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Organizing empire
Individualism, collective agency, and India
By Purnima Bose Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2768-6
Chapter One
ROGUE-COLONIAL INDIVIDUALISM: GENERAL DYER, COLONIAL MASCULINITY, INTENTIONALITY, AND THE AMRITSAR MASSACRE
On April 13, 1919, in the Indian city of Amritsar, General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer ordered his Gurkha and Baluchi soldiers to fire upon an unarmed crowd, estimated at between ten and twenty thousand, assembled in an enclosed compound, the Jallianwala Bagh, to protest the Rowlatt Act, which allowed for detention without trial. The crowd had gathered in defiance of his proclamation earlier that morning:
No person residing in the city is permitted or allowed to leave the city in his own private or hired conveyance or on foot without a pass. No person residing in Amritsar city is permitted to leave his house after 8. Any persons found in the streets after 8 are liable to be shot. No procession of any kind is permitted to parade the streets in the city, or any part of the city, or outside of it, at any time. Any such processions or any gathering of four men would be looked upon and treated as an unlawful assembly and dispersed by force of arms if necessary. (United Kingdom, Parliament, Report of the Committee 28)
Dyer's troops opened fire, without warning, on the peaceful gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh, discharging some 1,650 rounds, killing 379 people and wounding 1,137 (29). After histroops had fired for ten minutes, Dyer ordered them to retreat without making any medical provisions for the injured. Because of the 8 P.M. curfew in the region, it was extremely difficult for the friends and families of the victims to retrieve their corpses and to tend to the wounded. As a well-documented use of lethal force against a colonized population, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre made clear that British colonialism, in spite of its claims to be a project in liberal humanism, articulated in the political idiom of the "improvement" or "civilizing" of the natives, relied on force in order to secure and maintain its rule (Guha, Dominance 275). General Dyer's massacre provoked a crisis among the metropolitan bourgeoisie, because it rendered visible the contradictions that structured every aspect of British Indian colonial relations.
British "bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism," Ranajit Guha argues. "None of its noble achievements-Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty, Rule of Law, etc.-can survive the inexorable urge of capital to expand and reproduce itself by means of the politics of extra-territorial, colonial dominance" (Dominance 277; emphasis in original). Indeed, a precondition of maintaining colonial rule was the failure of the metropolitan bourgeoisie to actualize its own universalist project, thus leading to a number of contradictions which informed the specificity of the British colonial formation on the subcontinent (274). These contradictions included, for example, parliamentary rule over a state formation which lacked the concept of citizenship for the vast majority of its subjects, the development of capitalism predicated on a neofeudal organization of property, and a liberal education purposefully promulgated to perpetuate the natives' loyalty to an autocratic regime (271-72). Analyzing the relations between dominance and subordination within colonial India in light of such contradictions, Guha notes that each of these terms is constituted by a "pair of interacting elements" which "imply each other contingently": dominance is made up of the interaction of coercion and persuasion, while subordination is determined by the interaction of collaboration and resistance (229-30; emphasis in original). In the British Indian context, according to Guha, coercion always obtained over persuasion given that there could be "no subjugation of an entire people in its own homeland by foreigners without the explicit use of force" (233). Because dominance was secured by coercion, emphasizing the use of force rather than consent, British dominance on the subcontinent was actualized without hegemony, requiring, in the process, the "fabrication of [a] spurious hegemony" (283).
Guha's insistence on repositioning hegemony within the "trajectory of real historical power relations" is instructive for an analysis of the crisis in the British House of Commons occasioned by Dyer's carnage in Amritsar. The parliamentary debates reveal the discursive operations of rogue-colonial individualism through which a "spurious hegemony" was established. While General Dyer was investigated for violations of military procedure, the parliamentary debates illustrate how military-civilian relations are constructed by rhetorical strategies that contain violations against the colonial regime's own ideological articulation. Colonial discourse creates an opposition between those officials whom it deems "good," agents whose behavior conforms to the colonial norm, which is the regulated use of force, and those whom it deems "bad," agents whose actions fall beyond the norm by using force blatantly. Confronted with pressure from angry natives and their metropolitan sympathizers, who are outraged by incidents of excessive force, the colonial regime creates a safety valve to dissipate some of this tension and avert nationalist challenges to the colonial state and scrutiny of the colonial project as a whole. Through the process of individuation, a specific person is scapegoated in a discursive manifestation of rogue-colonial individualism. As demonstrated by the public reaction to the Amritsar massacre, the ideology of rogue-colonial individualism often emphasizes the importance of ascertaining the "intentionality" of the principle personalities involved. Through methods of individualizing the participants into rogue-colonial officials, the systemic workings of colonial power are renegotiated and the function of violence such as surveillance and discipline is itself displaced by other, less threatening narratives.
