The Case That Shook the Empire – Sankaran Nair and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

David Hall presented a program of book reading by authors Raghu and Pushpa Palat. Their book The Case That Shook the Empire: One Man's Fight for the Truth about the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (JBM), was presented to a keen audience of thirty people or so. Our own KRG reader Thommo (Thomas Chacko) interviewed them and elicited the important points.

Thommo introducing the authors

Raghu Palat, Pushpa Palat, & Thommo

Mr Jose Dominic of CGH Earth received the first copy of the book. While doing so he suggested a number of historical subjects concerning Kerala that could engage the authors’ interests in future. Courtesy of CGH Earth, excellent refreshments consisting of organic biscuits and parippu vada were served with chukku capi (black coffee with dry ginger).

Jose Dominic receiving the first copy of the book

Thommo, Raghu Palat, Jose Dominic, & Pushpa Palat hold the book

It was obvious from the outset that Pushpa Palat could talk her husband Raghu under the table; our moderator intervened on occasion to balance the proceedings. Pushpa bore a faint resemblance to our KRG reader Priya, who was also present along with Pamela, Geetha, KumKum, and Arundhaty.

Jose Dominic (back to camera) with KumKum & Pamela

The life of Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, great grandfather of Raghu Palat, illustrates how many rich insights into Indian colonial history lie hidden in the archives until they are popularised by modern authors who care to dredge up the interesting highlights from dry and dusty old archives. Our thanks must go to such authors for enlightening the modern mind. The history they narrate from a century ago throws light even on contemporary events. 

Questions and comments from the audience enlivened the participation and extended the discussion into further areas of British-Indian colonial history, more ignominious even than the JBM.



On Oct 10, 2019 David Hall hosted authors Raghu and Pushpa Palat who wrote a book on Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair’s fight to get the truth out about the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (JBM) on April 13, 1919. The husband and wife duo are established authors in different genres; she in lifestyle and children’s literature, and he on banking and finance. Their interest was sparked by a visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar some years ago, and a visit to the nearby site of the JBM. There they entered a museum that revealed the history. They came across an exhibit about the involvement of Sir Sankaran Nair, who was the great grandfather of Raghu Palat.

Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair

They were struck by the history and wanted to leave a memoir for their own daughters and grandchildren, who grew up knowing something about this grand lawyer figure from their own past, about whom they knew a few stories. For instance, that he was argumentative in the extreme, and when reasoned approaches did not secure him victory in a polemic, he would raise his stentorian voice and thunder until all opposition was overcome. (This behaviour KumKum says has been observed in many Malayalees, including her own husband, his paternal cousins and forebears.)  Throughout his life Sankaran Nair was ready to take a stand for his independent opinion.

K.P.S. Menon (diplomat and India’s first Foreign Secretary) had written a biography of Sir Sankaran Nair, his father-in-law. Sir Chettur Madhavan Nair, a nephew of Sankaran Nair, who served as judge of the Madras High Court, also left a book about his uncle. Besides there were a number of articles in newspapers.

Here is a quote from an article in The Hindu by the late famous chronicler of Madras, S. Muthiah: 
“Educated in Presidency College and Law College, Madras, he [Sankaran Nair] became a Madras High Court vakil in 1880 and soon proved the equal of the English barristers who dominated the courts at the time. He was appointed Advocate General in 1907 and to the High Court Bench in 1908, serving as a judge till 1915. He was knighted in 1912. When he was appointed to the Viceroy's Council in 1915, the more interesting part of his life began, but it was also to spell disappointment and disillusionment.” Muthiah goes on to recollect Sankaran Nair’s association with The Hindu, in which he purchased an equal share with Kasturiranga Iyengar.

Raghu and Pushpa felt there was more depth to be explored and wrote a longish draft which they showed to their publishing agent. He encouraged them to complete a book, but gave them a tight schedule (which they met) and the publication happened in 2019, the centenary year of the JBM.

What makes the book different is the wealth of information it contains about other lesser known atrocities committed by the British colonial masters, for example, the killing of 1,500 tribal people in the North East.

Sankaran Nair had the temerity to fight the case which is the subject of the book, in England, and the outcome would be governed by the verdict of an English jury. The trial for libel against the Lt. Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer originated in a book Nair wrote titled Gandhi and Anarchy, published in 1922 by a small press in Baroda. It would have faded into obscurity. But he ascribed singular responsibility to Sir Michael O’Dwyer for the JBM, stating: “… under a Lieutenant Governor, a single individual, the atrocities in the Punjab, which we know only too well, could be committed with impunity.” 

