Abstract

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 occupies a central place in the history of British rule in India, but its significance extends beyond the immediate question of General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer’s decision to order his troops to fire upon a large civilian gathering. The episode presents a particularly revealing institutional problem because the men who physically carried out the order were overwhelmingly drawn from the populations of South Asia and neighbouring Nepal, while the authority under which they acted remained embedded in a British imperial command structure. The Hunter Committee recorded that Dyer entered Jallianwala Bagh with twenty-five Gurkhas and twenty-five Baluchis armed with rifles, alongside another forty Gurkhas carrying kukris. Two armoured cars accompanied the force but could not enter through the narrow approach. Dyer did not first warn the gathering to disperse; he ordered the riflemen to fire, and the firing continued for approximately ten minutes, during which about 1,650 rounds were discharged. The official colonial figure recorded 379 deaths, although the actual number of people killed remains disputed and later estimates have generally been higher (Government of India, 1920). The massacre took place after serious violence in Amritsar on 10 April and after restrictions had been placed upon public meetings. Those circumstances are historically relevant, but the colonial inquiry did not regard them as sufficient justification for the manner in which Dyer employed lethal force.

The event becomes more intelligible when situated within the development of the British Indian Army. Before 1857, the Bengal Army recruited heavily from the Gangetic plains, including large numbers of Purbia soldiers from areas corresponding broadly to present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The rebellion of 1857–58 fundamentally altered British calculations concerning the composition and political reliability of the army. More than 80 percent of the Indian units of the Bengal Army disintegrated during the rebellion, and the subsequent reorganisation increasingly favoured recruitment from Punjab, the North-West Frontier, and Nepal (Deshpande, 2019; Roy, 2013). From the later nineteenth century, British military authorities increasingly employed the idea of “martial races,” a racialised and socially constructed framework that portrayed particular communities as especially courageous, physically resilient, masculine, loyal, and suitable for military service (Roy, 2013; Streets, 2010). This framework was not a scientifically demonstrated classification of human ability. It was a colonial administrative and military doctrine whose practical consequences nevertheless became real because it shaped recruitment, regimental organisation, employment, pensions, status, and relations with local elites.

Military recruitment therefore cannot be reduced to ideology alone. Service could provide regular income, pensions, social prestige, family security, and opportunities for patronage. In colonial Punjab, recruitment could become intertwined with family strategies and local political competition, with elites using relationships to the colonial military establishment to strengthen their position (Mahmood, 2016). During the First World War, this recruitment architecture reached a remarkable scale. Between 1914 and 1916, approximately 225,000 combatant recruits entered the Indian Army, including roughly 110,000 from Punjab, 33,000 from Nepal, 14,000 from the Frontier and Trans-Frontier regions, and 68,000 from the remainder of India (Townshend, 2021). The resulting army was therefore not simply British in personnel or Indian in personnel; it was a colonial institution in which British command was exercised through a large and differentiated body of Indian and Nepalese soldiers.

Jallianwala Bagh consequently raises a problem that cannot be adequately answered through the categories of either obedience or rebellion alone. A soldier could be motivated by economic security, family obligations, professional identity, regimental loyalty, fear of disciplinary consequences, belief in the authority of command, or some combination of these factors. The evidence does not permit historians to reconstruct the private motives of each individual rifleman, and it would be methodologically unsound to claim that the soldiers fired simply for money or because they personally accepted British racial ideology. At the same time, it is equally inadequate to treat the soldiers as morally irrelevant because they were “only following orders.” The event demonstrates how institutions distribute authority and responsibility across different levels while simultaneously shaping the range of choices available to individuals. It also provides a useful context for understanding Gandhi’s later strategy of satyagraha and non-cooperation. Rather than confronting the British Empire primarily at the level of military strength, Gandhi sought increasingly to weaken imperial power by withdrawing the cooperation on which its administration depended (Hardiman, 2018). Jallianwala Bagh can therefore be examined as a case study in the relationship between belief and power, recruitment and identity, employment and obedience, law and legitimacy, command and responsibility, and cooperation and political control.

Introduction: Jallianwala Bagh as an Institutional Problem

The usual historical account of Jallianwala Bagh begins with Dyer. On 13 April 1919, he entered Jallianwala Bagh with a military force, deployed his men at the entrance, and ordered them to fire on the people gathered inside. That account is indispensable, but it becomes incomplete if the institution through which his command was executed disappears from the narrative. A commander exercises power through a chain of authority, and the physical execution of an order depends upon people occupying subordinate institutional roles. At Jallianwala Bagh, the immediate command was British, but the men carrying rifles were recruited through a colonial military system that drew heavily upon South Asian and Nepalese populations. The distinction matters because the incident was not simply “British soldiers versus Indians.” It was a manifestation of an imperial system in which British authority relied substantially upon soldiers recruited from among the peoples over whom that authority was exercised.

The circumstances leading to the massacre must nevertheless be stated accurately. Amritsar had witnessed severe unrest on 10 April 1919. Europeans were attacked and killed, property was damaged, and the colonial authorities regarded the city as experiencing a dangerous breakdown of public order. Dyer had also issued a proclamation prohibiting public meetings. A substantial crowd nevertheless assembled at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April. Some participants had come in connection with the political meeting, while others were in Amritsar during the Baisakhi festivities. The gathering cannot therefore be reduced either to a perfectly uniform political demonstration or to a purely accidental crowd. The historical record also indicates that the people assembled were not carrying firearms, although some may have possessed sticks (Government of India, 1920).

