There are places that you visit, and there are places that visit you back. Jallianwala Bagh is the second kind. It has been exactly one week since I walked through that narrow passage in Amritsar, and I am still not entirely sure I walked out the same person.
Four days from now, India will drape itself in tri-colour and
pride. April 13th marked 107 years since this ground drank the
blood of over a thousand of its own children. Independence and massacre,
standing days apart on the calendar, forever shaking hands in silence. I
have always found that timing strangely unsettling.
Because somewhere between celebrating freedom and remembering the price of
freedom lies a question we rarely stop to ask - do we truly understand what
independence cost us?
I first met Jallianwala Bagh not in Amritsar, but in a school textbook, a
paragraph, a black-and-white photograph, a few hundred words that were never
enough. I remember the flush of emotion.
The anger. The helplessness. The tears.
And strangely, growing older never diluted any of it.
Instead, the story built a small, dark room somewhere in my
mind - a room filled with screams, despair, helplessness, rage and the
unbearable cruelty of people who believed they had the right to decide who
should live and who should die.
Even then, something in me refused to close that chapter. It
sat in a corner of my mind for years, quietly waiting, the way grief does when
it isn't fully yours but you carry it anyway. I promised myself I would go.
Last Tuesday, I finally kept that promise.
The temperature outside was nearly 35 degrees. The sun was scorching. The
heat was relentless.
But honestly, it was nothing compared to the heat inside
my mind which was far greater than the heat outside.
As I walked through that narrow passage into the Bagh, my
imagination began filling in the silence.
I could almost see the people who had walked through that
very passage on Baisakhi Day.
Families. Children. Men and women.
People who came expecting a gathering, not a graveyard.
And then my mind began asking questions.
How many of them had walked in laughing?
How many mothers had brought their children?
How many people had absolutely no idea that they were walking into a place from
which many of them would never walk out?
And then came the darker questions.
How did the soldiers arrive?
How did the orders get prepared?
How did those in power decide that this was the place to make an example?
And how did the man who became known as the “Butcher of
Amritsar” walk into that narrow passage and turn a gathering of unarmed
people into a killing ground?
There was no meaningful warning.
No opportunity to disperse. No escape. Just an order.
FIRE
Men. Women. Children. No one was spared.
The official British accounts grossly understated the scale
of the massacre, while Indian accounts and later estimates placed the death
toll substantially higher. Thousands were wounded.
And yet one fact continues to haunt me.
The justification was that those gathered were somehow a
threat. That they were armed. That they deserved it.
Then I cannot stop asking:
If they were so dangerous, where were the weapons?
Where were the British officers killed that day?
How many British policemen died in that firing?
How many?
The answer is chilling.
NONE. ZERO
And that raises an even more disturbing question: How many people dared to question the narrative then?
And what happened to those who did?
The horror did not end when the firing stopped. The dead and wounded were left behind. The passage was sealed. The wounded were denied timely help.
The image of bodies lying helplessly in that space, and
people desperately trying to escape through whatever opening they could find,
is difficult to comprehend even today.
And then there was the ‘well’.
The well into which people jumped, desperately trying to
escape bullets.
A well that became a grave for those who believed that drowning might somehow
be less terrifying than being shot.
How desperate must a human being become to choose death
by jumping into a well rather than face a rain of bullets?
I stood there and could not answer that question.
I still cannot.
As I walked further into the Bagh, hundreds of voices seemed to be speaking
inside my head at once.
Not the voices of historians. Not the voices of textbooks.
The voices of the people who were there.
I kept looking at the walls.
And I wondered - What did these walls witness?
What did they hear?
The first scream?
The first gunshot?
The cries of mothers?
The footsteps and cries of people running for their lives?
The last words of someone who knew there was nowhere left to run?
Walls usually hold structures together. But these walls hold
memory. Brutal and Bloody Memories
And some memories should never be allowed to die. Perhaps,
they would never die.
Inside the museum, I came across photographs, stories and
accounts of the freedom struggle.
And one discovery particularly disturbed me.
That sentence stayed with me. What?? Saved India?
No. He did not save India.
He saved an empire's snatched authority.
And that episode reminded me of something much larger than
Jallianwala Bagh: Language is powerful.
Narratives can turn perpetrators into protectors.
Cruelty can be dressed up as courage.
Oppression can be packaged as order.
And a massacre can be narrated as an act of salvation.
Perhaps that is why history must never be remembered only
through the words of those who wrote it from positions of power.
And then the Bagh opened before me.
Today, there is green grass. There is water. There is a
memorial standing with quiet dignity. There are lotuses around it, almost like
tears frozen into flowers. There is a lamp lit in memory of those who breathed
their last there.
