Rowlatt Act, Jallianwala Bagh and the Khilafat Movement (1919‑1920)

Rowlatt Act, Punjab Wrongs and Khilafat: The Years 1919 and 1920

Three Grievances and Gandhi's Response

Each grievance had its own cause and its own leaders. The Rowlatt Act angered politically aware Indians in every province, the Punjab wrongs fell hardest on one province, and the Khilafat question moved Muslims. Gandhi chose to treat all three as one national injury and to answer them with non-violent mass action.

Chronology of 1919 and 1920

The sequence matters more than any single date, because each event made the next one possible.

• Early 1919: The Rowlatt Bills were introduced on 6 February, and Gandhi formed the Satyagraha Sabha in Bombay.
• 18 March 1919: The Imperial Legislative Council passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, called the Rowlatt Act after the committee behind it.
• 30 March and 6 April 1919: Delhi held the hartal against the Act on the first date, and most of the country held it on the second.
• 10 April 1919: Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew were deported from Amritsar, and the city's crowds turned violent.
• 13 April 1919: Dyer's troops fired on the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh. By that day the government had decided to put most of Punjab under martial law.
• 14 October 1919: The government announced the Disorders Inquiry Committee under Lord Hunter.
• 23 December 1919: The Government of India Act 1919, based on the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals, received royal assent.
• 8 March 1920: The Hunter Committee's report was released.
• 10 August 1920: The Treaty of Sèvres, which the Khilafat Movement had feared, was signed.
• September and December 1920: The Congress adopted Non-Cooperation at Calcutta and confirmed it at Nagpur.

Wartime Hopes and the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 1917 to 1919

The Montagu Declaration and Wartime Expectations

India's effort in the First World War was large, and Indians expected a political reward for it. On 20 August 1917 Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, told the British Parliament that the policy of the government was "increasing association of Indians in every branch of administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire".

Montagu then went to India in late 1917 to meet the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, and Indian leaders. Their report, prepared in 1918, is known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, and it became the basis of the Government of India Act 1919. Punjab had a special stake in these expectations. Many of its men had served in the war, and they expected to be rewarded for their service.

The expectation was soon disappointed. While the reform proposals were still being finished, the government prepared a law to keep the wartime powers of detention. Reform and repression arrived in the same year, and Indians read them together.

The Government of India Act 1919 and Dyarchy

The Government of India Act 1919 received royal assent on 23 December 1919. It declared that the aim of British policy was the gradual introduction of responsible government and, for the provinces, it introduced dyarchy, a dual system in which the provincial subjects were divided into two lists. The transferred subjects, such as agriculture, health, education and local self-government, went to Indian ministers who were answerable to the provincial council. The reserved subjects, such as law and order, police, finance and land revenue, stayed with the Governor and his executive council.

At the centre, the Imperial Legislative Council was replaced by a bicameral legislature of a Legislative Assembly with 145 members and a Council of State. The franchise was widened, but only about five million Indians in a population of over 300 million could vote, and the Viceroy kept overriding powers. Separate electorates, begun for Muslims in 1909, were extended to Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans. The Act also provided for a statutory commission to review its working after ten years, which is why the Simon Commission came in 1927.

The Congress rejected the Act as inadequate. Some leaders accepted it and chose to cooperate with the reforms. Surendranath Banerjea and Tej Bahadur Sapru led these Moderates out of the Congress and formed the Indian Liberal Federation. The Congress boycotted the first elections under the Act, held in November 1920, and dyarchy was brought into force in the provinces in 1921.

The Rowlatt Act: Committee, Provisions and Opposition

The Sedition Committee and the Rowlatt Bills

The wartime Defence of India Act 1915 gave the government sweeping powers of detention and was due to lapse after the war. The government feared that the revolutionary conspiracies of Bengal and Punjab, among them the Ghadar movement, would revive once those powers ended. In 1918 it appointed a committee under Sir Sidney Rowlatt, an English judge, to inquire into "criminal conspiracies connected with revolutionary movements in India". The committee is called the Sedition Committee, and the law that followed bears the name of its president.

