01Baisakhi, 1919
Punjab was in uproar over the Rowlatt Act, and on 10 April the arrest of the Amritsar leaders Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal led to riots in which Europeans were killed. On 13 April, Baisakhi, thousands gathered in the Bagh, many of them pilgrims in town for the festival who had not heard of Dyer’s ban on meetings. The ground had walls on all sides and one narrow main entrance. Dyer came with Gurkha and Baluch riflemen, blocked the entrance and ordered fire without warning. About 1,650 rounds were fired, aimed where the crowd was thickest and at the walls people tried to climb. Many jumped into the well and drowned. A curfew kept the wounded lying there through the night.
02What the walls keep
The Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; the Congress inquiry estimated about a thousand, and the wounded ran into the thousands. Rabindranath Tagore gave up his knighthood on 30 May 1919. In the Bagh the walls still show the bullet marks, and the Martyrs’ Well, from which bodies were taken, is preserved. The memorial, a flame-shaped pillar of red sandstone, was opened by President Rajendra Prasad on 13 April 1961. Udham Singh, who had been in Amritsar that year, shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Punjab governor of 1919, in London on 13 March 1940 and was hanged for it. After a renovation the site reopened in August 2021.
The life of this place
- 13 April 1919Dyer’s troops fire on the Baisakhi crowd.
- 30 May 1919Tagore renounces his knighthood.
- 13 March 1940Udham Singh shoots Michael O’Dwyer in London.
- 13 April 1961President Rajendra Prasad opens the memorial.
- 28 August 2021The renovated memorial reopens.
A few minutes’ walk from the Harmandir Sahib; open daily, with a museum and an evening light and sound show.
