On April 13, 1919, the Baisakhi holiday for Sikhs, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer led fifty soldiers into Jallianwala Bagh, a compound in the city of Amritsar, and ordered them to open fire on an assembled crowd of about 20,000 demonstrators. In the carnage that followed—with 1,650 bullets fired—379 people were killed and over a thousand wounded, according to official numbers (unofficial statistics peg the casualties much higher). Ever since the massacre, Jallianwala Bagh has become a byword for colonial brutality in modern Indian history and each anniversary serves as the occasion for feeble expressions of regret from successive British governments. The centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh butchery has seen the arrival of several new books exploring this shocking mass slaughter of unarmed civilians at Amritsar.

In Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre, Kim A. Wagner takes a fresh look at the much-studied massacre and argues that the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity was not a singular event but was part of a continuous history of racialized colonial violence. Given the number of studies on the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, it is difficult to imagine a work offering something substantially new or different. However, Wagner's book delivers persuasive new insights on the Amritsar Massacre, deflating current apologia for British colonialism and overheated narratives claiming the Amritsar Massacre for nationalist teleologies. In thirteen tightly crafted chapters, Wagner constructs a detailed, sober argument, emphasizing the banality of colonial violence and its location in the spatial, imperial, and racial politics of colonial India more generally. Describing his analysis of the Amritsar Massacre as “a microhistory of a global event” (xxi), Wagner focuses on the events of 1919 rather than their aftermath, producing a dispassionate analysis of the massacre, presenting the logic of colonial violence not as a justification for but as an explanation of the actions of colonial officials and the inhabitants of Amritsar. The events of April 13, 1919, at Amritsar were, according to Wagner, not an aberration in the record of a generally benevolent imperial regime based on the rule of law. Rather, he argues, imperial violence was structural; empire was predicated on fear and intimidation, dependent for its continuation on brutalizing the bodies of colonial subjects.

Such an approach places the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in the context of a larger history of spectacular colonial punition, racialized spatial politics, and the histoire événementielle of the month of April 1919. Wagner argues that the violence at Jallianwala Bagh had roots going back at least as far as the events of 1857 when large sections of North India exploded in armed uprising against British authority. The uprising's repression was savage and bloody. British official and popular narratives justified exemplary and spectacular punishment as the only way to keep an incorrigibly seditious people in line. Spectacles of punitive violence were justified by colonial administrators such as John W. Kaye as “a wonderful display of moral force” (4) that would deter future rebels. The memory of the 1857 uprising and its brutal suppression guided those in authority during the events of April 1919 in Amritsar. Reginald Dyer, the officer at the center of the Amritsar Massacre, was thus not an extraordinarily evil man. Rather, as Wagner demonstrates, Dyer was a typical colonial official following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century predecessors. Those who had 1857 rebels executed by having them tied to and then blown apart from the mouths of cannons, a grisly ritual punishment inflicted also upon the Kuka Sikh rebels of 1872, provided a template for the civilian and military administrators facing popular unrest in Amritsar decades later. Like John W. Kaye, Dyer justified his order to shoot upon the Jallianwala Bagh crowd as one aimed at “producing a sufficient moral effect” (169) on other Indians. As Wagner communicates through his study, Dyer's actions and other wanton acts of cruelty in Amritsar were emblematic of the quotidian violence at the heart of colonial rule.

The spatialities of the city of Amritsar, its Civil Lines, its European and non-European inhabitants of segregated neighborhoods, the insecurities of the ruling class, and the intentions of the demonstrators come alive through Wagner's skillful use of a wide range of published and unpublished sources. His ability to swoop down on the minute details of Amritsar's neighborhoods and then zoom out to give the reader an expansive view of broader political and social horizons is masterful writing. Wagner's interweaving of archival material with vignettes from Rudyard Kipling's Kim, George Orwell's Burmese Days, and other literary works portray a city of repressed tensions and fears, from the crowded alleys of the old city to the serene precincts of the Darbar Sahib (the Golden Temple). The Great War with its incessant demands had been particularly harsh on Punjab that had supplied the bulk of the Indian military recruitment. Traders were also hit with a postwar slump. The countryside around Amritsar was also full of unrest. British opinion in India was suspicious and critical of the 1917 Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. The 1919 Rowlatt Act aimed to offset even the limited liberalism of the reforms by continuing wartime emergency powers against sedition and revolution.

And yet, as Wagner emphasizes, the city itself did not explode in violence until two leading anti-Rowlatt activists, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr. Satypal, were deported from the province. Demonstrators protesting the expulsion were fired upon by soldiers on April 10. As retaliatory violence targeting British residents spread, the situation seemed—to frightened British officials—to be a return to 1857. It was against this backdrop of exaggerated fears and communication lapses that Brig. Gen. Reginald Dyer arrived in Amritsar on April 11 and, in complete violation of both civilian and military protocol, took charge of the city. Declaring an (illegal) martial law, Dyer received a free hand against civilians whom he viewed as insurgents. In a carefully reconstructed chain of events, Wagner demonstrates how the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh was an outcome waiting to happen, when all civilians were viewed as conspiratorial rebels deserving exemplary punishment for crimes against British women and attacks on British property and personnel. The collective punishment of a city and a province—the public floggings, the crawling order, the curfews—is comprehensible only in the context of an official mindset predisposed to spectacular violence.

The Amritsar Massacre was thus the moment when the violence underpinning colonial rule became visible through the cracked carapace of imperial benevolence. Wagner's Amritsar 1919 is a timely and well-written work on the Amritsar massacre, reminding readers that the contingent choices exercised by the perpetrators of savage violence in Jallianwala Bagh were based on longer traditions of colonial authority in which violence was presented as just retribution. Such rationalizations of administrative violence as distasteful but necessary harshness in the cause of maintaining authority and racial hierarchy abound even today, a hundred years after the Amritsar Massacre.