(Kim A Wagner is a professor at University of London and author of Jallianwala Bagh: An Empire of Fear and the Making of the Amritsar Massacare. The article was first published in The Print on August 31, 2021)
- With the most recent revamp of the Jallianwala Bagh memorial, we are seeing the final traces of the past erased to give way to a tacky tourist-attraction. News reports describe the new ‘attractions’ of the transformed site, including an array of sculptures and 3D projections. The original entrance to the Bagh, through which Dyer and his troops entered in the afternoon of 13 April 1919, has been ‘repositioned’ and is lined with figures, while visitors can enjoy a lightshow in the evening, projected directly onto the monument. A hundred years on, there are now ticket counters at the site that Gandhi envisaged as a mourning place for the dead…
Also Read: India is indeed walking the green talk: Sumant Narain