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‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’:
THE AMRITSAR MASSACRE AND THE
*
SPECTACLE OF COLONIAL VIOLENCE

I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed and I consider this is
the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral, and
widespread effect it was my duty to produce, if I was to justify my action. If
more troops had been at hand the casualties would be greater in proportion.
It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a
sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who
were present but more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no
question of undue severity.1
This is how Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer explained the
reasoning behind his order to fire at point-blank range into a
large crowd of Indian civilians gathered in Amritsar, in the
Punjab province of India, in April 1919 (see Plate 1).
Britain had emerged victorious from the First World War only
to be plunged into a global crisis that radically transformed the
very nature of its empire. Unrest in India, Egypt, Ireland and
Mesopotamia, and the opening of the Third Anglo-Afghan
War, coincided with a period of profound international
destabilization. In India the continuation of repressive wartime
measures, coercive recruitment practices and economic hardship
caused widespread disillusionment among the population in
Punjab, many of whom had initially supported the British war
effort. In an attempt to stop the spread of nationalist protests and
curb Gandhi’s emergent mass movement, the British authorities
arrested and deported two local nationalist leaders from
Amritsar. This pre-emptive move on the part of the authorities
provoked extensive riots across the city, during which scores of

* This article has benefited from the comments and suggestions of numerous friends

and colleagues, including Mark Condos, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Saul Dubow, Julie
Hartley, Will Jackson, Colin Jones, Patrick Longson, Dane Kennedy, Susan
Pennybacker, John Pincince, Gavin Rand, Gajendra Singh and Martin Thomas.
Research for this article has been generously supported by the British Academy and
the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship Programme.
1 Brigadier-General R. E. H. Dyer to the General Staff, 25 Aug. 1919, in Disorders

Inquiry Committee, 1919–1920: Evidence, iii: Amritsar (Calcutta, 1920), 203. This is
usually referred to as the Hunter Committee Report.

Past and Present, no. 233 (Nov. 2016) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2016.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtw037
186 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
Indian protesters were shot down while five Europeans were
killed by angry crowds. Political meetings had been banned and

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an uneasy calm prevailed when, on the afternoon of Sunday 13
April, Dyer went to the walled enclosure known as Jallianwala
Bagh to disperse the mass meeting.2
Credited as the event that galvanized the first major anti-colonial
nationalist movement and inexorably set Indian nationalists,
including Gandhi, on the path towards independence, the
Amritsar massacre, however, remains poorly understood. Like
Sharpeville and Bloody Sunday, the event has become a byword
for colonial violence, usually encapsulated by formulaic reference
to the 379 civilians killed and more than twelve hundred wounded
by the 1,650 bullets fired by the colonial troops over the duration of
ten minutes.3 In the recent mammoth volume A World Connecting,
Charles S. Maier’s contribution simply lists the massacre among a
litany of European colonial conflicts of the early twentieth century,
describing how ‘General Reginald Dyer famously emptied his
machine guns against assembled Indians at Amritsar in 1919’.4
This invocation of the massacre merely as shorthand for colonial
brutality brings to mind Jordanna Bailkin’s poignant observation
that ‘there is nothing more banal about colonial projects than their
violence’. Making sense of colonial violence, however, is a different
matter, and this article seeks to understand its forms and functions
rather than, to use Bailkin’s words, ‘simply taking it for granted’.5

2 The most recent literature on the subject includes Derek Sayer, ‘British Reactions

to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past and Present, no. 131 (May 1991); Nasser
Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor,
2003); Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London, 2005);
Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London, 2010).
3 These are the official figures and contemporary Indian estimates are considerably

higher: see Correspondence between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for
India on the Report of Lord Hunter’s Committee (London, 1920); Report of the
Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress,
2 vols. (Lahore, 1920), i.
4 Charles S. Maier, ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood’, in Emily S.

Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 192.

Dyer did not in fact use his machine guns, nor did he ‘empty’ his ammunition;
these are just some of the oft-repeated misconceptions about the Amritsar
massacre. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton’s references to the massacre
elsewhere in the volume are rather more pertinent: see ‘Empires and the Reach of
the Global’, ibid., 309, 418.
5 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British

India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlviii, 2 (2006), 466.

1. A rather fanciful depiction of the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre as imagined by the German artist Eduard Thöny, who had just spent four
years producing anti-British propaganda cartoons. From Simplicissimus, 21 Jan. 1920, 615. Image courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library.
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188 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
The periodization of the Amritsar massacre can similarly be
said to have been taken for granted and, as indicated by the title

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of Alfred Draper’s popular account Amritsar: The Massacre that
Ended the Raj, the events at Jallianwala Bagh are commonly seen
to mark the beginning of the historical process that concluded
with Indian independence in 1947.6 Assumed to have been the
direct result of the global changes brought about by the First
World War, the massacre thus provides the starting point in
studies of decolonization that focus exclusively on the twentieth
century and privilege change over continuity. In his renowned
work on the ‘Wilsonian moment’, for instance, Erez Manela
includes a chapter entitled ‘From Paris to Amritsar’, implying a
more or less direct link between the Peace Conference held in
1919 and the events at Jallianwala Bagh, a connection that is
never substantiated.7 In such accounts, the causes behind the
massacre are identified exclusively in terms of short-term
factors unique to the world after 1918 as a particular historical
moment and shaped largely by events outside British India,
and therefore, ultimately, external to the dynamics of colonial
rule.8 While the ubiquity of violence as a central part of
the colonial order is explicitly acknowledged in recent
scholarship on decolonization, the periodization nevertheless
remains unchanged, and colonial violence is still framed by a
chronologically bounded argument.9
In the following, two distinct but interrelated points are made:
how to read colonial violence, and how to read a historical event in
6 Alfred Draper, Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj (London, 1981).
7 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International
Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007).
8 The suggestion that the Amritsar massacre was a direct result of the trauma

sustained by the British during the First World War must be dismissed out of hand:
see Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931
(Basingstoke, 2009), 64–5. For a more sophisticated argument, see Jon Lawrence,
‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post-First
World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, lxxv, 3 (Sept. 2003).
9 See, for instance, Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of

Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the
Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York, 2005); Benjamin
Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire
(Basingstoke, 2011); Martin Thomas, ‘Colonial Minds and Colonial Violence: The
Sétif Uprising and the Savage Economics of Colonialism’, in Martin Thomas (ed.),
The French Colonial Mind, 2 vols. (Lincoln, Nebr., 2011), ii; Martin Thomas, Violence
and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–
1940 (Cambridge, 2012).
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 189
the context of the longue durée. These points are connected, and
only by recognizing the extent to which an event such as the

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Amritsar massacre was produced by its historical precedents,
rather than just by historical contingencies, can we begin to
understand the meaning of its violence. Whereas most studies
of the massacre effectively focus on its aftermath — its political
impact and the public debates and legal issues it raised — this
article examines the structural dynamics of the event itself as a
particularly illuminating instance of colonial violence.
Understanding how colonial violence worked, or was believed
to work, as a technique of power goes to the very heart of recent
debates on the nature and legacies of imperialism.10
Demonstrations of violence were intrinsic to the colonial
encounter, not just in British India, but throughout the
European empires in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. By
examining the structural continuities of the Amritsar massacre,
this article asks us to re-envision in a novel fashion the way we
think about colonial violence across imperial formations.
The nature of colonial violence in the twentieth century was not
simply a function of, nor coterminous with, imperial decline after
1918 as Britain and other European powers sought to hold onto
their empires by all possible means. In the case of Amritsar, rather
than being the beginning of the end, as it were, the violence of the
massacre might be better understood as the final stage of a much
longer process. With the massacre bearing more than a passing
resemblance to a firing squad on a massive scale, the logic that
informed it harked back to the early days of the Raj and the
spectacles of public execution of which the British made such
widespread use in times of crisis. In a recent study of everyday
violence in British India, Elizabeth Kolsky has argued that
the history of violence in British India cannot be understood by traversing
from one cataclysmic event to the next, from the Battle of Plassey to the
Uprising of 1857 to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, as the micro-moments
betwixt and between these macro-events are where the violence central to
the workings of empire can be found.11

10 Niall Ferguson’s controversial Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London,

2003) has been followed by a spate of recent publications, including Kwasi Kwarteng,
Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (London, 2011); Jeremy Paxman,
Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (London, 2011); Richard Gott, Britain’s
Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London, 2012).
11 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of

Law (Cambridge, 2011), 2.

190 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
‘Traversing from one cataclysmic event to the next’ is
nevertheless exactly what this article proposes to do. While

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quotidian acts of violence may have defined the subaltern
experience of colonialism more generally, it is in the study of
crises that historians are offered a glimpse, however brief, of the
colonial state stripped bare and the demonstration of power
expressed in the pure form of brute force. It is, I suggest,
moments of acute vulnerability (real and imagined) that reveal
the inner workings of colonial rule, as the British in India enacted
extreme forms of violence, not merely to preserve law and order,
but to preserve their own lives.12

I
AMRITSAR REVISITED
Ever since Winston Churchill in 1920 proclaimed that the
Amritsar massacre was an isolated event, while Gandhi
argued instead that it was the function of the colonial ‘system’
itself, historians have struggled to make sense of Dyer’s
actions.13 Enjoying the staunch support of his superiors in the
Punjab administration, Dyer’s decision to fire was later
condemned by the British Indian government and he was
eventually dismissed from the army following the Hunter
Commission inquiry. The reception Dyer received upon his
return to the imperial metropole, however, revealed the
tension and political divides of post-war Britain. The
conservative newspaper the Morning Post famously organized
a subscription in support of the disgraced imperial soldier,
whom many regarded as a hero betrayed by liberal politicians.
Dyer’s dismissal was upheld by the House of Commons but,
notably, not by the House of Lords. Nigel Collett’s mammoth
biography of Dyer, The Butcher of Amritsar, which remains the
key work on the subject, constitutes perhaps the strongest
example of the ad hominem approach:
Dyer stands alone in modern British history. Nowhere in the world since
the Indian Mutiny of 1857 have the British turned such violence upon a
civilian population. Not since 1919 has anything approaching what he did
been repeated . . . It is therefore to his life that we must turn for an

12This is also the point cogently made by Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency.