O’Dwyer had been seeking to clear his name for a long time in England of blame for the JBM and found in this passage, which he felt was libellous to him, an opportunity to vindicate himself. Through his lawyers he asked Sankaran Nair to publicly withdraw the book from circulation and apologise, and pay £1,000 to charities specified by O’Dwyer. (Libel is the publication of a defamatory statement in permanent form; the best defence is to be able to show that the statement in question is based on true fact.)

Before this action Sankaran Nair resigned from the Viceroy’s Council. For him the turning point was the clamp down on the press in the Punjab. He agreed after meeting with Motilal Nehru (Jawaharlal’s father), Annie Besant of Theosophy fame, and the Rev C.F. Andrews, who identified with the cause of India’s Independence, to reconsider – provided Rev. Andrews would go to Punjab and report the facts on the ground. As it turned out Rev. Andrews was stopped at the border (shades of Jammu and Kashmir in Aug-Sep 2019?). Thus Sankaran Nair’s resignation stood.

Raghu and Pushpa Palat read from p.92 of the book, a passage where Sankaran Nair is asked by the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, to suggest a replacement for him on the Council.
“He pointed to the turbaned, red- and gold-liveried attendant standing standing ramrod straight by the giant doorway. ... ‘That man there, Ram Parshad.’ Lord Chelmsford almost shot out of his chair. Nair replied ‘Why not? He is tall. He is handsome. He wears his livery well and he will say yes to whatever you command. Altogether he will make an ideal Member of the Council.’ ”

Immediately after the resignation of Sankaran Nair the press censorship was lifted and a commission called the Hunter Commission was appointed to report to the British Parliament on what had happened.

The husband-wife collaboration  of Raghu and Pushpa Palat came about because they realised the book they had in mind needed to reflect the human interest of the case, as much as the technicalities of the arguments and the historical details. This called for Pushpa’s lifestyle genre of writing to pursue the human interest part; combined with Raghu’s strength which lay in facts and figures, to describe the formal aspects of the case and the historical background. Both confessed to having ‘huge egos’ about their own writing.

Raghu’s work brought out the contribution to the freedom struggle by this southernmost province of India, the Madras Presidency, to which Malayalees belonged. Sankaran Nair was a most influential person at that time – the Chelmsford Reforms had to fly by him to find a place in the proposals. As a Judge of the Madras High Court  he was sensitive to the need to promote Tamil culture.

The JBM was followed two days later by another atrocity in Gujranwala where demonstrators had gathered to protest the JBM. One cannot imagine that the air force was called upon to intervene! The British commander actually used bombs and machine guns from the air to fire on the demonstrators, causing 12 deaths and many more injured. He wrote with a touch of sanctimony:
“I think we can fairly claim to have been of great use in the late riots, particularly at Gujranwala, where the crowd when looking at its nastiest was absolutely dispersed by a machine [aircraft] using bombs and Lewis [machine] guns.” 

In Lahore demonstrating students were whipped and terrorised by the British authorities after the JBM. A street where a British woman was assaulted was subjected to a ‘crawling order’ meaning that anyone wishing to proceed in the street between 6am and 8pm was made to crawl the 180m on all fours, lying flat on their bellies, in obeisance to the white woman, just as Hindus were accustomed in the same manner to pay homage to their deities in temples; so Brig-Gen Dyer ordered, the man-on-the-spot who gave the firing order of the JBM. If any person raised their back they were hit with a rifle butt. 

Michael O' Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab in India, was assassinated by Sardar Udham Singh, a revolutionary of the Ghadar Party in March 1940 in London, in revenge for the JBM. Udham Singh, born in 1899, was quite young at the time of the JBM. Someone asked why Udham Singh did not assassinate Brig-Gen Dyer the perpetrator who gave the firing order at Jallianwalla. Had he been murdered Dyer might have considered it a deliverance from the ignominy he was suffering, demoted from Brig-Gen rank (which he held temporarily) to Col, and suffering from many medical problems. A series of strokes during the last years of his life led to paralysis and aphasia. Be it noted that Dyer was presented with a purse of £26,000 (over a million in today’s money) from a fund set up by an imperialist newspaper. Dyer stated that he would add an Eleventh Commandment to the Decalogue: Thou shalt not Agitate. This is prophetic because authoritarian leaders even today  imprison people – forget actual agitation, they are ready to incarcerate if they even perceive a threat that people in a democracy might mount a non-violent protest.

