Reginald Dyer

Early career

Dyer was born in Murree in the Punjab region of British India to a family that ran a brewing business, and was educated in Ireland and England before attending the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He served in the Indian Army for much of his career, including operations on the North-West Frontier, and in early 1919 had recently returned from service against tribal forces near the Afghan frontier when he was assigned to help suppress the unrest spreading across Punjab.

Jallianwala Bagh

On 13 April 1919, during a period of unrest in Punjab following the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of local nationalist leaders, a large crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed public garden in Amritsar, for a meeting held on the occasion of the Baisakhi festival. Dyer, in command of British and Gurkha troops in the city, marched his force to the garden and, without ordering the crowd to disperse or issuing a warning, directed troops to open fire on the assembled crowd, most of whose exits were blocked or narrow. Firing continued for roughly ten minutes until ammunition was nearly exhausted. Casualty figures are disputed: the official British inquiry recorded 379 dead, while Indian nationalist estimates, including those cited by the Indian National Congress, put the toll considerably higher; the precise number has never been conclusively established. In testimony to the Hunter Committee, Dyer stated that his intention had not simply been to disperse the crowd but to produce a wider deterrent effect, a line of testimony widely cited afterward as evidence that the firing was intended as exemplary punishment rather than crowd control.

The crawling order and related measures

In the same period, Dyer imposed a "crawling order" on the street in Amritsar where a British missionary, Marcella Sherwood, had been assaulted by a mob days earlier, requiring any Indian using the street to crawl its length on hands and knees; other punitive measures in the city under martial law included public floggings for offences connected to the disturbances.

Inquiry and aftermath

The British government appointed the Hunter Committee to investigate the disturbances in Punjab, including the Amritsar firing. The committee's 1920 report criticized Dyer's actions as excessive and unjustified, and he was censured and relieved of his command, effectively ending his military career, but he faced no criminal charges. The episode divided opinion in Britain: Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, spoke against Dyer's conduct in a House of Commons debate that voted to condemn it, while the House of Lords separately passed a motion approving it, and a public subscription organized by the Morning Post newspaper, supported by prominent figures including Rudyard Kipling, raised funds for Dyer from sympathizers who regarded him as having saved British lives in Punjab. Dyer's health declined after his removal from command, and he died in England in 1927. In 1940, Udham Singh, who had links to Amritsar around the time of the massacre, assassinated Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who had publicly endorsed Dyer's actions, in an act widely understood as retribution for Jallianwala Bagh.