It was Baishaki and the occasion called for a celebration. Instead, there was bloodshed and violence. More than a century later, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre remains a symbol of imperial brutality and tyranny. It caused widespread anger, reverberations of which were felt far and wide across India. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood as a mark of protest. Winston Churchill, an apologist for colonialism who once called Indians “beastly” in the aftermath of the Bengal famine, condemned the incident as “monstrous.”
