Public Order and Popular Protest in Colonial India: Remembering Jallianwala Bagh Massacre after a Century

02 July 2020, Version 1
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press at the time of posting.

Abstract

This working paper reconstructs the unfolding of events in India in March-April 1919 that led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It evaluates the events and administrative and military response from a legal history perspective. It also argues that Jallianwala Bagh massacre was not a unique event in itself but was the culmination of colonial rage against a broader anti-colonial mobilisation.

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Comment number 1, Eduardo Rueda Vasquez: Jul 03, 2020, 13:37

I have seen the recreated scene in the movie GHANDI, but reading your masterful historic paper of the event, explains very well the antecedents and causes. For the first time I have a good grasp of what was portrayed in just a few minutes in the movie. FYI, 29 years later, during another grim April, another continent, another repressive assassination after the protest of banana workers massacre as described in the novel ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and later the assassination of their political leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, triggered a civil war which still rages after 72 years, but that the whole world have totally ignored in the background of World War II, Korea War (where ironically some of these workers participated and died), Viet Nam War, Gulf War I, Gulf War II, Global War Against Terrorism, etc. (where ironically again, the descendants of those workers, children and grandchildren have participated) Now we are involved in a global war against an invisible enemy, which may affect directly and indirectly everybody on earth, yet no "Manhattan global project" is planned or put into effect, to counter and possibly stop similar pandemics that lurk in the horizon. Thank you