Painting a picture of colonial cruelty

by AMIT ROY

A DRAMATIC painting of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the Singh Twins, Rabindra

and Amrit, was unveiled last week at the Manchester Museum by Lord Meghnad Desai on the centenary of the atrocity.

Measuring 2.5 x 3 metres and executed in the Mughal miniature style for which the Singh Twins are known, the painting is called Jallianwala: Repression and Retribution. It will remain on display until October 2.

“It is a beautiful painting which puts in a lot of the historical context,” said Desai, who inaugurated an exhibition on Jallianwala Bagh, curated by a team headed by his wife, Lady Kishwar Desai.

The Singh Twins revealed that their painting is the first part of a triptych, with the two other paintings in the series focusing on the reasons and the legacy of the massacre which took place in Amritsar on April 13, 1919.

Rabindra and Amrit explained they have set what happened in Amritsar in the wider context of British history by also including “depictions of the 1770 Boston Massacre and Manchester’s Peterloo Massacre of 1819” which position Jallianwala as part of an “ongoing history of state violence against civilian protests in Britain and its colonies”.

There is an image of the man responsible for the massacre, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, on the right, while on the left, there is one of the social and political reformer Annie Besant carrying a placard bearing the image of the Indian freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

The Singh Twins said that their painting “also carries a positive message of Hindu-Muslim unity… which we feel India and Pakistan, as two nations whose people share the same Punjabi heritage and experience of imperial oppression, would do well to remember and to build on – against the ongoing political tensions which have existed between them since the partition in 1947.”