Massacres through the ages: from 1919 to...

After Nellie, Delhi riots, the writer feels Tagore’s pain over Jallianwala Bagh slaughter

Mamoni Raisom Goswami - Its My Life

Illustration by Uday Deb The author recalls history’s gory chapters The pages of history are smeared with blood. The present just continues to flow in a continuous stream. I have seen blood on some of the worst killing fields in the country. I was there even before the blood had dried at Nellie, an obscure hamlet in Assam’s Morigaon district that became the graveyard of thousands of innocent people. I was there too — in riot-hit Delhi — after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In Nellie, an aged woman had disrobed completely in front of me to show the deep, raw gashes on her body — the result of some faceless, nameless attacker’s swings of the machete. In Delhi, at Jahangirpuri a Sikh gentleman had shown me his blood-soaked turban. For once, I was at a loss for words. But then, there was no need for me to say anything. Those faces, one wrinkled with wisdom, the other streaked with dried up tears, told their own stories. On February 21, 1998, I arrived at Jallianwala Bagh, the country’s most sacred massacre site. At one corner of the garden was a small room and from one of its walls was hanging a portrait of an old woman. Like the old woman of Nellie and the Sikh gentleman of Jahangirpuri, I could feel the presence of the old woman of Jallianwala Bagh, to tell me the ghastly story of that day — April 13, 1919. As I walked through a narrow corridor, I felt this was the same path through which thousands of men, women and children packed into the garden that fateful day. And this was the same route taken by Brig. Gen. Reginald Dyer and his 150-odd armed soldiers. The people were protesting against the notorious Rowlatt Act clamped by the British government on its colonies. A meeting was called to protest against the act. Official records show that six minutes before sundown, Gen. Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on the unarmed, innocent people. Humanity was gunned down by the barbaric British officer. The firing lasted for 10 to 15 minutes, until the soldiers ran out of ammunition. The toll stood at over 1,500, including a seven-week-old baby. On the outside wall of the small room was a framed copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to the Viceroy written on May 30, 1919, rejecting the knighthood conferred on him. “…And these are the reasons which have painfully compelled me to ask Your Excellency, with due deference and regret, to relieve me of my title of knighthood, which I had the honour to accept from His Majesty the King at the hands of your predecessor …” Standing in the garden of notoriety, I could feel the pain and anguish that must have coursed through Tagore’s veins many years ago.