Saturday, December 28, 2019

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919



Title: Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 – The Real Story
Author: Kishwar Desai
Publisher: Context, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9789387578746
Pages: 245

The First World War was a watershed moment in Indian history. The country wholeheartedly donated to the coffers of its imperial British masters in terms of money, material and manpower. A large number of Indian soldiers who had fought for the British had come back victorious only to find shockingly repressive measures at home. The homilies on liberty and fraternity so liberally sung by the Allied leaders found no application in India. Widespread unrest was growing up everywhere and revolutionary movements like the Ghadr party thrived. Then the government introduced a draconian law called the Rowlatt Act to muzzle dissent. Alarmed at the enormity of discretionary powers it conferred on the Executive, Indian society erupted in protest. Gandhi was looking for an opportunity to make a grand entry into Indian politics ever since his return from legal practice in South Africa. He advocated passive resistance or Satyagraha through non-violent means to take on the British. In fact, he franchised Satyagraha to local leaders who were capable of organizing the populace. Charades of non-violence were discarded almost in no time and many parts of the country were engulfed in deadly violence in which shops were forcefully closed, passengers made to alight from vehicles and walk the rest of their way as part of enforcing the total shutdown called hartal. The violence peaked in Punjab, which was a state treated as special by the British as it had contributed sixty per cent of the total Indian troops even though it possessed only 7.5 per cent of the population. Amritsar city was especially afflicted with violence. On 13 April 1919, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer led a troop of soldiers to Jallianwala Bagh where about 5000 people were peacefully assembled, though in violation of martial law regulations. He opened fire on the crowd without warning and stopped only after ten dreadful minutes, after exhausting 1650 rounds of ammunition. Official records state that 379 people lost their lives, but the actual figures are much higher. This book attempts to describe that fearful moment in the story of the struggle for Indian independence. Kishwar Desai is an author, columnist and the Chair of the trust that set up the Partition Museum at Amritsar. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a television anchor and producer for over twenty years.

Gandhi led the anti-Rowlatt Act agitation at the national level. He was not a member of the Congress and the party was not really involved in the agitation though individual members like Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal organized rallies. The lack of an organizational set up greatly contributed to the confusion and the disastrous turn of events. It was only once the details of the massacre and other atrocities began to be known that Congress took part in the investigations. The Satyagraha turned violent when Gandhi was arrested at Delhi and prevented from entering Punjab. European civilians were specifically targeted in Amritsar and Ahmedabad that included women too, killing five in the former and one in the latter. Christian missions were also attacked. Ex-soldiers took part in the violence and they might have joined in the disruption of railway network and cutting of telegraph lines which were strategies used to break the communication systems of the enemy during the war. With the arrest and deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal, the protest further intensified in Amritsar in which ten people were killed in police firing on 10 April 1919.

Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who took charge as the military chief, replacing the more pacific MacDonald was in fact born and brought up in Shimla. He was fluent in Hindustani. Desai alleges that Dyer turned up at Amritsar on his own volition. On 10 April 1919, five Europeans were lynched by the mob and British institutions torched. Dyer was provoked at the disregard and mockery exhibited by the people who even spat on the ground in contempt of the soldiers. He wanted to punish the people for these slights and to set an example by which Indians would be morally pinned down. On 12 April, a meeting of the protestors decided to continue the civil shutdown demanding the release of Kitchlew and Satyapal. It also decided to convene a gathering at Jallianwala Bagh under the chair of Lala Kanhya Lal, a 75-year old pleader. The author goes on to suggest that Dyer persuaded a governmentspy to fix the time and venue so that he can inflict maximum intensity punishment since the Bagh is known to have only a single point for entry and exit.

