In this extract from a 1966 radio recording, Indian politician and diplomat Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit explains that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar was a turning point for the Indian independence movement; the massacre also fundamentally changed her personal view of British rule in India.

In 1919 a peaceful crowd demonstrated at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar against the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act. This law allowed the police to detain without trial anyone that they suspected of revolutionary activity. Led by General Reginald Dyer, British Indian Army troops brutally quashed the demonstration and fired live rounds straight into the crowd, which included children, killing an unknown number of people. Estimates range from 400 to 1,000 killed and 1,000 to 1,500 injured.

In this recording, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit also mentions the infamous ‘crawling order’. In the chaos of the massacre, a British woman was attacked in a narrow street. As retribution, General Dyer ordered every Indian man passing through this street to crawl on their stomachs.

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit held various political offices in local government in the pre-independence period, and joined the movement fighting for independence from British rule alongside her brother, Jawaharlal Nehru. After 1947 she entered the diplomatic service and became the first woman to be appointed president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1953.

This sound clip is an extract from a recorded talk on Gandhi and India, which is held at the British Library as part of the BBC Sound Archive.

VIJAYA LAKSHMI PANDIT:

1920 was a significant year in our family. It was a year in which we were called upon to face a situation which we had been trying to evade all this time. And to take a definite stand. It stemmed from the tragic happenings in Amritsar. It’s difficult to describe at this period of time. But we woke up one morning, to find that quite suddenly, a peaceful group of citizens, who had gone to protest, against the Rowlatt bills becoming acts, had been shot at, by armed policemen. And not only shot at but many had been left dead and dying, and injured. And all in the name of security. Well this was something that dazed one, bewildered one, it was so horrible, that everybody from the smallest little person who was unconnected with politics, unconnected with what was happening in the country, right up to those who were involved in the political situation, there was a feeling of the utmost horror and indignation, that we, who had fought side by side with the British, that we who had given our solders, who had given their lives for the very things which Britain was fighting for, for the freedom of speech, for the freedom of association, for a democratic world, were being shot at because we objected to imposition of laws on us that prevented our meeting freely or speaking freely. We interpreted this as a sort of reward in reverse for what we had done during the war. And it ignited something in the Indian mind, a flame of hatred and passion, it was something that I’ve never seen again. There was not anybody in India who was not conscious of the indignity that had been perpetrated upon him. And later when the various reprisals took place. And you will remember the famous crawling order down a certain lane where a woman missionary had been killed, that was really the end. On that day British rule in India ended because as Gandhi told us, because one man had been made to crawl on his belly, the whole nation had crawled on its belly. And the humiliation of this was so great that India was a nation in mourning. There wasn’t a home that didn’t feel this. There wasn’t a single individual who wasn’t conscious that they had been personally humiliated and had lost their dignity and their self-respect by what had happened there. And I don’t think any act that could have been thought up could have had greater results in creating hatred and bitterness and opposition to British rule, than this one crawling order in Amritsar.