Everything looks peaceful.
And perhaps that is the strangest part.
The place is beautiful today because the people who died
there never got to see that beauty.
The ashes of Udham Singh rest here too.
Twenty-one years after Jallianwala Bagh, he travelled to
England and assassinated Michael O'Dwyer, the former Lieutenant-Governor of
Punjab, whom he held responsible for the political climate that enabled the
massacre.
I stood before his ashes and wondered: What does
twenty-one years of vengeance feel like?
Twenty-one years of remembering.
Twenty-one years of carrying anger.
Twenty-one years of carrying a wound that refuses to close.
How much pain must a person carry to hold on to a memory for two decades- and
then cross continents to act upon it?
I wish I could have heard his story from him.
Not from a textbook. Not from a museum.
From him.
The well still stands.
Covered now. Protected. Preserved for generations to see.
The bullet marks still remain on the walls.
28 here.
36 there.
………….And many more.
Numbers carved into stone.
But are they merely numbers!!
They are coordinates of grief.
Every bullet mark represents a moment when somebody's life
changed forever.
And perhaps that is why I walked through Jallianwala Bagh differently.
I was not simply walking through a historical monument.
I was walking through the aftermath of someone's last
day.
When I finally stood silently before the memorial, I had no
words.
And even today, I don't know what I should have said.
Should I have said Sorry? We failed you?
Should I have said: We remember you?
We feel your pain?
We honour your sacrifice?
We can never repay what you gave us?
Or perhaps: Thank you. Because of what you endured, we
live in an independent India today.
But even “thank you” felt painfully inadequate.
Because what do you say to someone who gave you the one
thing you were born taking for granted?
FREEDOM
What do you say to those whose final moments became the
foundation of someone else's tomorrow?
I stood there.
Silent and with all Silence in my mind.
And perhaps silence was the only honest response I had.
But I do have a request to my fellow Indians.
Please remember what these places are.
1. When you visit places that carry history, be silent
enough to listen.
Not every place needs your photograph.
Not every place needs your laughter.
Not every place needs your commentary.
Some places deserve your silence.
Because when you stand at a site where people died, silence is not
emptiness. It is respect.
2. Please don't turn memorials of death into spaces of
entertainment.
Do not laugh. Do not
make jokes.
Do not behave as though you are simply visiting another tourist attraction.
Imagine someone cracking a joke beside a grave.
That is how it feels.
3. Tell these stories to our children.
Tell them that freedom did not arrive as a gift.
It came through imprisonment.
Through hunger.
Through humiliation.
Through sacrifice.
Through blood.
Through people who gave up the ordinary lives they could have lived so that
generations after them could live extraordinary ones.
If our children know only that India became independent on
15 August 1947, they know a date.
If they understand what people endured to make that date
possible, they understand history.
4. Preserve these places.
Not merely as monuments.
Not merely as tourist destinations.
But as living classrooms of memory.
Because a nation that forgets the places where it suffered
eventually forgets the value of what it gained.
5. And finally, perhaps the most important one - They
gave their lives for India to become independent.
We don't need to give our lives today.
We need to give something else.
RESPONSIBILITY.
Responsibility to our country.
Responsibility to our
Constitution.
Responsibility to one another.
Responsibility to question
injustice.
Responsibility to reject hatred.
Responsibility to protect public
spaces, institutions and the dignity of fellow citizens.
Responsibility to stop asking only: “What has my country given me?”
And occasionally ask: “What am I giving my country?”
Because independence was not the end of the struggle. It
simply changed the nature of our responsibility.
As I walked out of Jallianwala Bagh that afternoon, the sun
was still burning.
But I carried a different heat with me.
Not just anger. Not just grief. Something more heavier.
A responsibility.
And perhaps this is what Jallianwala Bagh whispered to me
that day:
They did not die so that we could merely inherit a free
country.
They died so that we could learn how precious freedom is.
So, when August 15th arrives and we raise our
flags, sing our anthem and celebrate our independence, perhaps we should pause
for a moment.
Remember the walls.
Remember the well.
Remember the bullets.
Remember the nameless.
Remember the families that never returned home.
Remember the people whose tomorrow was taken away so that we could have
ours.
And then ask ourselves one uncomfortable question:
If they paid for our freedom with their lives, what are
we willing to pay for it with?
Not blood. Not martyrdom. Not death.
Our integrity.
Our responsibility.
Our citizenship.
Our courage to stand against injustice.
And our commitment to never take freedom for granted.
Because perhaps the greatest way to honor the dead… is
not to keep mourning how they died. It is to live responsibly because they did.
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