The law becomes the primary vehicle through which the colonial regime affects the disarticulation between its governance and its reliance on force that is so central to rogue-colonial individualism. By providing a mechanism through which the use of force can be regulated and potentially criminalized, through the censure of the most egregious offenders of colonial brutality such as General Dyer, the authoritarian nature of colonial rule is obscured by the trappings of bourgeois democracy. Yet the ambiguities of the law constantly threaten to unravel this spurious hegemony and rend the fabric of colonial ideology. In its generic sense, the law signifies a body of rules of action or conduct that is prescribed by a controlling authority-generally the state-which has binding force on its citizens (Black's 612). The boundaries of jurisprudential discourse, however, are themselves fluid given that the law is derived from three major sources: judicial precedents, legislation, and custom. Diffuse in origins, the law is manifest in multiple forms, textual and extratextual, including civil law, criminal law, martial law, common law, and international law. The extratextual sources for the law additionally perplex the imperative to adjudicate, since these sources are not stable categories but are subject to historical processes and interpretive fluidity. As the oral texts of "custom" change over time so too do the meanings attached to them through the process of interpretation. It is perhaps the multiple manifestations of the law, in the context of colonialism, that have contributed to the vexed status of massacres in jurisprudential discourse. Paraphrasing Guha, we might note that the law reaches its historical limit in colonialism. For while we might conceptualize the law ideally as a system of norms that exists to safeguard the bodily integrity and liberty of individual subjects, what the parliamentary debates of the Amritsar massacre expose is the law as the solemn expression of the will of the supreme power of the colonial state (Black's 612).
This chapter examines the debates on General Dyer and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in the House of Commons to show the centrality of the law to the ideology of rogue-colonial individualism. As illustrated by the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar massacre, the law serves to obfuscate the brutal foundations of colonial rule while constructing a spurious hegemony as part of colonialism's apparatus of self-justification. Though the various official representatives of the British state were by and large united in their commitment to the idea of Empire, their conceptions of the proper aims and responsibilities of the colonial project were by no means unified or monolithic. As David Scott explains in "Colonial Governmentality," "'the colonial state' cannot offer itself up as the iteration and reiteration of a single political rationality"; rather, different political rationalities and configurations of power, which were often discontinuous with earlier ones, emerged at given moments within the structures of the colonial state (197; emphasis in original). The Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the attendant discussion of General Dyer were underpinned by the competing political ideologies, geopolitical interests, and party agendas of those political and military officials who participated in them. My method in this chapter is to read the various interpretations of Dyer's intentionality against the conflicting motivations, both domestic and international, that underwrite their pronouncement.
An investigation of the discursive operations of intentionality and the law within the parliamentary debates additionally demonstrates how colonial subjects are interpellated through the military apparatus and suggests how different colonial locations, such as India and Ireland, are linked in the imperial grid. General Dyer's career exposes the isomorphic parallels between these two colonial sites by showing how Ireland functioned as a training ground for counterinsurgency in other parts of the Empire. This interpellation is of course structured by gender and race, and its articulation in the discourse of rogue-colonial individualism illustrates the peculiar conjucture between patriarchy and colonial domination operative in the British Indian context. As General Dyer's explanation of his intentions reveals, massacre becomes a way of asserting colonial masculinity over the natives. While General Dyer emerges as a Janus-faced figure in these accounts-either the valiant military man discharging his duties under mutinous circumstances or a monstrous aberration of a colonial system predicated on the rule of law-the natives are gendered as male, embodying the potential of a radical nationalism that threatens to solidify into an armed struggle, modeled on that of Sinn Fein and the IRA, against the colonial state. Absent in these narratives are the South Asian women and children who were present in the Jallianwala Bagh and massacred by Dyer's troops. The parliamentary debates concerning General Dyer's conduct at Amritsar illustrate how the multiple expressions of Dyer's culpability or, depending upon one's perspective, heroism occurred within a narrowly circumscribed field, focused on ascertaining the "intent" of the principal participants, that never impugned colonialism and its relationship to deadly force. The ideology of rogue-colonial individualism seeks to distance the colonial enterprise from its constitutive violence by criminalizing those colonial officials who engage in explicit and excessive brutality against natives.
