On April 8,1919, Gandhi took the train

from Bombay to Delhi and on

April 9 was served with an order not to
enter Delhi or Punjab at Kosi. He
refused, of course, to obey the order,
was arrested, and brought back under
police guard to Bombay. As the news
of Gandhi's arrest spread through
Bombay, however, riots broke out;
crowds threw stones at British
buildings
and violently obstructed tram-cars.
"This is not satyagraha," Gandhi
warned as soon as he learned of the
violence. "If we cannot conduct this
movement without the slightest
violence
from our side, the movement might
have to be abandoned."10 The
violence
of his followers, however, paled in
comparison to the response of
British India's police and soldiers.
Gandhi went from Bombay to his

1
Sabarmati
Ashram on the outskirts of
Ahmedabad, where more serious riots
broke out as word of his arrest spread.
Before he could calm the crowds
some fifty people were killed and 250
wounded. That was April 13, 1919,
the day of India's worst massacre. As
the sun started to set on Amritsar's
Jallianwala Bagh, British Brigadier
Reginald Dyer ordered fifty of his
toughest Gurkha and Baluchi troops to
open fire without warning on an
unarmed gathering of Punjabi
peasants celebrating their spring
harvest.11
Four hundred were murdered, another
1,200 wounded. As their ammunition
ran low, the troops withdrew without
caring for any of the wounded
or calling for any medical assistance.
Martial law was imposed over the
entire
province of Punjab, and so news of the

2
Amritsar atrocities was slow to
escape, leaving Gandhi and the rest of
India oblivious of its magnitude for
many months.
With no reference to Jallianwala
Bagh's butchery, therefore, on April
14 Gandhi wrote his apology to
Maffey, the viceroy's secretary. He had
found Ahmedabad a city of
"lawlessness bordering ... on
Bolshevism . . .
a matter of the deepest humiliation and
regret for me."12 Later that day,
addressing
10,000 people who walked to his
ashram to hear him speak,
Gandhi said he was "ashamed" of the
violence that had "disgraced"
Ahmedabad for the past few days.
"Satyagraha admits of no violence, no
pillage, no incendiarism; and still in the
name of satyagraha, we burnt
down buildings . . . stopped trains, cut
off telegraph wires, killed innocent

3
people and plundered shops and
private houses."13 Gandhi
passionately
decided as "penance" for these violent
insults to Satyagraha to fast for
three days and confessed that unless
the violence in Ahmedabad stopped he
would no longer find life "worth living."
He returned to Bombay on Friday and
found the situation there so volatile
that he announced his decision
temporarily to suspend civil disobe-
[ 101 ]
Gandhi's Passion
dience on April 18, 1919. Three days
after his scrupulous act of suspension
he learned of the savage behavior of
the Punjab's martial authorities, where
the public whipping of men caught
walking rather than crawling to their
homes on certain streets in Amritsar
had been ordered in the ugly aftermath
of Dyer's horrendous massacre a week
earlier. "Such whipping would

4
rouse gravest indignation," Gandhi
wired Maffey. "Hope there is some
explanation
that would remove all cause of
anxiety."14 There was, however,
none. More and more details trickled
out, slowly informing Gandhi and
India's
leaders of the inhumane actions
ordered by Dyer and his supporting
Lieutenant Governor Michael O'Dwyer
during that blackest spring of Indian
history.