Dyer’s infamous ‘crawling order’ is also the subject of Ghulam Abbas’s short story ‘Raingneywale’ (‘Those Who Crawled’). Born in Amritsar, Abbas would have been a mere lad of 10 years of age at the time of the incident but surely anyone with any links to the city would have carried the effect of that trauma in some way or to some degree. A hundred years late,r the humiliation that a depraved mind can heap upon those it considers inferior beings continues to horrify. At the same time, stories such as ‘Those Who Crawled’ need to be read and revisited so that we learn from the misdeeds of the past.

There was a time when poetry was considered the most suitable form for passing down history. Some of our greatest epics came to us in verse. There was a long lull when poetry was thought to be about the softer emotions of life, about love and romance and fantastical adventures in magical lands realms of the imagination. However it took events of great magnitude, such as the Great Uprising of 1857 to release a burst of political consciousness that left no one untouched – not the creative writer or even the poet.

With something as soul-stirring as the Jallianwala Bagh incident, the poets of the age were compelled to take note. In fact, 1919 marks a turning point in the literary history of India as poets in the different bhashas begin to take up newer, more immediate concerns like never before.