Why General Dyer was felicitated at Golden Temple days after Jallianwala Bagh massacre

It was July 1920, a year after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, that the 'Butcher of Amritsar', Reginald Dyer, was presented with a golden sword in London. The engraving on it read, "Defender of the Empire". Simultaneously, a public campaign by the conservative newspaper, Morning Post, raised 26,317 pounds for the military officer who had ordered troops to fire on a trapped crowd at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh, killing thousands of Indians. Yet perhaps the most controversial honour Dyer received came much earlier — and just days after the massacre, when he was welcomed and honoured at the Golden Temple in Amritsar with a siropa and kirpan.

Even as Winston Churchill (then the British Secretary of State for War and Air) condemned the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 as a "monstrous event", Dyer's admirers in the British Parliament hailed him as the man who had "saved the Raj from collapse".

While sections in Britain hailed and honoured Dyer for the massacre, a baffling tribute had already been bestowed upon him at Amritsar's Golden Temple, just days after his troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd at the nearby Jallianwala Bagh.

The priests even proposed that Dyer be inducted as a Sikh and agreed to overlook the requirement of unshorn hair when he said he could not grow it as a serving British officer.

Days after ordering troops to fire on unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer was invited to the Golden Temple and honoured with a siropa (the highest robe of honour in Sikhism) and a kirpan (religious blade) by the shrine's management. To many Indians, including Sikhs, it remains one of the most mind-boggling and controversial anecdotes of Indian colonial history.

We are reminded of the incident from more than a century ago because of the Sikh religious authority taking political leaders to task. Earlier this week, the Akal Takht, Sikhism's highest temporal authority, declared Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann "Guru dokhi (anti-Guru)" and "Panth virodhi (anti-community)." The religious authority, which is located within the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex, accused Maan of lying about an objectionable video.

Mann rejected the charges, saying two forensic reports showed that he was not the person seen in the video.

Last year, former Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) chief Sukhbir Singh Badal was declared tankhaiya by the Akal Takht. Along with Badal, several other Akali Dal leaders, who were part of Punjab's SAD government (between 2007 and 2017), were "found guilty of religious misconduct". Sukhbir Singh Badal, the former Punjab Deputy CM, was made to put on a plaque around his neck with a note saying "his confession of sins" as he performed duties of atonement.

While the recent declaration of Bhagwant Mann as "anti-Guru" and "anti-community" highlights the enormous authority exercised by the religious institution, this week's History of It is about why Reginald Dyer, the 'Butcher of Amritsar', was honoured at the very seat of power in the city where he had presided over a bloodbath just days earlier.

So, did Sikhs support General Dyer? Who invited Dyer to the Golden Temple? Why was Dyer facilitated? That's all we would be looking at.

SO, WHO HONOURED DYER IN GOLDEN TEMPLE?

Here, the first thing to understand is that the Golden Temple or the Akal Takht of 1919 was very different from that of today. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which today manages the Harmandir Sahib and many historic Sikh shrines, did not exist then. Although the Akal Takht was already Sikhism's most-revered institution, it was yet to acquire the panth-wide support and authority that it would gain during and after the Gurdwara Reform Movement and the establishment of the SGPC in the 1920s. Because then, it were the hereditary elite priests who controlled the gurdwaras, their management and the religious edicts.

Back then, the control of major Sikh shrines rested with hereditary mahant, priests and Colonial British Raj-backed managers. And, many enjoyed patronage from the British administration. Historian Mohinder Singh in his seminal work, The Akali Movement, wrote that these managers, mahant and priests were frequently used by the administration's officials to honour British officials and condemn nationalist forces.

Author Khushwant Singh, in his book, A History of the Sikhs, recorded that after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the imposition of martial law, Dyer actively sought to retain Sikh support. The British government's Hunter Commission put the death toll at 379, while Indian estimates ranged much higher. A Congress enquiry suggested that more than 1,000 people might have been killed and over 1,500 wounded in the firing at Jallianwala Bagh on April 13, 1919, the day of the Baisakhi festival.

Dyer, then a Brigadier-General, summoned Golden Temple officials and influential Sikh leader Sunder Singh Majithia and asked them to use their influence in favour of the British Indian government. He also dispatched mobile military columns into Sikh villages to demonstrate that the colonial state remained in control at a time when Punjab was reeling from unrest, martial law and growing anti-Colonial sentiment.

