Except in the strict pages of history, memorable events stand in no need of memorable phrases .Jorge Luis Borges
13 April, 1919, Baisakhi Day, Amritsar
HOW can one presume to know the horror? A city agitating against an oppressive Rowlatt Act, deprived of water and electricity for days. 20,000 citizens, an eighth of the entire population of the town, gather in protest at Jallianwala Bagh. "The term Bagh is a misnomer," says the Congress Report of 1919. "It is a wasteland...an irregular quadrangle...enclosed by the back walls of the houses surrounding it. The main entrance is a narrow passage...there are no other regular entrances. The ground at the entrance is at an elevation, remarkably fit for posting soldiers and firing into a crowd in front. When, therefore, General Dyer marched into the Bagh with his 90 soldiers, the crowd had no easy exit."
Dyers rifles pumped 1,650 rounds into the unarmed gathering, directing the fire upon places where the crowd was thickest because the general had made up his mind "to punish them for having assembled". He stopped firing only when the ammunition ran out. "If I fired a little, I should be wrong in firing at all." Ten minutes, six hundred seconds, 1,650 bullets, a thousand dead. If the number was a thousand and not more, the fault was not his. On that day, Jallianwala Bagh became inseparably coupled with the term massacre.
When Mahatma Gandhi visited Jallianwala Bagh a few months later, he found it wanting in visual aesthetics. "It is not a garden but a rubbish dump...people throw refuse into it from their rear windows. There flowed in this Bagh a river of blood, the blood of innocent people. Because of this the place has become sanctified." He felt the need for "a memorial column which, without expressing ill will to anyone, will remind us of the sacrifices, through death, of the inno-cent...and thus convert the heap of refuse which today goes under the name of a garden into a garden indeed,...fully worthy of India."
The massacre slipped easily into the mainstream narrative of the freedom struggle. The victims of imperialist violence had been unarmed Indians. Innocent in their passivity. It was the shifting focus of the proposed monument that didnt quite gel. "The problem that faces the country today is what kind of memorial to erect on the ground, to sanctify
which, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs mingled their blood. The three communities, instead of being bound in a bond of amity and love, are, to all appearances, at war with one another, and the nation is at a loss as to how to utilise the memorial fund."Mahatma Gandhi in his Experiments with Truth. The memorial had already metamorphosed from being one to remember the innocent dead to being one that signi-fied intercommunal harmony. The religion of the protesters who died seeking water, electricity and freedom had become as relevant as the event.
Jallianwala Bagh today is a garden. A bullet would probably not find a clear path to the walls of the houses at the other end. Trees, fountains and decorative hedges break the view. Some of the old bullet marks are still there; some have been repaired. To stop the seepage in the homes, perhaps. Children play on the lawns in the evening, their peals of laughter echoing a staccato that was heard on that hour many years ago. The memorial column does not carry the names of the dead. It does not bear ill will to anyone.
4 February 1922, Bazaar Day, Chauri Chaura
HOW can one quantify the influence of a Mahatma in the lives of humble folk? After a cross-country tour to launch his non-cooperation movement,came Gandhiji to be omnipresent in peasant India. In Chauri Chaura, elders recall that his visit in 1921 was heralded by celestial apparitions...the village folk believed that shrubs would shoot up into trees upon his arrival. The quest for Swaraj had charged nationalist volunteers to belittle the capacity of district jails, and the numerical strength of these swayam sevaks in a particular locality came to be regarded as a measure of its nationalist spirit.