It was observed by Raghu Palat that Sankaran Nair did not believe in non-violent non-cooperation of the kind Gandhi promoted. For him the freedom of India was to be achieved through the Law. This is a touching idea to have believed in after his signal loss in an English court of law, even though, the verdict was unjustified by the rule of jury trials, namely, that the verdict had to be unanimous, or it would be declared a mistrial. Indeed, in his case the one juror out of the 12 who delivered the verdict not-guilty as charged was Harold Laski, the well-known economist, among whose Indian pupils were K.R. Narayanan (later the tenth President of India), B.R. Ambedkar (architect of India’s Constitution and author of the book Annihilation of Caste), and Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India).  Yet Sankaran Nair was declared guilty – so much for the fairness of the English Law.

But Sankaran Nair was a man of his time, and thought that self-government and dominion status could be achieved in India. In their book Raghu and Pushpa Palat state: “He sought self-government and dominion status as in Canada and Australia, with Indians governing India. He believed this could be achieved by legislation and it was this belief that made him fight for the rights of India and Indians in the Viceroy’s Executive Council …”

From the evidence, the British rule in India was conducted in large part by people with the arrogant colonialist mentality that it was the white man’s destiny to rule over brown, black and yellow people. This was clearly Winston Churchill’s view expressed in his conviction that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” But more than that: they were racists in large part (with singular exceptions) who believed like the Nazis that the people they were destined to rule over were sub-human. 

Pushpa Palat and Raghu Palat fielding questions

Jacob Mathew, Executive Editor and Publisher of the Malayala Manorama Group, asks a question; Jose Dominic of CGH Earth

At question time Joe made the remark that JBM was far from the bloodiest massacre perpetrated in India, as Raghu and Pushpa Palat stated; that notoriety was reserved for the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which two or three million perished. The direct cause was the British reluctance to procure and ship grain, because Churchill did not consider Indian lives worth saving. How evil Churchill’s policies were has been brought out by Madhusree Mukherjee in a meticulously researched book titled Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010). A short review is here.

‘A bloody racist’ would be a succinct and accurate description of Britain’s war-time Prime Minister. Congress leader and writer Shashi Tharoor, in his book Inglorious Empire, has also called British prime minister Winston Churchill, one of “the worst genocidal dictators.” He has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst war criminals of the 20th century, said Shashi Tharoor, during an interview broadcast with ABC News.

Noting the clamp-down of the press in the Punjab as the turning point of Sankaran Nair’s life, which caused his resignation from the Viceroy’s Council, Joe noted an eerie similarity to the current clampdown on media and communications in Jammu and Kashmir, and the internment of leaders over the past 2 months. The Eleventh Commandment proposed by Brig-Gen Dyer is also in force there. 

So many laws instituted by the colonial masters in the Indian Penal Code (such as Section 124A on Sedition) to tackle the restive populace a hundred and fifty years ago, are now being used against Indians when they dare to criticise the government of the day. Dissent, and criticism of the government, are an essential part of democracy. Clearly, Section 124A violates Press Freedom; so why is it still on the books? In August 2018, the Law Commission of India recommended that it is time to repeal 124A. 

Another questioner attributed the longevity of the British rule in India to the Indians and their sense of ‘loyalty.’

Utsa Patnaik, economist, whose meticulous research put a figure on the wealth looted from India by UK

Joe added that besides physical cruelty, the British excelled in another, and far more pernicious form of enslavement, to keep India backward. They impoverished and looted India’s treasury; when they left, the country was reeling from poverty. The exact mechanism of draining wealth from India and transferring it to Britain was quite simple, but devilishly clever, according to Utsa Patnaik, the JNU economist. Her rigorous researches over years have revealed full details of the cunning scheme devised to enrich Britain and pauperise India. In essence a third or more of India’s tax revenues were spirited away to England’s coffers and collected there in the form of gold or silver. You can also read about this in the article How Britain stole $45 trillion from India. Therefore, in addition to the humiliations and cruelties of colonial rule, Britain waged a continuous economic war against India for 250 years. 

Jason Hickel who taught at the London School of Economics put it thus:
Britain didn't develop India. Quite the contrary – as Utsa Patnaik's work makes clear – India developed Britain.