What was on the agenda of the ill-fated meeting in the Bagh that was convened in violation of clear injunctions banning any public gathering of more than four persons? This was held to reassure the families of those arrested that they had the support of the inhabitants of Amritsar and that the anti-Rowlatt Act agitation would continue. On hindsight, it appears that the risk was not worth the benefits, but of course, the organizers had no means to guess the outcome beforehand as Dyer was so unpredictable. The authorities did not take any step to stop the meeting or to physically obstruct the paths. Hundreds of uniformed force was nearby, but no notices were served. A crier had proclaimed the notice of ban on meeting earlier, but it was not done in the Bagh area. Many people took their children to the meeting place as it was not thought to be of any danger and the day being the occasion of Baisakhi festival. Dyer’s massacre of the innocent people, including children, has no parallel in civilized history. For Dyer, it was not a murderous attack on defenceless people as he assumed that all the assembled was guilty of assault on the whites and it was a state of war.

If the shooting was brutal enough, its aftermath was even more horrific. After his action in the Bagh, Dyer and his team left the site, leaving the dead and wounded on the ground. Curfew was in place, so people could not move in the streets. The massacre occurred at around 4.30 pm, but some relief came only between 6 and 8 pm, when shooting orders were temporarily relaxed. Many of the wounded were left to cry in pain the whole night and several people simply bled to death. Relatives who came late to the maidan had to stay with the corpses the entire night, steeling their mind to remain deaf to the pitiful entreaties of the dying. Most of the survivors wanted to keep their presence in the Bagh a secret. Even if badly injured or mentally stressed, they didn’t go to hospitals fearing reprisals. This influenced the official death count to tilt to the lower side, which obviously didn’t include hundreds of unreported deaths. The tally of fatalities was taken only in August, four months later, and it was not until November 1919 that news of the shocking event came to be widely known as the public hearing of the Hunter Committee and Congress sub-committee started taking evidence. The organizers and the Congress party simply left the protestors to their fate. Motilal Nehru, who was in the Congress committee, wrote to his son Jawaharlal at the end of June 1919 – two months after the incident – that ‘he had seen badly decomposed bodies floating in the Jallianwala Bagh well’ (p.90). This shows that the organizers had not even bothered to properly dispose of the dead bodies even after martial law was revoked. The humiliating decrees passed by the military administrators were carefully selected to treat Indians in the most undignified manner. Crawling order was enforced in a street where a British woman missionary was assaulted. Lawyers who have been in the forefront of the Satyagraha were appointed as ‘special constables’ to maintain peace and order. Their duties involved lifting of chairs and tables and saluting the British officials irrespective of their rank.

The book presents some glimpses of shocking Indian apathy to the massacre and its perpetrators. Dyer had taken along only Indian troops, 25 Gurkhas and 25 Balochis, as he wanted to keep the blame away from British soldiers. Expecting a hand-to-hand combat if the crowd rushed at them, another 40 Gurkhas were armed only with khukris. In spite of his carnage, Dyer got himself declared as an ‘honorary Sikh’ soon after at the Golden Temple and Captain Doveton who shot a number of people in Kasur had verses composed in his favour by a Muslim poet (p.180). The author wisely does not elaborate on these, but leaves it with that single comment. It was a time of Hindu-Muslim unity since the Muslims were angry at the ill-treatment of the Sultan of Turkey, who was also the Caliph of Islam, at the hands of the British. Their bone of contention with the colonial power was due to this Turkish issue. The so-called ‘unity’ included hollow ceremonies such as drinking from the same water pot and entry into each other’s places of worship. It lasted only a few months. This book plays down the violence the protestors freely indulged in. The Hunter Committee notes that ‘low-class people, sweepers and skin-dyers etc’ were in the forefront of the processions, but Desai deems this to be showing ‘how deeply anti-Rowlatt Act agitation was taken up by the people’ (p.176).

The aftereffects of Jallianwala Bagh were anti-climactic. Gandhi did not pursue Satyagraha in Punjab and it simply fizzled out. Hunter Committee just censured Dyer, but this forced his promotion as head of a division to be revoked next year. He resigned in protest, but a large sum was collected in England through subscriptions for his benefit. Rowlatt Acts were never implemented. Accepting the reports of the Repressive Laws Committee, the act was repealed in 1922.