On the committee's recommendation two Bills were introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council on 6 February 1919. Indians called them the Black Bills. Every elected Indian member spoke against them, and Madan Mohan Malaviya spoke for six hours. Gandhi watched from the gallery and made a last appeal to the Viceroy not to proceed. The government used its official majority, and the Council passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act 1919 on 18 March 1919, against the united opposition of the Indian members.

What the Act Allowed and Who Opposed It

The Act carried the emergency powers of the war into peacetime in six ways:

• Detention without trial: A person suspected of terrorism or revolutionary activity could be imprisoned for up to two years without a trial.
• Arrest without warrant: The police could arrest on suspicion alone.
• Special trials: Cases were heard in camera and without a jury, by a panel of three High Court judges, and no appeal lay against its decision.
• Rules of evidence: The panel could admit evidence that the ordinary Indian Evidence Act would have excluded, and the accused could be denied knowledge of the accusers.
• Habeas corpus and press: The law of habeas corpus was suspended and the press came under stricter control.
• Restrictions after release: Convicted persons had to deposit security and were barred from political, educational and religious activity.

The Act took effect on 21 March 1919. Its critics objected that a law aimed at revolutionaries treated every political critic as a suspect, in a year when the same government spoke of self-government.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mazharul Haque resigned from the Imperial Legislative Council in protest. Jinnah wrote to the Viceroy that a government which passes or sanctions such a law in times of peace forfeits its claim to be called a civilised government. In popular speech the law was the Black Act and the Lawless Law.

The Rowlatt Act was repealed in March 1922, together with a long list of other repressive measures, on the report of the Repressive Laws Committee. Its greater effect was on Gandhi, because the Rowlatt Satyagraha gave him an issue on which the whole country could be moved at once.

The Rowlatt Satyagraha and the Hartal of April 1919

Satyagraha Sabha, the Pledge and the Hartal

Gandhi saw that constitutional protest had failed. After reaching Bombay on 1 March 1919 he organised the Satyagraha Sabha, with himself as president and B. G. Horniman as vice-president. Leading members of the Home Rule League sat on its committee and the League merged into the Sabha, so the satyagraha drew on the League's workers and branches. In 1919 Gandhi also took over the editorship of the English weekly Young India and the Gujarati weekly Navajivan.

The Moderate leaders issued a manifesto saying they would not follow the Extremists in this movement, and Srinivasa Sastri thought it ridiculous and dangerous to disobey other laws as a way of protesting against this one. The Moderate and Extremist groups, which had united in opposing the Bills, drifted apart again.

The Sabha circulated a pledge. Those who signed it declared that, if the Bills became law and until they were withdrawn, they would refuse civilly to obey these laws and follow truth and refrain from violence to life, person or property. After the Act was passed, Gandhi called a hartal, a voluntary suspension of business, with fasting and prayer. The date was first fixed for 30 March and then shifted to 6 April, and since the change did not reach every place in time, Delhi and some other places observed 30 March while most observed 6 April.

How Far the Hartal Reached

Gandhi described the satyagraha campaign in a letter to the Viceroy as an attempt to revolutionise politics and restore moral force to its original position. The response was larger than the organisers expected. In towns across North and West India life came to a standstill, with shops and schools closed, rallies held in many cities, and workers in railway workshops on strike. The protest was strongest in Punjab, where men who had served in the war expected a reward and received the Rowlatt Act instead.

The authorities were alarmed that railways and telegraph lines might be disrupted, and they moved against nationalist leaders. Gandhi was stopped at Palwal on his way to Punjab and barred from entering both Punjab and Delhi. In Delhi the hartal of 30 March was a success, but tension was high and rioting followed in Punjab, Delhi and Gujarat. The movement was widespread, but it stayed confined mostly to cities and towns.

