The Read: Anita Anand, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and India's Quest for Independence

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

Why did I get this book?

Pure impulse on seeing it in a bookstore.

Is it what I thought it was?

It looked like a compelling narrative history and that’s what it is.

It stunned me by telling me a story that I had literally never heard, and that’s despite knowing a certain amount of the basic history of British imperialism in India and the rise of Indian nationalism. I’m still trying to decide if that means I was simply not paying attention in some of my earlier readings or if there’s something important about how the story of Udham Singh was erased in European and American memory, though very much not in Indian memory. I think it’s both.

What continuing uses might I have for it?

If I ever did get around to teaching a class on British imperialism or on comparative anti-colonial and postcolonial political history, it would be a great read for students and it would frame a good, simple but powerful discussion about resistance and violence.

Quotes

“Part of the American Ghadar brotherhood at last, Udham was now among men who knew nothing of his tragic childhood and cared little that he was Khamboj. He could be anything he wanted to be. In the land of opportunity all he wanted to be was an assassin.”

“While Udham worked to become the man who might one day murder him, Sir Michael, blissfully unaware, concentrated on putting his thoughts on India down on paper.”

“Like many Indians who migrated to Britain, Dr. Diwan Singh found it easy to reconcile his hatred of the Raj with his genuine fondness for British people. They were not to blame for the excesses of their empire, a sentiment Udham Singh shared.”

Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints

This book tells the story of Udham Singh, the man who assassinated British imperial official Michael O’Dwyer, the man in charge in the Punjab when Reginald Dyer and his troops brutally massacred protesters in Amitsrar in 1919. Anand is a British journalist who has done a thorough job researching Singh’s life and contradictions, and tells his story compellingly. There are a lot of points where scholarly historians might want to complicate the subject—among them numerous strains of militant and violent resistance to British rule that have tended to be pushed out of the sanctified, Gandhi-dominated story of Indian nationalism. (These do surface with some frequency in this account, in part because Singh was connected to some of these movements when he returned from service in Mesopotamia in World War I and then subsequently after Amitsrar.) It’s also true that the need to tell the story as a series of continuous events experienced by and driven by individuals pushes Anand into a novelistic mode of seeing inside the heads of her main characters, providing a rounded view of their personalities and perspectives from their childhoods to the moment they appear in the story. (Hence we get a story of how sensitive Reginald Dyer was as a child and how that might suggest that his hardened determination to show Indians their proper place by any means necessary in 1919 wasn’t the entire sum of his humanity.)

The massacre at Amitsrar (and others that followed it) are familiar stories but they are still overwhelming to read about. The thought expressed by another general, Drake Brockman, who also ordered an attack on crowds in Delhi, is such a persistent one among imperial rulers, that the subjects of empire only respect force—when it is of course the exact oppposite, that almost the only way that imperial rulers in the 19th and 20th Centuries were able to think about relating to their subjects was through threatened or committed violence. Dyer was in entirely familiar and predictable ways framed as an exceptional “bad apple” rather than the natural consequence of a determination to retain imperial control of people who wanted to rule themselves. The astonishing thing then and now is that in the aftermath of the inevitable brutality of this kind of imperial rule (or similar occupation) is that anyone at all takes such an excuse seriously. (And yet that is exactly what much of the American punditry did in hearing about torture or the deaths of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan.)

Along those lines, the book also does a good job for those who might be familiar with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh at making clear the extraordinary and capricious scope of British violence against Indian civilians in the days before and after Dyer’s troops shot at a non-violent crowd. This included a pilot in a biplane machine-gunning people who were simply walking from one place to another, following them as they ran back into their town and shooting at their houses where they took shelter and Dyer ordering men who simply were at the wrong place at the wrong time brutally flogged in public. I think even now very few people in Europe, the UK or the US know how often this kind of collective punishment or demonstrative violence was used within the late 19th and 20th Century British Empire. Caroline Elkins’ imminently forthcoming book Legacy of Violence may help to remedy that somewhat, or so we can hope.

Udham Singh’s story is the real surprise for me, at least, and I suspect even for many Indian and British readers, not the least because it includes a detour to the United States and an illegal crossing from the Mexican border, facilitated by a network of Indian militants who were living in California. The entire history of the Ghadars in the US now seems hugely interesting to me and I’m going to have to track down some more to read on it—the adoption of the common pseudonym “Frank Brazil” to move South Asian militants around the Atlantic is a completely fascinating part of one chapter of the book. Udham’s movements generally strike me as something that opens a window onto a substantially untold history of human movement in the 20th Century—the means by which some people travelled frequently across borders and within borders in ways that evaded tracing or recording. Anand is also fascinated clearly by Udham Singh’s decision after some cunning and successful travels around Europe to return to Punjab in a way that almost guaranteed he would come to the immediate attention of the imperial police—and the complicated problem of whether Udham had a consistent plan or not to kill those responsible for the massacre in Amitsrar (e.g., was he truly the “patient” assassin?) Anand treats some of Udham’s moments of indiscretion and intense emotion as if they were brief interruptions of a long habit of discipline and planning, but I ended up feeling as if Udham was (like some of the people he knew and worked with) persistent in his anti-imperial feelings and his special animus towards O’Dwyer but also consistently impulsive, that what looks like patient planning was also the ordinary life of many expatriates from French and British imperial possessions who were at motion in the mid-20th Century world. (I note that one review of the book made this point as well, suggesting that Udham’s title should have been “The Wandering Assassin”.)

Anand ends the book with the return of Udham Singh’s remains to India after decades of pressure from its government, but after detailing also aggressive attempts by the British government in the aftermath of the killing of O’Dwyer to bury the case and have it drop out of public memory. She doesn’t pass judgment herself on the assassination, I think wisely, but I have to admit I’m a bit curious about how a debate on the case today might unfold in a British context. I’d have a hard time sitting still if anybody had the unmitigated gall to roll out the usual “violence never solves anything” as a reason to condemn Udham Singh, considering what happened in Amitsrar. General Dyer may have been a “broken man” as a result of receiving negative attention, but he was never found guilty of violating any law or even procedure, and O’Dwyer spent his life after his service in Punjab not only unrepentant but aggressively arguing again and again for further imperial violence against the subjects of the Raj. He wasn’t particularly deprived of much, considering he was seventy-five when he died and had lived a comfortable life without guilt or fear right up to when he was killed.