Kesari 2: What *Really* Happened

The grilling of Brigadier-General Dyer by Akshay Kumar’s Sir C Sankaran Nair, as shown in Kesari 2, is an imaginary sequence, proves Utkarsh Mishra.

IMAGE: Akshay Kumar and Ananya Panday in Kesari 2.

Akshay Kumar’s Kesari 2 has suddenly invigorated broader interest in the life of Sir C Sankaran Nair, eminent jurist and former president of the Indian National Congress.

Even before its release on April 18, the film has found an admirer in Prime Minister Narendra Modi who hailed Nair in a recent speech and chastised the Congress for ‘keeping his contribution in the dark.’

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor appreciated the fact that a film has been made on the life of Sir Shankaran.

The film’s trailer was released on April 3. It shows Akshay Kumar, playing Sir Shankaran, deciding to ‘sue the Empire for genocide’ in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

The trailer goes on to show Kumar’s Nair grilling Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer in the courtroom for ordering his troops to open fire on the unarmed crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, while Dyer defends his action, calling the assembly a group of ‘terrorists’.

R Madhavan plays the lawyer ‘defending the Empire’.

The movie is based on the book The Case That Shook the Empire by Raghu Palat, a great-grandson of Sir Shankaran, and Pushpa Palat. The authors have been actively sharing posts related to the movie on their social media.

(Other grandchildren include Lieutenant General K P Candeth, Western Army commander during the 1971 War, former foreign secretaries K P S Menon Jr and Shiv Shankar Menon.)

While it is customary for Hindi movies to offer a dramatised or alternative view of history, Kesari 2 goes a step further.

Contrary to what is shown in the trailer, Sir Sankaran Nair never ‘sued the Empire for genocide’.

The case he fought was filed against him by Michael O’Dwyer, lieutenant governor of Punjab from May 1913 to May 1919.

It was a defamation suit filed by O’Dwyer against Nair in 1922, over the latter’s book Gandhi and Anarchy, in which he held the lieutenant governor responsible for the atrocities in Punjab.

The case went on for two years in the King’s Bench Division of the high court in London and resulted in the jury deciding against Nair by an 11-1 verdict.

Although General Dyer’s conduct in Punjab in April 1919 was a major part of the trial, he never appeared in the courtroom on account of his health.

As described by the Palats in their book, although Nair lost — a predetermined outcome given the odds against him — the case was a moral victory because it was widely reported in both British and Indian newspapers and, for the first time, brought the grotesque details of the Punjab atrocities into the public eye.

Thus, while O’Dwyer won the defamation suit, he lost his reputation among the people at large.

Who Was Sir C Sankaran Nair?

IMAGE: Sir C Sankaran Nair. Photograph: Kind courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London/Wikimedia Commons

Chettur Sankaran Nair was born on July 11, 1857, during India’s First War of Independence, in Mankara village of Malabar district, which was then part of the Madras Presidency (now in Palakkad, Kerala).

His father Ramuni Panicker was a tehsildar, the highest post open to an Indian at the time. Sankaran was the third of his seven children.

The Panickers provided arms and athletic training to the Nair youth of the village.

After completing his schooling in Angadipuram, Cannanore (Kannur) and Calicut (Kozhikode), Nair joined Presidency College in Madras, from where he completed his BA in History and English and joined the Law College.

He became a lawyer at the Madras high court in March 1880.

He soon became involved in public life and attended the 1887 session of the Indian National Congress in Madras.

A decade later, he presided over the Amravati Congress, becoming the youngest president of the party, a record he held until 1929, when Jawaharlal Nehru was elected president at the Lahore Congress.

Nair was the first Indian to be permanently appointed as the Advocate General of Madras in 1906. He served in that role until 1908, after which he became a permanent judge at the high court.

He was knighted in 1912 and in 1915 — while the Great War was underway — was appointed a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. He resigned from the Council in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Punjab in 1919

IMAGE: R Madhavan in Kesari 2.

During the Great War, while India was reeling under poverty and a shortage of essential goods, forced recruitment into the British Indian Army was rampant.

In Punjab, this effort was led by Lieutenant Governor O’Dwyer, who made it a matter of prestige to provide the greatest number of recruits from his province. His overzealousness resulted in horrific atrocities inflicted on village after village. Those who resisted were punished in the most inhumane manner.

While Indians were hopeful that their contributions during the war would pave the way for self-government, what they received was the extension of the government’s emergency powers through the Rowlatt Act of 1919.