The distinction between the existence of a prohibited assembly and the response to that assembly is fundamental. The Hunter Committee did not deny that Dyer was confronting an unlawful gathering under the proclamation he had issued. Its criticism concerned the means by which he dealt with it. The Committee recorded that Dyer entered the Bagh through a narrow entrance through which the armoured cars could not pass, positioned twenty-five troops on one side of the higher ground and twenty-five on the other, and, without first warning the crowd to disperse, ordered the troops to fire. The firing continued for about ten minutes and was directed at different parts of the crowd as people attempted to escape. The Committee reported that approximately 1,650 rounds were fired and that the official investigation established 379 deaths (Government of India, 1920). The evidence therefore permits a precise distinction: a prohibition existed; political unrest had occurred; but the existence of those facts did not, in the judgment of the official inquiry, justify the particular use of lethal force chosen by Dyer.

Dyer’s own explanation is central to understanding the institutional meaning of the incident. He testified that he had not regarded the action merely as a dispersal of the gathering and that he intended to produce a broader “moral effect.” Whatever one makes of the precise language, the evidence indicates that he considered the operation partly in terms of its wider political and psychological consequences. The significance lies in the difference between using force to remove an immediate crowd and using force as exemplary punishment intended to influence a much larger population. The latter transforms a military action into a political demonstration of authority.

Jallianwala Bagh should therefore be reconstructed as an institutional sequence: unrest, administrative prohibition, intelligence regarding a gathering, military mobilisation, entry into a confined space with limited exits, absence of a prior warning, an order to fire, continued firing, civilian deaths and injuries, and later investigation. No single one of these elements adequately explains the entire event. Together they reveal an institutional system in which political authority, military capacity, individual command, subordinate obedience, and subsequent accountability were distributed across different actors.

I. The Power of What Everyone Believes

Before asking why soldiers obeyed, it is necessary to ask what the institution had taught them to believe. Institutions become powerful partly because they do not issue every command as a completely new proposition requiring independent philosophical assessment. They construct interpretive frameworks in advance. They tell people which authorities are legitimate, which populations are trustworthy or dangerous, what constitutes professional honour, which kinds of conduct are rewarded, and which behaviours are considered deviant. Once such categories become embedded in professional culture, an individual encounters later instructions inside an already organised system of meaning.

The British conception of “martial races” is an especially important example. By the late nineteenth century, colonial military discourse increasingly represented certain populations as possessing durable qualities of courage, endurance, masculinity, loyalty, and physical suitability for military service. Punjabi Sikhs, Nepalese Gurkhas, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Dogras, Rajputs, and other recruiting populations became associated with this framework, although British classifications were never perfectly uniform or consistent. Streets (2010) shows how representations of Highlanders, Sikhs, and Gurkhas became embedded in imperial ideas concerning race and masculinity, while Roy (2013) demonstrates that the martial-race theory shaped actual recruitment policy. The idea was therefore not simply a rhetorical flourish: it influenced who was recruited, how military units were organised, and which communities became associated with the honour and prestige of military service.

The importance of this belief system is that it could become self-reinforcing. If officials believe that a particular community is especially martial, they recruit more men from that community. The resulting concentration generates more soldiers, veterans, regimental histories, pensions, ceremonial traditions, and family connections to military service. The community then develops a visible military presence that can be cited as evidence that the original classification was accurate. In this way, the institutional process can transform an assumption into a social reality. The sequence is not simply belief → behaviour; it can become belief → policy → institutions → behaviour → apparent confirmation of belief.

The process was not entirely passive on the part of the communities involved. Recruits and local elites also possessed agency. Military employment could be desirable for reasons that had little to do with embracing imperial ideology, while local elites could use recruitment networks to pursue family and political advantage. Mahmood’s (2016) study of colonial Punjab demonstrates that recruitment could be incorporated into local strategies of patronage and competition. The relationship between empire and recruit was therefore not simply one of indoctrinator and indoctrinated. It could involve strategic adaptation from both sides.

The broader principle is significant. People do not act only on what they have privately reasoned out. They also act within what institutions teach them is normal. A soldier need not independently discover the proposition that obedience is a professional virtue if his entire institutional environment has established that proposition through training, discipline, rank, ceremony, evaluation, and the expectations of comrades. The power of an institution lies partly in its ability to make a particular interpretation of reality appear ordinary and unquestionable.

II. The British Recruitment Architecture Before and After 1857

1. Before 1857: The Bengal Army and the Older Recruiting Order

The British Indian Army did not begin as a system dominated by the later “martial races.” In the nineteenth century, the East India Company’s armed forces were divided among the Presidency armies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, supplemented by British Army units. The Bengal Army was especially important in the conquest and consolidation of northern India and recruited heavily from the Gangetic plains. Purbia soldiers, including substantial numbers from regions corresponding to present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, formed a major part of its infantry establishment (Deshpande, 2019).

The pre-1857 system is important precisely because it demonstrates that recruitment patterns were historically contingent. The British did not begin with an immutable racial theory that naturally dictated who should fight. The Bengal Army had developed through the requirements and opportunities of Company expansion. Its strength, however, became a vulnerability. The rebellion of 1857 revealed the political risks of an army in which large numbers of soldiers shared regional, social, cultural, and professional networks. More than 80 percent of the Indian units of the Bengal Army disintegrated during the rebellion, making the reconstruction of the army a central question for the post-1857 imperial state (Deshpande, 2019).

The British therefore faced a paradox. They could not dispense with Indian soldiers because the administration of India required a large military establishment, yet they had just experienced the consequences of relying too heavily on a concentrated recruiting base. The institutional response was not the abolition of indigenous military service but its reorganisation.

2. After 1857: Rebuilding an Army Less Vulnerable to Collective Mutiny

The reorganisation after 1857 changed the balance of recruitment. Sikh and Gurkha units acquired greater prominence, while the older Purbia recruiting base was relatively reduced. The use of class-based companies and mixed-class battalions allowed the army to retain communal and regional distinctions while preventing the recreation of a single, overwhelmingly homogeneous recruiting bloc. In institutional terms, the British were attempting to make the army diverse in composition but unified in command.