Punjab, Satyapal and Kitchlew

Punjab had its own grievances. War recruitment had been heavy, agrarian distress was spreading, and returned emigrants were harshly treated. Protest meetings began in Amritsar from February. The authorities banned the local leader Dr Satyapal from speaking in public and served a similar notice on Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew on 4 April. A complete hartal on 6 April was entirely peaceful, and a procession of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs passed through the streets on 9 April.

On 10 April the two leaders were deported from Amritsar and secretly taken to Dharamshala. A crowd marched to the Deputy Commissioner's residence to ask for their release, and a military picket fired on it. The city then erupted, with banks, post offices and railway stations attacked and several Europeans killed. On 11 April the missionary Marcella Sherwood was assaulted in a narrow street. The civil authorities handed Amritsar to the military, and Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer took command that night. Martial law was imposed on the city.

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 13 April 1919

The Bagh, the Crowd and the Firing

On Sunday, 13 April 1919, the day of the Baisakhi festival, Dyer banned all meetings by proclamation. The notice was not widely heard, and many people who had come to the Baisakhi fair or from outside the city did not know of the martial law. A protest meeting against the Rowlatt Act and the deportation of Satyapal and Kitchlew had been called in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed open ground of six to seven acres (about 2.4 to 2.8 hectares), walled on its sides and entered only by a few narrow passages. No firm count of the crowd was ever made, and estimates range from 15,000 to 30,000.

Dyer entered with a force of soldiers, blocked the main exit, and without warning ordered his men to fire at the densest parts of the crowd, near the narrow exits where people tried to flee. The firing lasted about ten minutes and 1,650 rounds were used, with the firing continuing until the ammunition was low. People were shot or trampled at the narrow gates, and some jumped into the well in the compound. A plaque at the site says 120 bodies were taken from the well.

The wounded were left where they lay. Dyer had imposed a curfew, so many could not be moved and died during the night, and he said later that it was not his job to take care of them. His stated aim was to produce a "moral effect", to create a feeling of terror and awe in the minds of the satyagrahis, and before the Hunter Committee he said that he had gone to the Bagh with the intention of firing if he found a crowd there.

Jallianwala Bagh Casualty Figures: Official and Indian Estimates

The number of dead is disputed because the government never made a full count. The first newspaper figure was 200, and Dyer himself reported that between 200 and 300 had been killed. The Hunter Committee's figure was 379 dead, made up of 337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby, with about three times that number wounded. The Sewa Samiti, which made its own investigation, also reported 379 deaths and 192 seriously wounded. Indian estimates are much higher. The historian Vishwa Nath Datta estimated 700, Madan Mohan Malaviya about 1,000, and the Congress inquiry about 1,000 dead among more than 1,500 casualties. Swami Shraddhanand wrote to Gandhi of 1,500 deaths.

Martial Law and the Punjab Wrongs

Dyer's order was not the end of the repression. Under martial law, which the government had decided by 13 April to extend over most of Punjab, a curfew stayed in force in Amritsar, water and electricity were cut off, floggings were common, and public punishments were designed to humiliate.

Satyagrahis were forced to rub their noses on the ground, to crawl in the streets and to salaam every European official. Dyer ordered that every Indian using the lane in which Marcella Sherwood had been attacked should crawl along it on hands and knees, and these crawling orders were carried out by soldiers in the streets of Amritsar. Villages around Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, were bombed. Many people were tried under martial law, and many were sentenced to death or transportation.

Taken together these acts are called the Punjab wrongs. They explain why the sense of injury spread across India and why Gandhi later put the Punjab wrongs beside the Khilafat wrong as grievances that justified non-cooperation. As the news spread, crowds took to the streets in many north Indian towns, and the government answered with more repression. Seeing the violence spread, Gandhi called off the Rowlatt Satyagraha.

Inquiries and Reactions to the Massacre

The Hunter Committee and Its Two Reports

Montagu promised an inquiry during the budget debate of 22 May 1919. The Government of India stiffly opposed the idea, but the Secretary of State had already committed himself. On 14 October 1919 the Viceroy announced the Disorders Inquiry Committee under Lord Hunter, a former Solicitor-General for Scotland, which is why it is called the Hunter Committee or Hunter Commission. Of its eight members, five were Europeans, Hunter among them, and three were Indians, namely Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, Pandit Jagat Narain and Sahibzada Sultan Ahmad Khan. It took evidence in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bombay and Lahore, and Dyer was questioned on 19 November. The report was released on 8 March 1920 in six volumes.

