The ‘patient assassin’ who avenged the Amritsar atrocity
Her grandfather escaped the 1919 massacre, now Anita Anand tells the story of another survivor who waited 21 years for revenge
According to my father, the youngest of five children growing up in India, my grandfather, Ishwar Das Anand, was a quiet man seldom moved to extremes of passion – except when anyone dared show him pity. “Do not feel sorry for me…” my Dad remembered him saying as he started to go blind in his fifties. “God granted me my life that day; it is only right that he take the light from my eyes.”
“That day,” he spoke of was April 13 1919, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which has come to represent one of the darkest days in British colonial history.
My teenage grandfather was in Jallianwala Bagh a large walled garden in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. Sheer dumb luck saved his life. Late for a meeting with a scrap metal dealer, he left the garden and the picnic with friends, telling them to save him something sweet. He passed a column of armed soldiers, but had no idea where they were going.
At the head of that column was Brigadier General Reginald “Rex” Dyer, who had heard an illegal rally was taking place and was en route to deal with those taking part. Leaving his vehicles outside Jallianwala Bagh, he marched his men in through a narrow passage and told them to take up positions near the only significant exit.
Some 20,000 civilians were inside Jallianwala Bagh. Some had come to hear the speeches; others, like my grandfather, to escape the maelstrom of Baisakhi, one of the province’s busiest religious festivals. But, without an order to disperse, the soldiers took aim and opened fire, mowing down innocent men, women and children. My grandfather’s friends were among the many killed; the youngest to die was aged six months, the oldest was a man in his eighties. Not a single shot was fired in retaliation.
By Dyer’s own admission, his men fired 1,650 rounds. Bodies were found in pyramids by the perimeter wall, where people had desperately tried to climb out of the bullets’ path.
Numbers have always been in dispute. British estimates put the dead at 379 with 1,100 wounded; Indian sources insist around 1,000 were killed and more than 1,500 wounded.
Winston Churchill would later describe the event as “monstrous”, but the bloodbath could have been so much worse. Dyer would have used machine guns had he been able to get his two armoured cars through the narrow entrance.
According to legend, a young, low-caste orphan named Udham Singh, almost the same age as my grandfather, was shot and injured during the massacre and trapped in the garden by the night-long curfew that followed. Denied medical assistance, he was supposedly driven mad by the sound of the dying. As the first rays of the sun touched the garden, Udham is said to have picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth, smeared it across his forehead and vowed that no matter how long it took, no matter where in the world it would take him, he would kill the men responsible for this outrage – and with as little mercy as they had shown.
Udham would dedicate the next 21 years to vengeance. Like a real-life Tom Ripley, he would systematically court enemies of the Raj, learning all he could from whomever could teach him. Dyer died of natural causes in 1927, so Udham focused his hatred on the brigadier-general’s boss, Sir Michael O’dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, who not only approved of the shootings but spent much of his time praising Dyer’s action and fortitude.
Udham’s obsession took him halfway around the world. Not long after the massacre, he left for eastern Africa, where he met his first teachers, while working on the “Lunatic Line”, the Ugandan railway built by the British. Militant anti-colonialists there would show him how to travel on false papers, crossing international borders undetected. He would return to India, smuggling guns and anti-british propaganda and rising in the esteem of Indian nationalists. They would push him towards Mexico and California, where he joined the most violent enemies of the Raj, Indian Ghadars, dedicated to its bloody overthrow.
Udham had many chances to live a happy life, but detonated them in pursuit of his revenge. He abandoned a wife and children, friends and paramours, anyone who got in his way. Killing Sir Michael was all that mattered. His enemy’s enemy was his friend, and Udham Singh consorted with communists in eastern Europe, as well as Germans building their forces in the run-up to the Second World War.
Finally, Udham ended up in Britain in the Thirties where he embedded himself in a network of Indian street peddlers. They provided him with support and intelligence as he tried to track down Sir Michael. One of these peddlers was a great uncle of my husband, a fact we only discovered years into our marriage.
In 1940, Udham Singh, the patient assassin, finally got to settle his score. Walking calmly into a meeting in Westminster’s Caxton Hall on March 13, filled with the great and good of the Raj, he pressed his gun into the fabric of Sir Michael’s jacket and shot him twice through the heart. His vengeance, so public and personal, was almost operatic in scale.
Udham was hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 31 1940, his body was thrown into an unmarked grave in a patch of scrub behind the jail. He would never know that one day, in 1974, his exhumed bones would be given a state funeral in a free India, nor that streets there would be named after him, films, songs and postage stamps would be created in his honour. My book about him, The Patient Assassin, is currently being adapted for the screen by documentary maker James Erskine.
But in Britain, he is all but unknown. In 2013, David Cameron became the first serving prime minister to visit Jallianwala Bagh. He laid a wreath of
Udham Singh had many chances to live a happy life, but he detonated them in pursuit of his revenge
white gerberas at the foot of the towering, red stone Martyr’s Memorial and wrote the following in the visitors’ condolence book: “We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right of peaceful protest around the world.”
Cameron’s words fell short of the apology Indians hoped for and, in this centenary year of the massacre, thousands have signed petitions demanding more. For me, the past is vivid every time I see my grandfather’s portrait, or read accounts of survivors. Two months ago, a friend passed me the number of Caroline Dyer, great granddaughter of the brigadiergeneral. I held on to it for weeks before I felt able to dial it. However, Caroline was warm and enthusiastic, and we agreed to meet – a nerveracking prospect for us both.
Caroline believes her greatgrandfather did no wrong, followed his orders and acted as a soldier. What was done was an inescapable part of colonial rule. I disagreed and told her of the damage, both to the dead and to survivors. She half-jokingly asked if I might have poisoned her chocolate brownie. (To reassure her, I ate half.)
Tears were shed on both sides. At one point, Caroline asked me if I expected her to say sorry for Dyer’s actions, something she was quite unprepared to do. Until then, I did not know what exactly I wanted from her, then it became clear: I wanted her to understand. I wanted to show her Jallianwala Bagh, the narrow entrance, the walls pockmarked by bullets. To her credit, she has agreed: we plan to visit Amritsar together. Some of my family will hate the idea. Some may not forgive me.
Sorry is not enough. There must be acceptance of the horror, an acknowledgement of the brutality. Udham Singh and I may have wanted very different things, but I, too, can be patient.