"Priests of the Golden Temple invited the general to the sacred shrine and presented him with a siropa (turban and kirpan)," Khushwant Singh wrote, adding that the invitation came from the shrine establishment led by Arur Singh, the British-appointed sarbrah, or manager, of the Golden Temple.

If honouring General Dyer at the Golden Temple is an astonishing fact, what actually happened during the ceremony — days after the massacre — is even more interesting.

GOLDEN TEMPLE PRIESTS TRIED TO MAKE GENERAL DYER A 'SIKH' AFTER JALLIANWALA BAGH

According to historian Mohinder Singh's The Akali Movement, the British government-appointed shrine management did not just present Dyer with a siropa.

The priests of the Golden Temple went a step further and attempted to symbolically induct Dyer into the Sikh fold.

Singh's 1978 book reproduced the remarkable exchange between Arur Singh, the British-backed sarbrah of the Golden Temple, and Dyer. The priests reportedly told him, "Sahib, you must become a Sikh even as Nikalseyan Sahib became a Sikh". Dyer objected that, as a British officer, he could not keep unshorn hair. Arur Singh replied, "We will let you off the long hair".

Dyer then raised another objection. It was his smoking habit.

"But I cannot give up smoking," he said.

"That you must do," Arur Singh insisted.

When Dyer again refused, the priest relented. "We will let you give it up gradually."

Dyer answered, "That I promise you, at the rate of one cigarette a year."

Mohinder Singh noted that, according to Dyer's biographer Ian Colvin, the ceremony proceeded nevertheless. Dyer was invested with the Five Ks, the sacred symbols associated with the Khalsa Panth of the initiated Sikhs.

WHY DID SOME SIKH ELITES SUPPORT DYER?

To a reader in 2026, honouring Dyer, days after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre might be incomprehensible. But sections of the Sikh elite in 1919 occupied a different political world.

The First World War had ended only months earlier. Punjab was the principal recruiting ground of the British Indian Army, which was obsessed with the concept of "martial race". The colonial administration had spent decades cultivating loyalty among influential Sikh families, landed elites, religious managers and military leaders. Many elites among this class cooperated with the Raj in lieu of stability and access to power.

The same argument would later be voiced by Dyer's defenders in the British Parliament. During a July 1920 debate in the House of Lords, some members insisted Dyer had not confronted "a mere riotous assembly" but "open rebellion, rebellion concerted with foreign enemies". Others argued that Punjab had been on the verge of a larger insurrection and that Dyer's actions had prevented a wider collapse of British authority, according to the archives of the British Parliament.

This view found purchase among the section of Punjab's loyalists. Some believed Dyer had acted harshly but necessarily. Others feared that confrontation with the British would hurt Sikh interests at a time when colonial patronage was the means to sustain influence.

Yet the loyalty among the Sikhs and Punjabis to the Raj, was far from universal. Historians have suggested the opposite. Author Khushwant Singh noted that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the martial-law regime alienated "almost all Indians, including its staunchest supporters, the Sikhs".

The honour bestowed on Dyer reflected the views of a small group of government-backed shrine managers and loyalist elites rather than the Sikh community as a whole.

HOW DYER'S FELICITATION HELPED SPARK THE AKALI MOVEMENT

While the Golden Temple facilitation ceremony for Dyer was intended to strengthen British influence among Sikhs, it achieved the opposite.

Historian Mohinder Singh, who described Arur Singh's decision to honour Dyer and declare him a Sikh as a "perfidious and sacrilegious action", added that it exposed the extent of colonial influence inside Sikh institutions. For many Sikhs, the Dyer episode was the face of a larger problem. The issue was not Dyer but who controlled Sikh shrines and in whose interests they were being run.

According to Mohinder Singh, the misuse of the Golden Temple by a government-nominated sarbrah proved to be the "last straw on the camel's back" and helped create the conditions for the Akali struggle.

The years that followed saw an unprecedented mobilisation for gurdwara reform. The Akali movement challenged the authority of mahants and government-backed managers, demanded community control of Sikh shrines and eventually led to the rise of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and the Shiromani Akali Dal, which later became a political party.

More than a century later, Dyer's felicitation at the Golden Temple, that too, days after the Jallianwala Bagh, remains one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of colonial Punjab. Akal Takht's recent declaration against Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann shows the authority the institution exercises today. And, it is an authority born out of the reform movement that followed controversies such as Dyer's honouring.