The majority and the Indian members disagreed on two important points, Dyer's firing and martial law.

The inquiry did not recommend a penalty. Dyer was removed from his post on 23 March 1920, passed over for promotion and barred from employment in India, but he was not prosecuted. Some British opinion made a hero of him, and the Morning Post raised £26,000 for him. In the House of Commons debate of 8 July 1920 Winston Churchill called the shooting "unutterably monstrous" and the House voted 247 to 37 against Dyer. Montagu had written privately to the Viceroy that it was "the savage and inappropriate folly of the order" that roused his anger.

The Congress Inquiry into the Punjab Disturbances

The Congress boycotted the Hunter Committee and appointed its own non-official committee. Its members were Gandhi, C. R. Das, Abbas Tyabji and M. R. Jayakar. Motilal Nehru, who was first named, had to step down when he was elected president of the Amritsar Congress of 1919. The committee signed its report on 20 February 1920, before the Hunter report appeared.

It found that there had been no conspiracy to overthrow the government in Punjab, that no reasonable cause had been shown for martial law, and that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was "a calculated piece of inhumanity towards utterly innocent and unarmed men including children". It blamed the Lieutenant-Governor, Michael O'Dwyer, for provoking the people, and it held that the Viceroy should be recalled. For Gandhi the work was a turning point, because sifting evidence for the committee showed him the truth about martial law, and the Hunter report struck him as little better than "thinly disguised whitewash".

Tagore's Knighthood and Gandhi's Medal

Rabindranath Tagore received the news of the massacre by 22 May 1919. He tried to arrange a protest meeting in Calcutta and then decided to renounce his knighthood as a symbolic act of protest. His letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, is dated 31 May 1919. He wrote that the time had come when "badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation". The same letter said that the accounts of the insults and sufferings of the Punjab had "trickled through the gagged silence" and reached every corner of India.

In 1920 Gandhi gave up the Kaisar-i-Hind medal, which he had been awarded for his ambulance work in South Africa. In returning it he named the Khilafat and Punjab wrongs together, and he described the government as an "unmixed evil".

The massacre was remembered long after. Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who had defended Dyer, was shot dead in London on 13 March 1940 by Udham Singh, a revolutionary and member of the Ghadar Party. The British government has never formally apologised for the massacre, though in 2019 it expressed deep regret.

The Khilafat Question: Caliphate, Treaty of Sèvres and Muslim Opinion

The Caliph and the Ottoman Defeat

Before the First World War the Ottoman Sultan, who ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul), was also the Caliph or Khalifa, the politico-religious leader of the Muslim world. The empire had fought on the side of the Central Powers and was defeated. At the end of the war it was dismembered, and the position of the Caliph became uncertain.

For Indian Muslims this was not a foreign question alone. The Caliph was linked to the holy places of Islam, and the victorious Allied powers had promised to protect the Sultan's status as Caliph. Many Indian Muslims also found the prospect of being made to fight fellow Muslims in Turkey intolerable. When it became clear that a harsh peace treaty was to be imposed, a Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay in March 1919. Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, the Ali brothers, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad launched the Khilafat Movement in 1919 to press for the preservation of the Caliph's religious authority.

The Khilafat Demands and the Treaty of Sèvres

The Khilafat Movement made three demands of the peace settlement:

• Holy places: The Sultan, as Khalifa, must keep control over the Muslim sacred places of the former Ottoman empire.
• Arab lands: Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Palestine must remain under Muslim sovereignty.
• Territory: The Khalifa must be left with enough territory to defend the Islamic faith.

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, did the opposite. It required the cession of large parts of Ottoman territory to France, Britain, Greece and Italy and set up occupation zones in the empire, and Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were severed from it. The treaty was never ratified. Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal rejected it, fought the Turkish War of Independence, and replaced it with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The Sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the Caliphate itself in 1924, and with that the cause on which the Khilafat Movement stood disappeared.

