Golden Afternoon by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online Page B

* books and newspaper articles, though Dyer acted as he did for one reason only: he firmly believed that he was preventing another Mutiny and a second Cawnpore. For the repercussions of that brutal Massacre of the Innocents, like a stone flung into a stagnant pool, had sent ripples out across India, driving men to acts of savagery that they chose to term ‘reprisals’. And sixty-two years later the last of those ripples was to lap against the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, when a man who had seen the smashed and mangled, near-dead body of Marcella Sherwood, † and feared a repetition of that appalling slaughter, ordered his troops † to fire on an ‘unarmed’ (if you don’t count
lathis
and clubs as arms) mob of thousands, who had already tasted blood and were being urged by a series of well-known rabble-rousers to march on the Cantonments and kill all the ‘
Angrezi
monkeys’.
    There is a postscript to all this.
    Many years later, long after India had achieved her independence and become two separate countries, while on a visit to Indian friends in Calcutta I had an interesting conversation with one of that city’s lively and cynical young writers. We had been commenting on his country’s rewriting of British–Indian history, with special reference to such matters as the bricking-up, post Independence, of a narrow alleyway leading out of the Jallianwala Bagh, with a view to impressing on foreign tourists the extreme brutality of the British (it makes that terrible episode look even nastier if there was no other way out of it — and nowadays there isn’t).
    Then there was also the recent removal by the Calcutta City Council of a monument to all those who died from suffocation in a single night in the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta — a gruesome incident that occurred over a century before the massacre of Cawnpore — and the fact that, in addition to abolishing the monument (no loss; it was not a thing of beauty), the Council had pronounced the entire incident to havebeen a malicious invention; a lying piece of British propaganda without a grain of truth in it, fabricated for the sole purpose of discrediting that heroic freedom fighter, and the local Nawab, one Suraj-ud-daula (in those days the larger part of India was ruled by Muslim potentates).
    I said that this seemed a pretty silly thing to do, considering the amount of evidence that existed, including letters from the only two survivors, and that I was surprised — if this type of Orwellian ‘
1984
’ Newspeak was becoming so popular in India — that while they were about it they hadn’t decided to repudiate the Cawnpore massacre as well. At which my chatty acquaintance laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry. We will! Just give us time. It’s early days yet, and Cawnpore isn’t nearly as easy to dismiss as the Black Hole was, because the evidence is still all there.’
    When I asked what evidence, he said: ‘The bodies, of course. They’re still down there, and if we began to say that the whole affair was only a propaganda horror-story cooked up by your lot, someone has only got to take the top off that well and there they all are. Bones last for thousands of years and it’s easy to find out how the owners died and what sex they were. And to date them. Besides, there must be a lot of other things down there. Hooks and eyes. Buttons. Whalebone from stays. Hairpins — any number of things besides a couple of hundred skeletons. But the bodies from the Black Hole were thrown into the Hoogly, which is a tidal river. See?’
    I said I saw. And I did.
    â€˜I daresay that one of these days,’ mused Young India, ‘when the ground has been cleared and people have forgotten where that well was, or what happened here, some business corporation will build a whopping great housing estate on the site, all concrete beehive flats. And if anyone