A session commemorating a 100 years of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre under colonial rule in 1919 was held on the last day of the Islamabad Literature Festival on Sunday.

Moderated by Aliya Iqbal-Naqvi, a member of the history faculty at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, the session had Professor Ali Raza and Ali Usman Qasmi, both of whom teach history at Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums), and Harris Khalique, poet, essayist and columnist, on the panel to talk about ‘Jallianwala Bagh and the Century that Followed’, beginning with why it is important to think of the massacre at all.

Mr Raza spoke about the legacy of Jallianwala Bagh, an incident that took place on April 13, 1919, when more than 1,000 unarmed men, women and children - Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs - were killed as they protested against the detainment of two political leaders who in turn had been agitating against the Rowlatt Act.

The Rowlatt Act, or kala qanoon, was a piece of legislation passed by the Imperial Legislative Council in February 1919 that allowed certain cases to be tried without juries and permitted the internment of suspects without trial, essentially a legalisation of emergency measures.

Mr Raza said: “When we reflect on the legacy of Jallianwala Bagh, it is important to not just honour the memory of those who were killed but also to reflect on what it is that continues to proliferate in the present in the forms of state violence, police violence and so on.”

Mr Qasmi said: “Carrying on with the centrality of violence, the projection is that it was an isolated event and to argue that otherwise the British rule was largely benevolent.”

“When it comes to the Jallianwala Bagh centenary, we organised events at Lums and we wanted to make it into a larger project about colonial violence generally, talking about Palestine, Congo, Algeria, New Zealand, Australia, etc. We thought we should try to get some funds and we found that there was no official support. That tells you a lot about the importance of remembrance. There are ways of remembrance which should be done in a manner that does not allow for its appropriation.”

“So many of these key moments, whether it is 1857 or Jallianwala Bagh, these are all moments in South Asian history when people banded together despite and above communal divides and that is a bit problematic in how we can or can’t recall them,” Ms Iqbal-Naqvi said.

“It is about the mindset – I always call it the Brown Raj, the Raj shifts, the

faces changed and a new elite has developed but along the same lines,” Mr Khallique said.

“When you look at Jallianwala Bagh we are commemorating the tragedy; Jallianwala Bagh defines not only how colonial powers work but also the resistance that we see in South Asia. We see people gathering, the way people do political rallies and processions in this part of the world is not entirely similar to what we see in other parts of the world.

“What we need to think collectively about is how do we stop Jallianwala Bagh from happening regularly in our lives. It is not a single event, it is our history for the past hundreds of years.”

The session was emblematic of the theme of the sixth ILF: ‘The Focus is Tomorrow: Reflecting on the Past’, as it examined the selective historiography, the politics of commemoration, shared history and the collective loss of memory.

Later, in his keynote address at the conclusion of the festival, Dr Ishrat Husain spoke of the immense value of literature festivals and the growing audience, the revival of reading and the increasing numbers of writers. He also spoke of the increasing number of students keen to study humanities and how in the future creative services will be valued more than ever.

Anwar Maqsood tied past and present together in an exchange of letters between Mohammad Iqbal and himself, where he drew attention to the follies of common characters. Iqbal in his letter talks about a celebration Quaid-i-Azam hosted on the day of his demise where he had invited Iqbal, Maulana Azad, Ghalib and Faiz, and narrates that the topic was Pakistan interspersed with couplets.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2019