Review by Choice Review
The Amritsar massacre was a turning point for Great Britain's Indian empire, and it signaled the beginning of the end. The shooting down on April 13,1919, of some 380 unarmed and peaceful Indians in the city of Amritsar, located in the Indian state of Punjab, turned Gandhi (and many others) definitively against the Raj. Wagner's meticulous reconstruction of the massacre makes its roots very clear: Indian unrest over the prolongation, after WW I, of wartime government security powers triggered a grotesque overreaction by the local government. Since its conquest by the East India Company in the 1840s, the Punjab had developed its own unique administrative ethos. Power devolved to the "man on the spot," and emphasis was on a rapid, crushing response to unrest. The memory of the mutiny-revolt of 1857 was very much alive in the minds of British administrators of the early 20th century. The political unrest in 1919 spooked the men on the spot; the Punjab government went into crisis mode, and an equally panicked army officer was empowered to crush a "revolt." Afterward, the provincial governor and the brigadier were sacked, but the damage was irreversible. The Raj never recovered. Wagner's postmortem of an imperial disaster should be widely read. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Raymond A. Callahan, emeritus, University of Delaware
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