13Hansard, 5th ser. (Commons), cxxxi, col. 1725 (8 July 1920); Sayer, ‘British
Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre’, 133.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 191
understanding of one of the most infamous events in Indian and British
history, and for an explanation of what it was that persuaded Dyer to act
as he did . . .14

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In his article on British responses to the massacre, Derek Sayer,
on the other hand, argues that the key to understanding the violence
may be found in the paternalism of British colonial discourse. Thus,
it was the place the local population occupied ‘within their rulers’
moral universe’ that explained how ‘they could be slaughtered for
moral effect’.15 While the emphasis on the role of the individual in
shaping events leaves room for the reputation of the empire to
remain largely untarnished, the structural interpretation identifies
violence as a central aspect of imperialism. For many Indians, then
as now, the Amritsar massacre revealed the true face of the
Raj, belying in the most dramatic way the expectations of
political reforms nurtured during the war.16 In nationalist
historiography and popular memory, General Dyer has thus
become little more than a synecdoche for the British empire, the
racial arrogance and callous brutality of which provides a jarring
contrast to Gandhi’s teaching of passive resistance and non-
violence.17 The pre-eminent Indian historian of the subject V. N.
Datta, for instance, argued that ‘it is obvious that Dyer was
primarily motivated by revenge’.18 In this intentionalist analysis,
the Amritsar massacre is reduced to a carefully orchestrated act of
vengeance and colonial violence defined by individualized emotions
as an erratic response to the heroism of nationalist protests.
The arguments that Dyer’s personality provided the key to his
actions, or that it was the colonial condition pure and simple that
caused the massacre, are nevertheless inadequate and ultimately
untenable when examining the Amritsar massacre. Dyer
14 Collett, Butcher of Amritsar, p. x.
15 Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre’, 163. Sayer was here
deliberately challenging the earlier sociological work of Helen Fein, who sought to
explain the events of 1919 by invoking a Durkheimian model of colonial society, with
‘class’ and ‘race’ as the sole determinants of conflict: see Helen Fein, Imperial Crime
and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919–1920
(Honolulu, 1977).
16 After independence in 1947, the Amritsar massacre was teleologically

refashioned as a key moment in the freedom struggle, and the official memorial
pays homage to nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and the sacrifice of the ‘martyrs’
killed at Jallianwala Bagh.
17 K. L. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh: A Critical Juncture in the Indian National

Movement’, Social Scientist, xxv, 1/2 (Jan.–Feb. 1997).

18 V. N. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh (Ludhiana, 1969), 168. See also Raja Ram, The

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: A Premeditated Plan (Chandigarh, 1969).

192 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
emphatically did not act alone, and he was not even the most
extreme among the British officials at Amritsar; compared to

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the proposed aerial bombardment of the city, including the
Golden Temple, his actions at Jallianwala Bagh seem positively
restrained.19 Furthermore, Dyer enjoyed widespread support
from a considerable section of the British in India, many, if not
most, of whom shared his views. The model of cultural
determinism is also not convincing: that the prevailing ideas of
paternalism and racial attitudes in British India shaped Dyer’s
actions should be self-evident, though that could be said of
most policies and practices within the empire, and thus
essentially lacks explanatory purchase. Though factually
accurate, the conventional account of the massacre, powerfully
depicted in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982), is in fact
analytically misleading and gives no clue to the motivation behind
Dyer’s actions beyond a vague impression of the colonial mindset
or the personal idiosyncrasies of the stone-faced general. Colonial
violence, in this view, is taken for granted, and as such requires no
explanation. Yet we cannot locate the causes of violence simply in
the circumstances of its enactment, and merely describing the
sequence of events leaves the erroneous impression that the
Amritsar massacre was simply a response to the threat posed by
Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement.
This inability to make adequate sense of the violence at
Amritsar, I argue, is based on the assumption that Dyer reacted
to the actual situation in front of him. When considering the
primary material, however, one cannot help but notice that the
British threat assessment and Dyer’s own accounts of the
situation bear little or no resemblance to the real circumstances
in Amritsar on 13 April. Considering that the unrest in Punjab
was at the heart of what has later been described as the ‘crisis of
empire’ — defined by the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the
‘Wilsonian moment’ and the spread of pan-Islamism and
Bolshevism — we might have expected Dyer and his fellow
officers to refer to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland or the
unrest in Egypt, which was unravelling at the same time.20 But
that did not happen, and the true nature of the challenge facing
19 Diary of Melicent Wathen, 1914–20, 177–9. Thanks to Roderick Wathen for

allowing me access to this unique material.

20 John Gallagher, ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922’, Modern

Asian Studies, xv (1981).

 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 193
the British in Punjab was apparently indiscernible to the men on
the ground. A few days before the disturbances in Amritsar,

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Deputy Commissioner Miles Irving warned that a serious
confrontation was coming but admitted that ‘Who are at the
bottom of this I cannot say’.21 Even the hartals, or general
strikes, called by Gandhi in protest against the Rowlatt Acts
were not acknowledged by Dyer, who explicitly stated that ‘I
should say that the acts that were now committed, that is, the
uprooting of railway lines, cutting of telegraph wires, murdering
of citizens, etc., was more than hartals, and the two had nothing to
do with each other’.22 In seeking to avoid what the anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins has described as ‘the ethnographic cardinal sin
of ignoring what the people found important’, we must therefore
follow Ann Stoler’s example and read the Amritsar massacre
‘along the archival grain’.23 According to Dyer, the crowd
gathered in Jallianwala Bagh were not simply in breach of the
prohibition against public meetings:
It is sufficient to say that I know that the final crisis had come, and that the
assembly was primarily of the same mobs which had murdered and looted
and burnt three days previously, and showed their truculence and
contempt of the troops during the intervening days, that it was a
deliberate challenge to the Government forces, and that if it were not
dispersed effectively, with sufficient impression upon the designs and
arrogance of the rebels and their followers we should be overwhelmed
during the night or the next day by a combination of the city gangs and
of the still more formidable multitude from the villages.24
The fact is that Amritsar had been quiet ever since the 10th, and
when Dyer entered Jallianwala Bagh three days later, there were
neither ‘rebels’ nor ‘multitudes from the villages’ ready to invade
the British lines. The anti-colonial violence of 1919 was certainly
brutal and explosive, but it was not the result of a conspiracy, nor
can it appropriately be characterized as a ‘rebellion’. Where
popular depictions show a peaceful crowd of locals quietly
listening to a political speech, however, Dyer instead perceived
21 Miles Irving to A. J. W. Kitchin, 8 Apr. 1919, in Disorders Inquiry Committee, vi:

Punjab Government and Sir Umar Hayat Khan (Calcutta, 1920), 3.

22 Testimony of Dyer, in Disorders Inquiry Committee, iii, 137.
23 Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and

Vice Versa (Chicago, 2004), 119; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Thinking
through Colonial Ontologies (Princeton, 2009). It may be noted that taking seriously the
perception and experience of one’s historical interlocutors need not entail an implicit
sympathy with, or prioritization of, such views. To understand is not to condone.
24 Army: Disturbances in the Punjab. Statement by Brig.-General R. E. H. Dyer, C.B. [3

July 1920] (London, 1920), 7.

194 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
a defiant and murderous mob, which had only days before run
rampant through Amritsar and which still had the blood of

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Englishmen on its hands. Acting upon the rumours of rebellion
throughout Punjab, which suggested that the British garrison at
Amritsar might be cut off, Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on
the crowd. If the forces being mobilized against the British at
Amritsar seemed to be hidden, the seriousness of the situation
was certainly not. According to Dyer, he felt himself to be
dealing with no mere local disturbance but a rebellion, which, whatever its
origin, was aiming at something wide reaching and vastly more serious than
local riots and looting . . . Amritsar was in fact the storm centre of a rebellion.
The whole Punjaub had its eyes on Amritsar, and the assembly of the crowd
that afternoon [at Jallianwala Bagh] was for all practical purposes a
declaration of war . . .25
Under such circumstances, the only appropriate response was
the use of force, and Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh reflected
commonly held sentiments among the British officers involved in
the suppression of the disturbances in 1919. In the colonial
capital, for instance, the senior officer commanding openly
stated that,
Composed as the crowd was of the scum of Delhi city, I am of firm opinion
that if they had got a bit more firing given them it would have done them a
world of good and their attitude would be much more amenable and
respectful, as force is the only thing that an Asiatic has any respect for.26
Dyer simply pursued this logic to its extreme conclusion, as he
made explicit when questioned by the Hunter Committee:
Q. I take it that your idea in taking that action was to strike terror?
A. Call it what you like. I was going to punish them. My idea from the
military point of view was to make a wide impression.
Q. To strike terror not only in the city of Amritsar, but throughout the
Punjab?
A. Yes, throughout the Punjab. I wanted to reduce their morale; the morale
of the rebels.
This was not, it might be added, simply a military action in
support of the civil authorities to disperse a riot, but a massacre
intended as punishment. Seeking to justify the notorious
‘crawling order’, which required Indians to drag themselves on
the ground along the street where the British missionary Miss
25 Ibid., 19.
26 ‘Written Statement by Brigadier-General D. H. Drake-Brockman, C.M.G.,
Commanding Delhi Brigade, Delhi, 16 Oct. 1919’, in Disorders Inquiry Committee, i:
Delhi (Calcutta, 1920), 172. Thanks to Mark Condos for pointing me to this
quotation.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 195
Sherwood had been attacked during the anti-British riots on 10
April, Dyer further explained that ‘My object was not merely to