No large-scale view of India in the immediate aftermath of the First World War is given in the book. The narrative begins only on 10 April 1919, three days before the massacre, and the reasons which forced the government to bring in Rowlatt Act are not elucidated. Desai has extensively used Indian sources in the forceful arguments and presents a thoroughly one-sided version of events. Some of the blanket accusations are not substantiated with facts. She dispels some popular myths about the incident. There were few outsiders attending the meeting on account of the restrictions in place on movement. People did not jump into the well, but accidentally fell into it as it did not have a rim in those days. And, there were no women victims involved. There are no index and bibliography. Interested readers can take down the book titles referred in the foot notes.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Monday, December 23, 2019

Indica




Title: Indica – A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent
Author: Pranay Lal
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9788184007572
Pages: 468

We have come across many ‘histories’ of India. Some will cover the British period, some would include the Mughals too and a few might cover everything from the Indus civilization. Beyond a few centuries, such narratives are constrained in scope by current political boundaries. Any meaningful exposition of the story of India prior to 1947 must include those events occurred within the present frontiers of Pakistan to be of relevance and objectivity. Natural history, on the other hand, quite freely does away with political boundaries conjured up in the twentieth century. The origin and development of the flora and fauna, of continents, mountain ranges and geography in general is a truly global study. With this in the background, I was a little surprised at the boldness in the book’s subtitle ‘a deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent’. Anyhow, this book turned out to be an informatively extravagant affair in which India acts as the pivot of the narrative. It does not mean that India was something special or different from others. Going by the author’s scientific outlook, the converse is vindicated in this book, that is, India was just like any other landmass across the globe and it was pure chance that lifeforms emerged and evolved here, just like anywhere in the world. Whatever little speciality it can claim is the speed – in geological terms – with which it shot through the ocean and hit the Eurasian landmass to make the Himalayas. Pranay Lal begins the story at the beginning of it all. He addresses the question of how the earth came into being and how rocks, continents and lifeforms emerged. Each topic is made richer by recounting examples from India. In that sense, this book is a great motivator for people who want to travel and explore the country. The author is a biochemist and an artist who works in public health and environment. He has extensive publications in the areas of public health, global trade, ecology and mysterious fevers.

As noted above, the book is dedicated to India. It points out examples and comparisons of the theories that explain geographical and biological concepts. The Pranhita-Godavari Valley is truly remarkable for it holds within it the entire spectrum of vertebrates from primitive fish and early amphibians to the first dinosaurs and early mammals. Even hand tools made by early humans have been discovered here. The author brings in objects and ideas familiar to Indian readers to express notions of natural science. The early lungfish that stepped on land is said to have grown to the size of a scooter or an auto-rickshaw. The comparison of the physical dimensions of a creature to the two most popular kinds of vehicles prevalent in India sets the tone of the discussion. It lists out the remnant fossils of sea life and creatures found in the Himalayas and Rajasthan and the strange tectonic events that has the immense power to elevate an ocean floor to a continent or transform a dried-up lake to a plateau.

Travellers to Hampi in Karnataka are captivated by the strange assortment of all types of volcanic rocks found in large quantities there. Boulders are found at other places in the Deccan too. Lal discloses the profound events that caused this massive upheaval. Around 68 million years ago, one of the most massive volcanic eruptions occurred in the Indian Ocean and continued for four million years. This happened near the present location of the Reunion Islands and just when the Indian subcontinent was moving above the spot on its onward journey to collide with Asia. This had a huge role in shaping the landscape and life in Greater India. There was a series of eruptions and the second one lasted a million years and produced nearly eighty per cent of all the lava released. It decimated almost all large animals on land, most large reptiles and many fish in the seas. Noxious gases cut off sun's rays and aggravated extinction on a planetary scale. Here, the author follows a slightly different argument than the established repertoire by hinting that this event had caused the extinction of dinosaurs in the world. He accepts that ‘a 5 to 15 km-sized meteor struck the earth at Chicxulub in the Gulf of Mexico close on the heels of the second eruption’. But the meteor impact is given only secondary importance. The Deccan eruptions were the greatest lava floods in earth’s history. The exposed lava flow in India covers an astounding area of 500,000 sq.km (roughly the size of Spain). It is only natural to expect that such a cataclysmic event will engender persistent acid rain and change of climate which would spell doom for the big animals.

