The Truth About Amritsar

The Amritsar Massacre is one of those historical events about which I knew only the bare facts: British colonial troops massacred unarmed Indian civilians in a public garden.

After reading Kim Wagner’s detailed history, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre, I now understand it in a deeper way: not just as a horrific and shameful event, but as part of a larger project of colonial violence.

What I like about the book is that Wagner tries to understand the real motives of General Dyer, who ordered and supervised the massacre, and of the other colonial administrators who participated or contributed. It’s easy to view men like Dyer as cartoon villains, but doing so lets the British Empire off the hook. It turns Dyer into an aberration, someone whose inexplicable brutality gave a bad name to an otherwise benevolent venture. That’s been a very prominent narrative about Amritsar in Britain for the last hundred years.

By seeking to understand Dyer, Wagner does not seek to excuse or justify his actions. The effect, instead, is to reach a deeper understanding of how the British Empire operated, how such vastly outnumbered colonisers were able to maintain power for so long over so many distant lands. And it has a lot to tell us about how state power still operates today.

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.