Administration in Punjab
O'Dwyer, an Irish-born member of the Indian Civil Service with long prior experience in Punjab's administration, became Lieutenant-Governor of the province in 1913. His term spanned the First World War, during which Punjab supplied a disproportionately large share of Indian military recruits and war revenue, and it extended into the unrest that followed the passage of the Rowlatt Act in early 1919, which extended emergency wartime powers of detention without trial into peacetime and provoked widespread protest.
Jallianwala Bagh and later life
When General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to open fire without warning on a crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, killing a number of unarmed civilians commonly estimated in the several hundreds — the exact figure remains disputed, with contemporary and later estimates varying widely — O'Dwyer, as the province's civil head, approved of Dyer's action and imposed martial law across Punjab. He continued to publicly defend the massacre in the years afterward, even after Dyer was censured by the Hunter Committee inquiry and removed from active command by the British government. O'Dwyer's defense of the killings made him, for many Indians, as much a symbol of the massacre's brutality as Dyer himself. On 13 March 1940, he was shot dead at a public meeting at Caxton Hall in London by Udham Singh, who said he had witnessed the aftermath of the massacre as a young man in Amritsar; Singh was tried in Britain and executed later that year.
Further reading
- Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury, 2019
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 August 2026.