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impress the inhabitants, but to appeal to their moral sense in a way
which I knew they would understand’.27 Accordingly, there was a
cultural specificity to the forms of punishment inflicted on the
local population by the British at Amritsar; the guilt of the
individuals was more or less irrelevant to the real purpose of the
spectacle of violence, namely, the performance of colonial power
pure and simple.
When questioned on his understanding of the concept of
‘rebellion’, Dyer explained to the Hunter Committee that ‘I
apprehended the danger of mutiny, loss of life, riot, bloodshed
and all that sort of thing’.28 Throughout his reports and
testimony, Dyer referred to the Indian rioters as ‘rebels’ but
occasionally slipped into a historically more specific language
that unmistakably invoked the Indian uprising, or ‘Mutiny’, of
1857. This crucial event had occurred some six decades prior to
the unrest at Amritsar, yet seemingly retained its relevance for
Dyer and other British officials in 1919. Irving, for instance,
argued that the prospect of Amritsar being invaded by
marauding villagers from the surrounding districts posed the
greatest danger during the unrest. In his judgement, ‘we should
have had a situation not paralleled since the Mutiny’. More or less
oblique references to the Indian uprising suffused the official
reports and testimonies elicited by the Hunter Committee: a
fact acknowledged in the final report.29 Miss Sherwood herself
stated that she was ‘convinced that there was a real rebellion in the
Punjab, and that General Dyer saved India and us from a
repetition of the miseries and cruelties of 1857’.30 This was not
just a colonial phenomenon: during the lengthy debates in the
House of Commons and the British press, politicians and
journalists of all leanings made reference to 1857.31
In order to understand a complex event such as the Amritsar
massacre, it is thus necessary to go beyond the conventional time
27 Army . . . Statement by Brig.-General R. E. H. Dyer, C.B., 17.
28 Testimony of Dyer, 137.
29 Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the

Disturbances in the Punjab, etc. (London, 1920), 31.

30 Letter read out in the House of Commons by Sir William Joyson-Hicks, Hansard,

5th ser. (Commons), cxxxi, col. 1757 (8 July 1920).

31 See Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre’.
196 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
frame and instead deploy what might be called ‘thick
periodization’: an awareness of, and attention to, the varying

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temporalities at play within a single event.32 While it is difficult
not to agree with Akira Iriye’s claim that ‘the Great War proved to
be the swan song of empires’, this emphasis, as Harald Fischer-
Tiné also points out, has been overstated at the expense of
continuities and long-term factors.33 Colonial violence was not
simply a response to anti-colonial resistance, and only at the most
superficial level of historical analysis can the Amritsar massacre
be said to have been provoked by the challenge posed by Gandhi
and the nationalist movement. The point is not merely that the
massacre was not unprecedented, but that we cannot begin to
make sense of it in isolation from these precedents. At Amritsar
on 13 April 1919, Dyer was responding not to the dramatically
changed political situation of the post-war empire, but rather to
the spectre of the ‘Mutiny’. It is thus to 1857 and the colonial
ritual of violence during the nineteenth century that we must look
in order to understand the Amritsar massacre.34

II
‘TERRORS FOR A NATIVE’
There was a roar . . . a bank of white smoke, and a jet and shower of black
fragments, sharp and clear, which leaped and bounded in the air; this and
a fearful sound from the spectators, as if the reality so far exceeded all
previous fancy that it was intolerable; then a dead stillness.
In December 1857, when the uprising in India had been all but
suppressed, The Times published yet another account from the
seemingly endless catalogue of horrors that took place on the

32 My argument owes much to the work of Veena Das, especially Veena Das, Critical

Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi, 1995), ch. 5;

Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley,
2006), ch. 6. See also Charles S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to
History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review, cv,
3 (2000); Harry Harootian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry,
xxxiii (Spring 2007).
33 Akira Iriye, ‘Beyond Imperialism: The New Internationalism’, Daedalus, cxxxiv,

2 (2005), 115; Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Indian Nationalism and the ‘‘World Forces’’:
Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the
Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, ii, 3 (2007), 344.
34 For a contemporary iteration of this argument, see Edward Thompson’s

overlooked classic The Other Side of the Medal (London, 1925).

 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 197
subcontinent that year.35 Under the prosaic caption ‘An Indian
Execution’, the anonymous correspondent described how five

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sepoys, or native troops, were blown from the muzzle of
cannons for conspiring to mutiny. As the smoke cleared, he
proceeded to inspect the scene of the execution:
I walked straight to the scattered and smoking floors before the guns. I
came first to an arm, torn off above the elbow, the fist clenched, the bone
projecting several inches, bare. Then the ground was sown with red grisly
fragments, then a blackhaired head and the other arm still held together
. . . close by lay the lower half of the body of the next, torn quite in two, and
long coils of entrails twined on the ground. Then a long cloth in which one
had been dressed rolled open like a floorcloth and on fire. One man lay in a
complete and shattered heap, all but the arms; the legs were straddled
wide apart, and the smashed body on the middle of them; the spine
exposed; the head lay close by, too . . . The troops immediately
marched off, and I rode home at speed, and when I dismounted the
dogs came and licked my feet.36
At a time when, according to Michel Foucault, modern states had
long replaced the spectacle of the scaffold with penal institutions,
the British in India still had recourse to exemplary punishment
through singularly brutal rites of public executions.37 The
practice of execution by cannon was originally a Mughal practice,
which appears to have been used as late as the twentieth century in
Iran and Afghanistan.38 The physical destruction of the body had a
distinct religious function within the cultural context of the Indian
subcontinent as it effectively prevented the customary funeral rites
of Muslims, as well as Hindus, and the punishment thus extended
beyond death. Europeans first encountered this technique during
the mid 1700s, and it soon became the favoured means by which to
quell mutinies among the native troops of the East India
Company.39 (See Plate 2.)

35 ‘An Indian Execution’, Times, 3 Dec. 1857, 7.

36 Ibid.
37 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (London, 1977). For a more recent work on executions within a non-
European context, see Stacey Hynd, Imperial Gallows: Capital Punishment, Violence
and Colonial Rule in Britain’s African Territories, c.1903–1968 (Oxford, 2007).
38 See C. J. Wills, In the Land of the Lion and Sun: or, Modern Persia. Experiences of Life

in Persia during a Residence of Fifteen Years in Various Parts of that Country from 1866 to
1881 (London, 1883), 203. The Wikipedia page ‘Blowing from a Gun’ is
uncharacteristically useful: 5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_
gun4(accessed 15 July 2016).
39 See, for instance, ‘Extract of the General Letter from Bombay’, 30 Apr. 1780:

British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, India Office Records, Home
Misc., H/149 (5), 111.
198 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
Closely following the ritual model provided by judiciary
practices in the imperial homeland, the British in India

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nevertheless favoured hanging when executing criminals.
Controlling the symbolism of public executions, however,
proved increasingly difficult within a colonial context, and the
hanging of hundreds of highway robbers known as Thugs
during the 1830s had fully exposed the porous nature of
colonial rituals of power.40 The Thugs signally failed to
conform to the expected behaviour of the condemned: they
boldly climbed the scaffold and, rather than letting the low-
caste executioners touch them, tightened the noose around
their own neck and then simply stepped off the platform,
effectively taking command of the ritual that was intended to
reflect their submission to the legal process of the colonial
state.41 British officials had to infer (rather wistfully) the
deterrent efficacy of such executions, claiming that the
behaviour of the prisoners ‘has removed all doubt of their guilt
from the minds of the spectators, and left in their bosoms a feeling
of indignation unmixed with any degree of sympathy for their
sufferings’.42 The truth is that the Indian spectators probably
felt nothing of the kind. Like a widow becoming sati by joining
her husband’s body on the funeral pyre, criminals about to be
executed were commonly believed to be in possession of semi-
divine powers: ‘They have a superstition’, wrote one British
officer, ‘that a man about to be executed imparts a sanctity to
all he touches; and in a manner similar to this, he always throws
flowers among the crowd, who eagerly scramble for them’.43 The
British might have sought to convince themselves that these
executions went according to plan. Their very own accounts,
however, insisting on the public approval of colonial authority,
could not hide their unease about a public ritual the symbolism of
which was increasingly slipping out of their control. In the
absence of a shared cultural framework, or a legitimate claim to
40 See Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century

India (Basingstoke, 2007).

41 Henry H. Spry, Modern India: With Illustrations of the Resources and Capabilities of

Hindústan (London, 1837), 165–8.

42 W. H. Sleeman to F. C. Smith, 15 Aug. 1832: British Library, Asia, Pacific and

Africa Collections, Board’s Collections, F/4/1406/55521.

