Q1.
Rabindranath Tagore sent a strong letter of protest to the then Viceroy. “The accounts of the insults and sufferings by our brothers in Punjab,” wrote Tagore, “have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers—possibly congratulating themselves for what they imagine as salutary lessons.” In the same letter, Tagore returned the knighthood he had received from the British. What does Tagore mean when he assumes that the colonial rulers ‘congratulated themselves’ after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre?
Answer
He means that the rulers saw the massacre not as a crime but as a success — a ‘lesson’ that would frighten Indians into obedience — and were quietly pleased with themselves for it. The bitterness lies in one word: salutary. A salutary lesson is a painful one that is supposed to do you good. Tagore is saying that the government believed it had done India a favour by shooting into a crowd.
Notice the other two phrases he chooses:
- “trickled through the gagged silence” — censorship. Punjab was under martial law and news was being suppressed, so the truth reached the rest of India only in fragments. Tagore is telling the Viceroy that the government cannot claim not to have known.
- “has been ignored by our rulers” — this is the real charge. Not only did they kill; they then treated the country’s grief as irrelevant.
Was Tagore right? The chapter says he was. Dyer “proudly defended his action before a British-dominated inquiry committee, which condemned it, though without recommending any penal action”; he was only removed from India after “a general outcry”; and Punjab’s lieutenant governor, O’Dwyer, “defended Dyer’s action”. Tagore wrote this before those facts were fully known — and they confirmed him. To this day the British government has not apologised, describing Jallianwala Bagh only as ‘a deeply shameful event in British history’.
Why returning the knighthood mattered: A knighthood was the empire’s way of saying ‘this Indian is one of ours’. Giving it back — publicly, in the same letter — turned an honour into an accusation. Tagore had no political office and commanded no movement; this was the strongest instrument he had, and he used it. Twenty-one years later Udham Singh answered the same massacre in an entirely different way, tracking O’Dwyer to London and shooting him. The chapter puts the two responses close together; they show how wide the range of Indian reactions to 1919 was.
The numbers, for the record: about ten minutes of firing, 1,650 rounds; official British counts admitted nearly 400 dead and over 1,200 wounded, while Indian estimates put the dead at over 1,000.