This reorganisation also altered the political geography of the army. Punjab, the North-West Frontier, and Nepal became increasingly significant recruiting regions. Roy (2013) argues that the martial-race framework played a substantial role in this process, even though the policy remained flexible and was modified under wartime pressure. The British were not simply searching for strong men; they were increasingly searching for men whom military authorities believed were reliable, recruitable, and suitably embedded within communities that could be connected to the imperial state.

The resulting architecture therefore combined three processes. First, recruitment became more geographically selective. Second, communities were represented in military administration as distinct “classes.” Third, regiments provided an organisational identity that could transcend the particular village, clan, or religious community from which an individual recruit came.

3. The New Architecture and the Martial-Race System

The martial-race theory should therefore be understood as a colonial administrative technology rather than a scientific account of human nature. British officers associated particular communities with particular physical and moral qualities and then organised recruitment accordingly. Because the state itself controlled access to military employment, the classification acquired material consequences. A community labelled martial could gain increased access to military jobs, pensions, status and regimental prestige.

This created a reciprocal relationship. British officials used military service to reward communities they regarded as reliable, while members of those communities could use military service to advance economically and socially. In Punjab, military recruitment became particularly intertwined with local patronage structures (Mahmood, 2016). The martial-race system was therefore neither purely imposed nor purely accepted. It was a system of institutional incentives in which colonial categories shaped opportunities and local actors responded to those opportunities.

4. The First World War and the Scale of Recruitment

The First World War demonstrated both the power and the limitations of the recruitment system. Between 1914 and 1916, approximately 225,000 combatant recruits entered the Indian Army: around 110,000 from Punjab, 33,000 from Nepal, 14,000 from the Frontier and Trans-Frontier regions, and 68,000 from the rest of India (Townshend, 2021). These figures are important because they show that the martial-race system was not merely an ideological description. It was connected to an enormous movement of men into military employment.

The scale also reveals why the economic dimension cannot be neglected. Military recruitment meant that particular villages and families could become deeply connected to the state. Pensions, wages, status, and veteran networks could create relationships lasting beyond the period of active service. The state acquired soldiers; families acquired opportunities; communities accumulated military traditions; and local elites gained additional avenues of influence.

Comparative Table: Principal Recruiting Populations Associated With the Martial-Race System

Recruiting population	Principal geographic origins	Recruitment pattern	Representative formations	Economic and institutional incentives	Major wars/campaigns associated with service
Punjabi Sikhs	Punjab, particularly central and eastern Punjab	Increasingly favoured after 1857 and prominent in late-colonial recruitment	Sikh formations and Sikh companies within mixed-class regiments	Pay, pensions, regimental honour, status, veteran networks, patronage	1857; North-West Frontier campaigns; First World War; later imperial campaigns
Punjabi Muslims	Punjab	One of the major recruiting “classes” and increasingly important during the World Wars	Punjab and Frontier Force formations; Punjabi Muslim companies	Pay, pensions, patronage, social status, family advancement	Frontier campaigns; First World War; Mesopotamia; Second World War
Gurkhas/Gorkhas	Nepal, particularly hill regions associated with long-standing Gorkha recruitment	Recruited following the Anglo-Nepalese War and retained strong regimental identities	Gurkha regiments	Pay, pensions, military prestige, long-service opportunities, regimental identity	Post-1816 imperial service; 1857; Frontier campaigns; First and Second World Wars
Pathans/Pashtuns	North-West Frontier and Trans-Frontier regions	Major frontier recruiting population	Frontier Force and Pathan formations; mixed-class companies	Pay, pensions, prestige, patronage, local status	Anglo-Afghan conflicts; Frontier campaigns; First World War; Mesopotamia
Dogras	Jammu and adjoining Himalayan regions	Established recruiting population in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries	Dogra units and mixed-class companies	Pay, pensions, status, employment	Frontier campaigns; First World War
Baloch/Baluchis	Balochistan and adjoining western regions	Recruited into Baluch and mixed-class formations	Baluch formations and mixed-class units	Pay, pensions, status, military employment	Frontier campaigns; First World War; Mesopotamia; Jallianwala Bagh
Jats	Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and adjoining regions	Recruited in Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim forms depending on region and unit	Jat and Punjab-associated formations	Pay, pensions, agrarian connections, status	Frontier service; First World War; later campaigns
Rajputs	Rajasthan and northern/central India	Long-standing military recruiting tradition	Rajput and Rajputana formations	Pay, pensions, honour, military identity	Company-era wars; 1857; First World War
Garhwalis/Kumaonis	Garhwal and Kumaon	Increasingly recruited as Himalayan soldiers	Garhwal Rifles and related formations	Pay, pensions, regimental prestige	Frontier operations; First World War; later imperial campaigns
Purbia recruiting population	Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar/Gangetic plains	Major Bengal Army recruiting base before 1857; relatively reduced thereafter	Bengal Army formations	Pay, caste/regimental status, employment	Company conquest wars; Afghan and Sikh wars; 1857

Note. These are historical recruiting categories and institutional patterns, not statements that the listed populations possessed inherent biological or psychological martial qualities. Recruitment categories varied over time, and regimental composition changed with military reorganisation and operational requirements (Deshpande, 2019; Roy, 2013; Streets, 2010; Townshend, 2021).

5. The Recruitment Map Was Also a Social and Political Map

The consequences of this recruitment architecture extended well beyond the army. Military employment could influence village-level status, family strategy, access to patronage, and relationships with the colonial state. In Punjab, recruitment networks became embedded in local politics. Mahmood (2016) shows that collaboration with British military recruitment could strengthen family influence and assist elites in competition with rivals. This helps explain why military service cannot be interpreted exclusively as ideological loyalty.

A recruit could seek military service because it was economically advantageous, while the colonial government could interpret that service as evidence of communal loyalty. A family could value the pension while remaining politically opposed to colonial rule. A veteran could take pride in regimental service while later participating in nationalist politics. Cooperation therefore did not require complete agreement.

