schools of thought.

While several poems were written in Urdu specifically on the massacre, some that deserve special mention are:

Jallianwala Bagh by Muhammad Iqbal:

The dust of this garden tells everyone who comes visiting
To not remain unmindful of the moving of the firmament
Its dignity has been nourished with the blood of martyrs
Do not expect tears from this tender sapling

‘The Hunter’s Complaint’ (‘Shikwa-e Saiyyad’) by Tirlok Chand Mahroom:

Anguish is not permitted nor is protest allowed
My hunter has decreed that I should die quietly

‘The Tyrannies in the Punjab’ (‘Mazalim-e Punjab’) by Zafar Ali Khan:

One day I said to my Lord and master in Amritsar
You too begin to crawl on your belly, O benefactor

‘To the Children of the East India Company’ (‘East India Company ke Farzandon Se’) by Josh Malihabad:

Surely you must recall that stain on Hindustan?
Surely you would remember Jallianwala Bagh?

And lastly, If You Wish to Learn Mercy... (‘Agar Seekhni ho Rehmat’) by Ahmaq Phaphoondvi. Taken together they reflect the anguish and horror evoked by the incident even in those outside the Punjab. These lines from Ahmaq Phaphoondvi, dripping as they are with sarcasm and satire, might be a good way to gain a sense of the rising nationalistic consciousness that was a direct outcome of the barbaric action in the Punjab:

If you wish to learn Mercy, learn it from Dyer
And learn the principles of Justice from O’Dwyer

And how best to flatter the masters
Learn the technique from the Khan Bahadur

And how to earn your daily bread honestly
Learn it from any officer in the Secret Police

Rakhshanda Jalil has edited ‘Jallianwala Bagh: Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry’ (Niyogi Books, 2019)

(Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian. She writes on literature, culture and society. She runs Hindustani Awaaz, an organisation devoted to the popularisation of Urdu literature. She tweets at @RakhshandaJalil. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)