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What's in a Name? Further Reflections on Jalianwala Bagh (part 2 of 5)

In my April 13 entry on Jalianwala Bagh , I offered what I called "a bare, brute minimum" description of the Jalianwala Bagh massacre, suggesting that it could be redescribed in multiple ways, and hinting at the broader implications of this fact. This is the second of five entries I plan to write on that theme.

Consider just one, apparently trivial dimension of re-description: the name of the event. We can refer to the event in more than one way. Why refer to it in one way rather than another?

I've referred to it as "the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919." But "Jalianwala Bagh" is a Hindi mouthful, not very user-friendly to English-speaking mouths. Another possibility is "Amritsar Massacre." The event is referred to in both ways. What's the difference?

"Jalianwala Bagh" is hard to pronounce, "Amritsar" easier. Does that make a difference? I think so. Take it from a guy with a name like "Irfan Khawaja": people hate mispronouncing a foreign word or name in public; it embarrasses them. And a conscientious person will avoid using a word in print that he can't pronounce in speech; it feels phony.

First lesson: I think one will be more apt to refer to the event as "Jalianwala" if one can pronounce that word in an authentically Hindi way. Second lesson: "Jalianwala Bagh" sounds more authentic than "Amritsar," and the person who uses it will tend to sound more authoritative than one who doesn't.

There's another subtle difference between the two names, however, and it works somewhat at cross-purposes with the one I just mentioned. Jalianwala Bagh is a park in the city of Amritsar. Amritsar, by contrast, is the city itself. There is a sense in which a massacre named after a park is "merely" an assault on the people who happened to be in the park. But a massacre named after a city seems somehow larger in scope--as though it were an assault on the city as such.

By way of comparison, consider the "Boston Massacre" of March 1770. We call it by the name of the city, not the precise location within it, and our doing so gives it a gravitas that the killing of five troublemakers might not otherwise have had. Now consider what's sometimes called the "Columbine Massacre" of April 1999. We describe it by the name of the school at which it took place, not the town (Littleton, Colorado) in which the school stood; the implication is that while the school may be tainted by the event, the town is not.

Christopher Hitchens's wonderful essay "A Sense of Mission: The Raj Quartet" (in his 1988 book Prepared for the Worst ) captures these nuances in a particularly apt way. "The Bibighar massacre at Cawnpore was essential in providing a righteous justification for the crushing of the Indian Mutiny [of 1857]," he writes, but "Amritsar/Jallianwallah was more complex..."

Why "Bibighar massacre at Cawnpore" as opposed to merely "Bibighar massacre" or "Cawnpore massacre"? Why "Amritsar/Jallianwallah" as opposed to one or the other? Precisely, I think, because Hitchens's essay raises the question of the exact significance of the two events. Were they anomalous, happenstance murders, or were they symbolic of some larger point? "Jallianwallah" gives one answer, "Amritsar" gives another, and "Amritsar/Jallianwallah" leaves the question unanswered.

I've been calling it a "massacre," and the unprovoked killing of 379 members of a peaceful crowd would rather obviously seem to merit that description. But not everyone would call the killing unprovoked, or call the crowd peaceful, and those who don't take pains not to call the event a massacre. One example is Penderel Moon, in his classic work Divide and Quit , which alludes in passing to Jalianwala while discussing the violence of the India/Pakistan partition (1947). “A generation earlier,” Moon writes (1919 being the "earlier generation," 1947 being the later), “when there had been a wave of lawlessness in the Punjab directed against the British, Brigadier-General Dyer had poured 1,650 rounds into a mob in Amritsar, killing 600-700 and wounding over 1,000…” The unprovoked killing of a "peaceful crowd" may be a massacre, but what about the killing of a "lawless mob"? Apparently not.

So why do *I* call it the Jalianwala Massacre? I use "Jalianwala" not for the first of the reasons I've rehearsed here but the second: not to signal authenticity, in other words, but to signal particularity. Jalianwala was a highly particular, and I think, relatively anomalous event. It stands out in history not because it was typical, but because it was atypical. I may be splitting hairs, but I think "Jalianwala" conveys atypicality better than "Amritsar", if only in a subtle way, by localizing or particularizing the event. I use "massacre" because there is no avoiding the moral judgment that that word conveys: contrary to Moon, the crowd fired on was a not a mob, and Dyer's acts cannot be mitigated in the way that our old ICS officer somewhat slyly insinuates.

The contemporary analogue of Jalianwala Bagh is, I suppose, Abu Ghraib. The similarities and differences between the two events are instructive. I don't have the time to list them all here, but I'll focus on one: the parallel question of what to CALL "Abu Ghraib." The term "Abu Ghraib," of course, is as neutral as "Jalianwala Bagh." But if Jalianwala Bagh was a massacre, what was Abu Ghraib?

Sometimes it's called a "scandal," but that trivializes it, focusing not on its victims but on those embarrassed by the fact that the event took place (or came to light). "Abu Ghraib affair," is similarly trivializing; it sounds no different from "scandal." "The Abu Ghraib case" sounds appropriately forensic but leaves the most obvious question answered...case of what?

"Torture" is the obvious answer--but only as "obvious" as "massacre" is or was in the case of Jalianwala Bagh. Just as it can seem unclear whether a "mob" can be "massacred," it can seem equally unclear whether "terrorists" can be "tortured." At least so it seems to many people I talk to. I've taught material on torture in a few classes at TCNJ and Rutgers, and a fair number of my students have trouble conceiving of the events of Abu Ghraib as amounting to genuine torture. The explanation, I suppose, is either that Abu Ghraib doesn't fit their stereotype of what torture is supposed to be, or its victims don't fit their stereotype of what a torture-victim is supposed to be. (For an interesting discussion of these issues, which alludes, in a somewhat unflattering and question-begging way to an essay by yours truly, see Steven Lukes's essay, "Liberal Democratic Torture" (requires PDF).

More on such niceties in future entries. My basic point for now is this: The name of an event determines, in part, how we think of it; conversely, how we think of an event also determines, in part, how we name it. Both judgments determine the first draft of history, and the first draft, of course, has a lot to do with the final draft. I don't know how or whether Jalianwala Bagh is discussed in British history textbooks; I'd be interested to know. By the same token: I wonder whether Abu Ghraib will be discussed in American history textbooks 100 years from now, and if so, under what description.