The recruitment system was best understood as selective incorporation. The empire incorporated particular men and communities into valuable institutions without granting the wider population political equality.

III. The Martial-Race Theory: Classification as Political Technology

The doctrine of martial races was powerful partly because it transformed administrative preference into social identity. A British official did not merely record that a particular Sikh, Gurkha, or Pathan had fought bravely. The system increasingly transformed such examples into claims about collective characteristics. The resulting categories were then embedded in recruitment manuals, regimental structures, and military practice (Roy, 2013; Streets, 2010).

The negative side of this classification should not be overlooked. Once some communities were described as martial, others could be implicitly treated as less martial or less suitable for military employment. The result was a redistribution not only of jobs but also of institutional prestige. Military service became disproportionately associated with Punjab, the frontier, and Nepal.

Yet British policy was never perfectly consistent. Wartime manpower requirements forced expansion beyond the most rigid version of the theory. Roy (2013) shows that recruitment accelerated especially in 1917 and 1918 and that additional communities entered the army, even though the traditional recruiting populations remained dominant.

This demonstrates an important feature of political classification: it can be powerful without being absolute. Institutions can shape behaviour strongly while remaining capable of adaptation when practical circumstances change.

IV. Sikhs, the British Military, and the Question of Jallianwala Bagh

The Sikh case reveals one of the most significant contradictions within the colonial military system. Before British annexation, the Sikh kingdom possessed a substantial military establishment, and the Sikh Khalsa Army fought the East India Company during the Anglo-Sikh Wars. After the annexation of Punjab in 1849, the British increasingly recruited Sikh soldiers. British interpretations of Sikh conduct during the 1857 rebellion subsequently became an important part of the military culture through which Sikhs were represented as a valuable martial population (Streets, 2010).

The historical development should not, however, be compressed into the statement that “Sikhs supported Britain.” Sikh society was not a single political actor. Soldiers, peasants, landholders, religious reformers, political activists, revolutionaries, and colonial employees could have different interests. The expansion of military employment did not eliminate political opposition to colonial rule.

Were Sikh soldiers used at Jallianwala Bagh?

This question requires a distinction between the specific firing party recorded by the Hunter Committee and the broader regimental structure involved in the operation. The Hunter Committee’s formal account states that Dyer’s force included twenty-five Gurkhas and twenty-five Baluchis armed with rifles, forty additional Gurkhas carrying kukris, and two armoured cars that could not enter the Bagh. Its account therefore does not identify Sikh riflemen as the rifle party that fired on the crowd (Government of India, 1920).

At the same time, the wider regimental history is more complicated. The National Army Museum records that the 59th Scinde Rifles was a mixed-class regiment containing three Pathan companies, two Sikh companies, two Dogra companies, and one Punjabi Muslim company in 1914, and that men of the regiment were involved in the Jallianwala Bagh operation (National Army Museum, n.d.). The historically precise formulation is therefore that Sikh companies formed part of the broader regimental structure associated with Dyer’s force, but the Hunter Committee’s identified rifle detachment was composed of Gurkha and Baluchi soldiers. This distinction is particularly important because it prevents the actions of a particular military unit from being transferred to an entire ethnic or religious community.

Sikh Reaction

Jallianwala Bagh nevertheless had exceptional significance for Sikhs because the massacre occurred in Amritsar on Vaisakhi, one of the most important dates in the Sikh calendar, and in a city containing the Golden Temple. Sikhs were among the victims. The event therefore created a profound contradiction within the colonial relationship: the same imperial system that celebrated Sikh martial service had violently repressed civilians in the centre of Sikh religious life.

The political consequences developed over time rather than through one immediate and uniform reaction. Sikh politics subsequently included religious reform, agrarian interests, anti-colonial activism, and the Gurdwara Reform and Akali movements, among other currents. The historical record therefore supports a more complex proposition than “Sikhs were loyal to Britain” or “Sikhs opposed Britain.” Sikh military service and Sikh political opposition could coexist.

V. Gurkhas and Baluchis: Different Histories Within the Same Army

The Gurkha and Baloch histories were distinct. Gurkha recruitment developed from the relationship between the British and Nepal following the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–1816. After the Treaty of Sugauli, the East India Company began recruiting Nepalese soldiers, and Gurkha units subsequently became one of the most celebrated components of British imperial military culture. British representations of Gurkhas were deeply connected to the martial-race framework and to imperial ideas about masculinity and courage (Streets, 2010).

The Baloch were a distinct ethnolinguistic population whose historical homeland extended across territories that now lie principally within Pakistan and Iran, with historical connections to Afghanistan. Baloch soldiers entered Baluch and mixed-class military formations in British India.

At Jallianwala Bagh, these distinct historical trajectories converged inside a common colonial command structure. A Nepalese Gurkha and a Baloch soldier could have different languages, regional histories, religious affiliations, and political experiences while occupying the same professional role beneath a British officer. Imperial institutions could therefore integrate people without making them culturally identical.

That distinction is central to understanding how empire operated.

VI. “It Is My Job”: Obedience and Role-Based Responsibility

The phrase “it is my job” captures a real phenomenon in institutional behaviour. Military organisations depend upon hierarchy, discipline, and coordinated action. The soldier is trained to understand that the commander possesses information and authority, that the unit must act collectively, and that individual refusal may have consequences for both the individual and the group.

Under these conditions, an order can be experienced differently by an institutional participant and by an outside observer. The outside observer sees the deliberate use of lethal force against civilians. The subordinate may experience a sequence in which the government has declared an emergency, the commander has assessed the situation, the unit has been deployed, and the soldier’s professional duty is to execute the order.

This distinction does not establish that the soldier considered the order morally correct. It establishes that institutional role can mediate how responsibility is experienced.

Authority can shift perceived responsibility upward. A subordinate can regard the commander as responsible for deciding necessity while regarding himself as responsible for carrying out instructions. Professional identity and comradeship reinforce the same distinction. Refusal may appear not only as disagreement with an officer but as a failure of duty to the unit.

