Call it renovation, not restoration
No other incident in colonial India turned the people against the British as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also called the Amritsar massacre. It happened 102 years ago when Colonel R E H Dyer ordered his men to fire at the unarmed people who had assembled at the Jallianwala Bagh, a stone’s throw from the Sri Harmandir Sahib, popularly known as the Golden Temple. Accounts of the massacre in which 379 were killed and about 1,200 injured continue to have a chilling effect on the people. Today, the massacre is once again in the public conscience, unfortunately, for the wrong reasons. On August 28, 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated to the nation the new Jallianwala Bagh memorial. Four new galleries, a lotus pond, a new memorial column and a sound and light show were added to make Jallianwala Bagh a true ‘garden’ to be visited by tourists in large numbers.
In doing so, what the authorities concerned have presented to the nation is a renovated, not a restored Bagh. The fact of the matter is that the Bagh, which literally means garden, was never a garden like the Shalimar Garden in Kashmir. It was an enclosed place with just one narrow entrance. The entrance walls today have gaudily-done sculptures that eloquently say nothing. To be fair to the Prime Minister, who chairs the committee that controls Jallianwala Bagh, he has ‘beautified’ the area. The large well into which many jumped to protect themselves from Dyer’s bullets has been covered with a transparent barrier. The sound and light show will make the people sit, relax and enjoy, perhaps, munching peanuts. The Ahmedabad-based Vama Communications, which conceptualised and implemented the renovation of the Bagh with support from the ASI and the NBCC, can pride itself on the work done.
The moot point is whether Jallianwala Bagh needed such a makeover. Anyone who had visited the site oneand-a-half years ago when it was closed for ‘renovation’ would have been horrified by the bullet marks on the walls. Some bullets could even be seen embedded in the wall, 100 years after they were fired. They could not have looked at the well -- into which men and women, the old and the young jumped, only to die of asphyxiation and broken limbs -- except in a state of utter shock and devastation. As they entered or exited the Bagh through the corridor-like entrance, they would have imagined how the soldiers blocked the gate and forced the people to run helter-skelter and fall prey to the bullets fired ceaselessly by the soldiers at their chests with an intent to kill. The visitors would have returned not munching potato chips but wondering how a cruel, despotic regime could be so ruthless in dealing with unarmed people who rose up against it.
Yes, Jallianwala Bagh attracted tourists from all over India and abroad. They went there not to enjoy the scenery but to learn how man could be cruel to fellow human beings when he is fired by passions of vengeance -- the previous day some Indians had ransacked British banks and killed some white men. What has now happened at Jallianwala Bagh is what would happen to archaeological and historical sites everywhere if they were to be handed over to corporates who can’t hear anything but the tinkling of money. Through this work, the authorities concerned have caused irreparable damage to what Jallianwala Bagh symbolised to the people at large, a place of homage for the innocent Indians who became martyrs for a cause that helped the nation attain Independence 75 years ago.
Given the shoddy restoration work at Amritsar, is it any surprise that Gandhians are up against what is being attempted at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad? The Gandhi Ashram Memorial and Precincts Development Project, with an estimated cost of Rs 1,200 crore and spread over 54 acres, is far more ambitious than what has been done in Amritsar. In practical terms, it is being conceptualised and implemented as a Gandhi Theme Park where Hriday Kunj, the house where Gandhi and Kasturba spent many years and the museum Charles Correa designed will remain just annexes to the park where the people would congregate to socialise and make merry. The Ashram will lose its appeal as the abode of a person about whom Albert Einstein had said that generations hence would scarcely believe that a person by the name Gandhi lived on earth. The extravaganza in the name of Gandhi will, alas, mark his second assassination.