Indian envoy to UAE Navdeep Singh Suri translates banned poem on Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Exactly a hundred years ago today, Nanak Singh faced Gen Reginald Dyer’s firing squad at the Jallianwala Bagh. A protest meeting and Vaisakhi celebrations ended with the wanton massacre of over a thousand Indians.

Nanak Singh lost consciousness and ended up under a heap of dead bodies, says his grandson Navdeep Singh Suri, currently India’s ambassador to the UAE. But he survived, and went on to become one of Punjab’s best known novelists.

By 1920, Nanak Singh had published a long poem both to commemorate that horrific event and “the memory of those who sacrificed their lives.” That poem was published and promptly banned by the British government. Then it was lost.

Sixty years later, former president Giani Zail Singh, who was then home minister, searched the archives. “One morning, an envelope from the government arrived at our home. A copy of my grandfather’s poem was inside,” Suri said to TOI.

A century later, Suri has translated that powerful poem for a wider audience. The book, “Khooni Vaisakhi”, Suri says started the trend of protest poetry in Punjab, as a way to push back against a more and more draconian empire.

“The first page is a prayer — to pen a portrait of the departed ones, grant me the strength, my divine guru, to remind my people across India, lest we forget their sacrifice” — “The idea that he’s writing for posterity is very strong,” Suri says.

The second thing, he continues, that comes across throughout the poem is how strong is the amity between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Amritsar in 1919.

Partly he said, it was because Satya Pal and Saifuddin Kitchlew were arrested on April 10, which set off the series of protests that culminated in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Nanak Singh describes, Suri says, the way Ram Navami (which was on April 9 that year) was celebrated in Amritsar. “Hindus and Muslims gathered together to rejoice at a festival, my friends. Brotherhood conveyed by Muslims that day. Beyond incredible it was, my friends. A festival of Hindus though it was, Muslims made it just their own..”

(Miles Irving, then deputy commissioner of Amritsar would record in the Hunter Commission that communal harmony witnessed that day had a “sinister purpose.”)

Interestingly, the book includes a chapter by Justin Rowlatt, the great-grandson of Sidney Rowlatt, who had come to India in 1917 to head the “Sedition Commission” and was responsible for the infamous Rowlatt Act. Rowlatt, a journalist with BBC writes how he could not hold his tears at Jallianwala, after a tour by S.K. Mukerji, the head of the Jallianwala Bagh board, whose grandfather Sashti Charan Mukherjee was also present at the ground that fateful day, and survived by hiding under a stage.

Rounding off, Suri observes, “The thing that stands out for me is the raw courage of the people of that time, people like my grandfather. Remember the Rowlatt Act was in force then, to write so boldly after the massacre to write a Martyrs’ Certificate to Dyer:

“Wreaking terror upon us innocent folk
Did you fancy the taste of power, O Dyer?
You Tyrant! Until the end of time you’ll be called
The Murderer that you are O Dyer.”