The phrase “following orders” therefore has explanatory value without automatically resolving the question of moral responsibility.

VII. Economic Security, Family Welfare, and the Cost of Refusal

Economic security provides another layer of institutional dependence. Military service could offer wages, pensions, social status, prestige, patronage, and family security. In colonial Punjab, these material relationships could extend into local political structures and influence the position of families and elites (Mahmood, 2016).

The relevant chain is therefore more extensive than:

soldier → salary.

It can become:

soldier → income → pension → family security → social status → institutional dependence.

A soldier supporting parents, a spouse, children, or a wider household may experience employment as an obligation to others. The cost of refusing an institutional order therefore need not be personal alone.

This does not establish that any individual soldier at Jallianwala Bagh fired because he wanted financial security. It demonstrates a structural condition within which military obedience operated. Economic incentives explain why institutional participation could be attractive and why refusal could be costly; they do not establish the private motive of a particular soldier.

VIII. The Power of Group Identity

Economic incentives cannot explain military behaviour on their own. Regimental identity is another major component. Regiments create collective histories, ceremonies, symbols, battle honours, stories of heroism, and expectations of loyalty. Individuals can become deeply invested in being members of a regiment.

This produces what may be called role morality. The soldier evaluates behaviour partly according to the standards associated with the role. Courage means performing one’s duty. Loyalty means standing with the unit. Discipline means obeying command. Honour means fulfilling the task.

The soldier can simultaneously retain other identities—Sikh, Baloch, Nepalese, Punjabi, Muslim, Hindu, Jat, Rajput, villager, son, father—and yet experience the military role as dominant in the operational setting. Colonial military institutions did not necessarily erase existing identities. They created an additional institutional identity capable of organising conduct in particular circumstances.

IX. Law, Procedure, and the Colonial Exception

Jallianwala Bagh did not occur in a society without law or administrative procedure. British India possessed proclamations, regulations, military orders, courts, police forces, civil authorities, inquiries, and legislative institutions. The more difficult question is how such procedures could operate within a political structure that was itself unequal.

The existence of a prohibition against meetings did not automatically establish that every means of enforcement was legitimate. Dyer’s authority was institutional, but the method by which he exercised that authority was still subject to subsequent scrutiny. The Hunter inquiry demonstrates that imperial institutions themselves could recognise and reject aspects of colonial violence.

At the same time, the broader Punjab experience shows that legal administration could reproduce imperial inequality. Dhillon (2024) argues that compensation and indemnity mechanisms after the 1919 disturbances were structured within racialised legal relationships that protected European life, wealth, and property while Indian claims were often undervalued or neglected. The significance of this argument is not that “law did not exist,” but that legal procedure operated inside an unequal political order.

Formal legality and substantive equality are consequently not synonymous.

X. Racism, Colonial Power, and the Value Attached to Different Lives

The racial dimension of Jallianwala Bagh should be understood structurally rather than reduced to the proposition that every British official consciously hated Indians. Colonial rule created a political hierarchy in which British sovereignty over Indians was treated as legitimate while demands for political equality and self-government could be interpreted as disorder, sedition, or rebellion.

The martial-race doctrine was one manifestation of this wider structure. It classified some populations as more suitable for military service and associated them with courage, loyalty, and masculinity. Other populations consequently occupied less favoured positions in the military employment system.

The contradiction is important. A member of a particular community could be celebrated when serving the empire as a soldier while another member of that same community could be regarded as politically dangerous when challenging imperial authority. Military inclusion therefore did not constitute political equality.

This distinction helps explain how colonial institutions could simultaneously reward selected communities and dominate the society as a whole.

XI. Jallianwala Bagh and the Question of Genocide

Terminological precision is essential. Jallianwala Bagh is conventionally described as a massacre. Genocide is a distinct legal category, developed most significantly in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, requiring particular forms of intent concerning the destruction of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

A massacre can therefore involve deliberate and large-scale killing without necessarily satisfying the specific legal requirements of genocide. The historical case does not become less serious when described precisely.

The documented facts are sufficient to establish the gravity of the event: a large civilian gathering was subjected to sustained rifle fire without a prior warning to disperse; the space had few and inadequate exits; people attempted to escape; approximately 1,650 rounds were fired; and the official inquiry attributed 379 deaths to the incident (Government of India, 1920). Dyer’s evidence further indicates that the action was intended to have a broader psychological effect. These facts do not require the later legal category of genocide to establish the historical and moral seriousness of what occurred.

XII. Dyer, O’Dwyer, and the Distribution of Responsibility

Dyer’s operational responsibility must be distinguished from the wider responsibility of other officials. Dyer personally chose to take the troops into Jallianwala Bagh, deployed them, ordered the firing without warning, directed the continuation of the fire, and explained his purpose in terms extending beyond immediate dispersal. His decision therefore occupies the central position in the operational chain.

Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, occupied a different administrative position. He was strongly associated with the wider political environment in which the Punjab disturbances were handled, but his institutional role was not identical to Dyer’s immediate operational command. Historical analysis should preserve that distinction rather than treating all levels of authority as interchangeable.

O’Dwyer was not criminally prosecuted for the massacre. In 1940, Udham Singh assassinated him in London; Singh was subsequently convicted and executed. That later killing was a separate act of political violence and should not be presented as equivalent to formal accountability by the colonial state.

Dyer himself was not consequence-free. The colonial government and Army Council treated his conduct as unacceptable in important respects. He lost his effective command in India, was passed over for promotion, reverted to half-pay, and was not given further military employment in India. Yet he was not criminally prosecuted, imprisoned, or court-martialled. Parliamentary debate demonstrated that British political opinion was deeply divided over whether those consequences were appropriate (House of Commons, 1920a, 1920b; House of Lords, 1920).