The Act led to widespread protests in Punjab, which O’Dwyer interpreted as a ‘conspiracy to overthrow the Empire’.

He gagged the press and halted the circulation of newspapers.

On April 10, policemen fired upon a rally of unarmed protesters, killing several. This led to angry protests across the town, during which several government buildings were set on fire and Europeans were attacked.

O’Dwyer promptly declared martial law in the province, handing over control to the military. Thus, Brigadier-General Dyer arrived in Amritsar.

What happened after that is all too well known.

Gandhi and Anarchy

As the news of events in Punjab reached him, Nair decided to resign from the Viceroy’s Executive Council.

But he was urged by Motilal Nehru, C F Andrews and Annie Besant to continue and ‘advance India’s cause from within the Council’.

He remained in the Council until July 1919.

On learning that the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, had approved the government’s actions in Punjab and had treated Andrews ignominiously, Nair finally tendered his resignation.

In 1922, Nair published his book Gandhi and Anarchy, in which he criticised Mahatma Gandhi’s methods of non-cooperation, arguing that one should resort to boycott only after all constitutional methods are exhausted.

Calling Gandhi ‘the biggest opponent of the struggle for Indian home rule’, Nair declared that his methods would lead to more bloodshed and chaos, making peaceful resolution impossible.

However, in the chapter titled The Punjab Atrocities, he wrote:

‘Before the reforms (referring to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919), under a Lieutenant-Governor — a single individual — the atrocities in the Punjab which we know only too well could be committed almost with impunity.’

O’Dwyer took exception to this passage and, claiming it was libellous, demanded an apology from Nair.

His request was promptly refused, and he filed a defamation suit in the high court of London.

The Trial

IMAGE: Akshay Kumar in Kesari 2.

Nair was one of the most illustrious Indian jurists of his time, and a lawsuit could not deter him.

Contrary to what is shown in the Kesari 2 trailer, Nair did not conduct his own defence.

He approached three acclaimed barristers to represent him and finally settled on Sir Walter Schwabe, a former chief justice of the Madras high court.

Nonetheless, the odds were heavily stacked against him.

He was to fight an Englishman in an English court, where an all-English jury was most likely to favour his opponent.

To make matters worse, the case was heard by a highly opinionated judge who openly defended Dyer’s conduct in Amritsar and repeatedly interrupted the defence counsel to assert that the actions of O’Dwyer and Dyer had saved European lives and the Empire. He even said that the action taken against Dyer was unjust.

Dyer had been relieved of service following the report by the Hunter Commission, which had investigated the events in Punjab. He was also rebuked by then Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, and the British Parliament.

Even a man like Winston Churchill countered Dyer’s claim that he was confronted by a revolutionary army at Jallianwala Bagh, asking sarcastically: ‘What is the chief characteristic of an army? Surely it is that it is armed. This crowd was unarmed. It was not attacking anybody or anything.’

However, Nair writes in his autobiography — quoted by the Palats in their book — that ‘Dyer’s actions were completely irrelevant to the trial.’

Still, the judge’s open defence of Dyer’s conduct an integral part of the proceedings.

That notwithstanding, while senior officials — from former Viceroy Lord Chelmsford to General Sir William Beynon, the General Officer Commanding the 16th (Indian) Division in Lahore — were called to testify, Dyer was excused due to ill health.

Thus, the grilling of Dyer by Nair, as shown in Kesari 2, is purely an imaginary sequence.

Apart from a hostile judge and jury, Nair’s case was also weakened by the fact that most of his witnesses were common people from Punjab who could not appear before a court in London. Only their written testimonies were read out to the jury.

Nair was thus playing a game heavily rigged against him. The outcome was not surprising.

All but one member of the jury decided in O’Dwyer’s favour, and Nair was held guilty of defamation.

However, since the verdict was not unanimous, it fell upon the parties to accept the majority verdict to avoid a retrial.

Both parties were exhausted by the two-year-long proceedings, and O’Dwyer dropped his demand for an apology. He also limited the damages to 500 pounds.

Nair fought this battle because he refused to apologise.

Now that the demand for an apology was dropped, he had no problem accepting a majority verdict, even if it went against him.

But even in this loss, he saw a moral victory.

The world now knew what had happened in Punjab in 1919, details that had remained obscure despite the publication of the Hunter Committee report and the one by the Indian National Congress.