43 Lieutenant-Colonel Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt, to

England: In the Latter End of the Year 1817, and the Beginning of 1818 (London, 1819),
157.
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2. An execution of sepoys during the Indian uprising of 1857. From Harper’s Weekly, 15 Feb. 1862.
200 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
power, the British could never be certain that the ritual of public
executions was intelligible to their Indian subjects.44 If convicted

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murderers could project an image of unbowed piety on the
scaffold, the British were even less likely to achieve the intended
effect in the execution of high-caste sepoys. During moments of
crisis, such uncertainty in the very performance of power and
authority was little short of disastrous. As regiment after
regiment broke out in mutiny across northern India during the
summer of 1857, soon coalescing into popular risings that
threatened to upend British rule, the colonial state thus
unleashed its entire arsenal of exemplary violence.
The main concern of the British was to prevent the spread of
rebellion, and it was in that context that the first mass execution of
forty sepoys by cannon had been ordered in Peshawar on 13 June
1857 (see Plate 3). This was only the first of many such mass
executions, but it set a precedent for British violence throughout
the uprising. A contemporary British newspaper report elaborated
on the cultural specificity of the ritual enacted in Peshawar:
You must know that this is nearly the only form in which death has any
terrors for a native . . . he knows that his body will be blown into a thousand
pieces, and that it will be altogether impossible for his relatives, however
devoted to him, to be sure of picking up all the fragments of his own
particular body; and the thought that perhaps a limb of some one of a
different religion to himself might possibly be burned or buried with the
remainder of his own body, is agony to him.45
It is thus possible to talk about an ‘orientalization’ of colonial
violence during 1857, as colonial knowledge was turned against
colonial subjects in a form of spiritual warfare that transcended
mere physical punishment. British retribution deliberately
exploited the sepoys’ fears of ritual pollution, and the mass
executions by cannon enacted this particular logic in a highly
instrumental and systematic manner. The rebels were treated as
an undifferentiated mass, and the revenge of the British was thus
defined by its indiscriminate and collective character.46 The few
critics who objected to such practices had little impact on either
official policies or public opinion, mainly owing to the fact that the
mass executions were commonly believed to be the most
44 See also Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial

India (Delhi, 1998).

45 ‘Blowing from Guns at Peshawur’, Daily News, 5 Nov. 1857, 2.
46 See Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘ ‘‘Satan Let Loose upon Earth’’: The Kanpur

Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past and Present, no. 128 (Aug. 1990).
 3. A dioramic depiction of the execution of sepoys in Peshawar in 1857 that emphasizes the ritualized spectacle of colonial power.
From Illustrated London News, 3 Oct. 1857.
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202 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
effective, if not the only, means of maintaining British control.47
Descriptions of the reaction of Indian spectators invariably made

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reference to their changing skin colour as a sure sign that the
message had hit home: ‘Their faces grew ghastly pale as they
gazed breathlessly at the awful spectacle’.48 More than a
deterrent, however, these executions were perceived as uniquely
effective in re-establishing colonial rule by bolstering the prestige
of the British. In the semi-official history of the Indian uprising,
John Kaye described the impact of the executions in Peshawar:
To our newly-raised levies and to the curious on-lookers from the country,
the whole spectacle was a marvel and a mystery. It was a wonderful display
of moral force, and it made a deep and abiding impression . . . Among the
rude people of the border the audacity thus displayed by the English in the
face of pressing danger excited boundless admiration. They had no longer
any misgivings with respect to the superiority of a race that could do such
great things, calmly and coolly, and with all the formality of an inspection-
parade.49
Deliberately leaving out the gory details, Kaye turned the
executions into a celebratory demonstration of the virtues of
the stalwart British character that underpinned colonial rule
and sustained the civilizing mission.50 British accounts of the
execution of sepoys and rebels were, furthermore, made
morally palatable by consistently invoking Indian atrocities, and
part of the retributive logic of colonial violence that relied on
indigenous practice was thus derived from the aggression
ascribed to Indians in what the anthropologist Michael Taussig
has described as ‘colonial mimesis’.51 Execution by cannon could
thus be presented as both justified and civilized or, as Lord
Roberts put it, ‘Awe inspiring, certainly, but probably the most
humane, as being a sure and instantaneous mode of execution’.52
Visual representations of executions by cannon, disseminated
through the press across the empire, similarly provided an

47 See Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma

(Princeton, 2008).
48 ‘Blowing from Guns at Peshawur’.
49 John Kaye and G. B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, 6 vols.

(London, 1888–9), ii, 369–70.

50 Ibid., 369 n.
51 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and

Healing (Chicago, 1987).

52 Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Forty-One Years in India: From

Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief (London, 1897), 68 n.

 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 203
image of a carefully orchestrated military display indicative of the
order that British rule imposed on Indian society.53

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Apart from the brute language of power and terror, colonial
violence and its representation during 1857 thus conveyed a
reassuring message to Anglo-Indian and British audiences as
well.54 This secondary function of colonial violence is clearly
reflected in an eyewitness account of an execution in Bombay
published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words in
early 1858:
Those who witnessed the impressive scene will never forget it. The
Europeans were scarcely one to a thousand — in fact, they could hardly
be seen amongst the myriads of Asiatics; but all appeared as cool and
confident as if they had been at a review in Hyde Park. And yet there
was scarcely a man present who had not been sleeping with a loaded
revolver in his bedchamber for months . . .55
The public execution was in fact described as a perfect
reflection of the colonial situation itself, with the British
isolated and outnumbered but ultimately triumphant thanks to
their resolve and strength of character. In this sense, the mass
executions served to sustain the ‘bluff’ that was colonialism,
and shore up the self-confidence of the British in the crucible of
rebellion. The executions, though, were messy affairs, both
literally and symbolically, and it was only by sanitizing the
accounts of sepoys being blown from guns that they could be
represented as orderly and unequivocally efficacious
performances. Kaye’s assessment of the executions in Peshawar
was in fact belied by the account of Lord Roberts, who witnessed
the affair:
It was a terrible sight, and one likely to haunt the beholder for many a long
day; but that was what was intended. I carefully watched the sepoys’ faces
to see how it affected them. They were evidently startled at the swift
retribution which had overtaken their guilty comrades, but looked more
crest-fallen than shocked or horrified, and we soon learnt that their
determination to mutiny, and make the best of their way to Delhi, was
in nowise changed by the scene they had witnessed.56
This was not a controlled ritual, and the ‘stinking shower’ of
human remains was virtually impossible to instrumentalize.
53 See, for instance, Illustrated London News, 3 Oct. 1857.
54 See also Michael G. Vann, ‘Of Pirates, Postcards, and Public Beheadings: The
Pedagogic Execution in French Colonial Indochina’, Historical Reflections, xxxvi, 2
(Summer 2010).
55 ‘Blown Away!’, Household Words, 27 Mar. 1858, 350.
56 Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, 69.
204 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
Quite often the executions went terribly wrong, turning the
carefully choreographed ceremony into a grim farce, as was

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described by one medical officer:
One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the
guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. Whilst
hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head,
and three times the cap snapped, the man each time wincing from the
expected shot. At last a rifle was fired into the bottom of his head, and the
blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly handled
pump. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its
forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.57
While the British believed that the public executions effectively
forced Indians into submission and buttressed their loyalty, it is
clear that the bloody spectacles might as easily have driven Indian
troops, and the wider population, away from the colonial rulers.58
The supposed efficacy of executions by cannon, however, was far
too important to allow the British authorities to acknowledge
formally their ambiguous symbolism and messy reality, let
alone condemn the practice. In the House of Commons, Lord
Stanley expressed this sentiment in no uncertain terms: ‘Only by
great exertions — by the employment of force, by making striking
examples, and inspiring terror, could Sir J. Lawrence save the
Punjab; and if the Punjab had been lost the whole of India
would for the time have been lost with it’.59 British rule in
India, in other words, was sustained by the application of
exemplary violence, and this became one of the founding
narratives of the colonial state in India after 1857.
The language and mode of analysis derived from Foucault’s
discussion of executions, based as it was purely on Western
concepts of sovereignty and statehood, is thus also of limited
use when applied to the colonial situation.60 The executions of
1857 were not spectacles of entertainment for the masses, nor
57 ‘Blowing from a Gun’, Preston Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1857, 2.
58 Some accounts clearly suggest that sepoys only deserted when the British lost
trust in them, or when indiscriminate reprisals left wavering troops no other option but
mutiny: see, for instance, F. O. Mayne, Narrative of Events Attending the Outbreak of
Disturbances and the Restoration of Authority in the District of Banda, in 1857–58
(Allahabad, 1858), pt 2, 3.
59 Hansard, 3rd ser. (Commons), cviii, cols. 146–60 (14 Mar. 1859).
60 See also Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in

Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, xxxiv, 4 (2001); Taylor C.

Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments
in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean’, History
Compass, vii, 3 (2009).
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 205
were they lessons in citizenship, not least because Indians did not
enjoy the status of citizens within the colonial state. Ruling

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through coercion rather than consent, the British could only
ever hope to assert that power, not to elicit the approval of
the crowd.61 And where the European sovereign might fear that
the crowd identified with the convict on the scaffold, the British in
India could simply assume this to be the case; the mass executions
were never intended solely, or even primarily, for the attendant
sepoys, but by extension were intended for the entire Indian
population. Accordingly, these rituals became occasions for the
British to reinforce racialized hierarchy as both native regiments
and locals were forcibly gathered to witness the spectacle,
invariably and demonstratively covered by the loaded guns of
European troops prepared to put into action the symbolic
message of the executions. The colonial execution was thus
aimed, sometimes quite literally, at the native spectators (in
uniform and without) but operated within a structure of power
from which they were specifically excluded. These displays,
furthermore, marked the ultimate point of escalation in the
application of brute force: beyond the cannon, there was no
tool left in the armoury of the colonial state. As a political
ritual, the mass executions were accordingly both performative
and constitutive of colonial power.
As the uprising was eventually put down, this power was
transferred in 1858 from the East India Company to the British
Crown, heralding what many expected to be a new era of
order and tranquillity.62 Memories of the ‘Mutiny’, however,
died hard, and 1857 was not to be the last time that British rule
in India was so demonstratively maintained by the sword rather
than the pen.