The accurate conclusion is therefore neither that Dyer suffered “no consequences” nor that the British state subjected him to comprehensive criminal accountability. He suffered substantial professional consequences but no criminal prosecution or imprisonment.

XIII. Capacity Versus Decision

The distinction between institutional capacity and individual decision is one of the most useful analytical tools for understanding the massacre.

The colonial state supplied the institutional capacity for coercion.

The military recruitment system supplied the soldiers.

The command structure supplied the mechanism for transmitting orders.

The administrative environment supplied the political context.

Dyer supplied the immediate operational decision to use that capacity in a particular way.

The institution therefore made the action possible without making it inevitable.

This distinction avoids two opposite errors. The first is to attribute the entire event to Dyer personally and thereby ignore the institutions through which he possessed authority. The second is to treat the institution as an impersonal force and therefore dissolve the agency of everyone within it.

The historically stronger position is that institutions constrain and enable while individuals make choices inside them. Responsibility should therefore be differentiated according to authority, knowledge, opportunity, and capacity for action.

XIV. The Problem of “Following Orders”

The statement “I was only following orders” cannot by itself resolve the question of responsibility. But the opposite proposition—that every subordinate who participates in an institutional action is equivalent to the person who conceived and ordered it—is equally inadequate.

A subordinate may possess less information, less authority, and fewer alternatives than a commander. Yet the subordinate still physically participates in the action. The commander may possess decisive authority but cannot execute large-scale coercion without subordinates.

This is why responsibility must be analysed at multiple levels. The policy-maker determines the broad objective; the commander determines the operational course; subordinate officers communicate and supervise; soldiers execute; administrators later investigate, interpret, punish, compensate, or defend.

Institutional responsibility is therefore not a binary question. It is a question of differentiated participation within a chain of authority.

XV. The Power of Belief and the Construction of Obedience

The martial-race system demonstrates that obedience is not sustained only through fear. Institutions become more powerful when their expectations become meaningful. Soldiers can believe in the honour of their regiment, the authority of commanders, the value of discipline, the importance of comradeship, and the desirability of military employment.

A person does not need to believe everything an institution believes in order to participate effectively in it.

That point is crucial. A soldier might have no fully developed theory of British imperialism and still value his military career. He might disagree with government policy and still regard his commander as his legitimate superior. He might maintain a strong religious identity while understanding his professional duty through the language of the regiment.

Institutional power therefore depends partly upon partial alignment of beliefs, not complete ideological conformity.

XVI. Economic Security, Family Welfare, and the Moral Cost of Refusal

The material dimension returns to the question of why individuals entered the colonial military system. The evidence shows that military employment could provide meaningful economic and social benefits. Those benefits mattered because employment can become a family institution rather than merely an individual transaction.

A pension may support parents. A government salary may sustain children. Military status may alter social standing. Veteran networks may generate opportunities. A family’s relationship with the state may therefore become cumulative across generations.

The resulting dependence does not eliminate moral agency, but it changes the practical cost of disagreement. An institution becomes more powerful when refusal threatens not merely an individual’s immediate position but the security of people dependent upon that individual.

The essential methodological caution remains: structural incentives should not be converted into unsupported claims about private motives. The historical evidence demonstrates the existence of incentives. It does not allow historians to assign a specific motive to every rifleman.

XVII. Why Government Employment Is More Than Employment

The broader significance of the government-job question is that employment creates relationships between individuals and institutions. Where a state is a major provider of secure employment, pensions, status, and patronage, the state becomes woven into everyday social life.

The colonial government possessed precisely such capacities in military and administrative spheres. Employment could provide material advantages while simultaneously creating obligations of loyalty and participation. The resulting political relationship was not pure coercion and not pure consent. It was a structured combination of benefit and authority.

This is why a government can reproduce itself through ordinary individual calculations. The person thinking about employment may not be thinking about empire. The family thinking about a pension may not be thinking about imperial sovereignty. The local elite seeking patronage may not be thinking about abstract ideology.

The empire could therefore be sustained through thousands of ordinary decisions that were rational at the individual or family level even when they contributed to a larger political structure.

XVIII. Gandhi’s Alternative: Satyagraha, Non-Cooperation, and Withdrawal of Cooperation

Jallianwala Bagh also helps explain why Gandhi’s political strategy differed fundamentally from conventional military resistance. The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 constituted Gandhi’s first major all-India mobilisation of satyagraha, and his conception of nonviolence had developed through earlier campaigns in South Africa and India. Hardiman (2018) emphasises that Gandhi transformed existing traditions of passive resistance by giving nonviolence a stronger ethical and political content.

The institutional problem was straightforward. The British Empire possessed overwhelming military force. An attempt to defeat it directly would confront the imperial state at the level where it possessed its greatest advantages: trained soldiers, firearms, police, prisons, intelligence, transport, and administrative coordination.

Gandhi’s strategy therefore addressed a different source of power: the empire’s dependence upon Indian participation.

Indians staffed government departments, worked railways, served in the army and police, administered local institutions, paid taxes, conducted commerce, attended educational institutions, and performed countless other functions without which colonial government could not operate effectively.

Non-cooperation sought to alter those relationships.

The strategic distinction can be stated as follows:

Armed resistance confronts the state’s coercive capacity.

Non-cooperation confronts the state’s dependence upon social participation.

The difference was fundamental.

XIX. Why Non-Cooperation Could Work Against a Stronger State

The potential power of non-cooperation derives partly from scale. A government can imprison an individual. It can suppress a small protest. It can dismiss a particular employee. It faces a different institutional problem when large numbers of people simultaneously withdraw participation.

This did not make the colonial state powerless. It retained enormous coercive capacity, and Gandhi’s movements repeatedly faced repression. Nor was non-cooperation automatically successful. It required organisation, communication, discipline, leadership, sacrifice, and control over outbreaks of violence. The suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement following the violence at Chauri Chaura illustrates the difficulty of maintaining nonviolent discipline across a mass movement (Gordon, 1973; Nanda, 2002).

