Chronological Index:

1 2 3 4 5

 Colonial repression

General Presentation

The British conquest of India was accompanied by large-scale violence, sometimes directed toward the Indian civilian population. During the colonial wars of conquest, there were mass killings, but few are remembered. This is not the case with those linked to what the British called the Sepoy Mutiny, known in India as the First Indian War of Independence. This event is also referred to as the Great Rising of 1857-58 and was the only serious challenge to British rule between 1765 and 1919. The Sepoy Mutiny / Great Rising was accompanied by small-scale killings of British military officers and civilians, including the famous massacre at Cawnpore, which gave rise to one of the main memory sites of the British Empire, as well as by large-scale killings of Indian civilians in the wake of the repression of that rising. There followed some sixty years of Pax Britannica, during which the lack of direct challenge to British domination suffices to explain the absence of major episodes of violence. After the First World War, as Indian nationalism became a mass phenomenon, colonial repression sometimes took a violent turn, and killings occurred, albeit on a limited scale compared to other colonial contexts.

Chronological sequence

Map of Punjab in 19491919, April 13: Demonstrations were staged all over India from April 6^th onwards in protest against the Rowlatt bills. British Judge Rowlatt had promulgated repressive laws curtailing civil liberties in India. In the Punjab, where anger against the colonial regime was particularly strong, demonstrations sometimes took a violent turn. In Amritsar, the Holy City of the Sikhs, however, a crowd of 20,000 including many women and children was demonstrating peacefully in an enclosure known as Jallianwalla Bagh, when British General Reginald Dyer ordered a platoon of soldiers of the Baluch Regiment to open fire on the unarmed crowd, killing some 380 and wounding 1,500. The general claimed to have wanted to “make an example” and thus prevent a new Mutiny. British settlers hailed him as a savior and the Indian public at large labeled him a mass murderer. Following Jallianwalla Bagh, as it later became known in India, Rabindranath Tagore, a poet winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, renounced his knighthood in a symbolic gesture of protest against this event*** (Draper, 1981).

1921, October 25: Northern Kerala Muslims, mostly peasants and agricultural laborers, known as Moplahs (Mapillai), rose against British rule and local Hindu landlords. Some landlords were killed by the insurgents, who also proceeded to forcibly convert some Hindus to Islam. This rising was linked to a general movement of Muslim protest against the British anti-Ottoman policy, known as the Khilafat agitation. Soldiers of the Dorset Regiment launched an assault on Melmuri, a locality where some rebels had entrenched themselves. As a consequence, 246 were killed including many women and children, who were not active rebels*** (Wood, 1987:210).

1921, November 10: A group of 100 Moplah prisoners being transported to a camp were asphyxiated in a railway car; 70 died. The administrator responsible for their death was later penalized, but not punished*** (Wood, 1987:205).

1925, May: At Neemuchana in Alwar state, a princely state of Northern India, the state police fired upon peasants protesting against an increase in land revenue. 156 died and 600 were injured*** (Sarkar, 1983:241).

1930, April 23: In Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Province (in present-day Pakistan), a demonstration protesting against the arrest of local Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as “the Frontier Gandhi,” turned violent and the army opened fire on the crowd. This demonstration was part of the Civil Disobedience movement launched by Gandhi, which otherwise remained largely non-violent. The Peshawar demonstration’s official death toll was 30, but an unofficial one estimated it at 200 to 250*** (Sarkar, 1983:288).

1942, August: Shortly after the launching by the Congress of the “Quit India” movement on August 8^th that demanded immediate independence, the British unleashed massive repressive operations, using 57 army battalions. The official death toll, mostly in Bihar and the Eastern United Provinces, was 1,060 demonstrators killed (as opposed to 63 policemen and a small number of military personnel), but unofficial estimates were higher (1,761 for Bihar alone according to a Congress source). In some places air power was used against crowds which mostly had crude weapons*** (Sarkar, 1983:394-404).

1 2 3 4 5