DYER INTENTIONS: MASSACRES AND COLONIAL MASCULINITY
While factual clarity is rarely an aspect of international disputes such as colonial massacres, with the Amritsar massacre the factual details of the event were not disputed; yet these details caused less of a reaction fromthe British public than did Dyer's explanation of his intentions in ordering the attack on civilians. Both Dyer's critics and his supporters drew on the concept of intentionality, nuancing it in different ways, either to condemn his actions or to validate them. The invocations of intentionality functioned on two different registers, namely the individual and the collective. Dyer and his partisans justified the massacre by arguing that he had acted out of anticipatory self-defense, maintaining that the collective intent of the crowd was to initiate a second Mutiny. His critics, in contrast, insisted on limiting the discussion to questions of Dyer's individual intent and responsibility, to distance him from the military establishment and the colonial rule of law. That intentionality could be used to rationalize fundamentally contradictory stances on Dyer's conduct is symptomatic of its lack of clarity as a legal category. In jurisprudential discourse, "intention" has been associated most often with criminal law and is generally linked to malice aforethought. Determining the relationship between intention and malice aforethought in criminal cases, furthermore, has been crucially dependent on questions of objectivity and probability (Dine 72).
According to Black's Law Dictionary, "intent" signifies the "design, resolve, or determination with which [a] person acts." Because "intent" is a "mental attitude which can seldom be proved by direct evidence," it "must ordinarily be proved by circumstances from which it can be inferred" (Black's 559). "Intent" thus describes a "state of mind existing at the time a person commits an offense and may be shown by act, circumstances and inferences deducible therefrom" (559). One of the earliest statements of intent, Foster's Crown Law of 1762, assumes that those charged with murder acted out of malice aforethought and places the burden of proof on the defendant, stating: "In every charge of murder, the fact of the killing being first proved, all the circumstances of accident, necessity, or infirmity are to be satisfactorily proved by the prisoner, unless they arise out of the evidence produced against him: for the law presumeth the fact to have been founded in malice unless the contrary appeareth" (quoted in Dine 72). Before the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898, however, defendants were barred from giving evidence in their behalf in murder cases and, consequently, the court was denied direct evidence of the defendant's mental state at the time of the offense (Dine 73). The two unsettled questions revolving around ascertaining intent and malice aforethought, according to Janet Dine, are:
1) do the jury need to examine the mind of the defendant or may they take an objective stand and assume that his mind worked in the way an ordinary reasonable juror's mind would work?; 2) as nothing in human affairs is certain, no person can say that they can, with absolute certainty, achieve a particular result. The result of a particular human action can therefore only be described as falling on a particular point on a scale of certainty ranging from highly unlikely to virtually certain. At which point along this scale is a particular result intended? Is it intended when it was foreseen as likely, highly likely, virtually certain? (72)
These unresolved questions of objectivity and probability have facilitated what Andrei Marmor calls the "expertise thesis" which maintains that when authority is invested in an individual on the assumption that she or he is "more likely to have a better access to the right reasons bearing on the pertinent issue, it would typically be most sensible to take the authority's intentions into account" when her or his "directives require interpretation" (178).
In testifying to the Hunter Committee, the committee officially appointed by the British government to investigate the massacre and what were quaintly known as other "disturbances" in north India, Dyer foregrounds his identity as a military officer, legitimizing his authority on the basis of military expertise and access to conditions on the ground. He narrates his "intentions" by stressing that his objectives were calculated from a military perspective. Believing that there was evidence of a widespread rebellion which was not confined to Amritsar alone, he felt that his duty at the Jallianwala Bagh was not limited to dispersing the crowd but was "to produce a moral effect in the Punjab" (United Kingdom, Parliament, Report of the Committee 30). Dyer had ascertained, in his words, that the "situation was very very serious" and "had made up" his "mind ... to do all men to death if they were going to continue the meeting" (112). He explains:
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