UDHAM SINGH

The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand ;Published by Simon&and Schuster;Pages 373 ;Price Pounds 20/-   

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This is the Centenary year of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. We witnessed the dramatic image of the Archibishop of Canterbury Justine Welby prostrating in front of the memorial to the victims of the massacre-a visible symbol of repentance.He declared that he felt a deep sense of shame. The centenary has also resulted in a number of books--especially by Kim Wagner and Kishwar Desai. A paramount character of the event and its aftermath is Udham Singh who shot to death Sir Michael O'Dwyer who ordered the shooting.

Udham Singh was the man who on the afternoon of 13 March 1940 entered a public meeting at Caxton Hall, Westminster, and assassinated Sir Michael O’Dwyer. That primary job done, he took aim at other members of the platform party and wounded Lord Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, Sir Louis Dane, who had been O’Dwyer’s predecessor, and Lord Lamington, a former Governor of Bombay.

This grand assembly of old India hands had just finished their discussion of Afghanistan and the threat posed to it by Germany’s then ally, the Soviet Union. They were relaxed and unaware of any danger; a better-equipped assassin would have made a clean sweep of all four. But Udham Singh, had somehow managed to acquire the wrong calibre bullets for his Smith & Wesson; O’Dwyer alone died because he was shot in the back at point blank range and, as the first target, he had no time to defend himself. But O’Dwyer was the only victim Singh cared about – the rest were a bonus in a long-delayed act of revenge that had its origins more than 20 years before, when on 13 April 1919 troops led by General Reginald Dyer fired into a crowd of unarmed civilians in the city of Amritsar, killing either 379 (the official figure) or more than 1,000 of them (the unofficial estimate of the Indian National Congress). Indian fury at the slaughter extended well beyond the nascent independence movement, and the relationship between the rulers and ruled lurched into what became an unstoppable decline.

The book under review is a true tale of massacre, revenge, and India’s quest for Independence.The author is  Anita Anand who is a biographer and radio presenter and it throws a flood of light on Udham Singh.

The Jallianwala massacre brought the two men together. In April  1919, O’Dwyer instructed General Reginald Dyer to order his men to fire on a crowd of thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Jallianwala Bagh, a popular garden in the Punjabi city of Amritsar. Udham Singh, who lived in Amritsar, swore that he would avenge the victims.Singh was an impoverished Punjabi orphan and Dwyer  an ambitious Anglo--Irish civil servant who was the second most powerful man in the British Raj . Anand expertly weaves their stories together, making their unlikely meeting both inevitable and tragic. She also recognizes that many questions surrounding Singh will remain unanswered. The historical record is murky, and the intelligence files surrounding his case have only recently been released. 

Singh himself—at turns a charming rogue, a spinner of tales and a passionate revolutionary—didn’t seem to know if he was a patriot, madman or pawn. This lack of clarity allowed Singh to be labeled either a martyr or a terrorist, depending on the point of view of the person telling his story. Anand, whose family was directly affected by the massacre, rejects these easy labels. Instead, she delves into the historical record with rigour and objectivity, painting a portrait of Singh that is more than symbolic .

The book is an acute work of historical detection which  has a complex, weblike structure that makes for an unputdownable and riveting   account of the massacre and its aftermath. Anand poignantly portrays a complex flawed man overwhelmed  by anger, guilt and grief. 

  On April 13, 1919 the Punjab’s Lieutenant Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer ordered a heavily-armed detachment of soldiers to a dusty, neglected, but nonetheless popular gathering place called the Jallianwala Bagh, which was crammed with people, some of whom were there to attend a political meeting and many, many more of whom were merely relaxing in one of the city’s only respite-spaces away from the press of traffic. The only entrance to the Bagh was so narrow that the mounted machine-guns  Brigadier General Reginald Dyer (“The Butcher of Amritsar”) brought along couldn’t enter the park, but the soldiers he marched in on foot were heavily armed. 

The dramatic entrance of the soldiers had an immediate effect on those inside the Bagh. Expecting an imminent order to disperse, some started to pack up their picnics as the soldiers spread out on a raised bank of earth along the northern wall. Others stood rooted to the spot, watching as the uniformed men dropped to one knee and took aim. 

“Wherever there was hope, there was death,” Anand writes. “A fanning peepul, an indigenous tree with a broad trunk, became a shelter for dozens of screaming people. Dyer directed his men to aim at the tree. Splinters flew with blood and flesh”. 

Anand structures her  new book around key lives that day: she focuses not only on the biography of Dyer, the but also, even more fascinatingly, on the biography of Udham Singh, who achieved a place in the pantheon of Indian national heroes and martyrs: he was hanged for the murder a few months later. Anand has delved into the life of Udham Singh, climaxing of course in the moment when he’s stalking his prey at last.

