Jallianwala Bagh, 13 April 1919: Ten Minutes, 1,650 Bullets, and the Revenge That Took 21 Years

Sunday 13 April 1919 was Baisakhi, the harvest festival, and Amritsar was full. Families had come in from the villages to visit the Golden Temple and the cattle fair. In the afternoon, thousands drifted into Jallianwala Bagh, a big walled garden a few minutes’ walk from the temple, where a political meeting was being held. Many had no idea that public gatherings had been banned.

Just after 5 pm, an army officer named Reginald Dyer arrived with about 50 riflemen and 40 more Gurkhas armed only with knives. His armoured cars could not fit through the narrow entrance. He placed his soldiers at the main way in, the only easy way out.

About thirty seconds after he entered, without any warning or order to leave, he told them to fire.

The soldiers fired for about ten minutes. They fired 1,650 rounds, about 33 bullets each. People ran for the walls, tried to climb them, crushed each other at the narrow exits. Many were shot in the back as they ran. Others jumped into the well in the garden.

When the soldiers ran low on ammunition, Dyer marched them out. He did not count the dead. He did not send help for the wounded. He had already imposed an 8 pm curfew on the city, so families could not come to carry their people home. The wounded lay in the garden all night.

Later, asked whether it had been his job to help them, he answered that it was not.

No, certainly not. It was not my job.

The massacre did not come out of nowhere. In March 1919, Britain passed the Rowlatt Act, which allowed Indians to be detained without trial for up to two years. Gandhi called for strikes, and Punjab, ruled by the hardline Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer, became the centre of the protests.

On 10 April, two popular Amritsar leaders, Dr Satyapal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, were arrested and sent away. Crowds protested, troops fired and killed about 20 people, and in the riots that followed five Europeans were killed. A mission-school teacher, Marcella Sherwood, was beaten and left for dead; a Hindu family rescued her. Dyer arrived the next day.

After the massacre came martial law, declared on 15 April and backdated to 30 March. In Amritsar, Dyer issued his notorious crawling order: Indians using the lane where Marcella Sherwood had been attacked had to crawl along it on their bellies. People were publicly flogged. Across Punjab, 852 people were court-martialled; 108 were sentenced to death and 18 hanged. In Gujranwala, aircraft dropped bombs on rioters.

Official figures at first spoke of about 200 dead at the Bagh. News of the scale of the killing took months to reach the rest of the world.

Under pressure, the government set up an inquiry led by Lord Hunter. In November 1919, Dyer was questioned in Lahore, and his answers shocked even his defenders. He said he could probably have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back and laughed at him. Asked if he would have used machine guns had he got them inside, he said he probably would have.

The committee’s British majority found that he had been wrong to fire without warning and to keep firing as the crowd fled, and called it a mistaken conception of duty. The three Indian members wrote a separate, harsher report. Dyer was relieved of his command in March 1920 and retired as a colonel. O’Dwyer was not censured.

The Indian National Congress held its own inquiry, chaired by Gandhi, whose secretary interviewed hundreds of survivors. It estimated about 1,000 dead.

Call it what you like. I was going to punish them.

In Britain, the debate split the country. In the House of Commons on 8 July 1920, Winston Churchill called the shooting a monstrous event, and MPs backed the government’s handling of Dyer. But two weeks later, the House of Lords voted 129 to 86 that Dyer had been treated unjustly.

The Morning Post newspaper opened a fund for him under the headline The Man Who Saved India. It raised more than £26,000, a fortune at the time; Rudyard Kipling gave £10. Dyer was never given another command. He died in England in 1927, after a series of strokes.

In India, the massacre changed everything. On 31 May 1919, Rabindranath Tagore wrote to the Viceroy giving up the knighthood Britain had given him, saying such honours only made the shame more glaring. A member of the Viceroy’s own council, C. Sankaran Nair, resigned.

Gandhi, who had once believed in working with Britain, turned against it. In August 1920 he returned his medals, including the Kaisar-i-Hind, and launched the Non-Cooperation Movement. A boy from Lyallpur district named Bhagat Singh, aged 11, visited the Bagh soon after and took home a bottle of soil soaked in blood.

Historians often call Jallianwala Bagh the moment Britain lost its moral claim to rule India.

Udham Singh was born Sher Singh in Sunam in 1899 and raised in Amritsar’s Central Khalsa Orphanage. On 13 March 1940, more than 20 years after the massacre, he walked into a meeting at Caxton Hall in London and shot Michael O’Dwyer dead. He wounded three other British officials.

In custody, he called himself Ram Mohammad Singh Azad: a Hindu name, a Muslim name, a Sikh name, and the word for free. At his trial at the Old Bailey he said he was not afraid to die. He was hanged at Pentonville prison on 31 July 1940. In 1974 his remains were brought back to India, and an urn of his ashes is kept at the Bagh.

I am not afraid to die.

The site was bought for the nation in 1923, and the Flame of Liberty memorial, designed by the American architect Benjamin Polk, was opened by President Rajendra Prasad on 13 April 1961. Thirty-six bullet marks are still preserved in one wall, and the Martyrs’ Well is behind a clear barrier.

A renovation opened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in August 2021 added galleries, a sound-and-light show and a statue of Udham Singh, and covered the narrow entrance lane in murals. Critics, including historian Kim Wagner and Rahul Gandhi, said it erased the feel of the place where people had been trapped.

Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham (2021), with Vicky Kaushal, won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and recreated the massacre in harrowing detail. Kesari Chapter 2 (2025), with Akshay Kumar as C. Sankaran Nair, invents a courtroom case against Dyer; the real case was O’Dwyer’s libel suit against Nair in London in 1924, which Nair lost. The massacre also appears in Gandhi (1982), The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002), Rang De Basanti (2006) and Phillauri (2017). An eyewitness, the Punjabi writer Nanak Singh, wrote a long poem about it, Khooni Vaisakhi, which the British banned.

Jallianwala Bagh is often told as a story about one cruel man. The record tells a bigger one: a governor who approved it, a system that cheered it, a newspaper that raised a fortune for it, and a House of Lords that voted to defend it.

It is also a Punjabi story in the fullest sense. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims died together in that garden, and the man who answered it 21 years later chose to be called Ram Mohammad Singh Azad. If you visit the Bagh, look at the bullet marks in the wall. They are the best history lesson in Amritsar.