The Bullet Never Stops Echoing
When I finished watching Kesari 2, my eyes were moist and my heart knotted with anger. The film may have been about a courtroom, not a battlefield. But it threw me back to Amritsar. To a warm afternoon years ago when I stood at Jallianwala Bagh. The walls were still standing. But they were screaming. You don’t need imagination to hear the bullets. You just need memory. And silence. There’s an eerie quiet there. A stillness that feels like it’s watching you. Judging. Whispering. Asking why we moved on.
We didn’t. We just buried it in English.
Because in most Indian classrooms, history is still an essay. In British ones, it is an erasure. But Jallianwala Bagh is not an essay. It is a wound. And it never healed because no one tried to. Because even in 2025, we are yet to see a full apology for what Britain did that day.
Let me put it plainly.
On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer walked into a garden full of unarmed Indians and opened fire. He didn’t warn them. He didn’t ask them to leave. He didn’t care if they were protesting or praying. He blocked the exits and ordered his soldiers to shoot into the crowd till their ammunition nearly ran out. 1650 rounds. Ten minutes. Hundreds dead. Maybe more. Children. Women. Men. Pilgrims. All slaughtered in a public square with nowhere to run.
And then he walked away. Left the bodies. No ambulances. No apology.
This wasn’t an act of governance. It was an act of war. Against civilians. By a man in uniform. Carried out in broad daylight. And applauded in the House of Lords.
Yes. Applauded.
Britain gave him a hero’s fund. 26,000 pounds. For killing Indians. That’s what our lives were worth then. Pounds. And pride. Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor who approved it all, called it correct action. No one was arrested. No one faced a trial. No justice was served.
But one man stood up.
Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair.
The man at the heart of Kesari 2. A Malayali jurist and social reformer. A legal mind sharper than any bayonet. In 1919, after the massacre, he resigned from the Viceroy’s Council in protest. When the world moved on, he didn’t. In 1922, he published a book. Gandhi and Anarchy. It criticized Gandhi’s methods, yes. But it did more than that. It exposed O’Dwyer. Named him. Held him accountable for creating the conditions that led to the bloodshed.
O’Dwyer sued him for defamation. In London. Before a British jury. Before a judge who didn’t even pretend to be neutral. The trial lasted five and a half weeks. The longest civil trial in England at the time. Justice McCardie presided with open bias. The jury was all-white. And the verdict? Eleven against Nair. One dissent.
The one dissent was Harold Laski, the Marxist political theorist. The only one in the courtroom who didn’t lose his conscience.
Nair was ordered to pay £500 and court costs. O’Dwyer, dripping in colonial smugness, offered to waive the penalty if Nair would apologize.
Sir Sankaran Nair refused.
He chose dignity over relief. He looked the empire in the eye and said no. He may have lost the case, but he won something bigger. A permanent place in the story of resistance. Not through violence. Not through marches. But through courage in a courtroom that was never designed to be fair.
His story is chronicled in the 2019 book The Case That Shook the Empire, written by his great-grandson Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat. And it did shake the empire. Because for the first time, the world saw a man who fought the British using their own laws. Their own courtroom. Their own language. And still walked out with more moral ground than anyone who sat on the bench.
The bullet didn’t stop at Jallianwala Bagh. It kept echoing.
In homes across Punjab. In poems written in rage. In letters where Tagore returned his knighthood. In Udham Singh’s gun, when he shot O’Dwyer in London twenty-one years later. In Sankaran Nair’s trial, where truth stood unarmed but unshaken. The bullet didn’t stop. It travelled. Across time. Across generations. Across continents.
The British called it an unfortunate incident. Some still do. But let’s not use that language. Let’s not dilute the blood.
It wasn’t a mistake but a method.
General Dyer said he wanted to teach Indians a lesson. He said if he’d used less force, they would have laughed at him. So he fired into children’s spines so they wouldn’t dare laugh again. And when asked if he would have done anything differently, he said no. The only regret he had was that he couldn’t get his machine gun through the narrow gate.
This wasn’t empire but execution.
And yet today, Britain talks about the Commonwealth as if we are friends. As if trade deals and cultural exchanges can cover up historical crimes. As if the empire was a mutual collaboration. As if colonisation was a chapter, not a chokehold. As if we need to move on, while they’ve never even looked back.
Every Indian who’s been to Jallianwala knows – it’s not just a garden. It’s a graveyard. You don’t walk through it. You carry it. In your blood. In your shame. In your rage.
My father once told me that history is not about what happened. It’s about what people are allowed to forget.
The British forgot. We didn’t.
And we won’t.
Because the bullet that was fired in 1919 wasn’t just aimed at those bodies. It was aimed at our memory. Our dignity. Our right to be human in our own land. And if Britain wants to move forward, if it wants to talk about ethics and democracy and human rights, it cannot do so while pretending Jallianwala was a footnote.
It was a massacre.
It was state-sponsored terror.
It was the day the British Empire lost its soul.
And if there’s any moral weight left in the idea of Britain today, then it must do what it has never done before.
Say sorry.
Not a statement buried in paperwork. Not a regret whispered in Parliament. A full-throated apology. From the monarchy. From the Prime Minister. From the institutions that enabled it. And most importantly – from the people who still benefit from an empire built on Indian bones.
Only then can silence return to the garden.
Only then will the bullets stop echoing.