This book is a general history of the world till the time the earliest Homo sapiens arrived in India on their exodus from Africa. It identifies three triggers that catalyzed the evolution of ape-like ancestors into full-fledged hominins. They are the ability to walk on two legs; a constantly growing brain and intelligence which led them to make tools, tame fire and cook meat. Homo erectus was the most prolific ancestor of humans, but very few fossils of them have been found so far in India and no complete skeleton has been found anywhere in the world. It is interesting to note that the largest ape ever walked on earth and which is supposed to have lived between 9 million and 120,000 years ago, was a ‘native’ of India. This giant ape is named Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, as its fossil was found from Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh. It used to have a height of three meters and though believed to have gone extinct 120,000 years ago, is there any chance that a few of them might still be alive and form the basis of the legend of yati, a large snowman believed by some to live in the inaccessible Himalayan mountains? The author, however, does not mention this probably because even the slightest reference to yati may take away the sheen of scientific rigour from the book. This book gives an ingenious tip to measure variations in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by counting the stomata in leaves collected over a number of years. This is very helpful for aficionados and is delightfully simple.

Pranay Lal claims that this book is the culmination of over twenty years of research, travel, conversations, interviews and a lifetime awe of nature. Every page in the book attests to this proclamation. It has the ordinary reader in mind when it explains the way in which scientific names are coined. The parts in the nomenclature are split and the Greek words elucidated. For example, the ape named Shivapithecus has the first part of its name ‘Shiva’ derived from Sivalik Hills which was its habitat and ‘pithecus’ means ape. The copy I had read was a hardback with very fine quality pages and excellent colour photographs lavishly thrown in. Naturally, this makes the book somewhat heavy. Indica is a book which is a must-have for all science enthusiasts who also love India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Thursday, December 19, 2019

How to be a Dictator




Title: How to be a Dictator – The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century
Author: Frank Dikotter
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2019 (First)
ISBN: 9781526618740
Pages: 275

The model of political organisation changed from kingdoms to nation states after the French revolution. That upheaval established the principle that sovereign rights were vested in the people and not God, and through them, their vicegerents on earth – the kings. Still, dictatorship and despotism did not vanish from the face of the globe as a result. The modern dictator is now burdened with the requirement to create the illusion of popular support. A dictator must instil fear in his people, but if he manages to obtain acclaim from them, he will probably survive longer. This book illustrates the lives of eight dictators of the twentieth century. Mussolini of Italy, Hitler of Germany, Stalin of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong of China, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Francois Duvalier of Haiti, Nikolai Ceausescu of Romania and Mengistu of Ethiopia are those eight figures who stunned the sensibilities of civilized society. Of these, five trumpeted communism, one Nazism, one Fascism, and one was not affiliated to any ideology. Frank Dikotter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. He has published a dozen books and lives in Hong Kong as a professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006.

Dictators are hoisted on the people first by exploiting their susceptibility to hero worship or outrage at real for imagined injustice. In communist regimes there was an added need for some sort of traditional resonance. Few people in predominantly rural countries like Russia, China or Korea understood Marxism-Leninism. Appeals to the leader as some sort of a holy figure were more successful than the abstract political philosophy of dialectical materialism that a largely illiterate population in the countryside found hard to comprehend. The dictator and his people are forced to be good actors. The leader needs to carefully rehearse his movements and take up appearances like caressing children or console the grieving. The people, on the other hand, have to smile on command, parrot the party line, shout slogans and salute their leader.

