# The Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh
**रॉलेट एक्ट और जलियाँवाला बाग़**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/jallianwala-1919/
- Chapter: [Crown and the freedom struggle](https://indianepics.online/chapter/raj.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1919 CE
- Where: Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar (31.6205, 74.8806)
- Tags: political, colonial

## Summary

On 13 April 1919 troops under General Dyer fire on a crowd in Jallianwala Bagh; the official toll is 379 dead, Indian estimates about 1,000.

13 अप्रैल 1919 को जनरल डायर के सैनिकों ने जलियाँवाला बाग़ में भीड़ पर गोली चलाई; सरकारी आँकड़ा 379 मौतें है, भारतीय अनुमान लगभग 1,000।

## Account

The Rowlatt Act of March 1919, passed on the Sedition Committee's advice against the votes of every non-official Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council, kept wartime powers of arrest and trial without jury. Gandhi called a satyagraha, and a hartal on 6 April closed shops in towns across India. In Amritsar the deportation of two local leaders, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal, on 10 April set off riots in which five Europeans were killed.

On 13 April, Baisakhi, thousands gathered in the walled garden of Jallianwala Bagh, many of them visitors who had not heard of the ban on meetings. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 riflemen through the narrow entrance lane, deployed them on either side of it and, without warning, fired about 1,650 rounds for some ten minutes. Martial law followed in the Punjab, with public floggings and an order that Indians crawl along the lane where a woman missionary, Marcella Sherwood, had been attacked. Tagore returned his knighthood.

The Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; the Congress inquiry put the figure at about 1,000, and other estimates run higher. Dyer was censured and retired, and a fund raised for him in Britain passed £26,000. Udham Singh, who said he had been in Amritsar that day, shot Michael O'Dwyer, the Punjab's lieutenant-governor in 1919, in London on 13 March 1940 and was hanged that July.

## Sources

- Disorders Inquiry Committee 1919–1920, Report (Hunter Committee) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.143541
- Sedition Committee 1918, Report (Rowlatt report) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.285698

## Image

Jallianwala bagh ,amritsar. Suchikha, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJallianwala_bagh_%2Camritsar.JPG

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