Hardiman (2018) also demonstrates that the Indian traditions on which Gandhian nonviolence built were not identical to Gandhi’s final conception of satyagraha. Earlier forms of “passive resistance” could be adopted primarily for reasons of efficacy, while Gandhi increasingly treated nonviolence as a moral and political principle. (academic.oup.com)

The strategic insight remained significant: a state may possess overwhelming coercive force while still depending upon the cooperation of the population it governs.

XX. The Power and the Limits of Collective Belief

The history of Jallianwala Bagh can therefore be read partly as a contest between systems of belief. The colonial military system depended upon beliefs in hierarchy, professional duty, regimental honour, command, and imperial legitimacy. The nationalist movement increasingly sought to transform beliefs about the legitimacy of colonial authority and the willingness of Indians to participate in its institutions.

The contest was therefore not fought only through weapons. It was fought through meaning.

A soldier who believes that his regiment is honourable behaves differently from one who believes that the institution is illegitimate. A civilian who regards government authority as legitimate behaves differently from one who believes that authority has forfeited its legitimacy. A population that regards government employment as desirable behaves differently from a population willing to sacrifice material security for political independence.

The most durable political power is therefore not coercion alone. It is the ability to persuade sufficient numbers of people that an institutional order is legitimate enough to participate in.

XXI. From Jallianwala Bagh to a General Theory of Institutions

The historical sequence can now be understood as a broader institutional cycle. The colonial state classified people, particularly through martial-race categories. It distributed opportunities, concentrating military employment in selected recruiting areas and communities. It created identities, especially through regimental institutions. It distributed rewards, including wages, pensions, prestige, and patronage. It distributed authority, allowing commanders to make decisions and subordinates to execute them. It supplied narratives, including loyalty, discipline, race, masculinity, order, and legality. It then distributed responsibility, so that different actors occupied different positions in the chain between policy and consequence.

The same system contained a vulnerability. Colonial government depended substantially upon the participation of Indians in administration, transport, taxation, policing, military service, education, and commerce. Political resistance could therefore operate not only by confronting coercive power but by changing willingness to participate.

This suggests a more general proposition:

Institutions are powerful because they make behaviour predictable; they become vulnerable when the people upon whose participation they depend cease to behave as expected.

Jallianwala Bagh illustrates the first proposition.

Gandhian non-cooperation illustrates the second.

XXII. What Jallianwala Bagh Does—and Does Not—Prove

Several conclusions can be established securely. On 13 April 1919, Dyer entered Jallianwala Bagh with a force including twenty-five Gurkhas and twenty-five Baluchis carrying rifles, forty additional Gurkhas carrying kukris, and two armoured cars that could not enter the Bagh. He did not first warn the crowd to disperse. Approximately 1,650 rounds were fired over about ten minutes. The official investigation later recorded 379 deaths. The gathering had occurred in the context of serious unrest and an official prohibition on public meetings, but the Hunter Committee did not regard those circumstances as sufficient to justify the manner in which Dyer employed lethal force (Government of India, 1920).

It is also established that the composition of the colonial army changed substantially after 1857. Punjab, Nepal, and the frontier became increasingly important recruiting regions, while the older Purbia dominance of the Bengal Army was reduced. The martial-race doctrine influenced this process, although British policy remained flexible and was modified by wartime manpower requirements (Deshpande, 2019; Roy, 2013; Streets, 2010).

The evidence further supports the proposition that military employment generated substantial economic and social relationships. In Punjab, recruitment could become embedded in local patronage and family strategies (Mahmood, 2016). By the First World War, hundreds of thousands of men had entered the army, with Punjab supplying a particularly large share of recruits (Townshend, 2021).

What cannot be established from the available evidence is the precise motive of every individual soldier who fired. It would therefore be inappropriate to claim that every soldier fired because of money, family welfare, racial ideology, fear, or loyalty. The evidence supports structural explanations of recruitment and obedience but does not provide direct access to every individual’s internal reasoning.

Nor can the participation of soldiers from particular communities be translated into collective responsibility for entire ethnic or religious populations. The institutional unit is the army, regiment, company, and chain of command—not an entire community.

XXIII. Conclusion

Jallianwala Bagh is frequently remembered through the figure of General Dyer, and Dyer’s responsibility for ordering the firing occupies the central place in the documentary record. Yet the event becomes much more significant when placed within the institutional history of the British Indian Army.

Before 1857, the Bengal Army relied heavily upon recruitment from the Gangetic plains, including substantial numbers of Purbia soldiers. The rebellion of 1857 exposed the political danger of concentrating a large proportion of military manpower within a recruiting population that could mobilise collectively. The post-1857 reorganisation consequently altered the geography and social composition of the army, increasing the importance of Punjab, the frontier, and Nepal and developing a greater reliance upon differentiated “class” recruitment (Deshpande, 2019; Roy, 2013).

The martial-race doctrine provided an intellectual framework for this transformation. It represented selected communities as naturally suited to military service, associating them with courage, strength, loyalty, masculinity, and endurance. These were not established biological facts. They were colonial classifications whose consequences became real because the state distributed employment, pensions, regimental status, and military opportunity according to them. As a result, recruitment itself helped generate military traditions that later appeared to confirm the original classifications.

Military service was also embedded within economic and social life. Wages, pensions, family security, status, patronage, and local prestige could make employment attractive. In Punjab, military recruitment intersected with local elite competition and family strategies. The resulting relationship between recruit and empire was therefore neither simple coercion nor complete ideological loyalty. It was a structured relationship in which individual and institutional interests could partially overlap.

