In 30 Seconds
Story
The Qissa Khwani bazaar of Peshawar had been for centuries the street of the storytellers, where the caravans rested and the professional tellers recited the epics of the passes to tea drinking audiences, and on 23 April 1930 the street acquired the story it has told ever since. The massacre enacted there that day, and the mutiny of conscience it provoked in the ranks of the empire’s own army, made an April morning on the Frontier one of the hinges of the Civil Disobedience year, the demonstration in blood of both the movement’s new reach and the Raj’s oldest fear.
The morning began with arrests. The Civil Disobedience campaign had come to the Frontier with Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars at its head, and the provincial government, which regarded any Pathan organisation as insurrection in waiting, moved to decapitate it, taking Badshah Khan on the Charsadda road and the Peshawar city leaders from their morning meetings. The crowds that gathered in protest converged on the Qissa Khwani, dense, loud and, the subsequent nationalist inquiry under Vithalbhai Patel documented and even official accounts substantially conceded, unarmed, and into the packed street the authorities sent armoured cars and troops. A dispatch rider’s death in the crowd’s press, an armoured car driving into the mass, and then the firing, which was not a volley but a morning, the troops shooting, ceasing and shooting again over some hours as the crowd, in the conduct that made the day legend, declined to flee, the wounded carried back and fresh ranks stepping forward over them, baring their chests to the guns with the cry that they were Khudai Khidmatgars, the official count of the dead twenty to thirty, the inquiry’s count some two to three hundred, the storytellers’ street littered, by every account, with bodies the city buried in processions for days.
Within the same crisis the empire’s instrument itself flinched. Two platoons of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Royal Garhwal Rifles, Hindu hillmen of a regiment decorated at Flanders and in the third Afghan war, ordered into the city against the Muslim crowds, refused, their spokesmen answering, in the words the movement treasured, that the Garhwalis did not shoot unarmed brethren, and some by accounts handing over their arms. The military reply was swift and meant to be exemplary, seventeen convicted by court martial, sentences of transportation for life pared to long terms, the battalion’s honour struck, and Chandra Singh Garhwali, the havildar the movement credited with the refusal, serving his eleven years into a poverty the free republic only slowly repaired. The exemplary lesson cut both ways, as the government’s own gravest assessments admitted, for the mutiny of two platoons had put before every Indian regiment the question the Raj could not afford to have asked, and before the nationalist movement the answer it had waited seventy years to hear, that the army’s obedience was no longer a law of nature. Gandhi, holding the movement’s line, pointedly declined to celebrate soldiers’ disobedience as such even while honouring the men, a nonviolent movement, he reasoned, could not build on the breaking of oaths, and the subtlety was its own tribute to the event’s explosive weight.
Peshawar’s aftermath ran through the year and the decades. The city passed for some days into the crowds’ effective control, the government withdrawing to return in strength in May, the province thereafter enduring the Frontier’s special repression, and the Khidmatgar movement, baptised in the bazaar, bound itself to the Congress and to nonviolence more firmly than before, the martyrs’ street becoming the movement’s Kaaba, as its orators said, on the empire’s most militarised ground. The Garhwali soldiers entered the pantheon beside the crowd they refused to kill, the rare martyrs of the trigger not pulled, and the storytellers, whose street had known Babur’s men and the Sikh darbar’s and every caravan of the passes, added to their stock the tale the plaques now carry, of the morning the unarmed walked into the guns, and the guns, in the hands that mattered most, at last said no.
