More Trouble than It Is Worth

On April 13, 1919, in the north Indian city of Amritsar, a senior British army officer named Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire into an unarmed crowd of Indian men, women, and children. General Dyer's brief was to impose order in the city, where violence had erupted in response to Mahatma Gandhi's call for nonviolent protest against the British, and where Indian agitators had brutally assaulted two English women. Dyer probably didn't know that the crowd, which had gathered at a large clearing in the congested old quarters of Amritsar, mostly consisted of peasants from nearby villages, who were in the city to celebrate Baisakhi (the festival of spring). What did seem clear to him was that these Indians had defied his ban on public meetings.

His soldiers lined up neatly and fired on the crowd without warning, for about ten minutes, until their ammunition was spent. Then Dyer marched them back, leaving about 400 men, women, and children dead and about four times as many wounded.

Brought before an official inquiry, Dyer claimed that "it was a horrible duty for me to perform. . . . I had to make up my mind that if I fired I must fire well and strong so that it would have its full effect."¹ Like many British people of his generation, he probably remembered well the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, when rebellious natives all across north India massacred British men, women, and children, and only prompt and severe British action—tens of thousands of Indians hanged, shot, or blown to pieces from the mouth of cannons—seem to have had saved India for the British.

Removed from active service, though not formally punished, Dyer returned to England, where he presented himself to the British public as the wronged savior of the British empire in India. He had good reasons to feel aggrieved. British officers in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Afghanistan were at that time using the harsher method of aerial bombing in order to suppress native uprisings—the method that, first tested upon colonized peoples, was used to terrorize civilian populations in Europe's next great war. Not surprisingly, Dyer found many sympathizers in England. The House of Lords passed a resolution commending him. Rudyard Kipling contributed to a fund organized by the Tory newspaper Morning Post, which fetched Dyer 26,000 pounds.

Schoolchildren in Britain today do not learn much about the British empire. The topic usually arouses embarrassment and unease among British people in their sixties and seventies. People old enough to remember the often violent anti-imperial movements of Asia and Africa, and the disastrous invasion of Suez in 1956, have also been the most vociferous critics of Tony Blair and his frequently expressed desire to rescue the apparently benighted peoples of Asia and Africa.²

Young, eager Western technocrats seeking to advance what they call free trade and democracy may not feel the need to consult the history of anti-imperialism and decolonization. But the peoples they wish to remake in their own image largely define themselves through that history. The massacre in Amritsar, which seems to have been largely forgotten in Britain, features conspicuously in history textbooks in India. Almost every school-going child learns about how the cruel General Dyer flogged Indians and forced them to crawl on their stomach after the massacre; how the killings galvanized the freedom struggle under Gandhi, how the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood in a stirring letter of protest to the British viceroy. For many Indians, who are unlikely to remember the British creation of a railroad and educational network across India, or even the millions killed in famines caused by inept British administrators, the moustachioed General Dyer remains the best-known representative of the foreign occupation that ended in 1947. This situation is unfair. But then nations, no less than empires, seem to need strong myths about themselves.

Recently, such nationalist mythmaking in postcolonial Asia and Africa has faced unexpected competition from imperial mythmaking in Britain and America. Public intellectuals as well as policy wonks seek to describe how...