On that bazaar day, a strong group of volunteers marched purposefully towards the Mundera bazaar with the dual motive of challenging (en route) the authority of the police, and then picketing the fish, meat, and liquor shops in the market. The latter motive being their peculiar, arguably relevant, local extrapolation of the Gandhian ideal. The provocative confrontation turned violent; the small clutch of policemen fired at the surging picketers and withdrew into the thana; the nationalists locked them up inside, poured oil on the building, and lit it to the victory cry of "Long Live Mahatma Gandhi." The police post was gutted, and the 23 policemen inside were burnt to death. The satya-grahis had turned violent; the first nationalist "riot" had taken place. The district Congress leaders hastily disbanded the volunteer groups, and a shaken Mahatma Gandhi called off the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Unlike Jallianwala Bagh, Mahatma Gandhi didnt visit the site of the carnage. Instead, he wrote an essay titled The Crime of Chauri Chaura in which he hoped "that the workers in Gorakhpur district would leave no stone unturned to find out the evil-doers and urge them to deliver themselves into custody." The sessions judge of Gorakhpur passed the death sentence on each and every proven member of the violent crowd. The high court upheld the hanging of the ringleaders. Nineteen were eventually hanged, and 110 were transported for life. There was no call for a memorial to be built for the Hindus and Muslims who were hanged. The event, regarded as an aberration in the Gandhian way, simply had to be forgotten. It was the British who built a memorial to the 23 torched policemen at the site of the reconstructed thana.
Purged from nationalist discourse, the Chauri Chaura episode continued to simmer in the lives of its surviving protagonists. Before the event they had been as acceptable as any other volunteer who had signed the pledge form; after the event they had found themselves forsaken as criminals. "...whoever fought against Imperialism and for Swaraj, be he right or wrong, violent or non-violent, the goal is the same," wrote an aggrieved Dwarka Gosain from jail after 15 years of imprisonment. Nationalist tracts disagreed. Shaanti aur ashanti do aise prayog hain jo saath saath nahin chal sakte. On Independence Day in 1947, the inscription on the police memorial was gouged out. By the twenty-fifth year of the countrys Independence, the residents of Chauri Chaura decided that they had waited long enough for national acceptance and raised their own nameless "private memorial". A decade later, the state relented and began building one that was official. Today a column of white marble soars above the neighbouring hutments, inscribed with the 19 names of the hanged volunteers of Chauri Chaura. For good measure, the mutilated police memorial has been appropriated by the nation as well. Also dubbed a Shaheed Smarak after a facelift, it now carries the names of the 23 burnt policemen alongwith the couplet:Shaheedon ki chitaon par lagenge har baras mele/Watan pe mitne valon ka yahi bas ik nishaan hoga. High on the obelisk runs the slogan Jai Hind. Both the volunteers and the policemen, in post-colonial hindsight, have been proclaimed as martyrs.
Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad
HOW does one put a date to this place, the chosen home of the Mahatma, the nerve centre of Indias Freedom Movement? There was no one particular day on which a specific event took place in this simple retreat to etch a memory. No massacre, no riot; not a bullet fired, not a body felled. Events happened elsewhere; it was their lessons that mattered here. History marched out of this sanctum. "This spot was witness to Gandhijis many tribulations, the dilemmas he pondered over and the important decisions he made." Sanctified not by blood, but by the presence of the Mahatma.
How does one put a date on a life?
His cottage is preserved unchanged, beautiful as it was. The few chosen by him as companions in religious community living do not live here anymore. A library documents the man.
But there were other men and women with lives less remarkable who did shed blood. They had simple homes too, which were not preserved but pillaged. They were not leaders, they were the led. Pitchforked by the decisions of greater men, they shared trauma, not companionship. Their individual histories are dead ends, too insignificant to be documented; they are remembered only in their numbers, as a suffering mass in the collective upheaval that marked the making of two nations. When Freedom came, they didnt recognise it. What kind of shaft would the nation wish to make for them?
The lives of lesser men are still recounted when old folk sometimes meet, witnesses to the many unwritten histories in the gaining of freedom. Tales that cut and mark and burn each time they are retold. With the passing of this generation will die the ritual of the telling and retelling of events chis-elled in memory. What will remain are the smooth marble-tiled columns that carry smooth PWD histories. A wish of a garden worthy of this nation will then be fulfilled.