The pairing of Dyer’s life and Udham Singh’s (with ample digressions about the author’s own grandfather, Ishwar Das Anand, who narrowly escaped being caught in the massacre) serves to create a more personal and immediate portrait of an India boiling with tension and delusion.

  Anand’s grandfather  could recall scenes from that terrifying day a century ago, but her book’s preoccupation is the aftermath: how a low-born Sikh murdered a country-born Irishman in the august surroundings of imperial London. In this story, very little is predictable. O’Dwyer, one of 14 siblings born to a Catholic farmer in County Tipperary, is hardly the conventional idea of a senior Raj administrator. Singh, flamboyant enough to find work as an extra in Alexander Korda’s Elephant Boy (where he appears in a corner of the Indian jungle created by the Denham Studios in 1936), refuses to conform to typical characterisations of the lone assassin. In Anand’s narrative, the courses of two lives separated by a gulf in race, class and geography narrow slowly until they meet each other, momentarily and theatrically, on stage in front of a London audience. 

At first glance, neither Singh’s choice of victim nor the source of his motivation is obvious. O’Dwyer was 30 miles away in Lahore, the provincial capital, when General Dyer ordered his troops to fire, and nothing suggests that Singh was a witness to the slaughter. O’Dwyer, however, got up to some bloody mischief of his own the next day when he ordered RAF planes to bomb and machine-gun what he wrongly identified as a rebellious mob in another district of Punjab, while a telegram to Dyer left no doubt that the Lieutenant Governor approved of the general’s action in Amritsar.

The Indian members of the official inquiry into the whole tragic debacle issued a minority report that castigated O’Dwyer for his assumption that Punjab was on the brink of revolt, arguing that the massacre had been precipitated by his overreaction. That didn’t moderate O’Dwyer’s views in any way. He continued to support Dyer long after the general resigned and never stopped publicising his belief that the massacre had prevented widespread rebellion.  He believed that Indian nationalism should never be appeased and that threats to the status quo needed to be punished severely. When Dyer, for long a sick man, died in his West Country cottage in 1927, O’Dwyer was left as the massacre’s most prominent apologist and a good replacement as its chief culprit.

 Anand gives the impression that Udham Singh swore vengeance on the day of the massacre itself or soon after. Singh “took a handful of blood-soaked earth in his hand … and he swore a terrible vow … No matter how long it took, no matter how far it took him … he would track down the dogs who did this to his people and kill them.” What Anand provides about his state of mind is good speculation; all we know for certain is that he moved about the world like an adventurer.

Born the son of railway crossing-keeper in rural Punjab and raised in an orphanage, Singh left India for the first time during the first world war, when he joined the Indian army’s expeditionary force to Mesopotamia as a carpenter. Lowly jobs in India followed, and then he went off again to work as a labourer on the Uganda Railway in East Africa. He travelled to England via France and eventually to Mexico, where he settled in El Paso for a time until in 1924 he was smuggled across the US border and into California. It was here, under the tutelage and occasional subsidy of the revolutionary Ghadar movement, that Singh seems to have discovered his vocation as an anti-Raj propagandist.

According to Anand, the Ghadars sent him on tours to continental Europe and the Soviet Union, and eventually to the UK, where his multiple aliases and addresses and his trip to Russia soon made him of interest to the authorities.  His trial at the Old Bailey in June 1940 lasted only two days. Worried about its effect on Indian and foreign opinion, the British government determined that it should attract as little publicity as possible. The number of reporters attending was to be limited; all press messages to India and America in particular were to be carefully scrutinised; censors in India were to be put on their guard against any rhetorical “heroics” that Singh might indulge in the dock. In the event, it was Reuters who supplied most of the copy from the trial, and Reuters had agreed to omit anything that could be described as incendiary in the political sense, and to make no connection between the massacre of 1919 and O’Dwyer’s assassination. Singh sank below the waves of wartime news as a solitary killer unconnected to history, perhaps a little mad.

He was hanged at Pentonville prison – a shamefully bungled execution by a nervous hangman, so Anand has discovered from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. But all the same it is an absorbing account of a strange and obsessive life.

According to legend, eighteen-year-old Sikh orphan Udham Singh was injured in the attack, and remained surrounded by the dead and dying until he was able to move the next morning. Then, he supposedly picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth, smeared it across his forehead, and vowed to kill the men responsible.

The truth, as the author has discovered, is more complex—but no less dramatic. The book throws a devastating light on one of history’s most horrific events, but it reads like a taut thriller and reveals the incredible but true story behind a legend that still endures today. 

                                                   

                                                       Udham Singh

P.P.Ramachandran.

22/9/2019.