Gujranwala, 14 April 1919: Terror from air and airmindedness in late colonial India

Abstract

This article revisits one of the earliest instances of British colonial aerial aggression in an urban milieu in South Asia to better understand the normative conceptions of airmindedness, the popular appreciation of aviation. A day after the massacre of unarmed civilians in Jalianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919, three Royal Air Force airplanes armed with bombs and machine guns flew out from Lahore toward Gujranwala in Punjab. The event unleashed a whirlwind of rumours that spread from Lahore to Rangoon, which spoke of the collective fears of aerial violence. If the scant evidence presented by the pilots to the official inquiry into the unrest in Punjab served only to whitewash the record, a peoples’ report that marshalled witness testimonies indicted the colonial state's proclivity for violence. By assembling photographic evidence and crafting a cartographic triangulation of the sites of bombing from their testimonies, the colonial subjects challenged the statist narrative. The asymmetry of vertical violence in Gujranwala was also excavated as political commentary in a novel published in New York by an Indian author. By piecing together these disparate discursive fragments, my article attempts to make a composite sketch of the popular responses to trace a non-Western perspective on airmindedness.