Dikotter notes that keeping up appearances constituted a large chunk of the dictator’s working time. Every public appearance of Mussolini was meticulously stage managed. Large crowds were needed to project the idea of consent of the people. In Mussolini’s Italy, schools and shops were closed while Fascist youth and party activists recruited from surrounding regions poured into the square from chartered buses. The author does not mention Indira Gandhi and the Emergency years in the narration because what he was after were full-time dictators. But readers are subconsciously reminded about the hordes of party workers and enthusiasts carted off to the prime minister's residence by Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie to acclaim loud cheers for Indira Gandhi and her brutal reign during the Emergency. There were wide differences in personal appearance from one tyrant to the other. Unlike Mussolini, Hitler shunned photographs. Like the former, he too was short-sighted, but never wore his spectacles in public. Adulation from other great leaders fertilized the official image-building exercise. Sometimes, the gullible among them fell for their host’s charms. Gandhi visited Mussolini during his autocratic rule and pronounced him ‘one of the great statesmen of the time’.

The book identifies a few personal virtues every dictator must possess in order to stay afloat. Hitler was an astute judge of character of those who met him. He could size up a person at first glance almost like an animal picking up a scent. He then pitted the followers against each other and discarded the critics as soon as they were no longer of use. Stalin showed concern for the people around him, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, remembering their names and past conversations. This translated to some amount of genuine admiration from the public. Birthday wishes to Stalin were portrayed as an ‘expression of devotion from millions of workers everywhere to the idea of the proletarian revolution’. Mengistu was blessed with an unusually good memory, never forgetting a face. He had an enormous appetite for work, preparing for every meeting in meticulous detail. Dictators were not uniform in their external projection. Hitler was loath to the idea of his statues being erected in prominent places. He insisted that statues and monuments be reserved for the great historical figures of the past, while he was a leader of the future. Stalin rarely appeared in newsreels and never spoke in public. Not once had his voice been heard over the radio. Mao had a good command over language and his speeches and essays thrilled party workers by inventive phrases like ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’, ‘power comes through the barrel of a gun’, and ‘great leap forward’. He appeared to his subjects as kindly, simple and modest who was no dictator despite wielding huge power.

Dikotter observes that generally, dictators who hold the reins for a long time tend to discard or transform the ideology that brought them to power and try to remould it in their likeness. The Chinese Communist party accepted Mao Zedong Thought as its official creed, the study of which became compulsory, as adults from all walks of life had to go back to classrooms, poring over official textbooks to learn the new orthodoxy. This was surprisingly bigoted and divisive as was Marxian theory in general. The Mao cult condemned a range of objects as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’. The blacklist expanded over time, turning the people to the only politically safe commodities available, such as Mao’s photos, badges, posters and books that became all the rage as entire branches of industry were converted to produce cult objects. The quantity of plastic needed for the Little Red Book alone reached 4000 tons by 1968. Kim Il-sung counted on fear which accompanied his cult. Even the slightest sign of disrespect towards the ‘Great Leader’ was harshly punished. One victim was sentenced to five years for wrapping a book in a newspaper containing a photograph of Kim.

The misery of daily life of the people is reflected in the book, but more stress should have been given on it. Every aspect of routine life fell under the control of the one-party state which took over everything from the education system down to the local sports club. The dictator took credit for whatever good policies implemented by the state machinery while laying the blame for everything which went wrong at his subordinates’ doors. This deflected disillusionment on to the party or bureaucracy and the leader was saved the trouble. People exclaimed respectful shouts of disaffection such as ‘if only Hitler knew’, or ‘if only Mao knew’, while the spider sitting at the centre of the web learned about the slightest flutter in the periphery. Absolute obedience to the leader was mandated by law but such obsequiousness was attributed to ideology. Stalin arrested people he wanted purged by labelling them as ‘left opportunists or right deviators’.

The book provides a memorably pleasant experience for readers. Dikotter’s style is sharp and straightforward. This book could have been expanded a little by including more dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro or Zia ul-Haq. As of now, the content is slightly dated as the last dictatorship narrated in the book went down more than two decades ago and there is no treatment on how a dictator can suppress information in the new connected world. Besides, the author does not handle the question of what maintained a dictator at the helm for long. It is not exactly the personality cult as mentioned in the subtitle. In the case of Duvalier, there was no official ideology, no all-encompassing party nor any attempt to institute thought-control even though dissent was prohibited. This cements the deduction that dictatorship is an aspect of polity that offer myriad faces just like any other human venture.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star