Amritsar, Punjab, India
Friday, August 29, 2014
As we have said in our previous entry, there were 3 reasons for coming to Amritsar.
You can read about the Golden Temple in our other diary entry but our next reason was to visit Jallianwala Bugh - The park in which hundreds of people were shot dead by the British Army in 1919.
It's not so famous in Britain as there was a massive cover up with a man named General Dyer being responsible for it.
We went to the park and amongst all the chaos, dirt and dust, this park was an oasis of calm cleanliness.
You enter the park the way they would have done in 1919, down a very narrow alley way. This was also fatal for them as it was also the only way out and was where the army had soldiers placed to fire at people who tried to leave
Jallianwala Bagh
The park was then laid out with paths leading you to all the poignant places where things happened, You could see bullet holes in the walls and the well in which women jumped to escape the gunfire. The well was then used by the army as a disposal site for many of the bodies and were thrown in on top of the people who had survived the fall. It is said that this well was full to the top when the army sealed it shut. Disgraceful.
It was on the train to Delhi that we read that it was only last week a lot of the bodies which had been recovered some time ago, were given their last rites and cremated. Their ashes being thrown into the Ganges.
With all this atrocity, you would have expected for us to receive a bit of a bad time in such a place. Everywhere we go we get asked "where you from" so when we were asked in the park and replied England, we kind of said it quietly expecting a rage of words thrown at us.
Not at all and indeed quite the opposite happened. You will see from our photos that we have many of complete strangers
Soldier topiary
We cannot begin to count the number of people who either came up to us and demanded a photo on their camera with their friends, or asked us to take pictures of them on our cameras. it was more than 20 for sure.
One lovely old man pushed others out of the way and grabbed our arms to put around him for a photograph. As he did not speak English we can only guess his reasons for wanting this.
Anyway, we did not get the treatment we feared we might and India once again has shown us just what generous, warm hearted and friendly people they are.
So later in the day we went to the Pakistan border to see the famous flag ceremony. Read about that next
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