Leaders, the Committee and the Manifesto

The All India Khilafat Committee brought together the Ali brothers, Maulana Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, among others, to build political unity among Muslims and to use their influence to protect the Caliphate. In 1920 the committee published the Khilafat Manifesto, which called on Britain to protect the Caliphate and on Indian Muslims to unite.

Mohammad Ali Jauhar was an Oxford-educated journalist who had edited The Comrade and the Urdu daily Hamdard, and he had been in prison for advocating resistance to the government. He held the unusual distinction of having directed the affairs of the Congress, the Muslim League and the Khilafat Movement. Hasrat Mohani and Maulana Abdul Bari of Lucknow, whose fatwa urged abstention from the Peace celebrations of 1919, also worked alongside the Ali brothers. The Khilafat leaders used religious forms such as the fatwa and the mosque meeting, and their appeal reached ordinary Muslims directly.

Khilafat Politics in 1919 and Early 1920

The first practical steps came quickly. At the end of November 1919 the All India Khilafat Committee met in Delhi and decided to dissuade the people from joining the Peace celebrations of December 1919. A poster printed at Delhi was headed "The Order of Mahatma Gandhi; the fatwa of Abdul Bari" and asked Hindus and Muslims to refrain from the celebrations and to remember the martyrs of Punjab, Delhi and Ahmedabad. A Khilafat conference was also held at Amritsar in December 1919, where the Congress session under Motilal Nehru met.

In January 1920 the Bombay committee discussed sending a deputation to England, and Muslim leaders hoped Mohammad Ali, then free, would join it. The Bombay committee, for its part, found the resolutions on boycott and non-cooperation passed at the Delhi meeting of November 1919 neither feasible nor workable. During 1920 the movement turned from petitions towards direct action, and Gandhi's programme of non-violent non-cooperation gave that action its form.

The Khilafat-Congress Alliance and the Road to Non-Cooperation

Why Gandhi Took Up the Khilafat Cause

Gandhi judged that the Rowlatt Satyagraha, however widespread, had not gone beyond cities and towns. He now wanted a more broad-based movement, and he was certain that none could be organised without bringing Hindus and Muslims closer. The Khilafat issue was one way to do so. He feared that the pent-up frustration of Muslims might turn to violent channels, so he offered to lead them if they accepted his technique of non-violence.

In 1920 an alliance was formed between the Khilafat leaders and the Congress. Gandhi and the Khilafat leaders promised to fight together for both Khilafat and Swaraj. Khilafat leaders had endorsed non-violent non-cooperation even before the Congress approved it in September 1920. The years of Hindu-Muslim cooperation from 1919 to 1922 are widely described as the heyday of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Doubts Within the Alliance

The alliance had critics from the start. Some members of the Congress felt that the status of the Caliph in Turkey was not India's concern and that bringing it into the national movement was undesirable. A few Muslim leaders were also uneasy, because the cause seemed to tie the loyalty of Indian Muslims to a religious power in a faraway country, a loyalty that lay outside India. Jinnah left the Congress at its 1920 session after warning against mixing the independence movement with religious elements.

Critics also asked whether a campaign centred on the Ottoman Caliphate could suit a movement meant to unite Indians of every religion. Later events showed that the doubts were not groundless. The movement temporarily united Hindus and Muslims but also reinforced the sense of separateness among Indian Muslims, and the following years saw several Hindu-Muslim riots in different parts of the country.

From Alliance to Non-Cooperation in 1920

The Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920 confirmed the break-up that the Khilafat Movement had feared, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak's death in August 1920 left Gandhi the undisputed mass leader of the Congress. At a special session in Calcutta in September 1920 Gandhi convinced the Congress of the need for a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat and for Swaraj. The Congress formally launched the Non-Cooperation Movement at its Nagpur session in December 1920, and the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement began in earnest in January 1921.