III
‘THE TRICK OF BLOWING MEN FROM GUNS’
Years later, when Punjab was again shaken by unrest and the
colonial authorities believed themselves to be faced by yet
another massive outbreak, a British officer took it upon himself
61 See also Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in

Colonial India (Delhi, 1998).

62 Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, 1964).
206 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
to punish the so-called ‘rebels’. Peace had in fact been restored by
the time the brutal and indiscriminate punishment was inflicted

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in a singularly exemplary fashion. The government initially
responded with approval, yet as soon as details of the affair
reached the press and the wider public, a scandal erupted both
in India and in Britain. The affair became a cause for national
embarrassment, and it was hotly debated in London and
throughout the empire. The officer responsible was eventually
removed from his post, although there was substantial support
for his actions among the Anglo-Indian community in particular,
and a public collection of funds was later organized for his benefit.
This brief outline of events refers not to the Amritsar massacre
but to the suppression of what became known officially as the
‘Kooka outbreak’ almost five decades earlier. In January 1872,
Deputy Commissioner J. L. Cowan responded to a minor émeute
among the Kuka Sikhs by summarily executing sixty-eight
prisoners by having them blown from cannon in the small
principality of Malerkotla in Punjab. The fact that this all but
forgotten event in many ways anticipated General Dyer’s
actions is suggestive of a level of continuity in the forms and
functions of colonial violence that has so far remained
unacknowledged in the historiography. Effectively bridging the
‘cataclysms’ of 1857 and 1919, this minor event, which rarely
receives even a cursory reference in standard histories of the
Raj, nevertheless provides a crucial opportunity to read colonial
violence and its entanglement with colonial anxieties.
The Kukas, formally known as Namdharis, were a revivalist
sect within Sikhism who became known during the early 1870s
for a series of murderous attacks on Muslims in Punjab.63 After
the failed raid on two small towns, Malodh and Malerkotla, the
surviving members of a Kuka gang, many of whom were
wounded, were captured in mid January 1872.64 The attacks
had been desperate actions by a motley group of impoverished
men; they had no clear plan or strategy, and they were certainly
not part of a bigger conspiracy or the vanguard of a Kuka rising.65
63 W. H. McLeod, ‘The Kukas: A Millenarian Sect of the Punjab’, in G. A. Wood

and P. S. O’Connor (eds.), W. P. Morrell: A Tribute (Dunedin, 1973).

64 The main sources for the details of the attacks are to be found in Copy of

Correspondence: or, Extracts from Correspondence, Relating to the Kooka Outbreak,

Parliamentary Papers, 1872 (356), xlv.
65 T. D. Forsyth to L. H. Griffin, 20 Jan. 1872, ibid., 20.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 207
To the British, however, the Kuka affair was little short of a second
‘Mutiny’. Amid rumours that Kukas were gathering in the

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thousands for renewed attacks, Cowan hastened to Malerkotla
to deal with the captives.66 Although it soon turned out that initial
reports of the attacks had hugely exaggerated the seriousness of
the situation, he nevertheless proposed to execute the prisoners
by blowing them from cannon: ‘They are open rebels, offering
contumacious resistance to constituted authority, and, to prevent
the spreading of the disease, it is absolutely necessary that
repressive measures should be prompt and stern . . . this
incipient insurrection must be stamped out at once’.67 Cowan
immediately went ahead with the mass execution in spite of the
fact that he received explicit orders to wait for the arrival of his
superior, Commissioner and Superintendent T. D. Forsyth.
When Forsyth reached the place the following day, he felt
compelled to support Cowan’s actions lest the authorities
should be perceived to be weak, and the remaining prisoners
were executed. On 17 and 18 January 1872 a total of sixty-eight
Kukas were thus blown from guns at Malerkotla.68
Occurring just fifteen years after the Indian uprising, the British
response to the Kuka affair was very much shaped by the memory
of 1857. Faced with what he perceived to be ‘an open rebellion’,
Cowan had simply followed the example provided by the
‘Mutiny’, and the link between the two events was further
established by his description of the Kukas as ‘rebels’ and
through the manner in which he punished them.69 In fact,
Forsyth claimed that Cowan’s chosen mode of execution was ‘a
proceeding warranted by former precedents when large numbers
of rebels were thus disposed of in 1857’.70 Furthermore, it was
not just the terminology and means of execution that were
reminiscent of 1857; the very rationale provided by Cowan
closely mirrored the reasoning that had informed the mass
executions of that year: ‘A rebellion, which might have attained
large dimensions, was nipped in the bud, and a terrible and
prompt punishment was in my opinion absolutely necessary to

66 J. L. Cowan to Forsyth, 15 Jan. 1872, ibid., 8.

67 Cowan to Forsyth, 16 Jan. 1872, ibid., 11.
68 Forsyth to Griffin, 8 Apr. 1872, ibid., 50–2.
69 Order by Cowan, 18 Jan. 1872, ibid., 47.
70 Forsyth to Griffin, 19 Jan. 1872, ibid., 18.
208 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
prevent the recurrence of a similar rising’.71 Invoking the horrors
of the past, when British men, women and children had been

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killed, Cowan and Forsyth both sought to legitimize the
execution of the sixty-eight Kukas, but their response also drew
on other colonial precedents. Following what appeared to be
random attacks on Europeans by Muslim ghazis, or fanatics, on
the North-West Frontier, the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867
had enabled the summary execution of such prisoners following
cursory trials.72 The Kukas were thus described in terms very
similar to those applied by the colonial authorities to Muslim
‘fanatics’, and the official reports were replete with references
to their ‘frenzy’ and ‘fanatical fury’.73
Forsyth, in particular, was at pains to present a dire image of the
threat posed by the Kukas, whose behaviour throughout Punjab he
deemed ‘a sufficient indication that there is some intention of a
general rising, and the slightest failure on the part of the authorities
to deal promptly with the marauders now caught would be a signal
to concealed parties to rush forward’.74 Fears of a second ‘Mutiny’
ran deep among the British in India, and anxieties of a general
rising were a common trait in colonial governance after 1857.
The fact that Cowan had transgressed his authority and carried
out the executions in direct defiance of his superior’s order,
however, was an altogether different matter. While he enjoyed
the tacit support of the government of Punjab, the governor-
general of India, the earl of Mayo, did not condone the
circumstances surrounding the executions, and within a week of
the incident Cowan was suspended pending further inquiries.75
The official response to the ‘outbreak’ brought to light the
tension that existed between the government of Punjab and the
central government of India. The lieutenant-governor of Punjab,
Sir Robert Henry Davies, insisted that the captured Kukas were
no ordinary criminals but had forfeited their lives owing to the
nature of their crimes: ‘Originating in a carefully stimulated
religious fanaticism, they had a political object, every step in the
attainment of which threatened the most serious disturbance
71 Cowan to Forsyth, 17 Jan. 1872 (2), ibid., 16.
72 See Mark Condos, ‘Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of
Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925’, Modern Asian Studies, l (2016).
73 See, for instance, Cowan to Forsyth, 15 Jan. 1872, in Copy of Correspondence, 9.
74 Forsyth to Griffin, 19 Jan. 1872, ibid., 18.
75 E. C. Bayley to Griffin, 24 Jan. 1872, ibid., 17.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 209
of the existing order of things’.76 Davies’s interjection on Cowan’s
behalf thus invoked the central tenets of the ‘Punjab system’,

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which favoured personal discretion over technical legalism.
True to the spirit of his predecessors during the ‘Mutiny’,
Davies even defended Cowan’s choice of execution: ‘Blowing
from a gun is an impressive and merciful manner of execution,
well calculated to strike terror into the bystanders’.77
The government’s decision on the case, however, constituted a
direct rebuttal of the proponents of the Punjab system.78 Despite
the difficult situation in which Cowan had found himself, the
manner of the execution, ‘its excessive and indiscriminate
severity’, was deemed to be entirely unjustified.79 Worst of all
was the fact that, by the time the executions took place, there
was no longer any immediate threat: ‘It is in short obvious’,
Mayo stated, ‘that his motive in ordering the executions was to
prevent a rising which he considered imminent, by an act
calculated to strike terror into the whole Kuka sect’.80 As a
result, Cowan was permanently suspended from his position,
while Forsyth was transferred to another province where he
would have no authority in matters relating to native states.81
(See Plate 4.)
The belief that Cowan and Forsyth had, through their prompt
action, saved the lives of many of their compatriots was, however,
widely shared among Anglo-Indians, and the ardently colonial
newspaper The Englishman stated that the two ‘deserve the best
thanks and admiration of the English community in India’.82
Once Cowan’s dismissal became public knowledge, a
subscription was organized by the readers of the newspaper,
which reported that ‘We learn from various sources that
subscriptions are being set on foot at all large stations in Upper
India for Mr. L. Cowan, whose summary dismissal has evoked a
76 Griffin to Bayley, 7 Feb. 1872, ibid., 28.
77 Griffin to Bayley, 29 June 1872, quoted in Gooroo Ram Singh and the Kuka Sikhs:
Rebels against the British Power in India, ed. Nahar Singh, 3 vols. (New Delhi, 1965–7),
ii, 81.
78 ‘Final Orders of General Governor in Council’, Bayley to Griffin, 30 Apr. 1872,

in Copy of Correspondence, 54–8.

79 Ibid., 54.
80 Ibid., 55.
81 Ibid., 57–8. See also Judicial Department to the duke of Argyll, 2 May 1872, in

Copy of Correspondence, 26.

82 Englishman, 10 Feb. 1872.
210 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
feeling of universal indignation throughout all classes of the
Anglo-Indian community’.83 Yet the affair affected more than

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just the Anglo-Indian community: touching upon the very
nature and prestige of the British empire, it was widely
debated throughout the imperial metropole, including the
House of Commons.84
Initially opinions were divided, but, as more details of the
events reached England, attitudes changed and the initial
expressions of anxiety concerning the threat posed by the
Kukas were increasingly replaced by incredulity.85 The fact
remained that no British lives had been lost during the attacks
on Malodh and Malerkotla, and to many observers the fears of
rebellion seemed misplaced and the executions blatantly
excessive.86 The Kuka affair soon disappeared from the
headlines and eventually from public memory. Cowan’s
attempts at rehabilitation failed and he disappeared into
obscurity, while Forsyth successfully lobbied the new governor-
general and went on to enjoy an illustrious career within the
colonial administration, receiving numerous honours including
a knighthood before his death in 1886.87 Morally defensible or
not, the suppression of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ further sustained
the lessons of the ‘Mutiny’ and as such became part of the lore of
the Raj. In Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘On the City Wall’, the
sahib narrator asks an Indian acquaintance about a mysterious
prisoner in the fort at Lahore:
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Who is it?’
‘A consistent man,’ said Wali Dad. ‘He fought you in ’46, when he was a
warrior-youth; refought you in ’57 and he tried to fight you in ’71, but you
had learned the trick of blowing men from guns too well . . .’.88
Written in 1888, the story takes place some fifteen years after
the old Sikh Khem Singh, a fictional rebel, had been deported
following the ‘Kooka outbreak’. Allowed to return to Punjab from

83 ‘Letter to the Editor’, Englishman, 14 May 1872.

84 See Times and Pall Mall Gazette, Feb.–May 1872.
85 See, for instance, ‘India (from Our Correspondent)’, Times, 26 Feb. 1872; see

also Times, 3 Apr. 1872.

86 ‘The Kooka Massacre’, Examiner, 1 June 1872, 545.
87 ‘This Evening’s News: India’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 Aug. 1873, 7; Autobiography

and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth, ed. his daughter (London, 1887).
88 Rudyard Kipling, ‘On the City Wall’, in Rudyard Kipling, In Black and White

(Allahabad, [1888]), 78.

 4. The original guns used by Cowan to execute the Kukas in 1872, exhibited at the Namdhari Shaheedi Smarak memorial at Malerkotla.
Photo: the author.
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212 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
his exile in Burma, Khem Singh’s appetite for sedition soon
awakens and the narrator unknowingly aids the old man to

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escape from his confinement:
He fled to those who knew him in the old days, but many of them were
dead, and more were changed, and all knew something of the Wrath of the
Government. He went to the young men, but the glamour of his name had
passed away, and they were entering native regiments or Government
offices, and Khem Singh could give them neither pension, decorations,
nor influence — nothing but a glorious death with their backs to the
mouth of a gun.89
In Kipling’s story, the British use of exemplary punishment had
served its purpose well and the spirit of rebellion was permanently
subdued; the exertions of the old firebrand to stir up trouble anew
no longer held any attraction for the local population. The story is
characterized by a sense of paternalist complacency: even though
the sahib is tricked into helping the old enemy of the state to
escape, the threat of native revolt has long since been rendered
harmless. Outside the quaint world of Anglo-Indian fiction,
however, the final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed
the gradual development of Indian nationalism, which erupted
into a forcefully anti-colonial movement after the ill-conceived
partition of Bengal in 1905. Kipling’s faith in the efficacy of
colonial violence was thus entirely misplaced, and while the
mass executions of 1857 and 1872 did leave an indelible
memory, it was among Anglo-Indians and colonial officials,
rather than the native population, that belief in the spectacle of
violence took seed.

IV
‘AN EXCESS OF COLONIALISM’
The suppression of the Kuka affair was never explicitly
mentioned during the debates over Dyer’s actions, yet it is
impossible not to recognize the one as the precursor to the
other, and both events as manifestations of a particular colonial
mindset shaped by the legacies of 1857. The disturbances of 10
April 1919, when official buildings were burned and British
civilians were attacked and killed by Indian crowds, closely
replicated the pattern of anti-colonial violence that constituted
such a crucial element in the colonial memories of 1857. The
89 Ibid., 94.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 213
rioters at Amritsar thus inadvertently triggered a response that
was overdetermined by the past, and the massacre should

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accordingly be recognized as one of those moments conforming
to Sahlins’s concept of the ‘structure of the conjuncture’.90 Dyer
explicitly invoked his colonial experience when defending his
actions before the Army Council back in Britain, in what
amounted to a plea of diminished responsibility due to the
trauma of the ‘Mutiny’:
But if one dominant motive can be extracted it was the determination to
avert from the European women and children and those of the law-
abiding Indian community the fate which I was convinced would be
theirs, if I did not meet the challenge and produce the required effect to
restore order and security . . . Of its force in the mind of an Indian Army
officer of thirty-four years’ residence in India I am sure the Army Council
have no doubt.91
Cognizant of their own anxieties, even supporters of Dyer
pointed to the continuing impact of 1857 as expressed by
Brigadier-General Herbert Surtees’s comments in the House of
Commons:
Whenever the people of India show signs of unrest or of conspiracy or of
revolution there rises before the minds of Anglo-Europeans the spectre of
the Indian Mutiny and the horrors of Cawnpore, and they are constrained
to ask themselves whether the disturbances are only the precursors of a
similar revolution. So a greater force is used in quelling disturbances than
would be used in other places where British rule is more firmly
established.92
It is indeed noticeable that both Dyer and Cowan referred to
the precedents of the ‘Mutiny’ in assessing the threat they were
facing and in legitimizing their response. What I have described
elsewhere as the ‘Mutiny’ motif provided both a nightmare
scenario as well as a panacea for all local unrest: if the Kuka
affair and nationalist protests in 1919 had the potential to
escalate into full-blown rebellion on a scale similar to the
Indian uprising, it was reasoned that they could also be
suppressed by the very same means that had saved British rule
six decades earlier.93 After 1857 the colonial authorities thus
90 Sahlins first developed this concept in Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and

Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann
Arbor, 1981). See also William H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social
Transformation (Chicago, 2005).
91 Army . . . Statement by Brig.-General R. E. H. Dyer, C.B., 13.
92 Hansard, 5th ser. (Commons), cxxxi, col. 1777 (8 July 1920).
93 Kim A. Wagner, ‘ ‘‘Treading upon Fires’’: The ‘‘Mutiny’’-Motif and Colonial

Anxieties in British India’, Past and Present, no. 218 (Feb. 2013).
214 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
rarely responded to the specific circumstances surrounding local
unrest but rather they responded to what they imagined that

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unrest was or could become: hence the consistent
disproportionality of colonial state violence. With precedents
such as the ‘Mutiny’ in mind, the exponential possibilities of
even small-scale disturbances was boundless, as far as the
British were concerned, and the official response inherently
excessive. The Amritsar massacre was accordingly both
retributive and pre-emptive: Dyer took revenge for the attacks
on Europeans, including a woman, during the riots three days
earlier, but he also acted to prevent a much bigger outbreak,
which he believed to be incipient.
It was thus the application of a decidedly outdated mode of
interpretation that led to the massacre, when, to put it bluntly, he
responded to twentieth-century challenges with nineteenth-
century methods. It should be obvious that the blueprint
provided by the ‘Mutiny’ was entirely inappropriate to
navigate India in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Between 1857 and 1919, India had undergone a fundamental
transformation and seen the emergence of the first major anti-
colonial movement.94 British rule on the subcontinent had also,
in the decades just prior to the massacre, witnessed the first
liberal reforms, however limited, while in Britain itself support
for the empire was far from uniform. The challenge to British
rule in India had thus changed dramatically during this period;
the manner in which colonial officers such as Dyer responded to
perceived threat, however, had not. As a critical event par
excellence, the Amritsar massacre may thus be described
as an anachronism.
As a closer examination of the events of 1857, 1872 and 1919
reveals, the forms and legitimacy of colonial violence were never
uncontested, within the colonial sphere or in the imperial
metropole. A feature in the American Harper’s Weekly in 1888
made the following observation in reference to a painting by the
Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin depicting an execution by
cannon in British India: ‘This scene was a standard British way
94 While revolutionary nationalism flourished during the early decades of the

twentieth century, it was a decidedly marginal aspect of the anti-colonial

movements and never posed a serious threat to British rule: see Richard Popplewell,
Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the British Empire,
1904–1924 (London, 1995).
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 215
to settle scores, and continued long after the war of independence
in 1857. It was hotly debated in British and Indian newspapers

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between liberals and conservatives. To the former it was an
excess of colonialism, to the latter an essential ingredient’.95
(See Plate 5.)
This ‘excess of colonialism’ caused concern because it belied
the ideals of the civilizing mission in such a spectacular manner
and made imperialism so hard to defend. Public opinion in
Britain underwent a gradual transformation between 1857 and
1919, and colonial acts of violence, which had barely raised an
eyebrow during the Indian uprising, caused an outcry in the
aftermath of the First World War. Violence thus became
increasingly difficult to legitimize, yet remained an intrinsic
aspect of the colonial order, whether it was in the form of
everyday beatings and whippings of servants and workers, the
sustained use of force during wars of pacification and punitive
expeditions, or later the brutal and drawn-out conflicts of
decolonization. The official condemnation of Cowan and Dyer,
therefore, ought not to be mistaken for an outright disavowal of
colonial violence as such, but rather as an attempt to maintain the
conceit of rule of law. More than the summary execution of the
captured Kukas, for instance, what made Cowan’s dismissal
inevitable was the fact that he exceeded his authority and
blatantly ignored orders from his superiors. The same goes for
Dyer, and when we look at the findings of the Hunter Inquiry and
the lessons identified by military theoreticians such as Charles
Gwynn, it is difficult not to conclude that if only Dyer had fired
warning shots and provided care for the wounded, he would not
have been censored for firing on the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh.96
Dyer was convicted mainly by his words rather than his deeds,
and the fact remains that no officer was ever sanctioned for
massacring so-called ‘rebels’ — only for not doing so within the
bounds of law.
The formal execution of Kukas in 1872 and the improvised
massacre of Indian civilians in 1919 obviously constituted
distinct modes of colonial violence, the historical context and
contingencies of which were, moreover, radically different.
95 ‘The Verestchagin Exhibition’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 Nov. 1888. This well-known

painting is often mistaken for a depiction of sepoys being executed during 1857, but in
fact shows the execution of Kukas at Malerkotla in 1872.
96 Major-General Sir Charles W. Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London, 1934).
216 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
Both events, however, were shaped by the same fear of a second
‘Mutiny’ (however improbable), and the aim of their violence was

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strikingly similar. The legality of colonial violence, inevitably
established or disputed ex post facto, thus mattered only in so far
as official sanction and public opinion was concerned: during
moments of crisis, the function of colonial violence did not
differ significantly between executions resulting from a legal
process, however perfunctory, and the discretionary actions of
the ‘man on the spot’.97 Dyer’s actions closely mimicked the
ritual of formalized punishment, and while the Amritsar
massacre was not technically speaking an execution, the logic
that underpinned its violence was identical to the colonial
rituals of power enacted during 1857 and afterwards. The local
confrontation at Amritsar was perceived by Dyer in the light of a
bigger existential struggle, and the fear that he and his men might
be cut off and ambushed in the narrow alleys of the city was the
very same fear that the British in India might be overrun.
Crucially, the same act saved them all with a single stroke. The
Amritsar massacre was thus ‘calculated to strike terror’ as much
as were the mass executions of sepoys during the Indian uprising
and of Kukas in 1872. The purely instrumental nature of the
spectacle of violence as performative rather than punitive was
made very clear by Sir John Lawrence prior to the execution of
mutineers in Peshawar in June 1857:
In respect to the mutineers of the 55th, they were taken fighting against us,
and so far deserve little mercy. But, on full reflection, I would not put them
all to death. I do not think that we should be justified in the eyes of the
Almighty in doing so. A hundred and twenty men are a large number to
put to death. Our object is to make an example to terrify others. I think this
object would be effectually gained by destroying from a quarter to a third
of them.98
Lawrence’s successor sixty years on, Lieutenant-Governor E.
D. MacLagan, expressed very similar views during the trial of the
rioters who had killed two of the British civilians at Amritsar on 10
April 1919:
97 Much recent scholarship on colonial violence has approached the subject

through the framework of law and the legal discourses that at varying moments
either problematized or legitimized the brutality of the imperial project: see R. W.
Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford,
2008); Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British
Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge, 2009); Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India.
98 Quoted in Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, 367.
 5. The execution of Kukas at Malerkotla, Jan. 1872. From a print after the painting An Execution in British India by Vasily Vereshchagin.

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218 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
The attack was a brutal and unjustifiable crime and all the accused have
merited the sentence of death . . . In view, however, of the fact that a
considerable number of persons have been sentenced to death for

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offences committed in Amritsar on this same day, I do not think it
necessary in the interest of justice that the whole of the 20 petitioners
should be executed.99
This, moreover, suggests that the overwhelming focus on the
colonized body so common to much recent literature on colonial
violence might not always be equally pertinent.100 The evidence
examined in this article certainly implies that the body of the
condemned was less significant as a receptacle of colonial
violence than it was simply as a message of colonial power.101
The individual guilt of the captured sepoys and Kukas, as much
as that of the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, was inferred rather than
proven, and ultimately of no real significance to the logic of the
colonial violence to which they were subjected.
The symbolic significance of Dyer’s actions is further revealed
by his remarkable admission in front of the Hunter Committee: ‘I
think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd
without firing but they would have come back again and
laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of
myself’.102 This statement is strikingly similar to the one found
in George Orwell’s famous short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’,
written about his experience in Burma little more than a decade
after Amritsar.103 Speaking from opposite ends of the political
spectrum, Dyer and Orwell both gave voice to the acute sense
of vulnerability that characterized the colonial experience,
especially during moments of crisis. The perceived need to
maintain British prestige and save face at all costs thus imbued
colonial violence with a crucially performative function. With the
99 Order by E. D. MacLagan, Amritsar (National Bank Case), 16 June 1919:

Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh, Home Judicial, 5315, 15. See also Sherman,
State Violence and Punishment in India, 20.
100 See E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–

1947 (Cambridge, 2001); Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao (eds.), Discipline and the
Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2006).
101 See also Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt

of 1857: Reply’, Past and Present, no. 142 (Feb. 1994), 184.
102 Testimony of Dyer, 117.
103 ‘A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of ‘‘natives’’; and so, in general, he

isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those
two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a
grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable
that some of them would laugh. That would never do’: George Orwell, ‘Shooting an
Elephant’, New Writing (Autumn 1936).
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 219
very survival of the colonial state at stake, the function of violence
was simply to ‘strike terror’ and, as Dyer put it, ‘There could be no

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question of undue severity’.
The need to maintain racial hierarchies further reveals the
Amritsar massacre to be just the most extreme expression of
what Partha Chatterjee has described as the ‘rule of colonial
difference’.104 The same logic that guided Dyer at Jallianwala
Bagh also informed his invention of the ‘crawling order’: one
was a brutal massacre, the other a relatively harmless but very
public humiliation, yet both constituted culturally specific
displays of colonial power and both were intrinsically collective
and implicitly racialized. The entire range of punishment
available to the British in India, what Taylor Sherman has
described as the ‘coercive network’, was deployed in Punjab
during the disturbances of 1919, from compulsory displays of
respect towards Europeans in the street (salaaming) to
machine-gun strafing from aeroplanes and armoured trains.105
Each of these measures was predicated on the bodily alterity and
essential ‘othering’ of Indians. Under colonial rule, the local
population never enjoyed the status of subjects and could
instead be treated collectively as potential enemies during
disturbances. This is what Achille Mbembe referred to when he
suggested that ‘the colonies are the location par excellence where
the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended —
the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to
operate in the service of ‘‘civilization’’ ’.106

V
THE SAVAGE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE
The Indian uprising, the Kuka affair and the Amritsar massacre
might have been unique in scope but they were not exceptional in
terms of the logic that guided the extreme forms of violence for
which they have become bywords. While British rule in India was
not essentially maintained through terror and rituals of violence
104 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial

Histories (Delhi, 1994), 10, 19.

105 Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, chs. 1–2.
106 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, xv, 1

(Winter 2003), 24. The theoretical point of reference is, of course, the work of Carl
Schmidt and Giorgio Agamben.
220 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
between 1857, 1872 and 1919, the same cannot be said of the
borderlands of the Raj, nor of the ever expanding frontiers of the

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empire. Fighting a range of local populations variously described
as ‘tribal’, ‘savages’ or ‘fanatics’ on the North-West Frontier, in
Afghanistan, in Sudan or throughout other parts of Africa and
elsewhere, the British routinely massacred locals with machine
guns, drove off cattle and burned villages in demonstrative
displays of power.107
What became known as ‘savage warfare’ was not simply shaped
by the tactical necessities of asymmetric fighting against irregular
enemies but was based on deeply encoded assumptions
concerning the inherent difference of local opponents.108 In his
study of German colonial violence in Africa as ‘total war’, Trutz
von Trotha suggests that violence constitutes a universally
understood language of power:
Violence is extremely convincing. It is simple and obvious. There are no
communication problems. The ‘language of violence’ needs no
translation — and this applies particularly to a world in which the
colonial conquerors could make themselves understood in their
meetings with Africans only when they were accompanied and assisted
by interpreters. In the language of violence, conquerors can express
themselves directly and may also know that they have been understood.109
As the cases examined in this article suggest, however, this is a
rather naive understanding of how violence worked within a
colonial context. Colonial violence was predicated on the
assumption that the only language understood by ‘uncivilized’

107 The literature is extensive, but see T. R. Moreman, The Army in India and the

Development of Frontier Warfare, 1849–1947 (Basingstoke, 1998); Huw Bennett,

Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya
Emergency (Cambridge, 2013), esp. ch. 4.
108 The use of exemplary force was obviously not limited to the British but a

common feature of colonial warfare within all the European and American empires:
see, for instance, Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of
War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005); Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail: A Colonial
Scandal in the Heart of Africa (Oxford, 2009); Michael C. Hawkins, ‘Managing a
Massacre: Savagery, Civility, and Gender in Moro Province in the Wake of Bud
Dajo’, Philippine Studies, lix, 1 (2011); Petra Groen, ‘Colonial Warfare and Military
Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–1941’, Journal of Genocide Research, xiv,
3–4 (2012); William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony
(Basingstoke, 2013).
109 Trutz von Trotha, ‘ ‘‘The Fellows Can Just Starve’’: On Wars of ‘‘Pacification’’ in

the African Colonies of Imperial Germany and the Concept of ‘‘Total War’’ ’, in
Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Anticipating Total
War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, new edn (Cambridge,
2006), 422.
 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 221
people was a prompt and vigorous response. The perceived
necessity of nipping unrest in the bud, invoked by Cowan in

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1872, assumed the force of doctrine within British military
practice. In C. E. Callwell’s classic manual Small Wars, first
published in 1896, the author argued that ‘The lower races are
impressionable. They are greatly influenced by a resolute bearing
and by a determined course of action’.110 In what could have been
a direct quotation from Forsyth, Callwell further stated that
‘Uncivilized races attribute leniency to timidity’.111 Colonial
violence was culturally constructed, and the levels of brutality
deemed to be necessary within the European empires were
considered unacceptable in conflicts between ‘civilized’ people.
It was precisely because of the perceived need for a culturally
specific ‘translation’ of violence that colonial punishment and
military campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were so demonstratively brutal. As a technique of
power, colonial violence during moments of crisis was not
simply a means to an end but an end in itself.112
The brutal tactics of pacification and the punitive campaigns were
never entirely banished from the armoury of imperialism, even as
colonial rule became firmly established. The British policy of
reprisals in Ireland during the ‘Troubles’, for instance, which
included the burning of villages and indiscriminate shootings of
civilians, merely reprised tactics that had been used for decades
during colonial campaigns in Africa and Asia.113 The same
applies to the increasing reliance on air power against ‘uncivilized’
enemies across the empire, which was in essence a continuation of
the same strategies of performative and exemplary force described
in this article, though by different means.114

110 C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd edn (London, 1906),
72.
111 Ibid., 148.
112 See also Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’,
American Historical Review, cvii, 4 (2002).
113 Charles Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–1921: The

Development of Political and Military Policies (London, 1975). It is noteworthy,

however, that even during the conflict in Ireland, there was still nothing comparable
to the racialized forms of punishment meted out to Indians in Punjab in 1919: see D.
M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of
Independence (Oxford, 2011).
114 David Killingray, ‘ ‘‘A Swift Agent Government’’: Air Power in British Colonial

Africa, 1916–1939’, Journal of African History, xxv (1984); Priya Satia, ‘The Defense
(cont. on p. 222)
222 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
As a direct result of the fallout from Dyer’s actions, the British
army adopted the doctrine of ‘minimum force’ during military

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operations. Yet this doctrine, which purportedly informed British
imperial policing during the inter-war period and counter-
insurgency after 1945, in truth made a virtue out of necessity.
Outnumbered and overstretched, the British had to maintain
control throughout the empire using the limited means at their
disposal, and the application of force was thus determined by
practical constraints as much as strategic and political
considerations. For minimum force to be effective it also had to
be exemplary, and, paradoxically, it thus required the pre-
emptive application of extreme force to suppress riots and
insurrections before they escalated. In practice, ‘minimum
force’ and exemplary violence were not incompatible, and
neither ‘minimum force’ nor the ‘rule of law’ necessarily
entailed restraint.115
During moments of crisis, as in Punjab in 1919, the ‘frontiers’
of empire can be said to have contracted as spectacular modes of
coercion, punishment and violence, usually relegated to the
margins of colonial control, were deployed within the heartland
of the colony. It was this implicit admission of colonial failure,
however brief, that caused such embarrassment and outcry as the
pretences of the civilizing mission were momentarily cast aside
and the brute power of the colonial project was revealed in all its
bloody glory. The focus on large-scale violence in the colonial
sphere is thus not simply a matter of studying the highlights in
the grand narrative of imperialism and anti-colonial struggles, as
Jonathan Saha has recently suggested.116 By traversing these
spectacles of violence we are in fact mapping the perceived
weakness and sense of vulnerability of the colonial state: the
ebb and flow of colonial anxieties.

(n. 114 cont.)

of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia’, American Historical Review,
cxi, 1 (2006).
115 See also Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons, ‘Dyer Consequences: The Trope of

Amritsar, Ireland, and the Lessons of the ‘‘Minimum’’ Force Debate’, boundary 2,
xxvi, 2 (Summer 1999).
116 Jonathan Saha, ‘Histories of Everyday Violence in British India’, History

Compass, ix, 11 (Oct. 2011), 845.

 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 223
VI
CONCLUSION

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The Amritsar massacre was a key transformative moment in the
history of British India, but it reflected the brutality of the early
stages of pacification and consolidation of empire as well as
anticipating the later conflicts of decolonization. The process of
decolonization following the two world wars, which saw imperial
disengagement and policing give way to counter-insurgency, is
usually examined in complete isolation from the period before
1918.117 In consequence, it is usually assumed that the inter-
and post-war periods saw an intensification of colonial violence
as imperial powers sought to maintain control in the face of
increasing opposition from anti-colonial nationalism and other
global forces. However, the late colonial state only appears to have
assumed more repressive forms, with increasing recourse to
indiscriminate violence, if one assumes a perspective restricted
to the twentieth century. Considered from the vantage point of
1857, the brutality of later colonial policing and counter-
insurgency can hardly be described as either ‘radicalized’ or
‘escalating’.118 Whether conventional historical periodization,
determined primarily by structures and events central to
European history, has any applicability within a broader global
context is indeed questionable. If new forms of colonial
governance developed following each of the world wars, the
logic that underpinned the violence by which they were
sustained was anything but new.119 Colonial violence retained
at its core a surprising degree of continuity during the long
117 See, for instance, Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to

Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge, 2006); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and

its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, Mass.,
2008); Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler (eds.), Crises of Empire:
Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–1975 (London, 2008).
118 The concept of ‘radicalization’ in the colonial context appears to be particularly

popular among German scholars, influenced, in part at least, by Hannah Arendt and
the historiography of the Third Reich: see, for instance, Fabian Klose, Human Rights in
the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria, trans.
Dona Geyer (Philadelphia, 2013); and, as suggested by the title, Maurus Reinkowski
and Gregor Thum (eds.), Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear and Radicalization
(Göttingen, 2013).
119 See, for instance, Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers

to Baghdad (Princeton, 2008); Martin Thomas, ‘Intelligence and the Transition to the
Algerian Police State: Reassessing French Colonial Security after the Sétif Uprising,
1945’, Intelligence and National Security, xxviii, 3 (2013).
224 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 233
century from the 1850s to the 1950s.120 Accordingly, we cannot
begin to understand the forms and functions of colonial violence

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that characterized the withdrawal of Britain and other imperial
powers from their respective colonies without considering its
genealogy.
The violence of 1857, 1872 and 1919 was a reflection of
weakness rather than strength and the function of a colonial
order that was never sufficiently strong to do without exemplary
punishment or demonstrative violence. It is ironic that the
inherent weakness of the colonial state was so dramatically
revealed through its performance of absolute power. This
contradiction of ‘white power and white vulnerability’121 was
the root cause of exemplary violence within the colonial world,
as Governor-General Lord Napier poignantly acknowledged
when passing his final orders in the Kuka affair in 1872:
‘Summary orders are often taken for acts of vigour, when they
are in truth acts of weakness. Such orders frequently show that
those who give them doubt their own strength, and are afraid to be
merciful to their opponents’.122
That the use of violence might even be counter-productive was
conceded in the final report of the Hunter Committee when
Dyer’s rationale for opening fire at Jallianwala Bagh was finally
dismissed in 1920: ‘The employment of excessive measures is as
likely as not to produce the opposite result to that desired’.123
Colonial violence ultimately undermined colonial rule by
alienating the native population and turning its victims into
martyrs of nationalist movements. It is noticeable that sites of
colonial violence have become central to anti-colonial
narratives and today function as the locus of post-colonial
pilgrimage, where former revolutionaries and apologetic
Western leaders alike pay obeisance.
Not only was colonial violence self-defeating: it has also
permanently soured efforts to gloss over the legacies of
imperialism in the world today. When, during the Oxford
120 This point is often made in connection with studies of concentration camps: see

Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford,

2013).
121 Michael G. Vann, ‘Fear and Loathing in French Hanoi: Colonial White Images

and Imaginings of ‘‘Native’’ Violence’, in Thomas (ed.), French Colonial Mind, ii, 52.
122 ‘Final Orders of General Governor in Council’, 55.
123 Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the

Disturbances in the Punjab, 30–1.

 ‘CALCULATED TO STRIKE TERROR’ 225
Union debate of May 2015, the Indian member of parliament
Shashi Tharoor (in)famously called for Britain to pay

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reparations to India for two hundred years of colonial
exploitation, he included in his list of indictments the following:
‘British imperialism had triumphed not just by conquest and
deception on a grand scale, but by blowing rebels to bits from
the mouths of cannons, massacring unarmed protesters at
Jallianwala Bagh and upholding iniquity through
institutionalised racism’.124 This pithy statement gives no
indication of the fact that the reliance on spectacles of violence
was anything but triumphant and ultimately proved to be the
undoing of empire.

Queen Mary University of London Kim A. Wagner

124 See Shashi Tharoor, ‘Viewpoint: Britain Must Pay Reparations to India’, BBC

News, 5http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-336186214(accessed 15 July

2016).