The composition of Dyer’s force at Jallianwala Bagh makes this structure visible. The Hunter Committee’s identified rifle party consisted of twenty-five Gurkhas and twenty-five Baluchis, with another forty Gurkhas carrying kukris. The wider regimental history also demonstrates the presence of mixed-class formations containing Sikh companies. The correct historical conclusion is therefore neither that “Sikhs were absent” nor that “Sikh soldiers carried out the shooting.” The more precise conclusion is that the immediate rifle party identified by the official inquiry was Gurkha and Baluchi, while the wider military structure involved mixed-class formations containing several communities, including Sikhs.

This is important because it demonstrates how imperial institutions reorganised social identities. A Nepalese Gurkha, a Baloch soldier, a Sikh, a Dogra, a Punjabi Muslim, or a Pathan could possess distinct identities outside the army while becoming members of a common institution under British command. Empire did not require all of these identities to disappear. It required them to coexist with a sufficiently powerful professional identity to make military coordination possible.

The phrase “it is my job” captures part of this phenomenon. It explains how an individual can experience an institutional command primarily through the categories of professional duty, hierarchy, comradeship, and obedience. It does not establish that the action was morally justified. Nor does it remove the individual’s agency. It demonstrates instead how institutions can alter the cost and meaning of choice.

Economic dependence intensifies the problem. The loss of employment can threaten not only the individual but the family. A pension may support parents or children. Military status may shape social standing. A government job can therefore become a family institution. The stronger the institutional benefits, the greater the practical cost of refusal.

The colonial state also possessed another source of power: law and procedure. Jallianwala Bagh occurred within a government that had proclamations, courts, military orders, administrative agencies, and mechanisms of inquiry. The Hunter Committee demonstrates that the imperial state could condemn aspects of an official’s conduct. Yet the wider Punjab experience, including compensation and indemnity practices, also demonstrates that legal procedure operated within a racialised political order (Dhillon, 2024). The existence of law therefore did not automatically mean equality.

Dyer’s own position illustrates the limits and possibilities of institutional accountability. He was not consequence-free. He was deprived of effective command in India, passed over for promotion, placed on half-pay, and denied further military employment in India. At the same time, he was not imprisoned, criminally prosecuted, or court-martialled. British political opinion was sharply divided over whether these consequences were appropriate. O’Dwyer likewise was not criminally prosecuted and later became the victim of Udham Singh’s assassination in London in 1940. These facts demonstrate the difference between administrative sanction, political controversy, and criminal accountability.

The distinction between capacity and decision is therefore essential. The institution provided the soldiers, hierarchy, weapons, and authority. Dyer made the immediate decision concerning how that capacity would be used. The soldiers physically executed the order. Later institutions investigated and interpreted what happened. Responsibility was distributed, but it was not necessarily equal.

The same analysis reveals why the power of collective belief matters. Institutions become powerful when people believe that authority is legitimate enough to obey, that professional identity is worth protecting, that the institution provides security, that comradeship matters, and that established categories describe reality. A soldier does not need to subscribe to every component of imperial ideology. Partial belief and role commitment may be sufficient.

This is the deeper political significance of the martial-race system. The British did not merely classify people; they created institutional opportunities around those classifications. Those opportunities changed social behaviour. The state rewarded some kinds of participation, and the resulting participation strengthened the institutional identities on which the system relied.

Gandhi’s strategy offers the corresponding insight from the perspective of resistance. The British Empire was stronger than any Indian movement at the level of conventional military power. Gandhi’s response therefore increasingly targeted the empire’s dependence upon Indian participation. Satyagraha, non-cooperation, boycott, and withdrawal from colonial institutions represented an attempt to undermine the system not by defeating its soldiers but by reducing the cooperation that allowed the state to function. Hardiman (2018) shows that Gandhi transformed earlier traditions of passive resistance into a political practice in which nonviolence possessed both moral and strategic dimensions.

This did not make non-cooperation effortless or automatically successful. Mass mobilisation required discipline, organisation, leadership, and control over violence. The suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement after Chauri Chaura demonstrated how difficult it was to maintain Gandhian discipline on a mass scale. Yet the underlying institutional insight was powerful: the state that possesses enormous coercive capacity may still depend upon the everyday cooperation of the population it governs.

Jallianwala Bagh therefore represents the coercive side of institutional power.

Gandhian non-cooperation represents the dependency side.

The two can be understood together.

An institution gains strength by organising belief, distributing incentives, defining roles, creating identities, and establishing authority. It becomes vulnerable when large numbers of people change what they believe about its legitimacy or withdraw the participation that sustains it.

The deepest question raised by Jallianwala Bagh is therefore not merely:

Why did Dyer order the firing?

Nor merely:

Why did the soldiers obey?

It is:

How do institutions persuade people to accept a role, a hierarchy, a classification, a law, a command, or a political order as sufficiently legitimate that they will cooperate with it—even when the consequences of that cooperation become morally catastrophic?

The corresponding question is:

What happens when enough people cease to believe, cease to cooperate, or both?

Those questions extend beyond colonial India. Yet Jallianwala Bagh offers an unusually clear historical case because a few minutes of firing exposed the operation of an institutional system built over decades through recruitment, classification, employment, identity, hierarchy, law, belief, and political authority.

The lasting importance of Jallianwala Bagh therefore lies not only in the number of people killed or in the conduct of one officer. It lies in what the event reveals about the relationship between human agency and institutional structure.

People seek security.

Institutions provide it.

People acquire identities within institutions.

Institutions teach people what authority means.

People then act within those structures.

When responsibility is distributed, each person can perceive only part of the consequence.

Yet the system can still produce an outcome for which no single explanation is sufficient.

That is the institutional problem Jallianwala Bagh leaves behind.

It is simultaneously a history of colonialism, military recruitment, race, class, belief, obedience, law, political legitimacy, and resistance.

And it remains a particularly stark demonstration that the power of a government does not rest solely upon what it can force people to do.

It also rests upon what people have been taught to believe is normal, legitimate, necessary, honourable, secure, and worth preserving.

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