The Congress was also reorganised for the task. Under its new constitution it was given a pyramid of village, taluka, district and provincial committees, with the All India Congress Committee and a Working Committee at the apex, and it ceased to be a preserve of the upper and middle classes. This brought the movement to the threshold of Non-Cooperation, whose programme, spread and end at Chauri Chaura in 1922 lie beyond these two years.

Mass Mobilisation and New Strands of Nationalism, 1919 to 1920

Masses Mobilised in 1919 and 1920

The Gandhian movements are remembered for the masses they mobilised, and the years 1919 and 1920 are where the process started. The earlier campaigns at Champaran (1917), Kheda and Ahmedabad (1918) had won Gandhi a reputation as a nationalist with a deep sympathy for the poor, but they were localised. The Rowlatt Satyagraha was the first campaign on the scale of the whole country, and it made Gandhi a truly national leader.

Different groups were drawn in by different grievances. Townspeople, shopkeepers and railway workers joined the hartal, and schools closed. Punjab's soldiers and villagers, who had borne the burden of the war, took part in the Punjab protests, but outside Punjab the movement still reached mainly the towns. Muslims, especially in towns, were drawn in by the Khilafat cause, and the Khilafat-Congress alliance increased Muslim participation in the national movement. The reorganised Congress then opened its doors to the small towns and villages, and the full countryside mobilisation of peasants, tribal groups and workers came in 1921 with Non-Cooperation.

Liberal, Gandhian, Khilafat and Revolutionary Currents by 1920

By 1920 Indian nationalism had several strands, and each added to its social base in its own way. The Moderates, whose leaders had trusted petitions and constitutional reform, split over the Act of 1919, as some left to form the Indian Liberal Federation and chose to work the reforms, while the Home Rulers and the Extremists went with Gandhi's satyagraha. Gandhian mass politics, with its use of the hartal and the pledge, drew in the towns. The Khilafat leaders added a religious and political strand which brought in Muslims. The revolutionary tradition of the Ghadar movement of 1914 and 1915 continued in the memory of Punjab, and Udham Singh's act in 1940 came out of the events of Amritsar.

The council-entry strand followed. After Gandhi suspended Non-Cooperation in February 1922, Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das formed the Swaraj Party to contest the councils created under the Act of 1919. The socialist, peasant and worker strands came later in the 1920s, but the Rowlatt, Punjab and Khilafat years explain how the base first widened.

Chain of Cause and Effect from the Montagu Declaration to Non-Cooperation

The years 1919 and 1920 are best understood as a chain of cause and effect. The wartime promise of reform met the Rowlatt Act, the Rowlatt Act produced the satyagraha, the satyagraha produced the Punjab repression, and the repression and the Khilafat question together produced the alliance behind Non-Cooperation. Townspeople, Punjabis and Muslims felt these grievances differently, and Gandhi turned them into one disciplined mass action.

Sources

• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II (Class X), Nationalism in India
• Government of Odisha: Orissa Review, January 2005 issue, Emergence of Gandhiji
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Part III (Class XII), Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement
• NCERT: Exploring Society, India and Beyond (Class 8), India's Long Road to Independence
• Maharashtra State Gazetteers: Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement, Vol. II, The Satyagraha Movement
• Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti: Chronology
• PIB: Ministry of Tourism webinar, Jallianwala Bagh: A Turning Point in the Freedom Struggle (17 August 2020)
• Publications Division: Mahatma Gandhi timeline, 1919 (Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh)
• Maharashtra State Gazetteers: Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement, Vol. X, The Khilafat Movement, 1920‑21
• Publications Division: Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movement, 1919‑1922
• Wikipedia: Rowlatt Act
• Wikipedia: Jallianwala Bagh massacre
• Wikipedia: Sidney Rowlatt
• Wikipedia: Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms
• Wikipedia: Government of India Act 1919
• Wikipedia: Kaisar-i-Hind Medal
• Wikipedia: Khilafat Movement
• Wikipedia: Treaty of Sèvres
• Wikipedia: Mohammad Ali Jauhar
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers