GANDHI, Mahatma.

£35,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Two autograph letters signed relating to the Amritsar Massacre. Gandhi writes to correct his report on the Amritsar Massacre, an event that shocked India and marked a milestone on the path to independence.Following the massacre on 13 April 1919, Gandhi urged a boycott of the official investigation. He led an independent investigation and published an extensive report on 25 March 1920. This "Congress Report on the Punjab Disorders" placed the massacre in the context of a wider campaign of violent suppression and concluded: "The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a calculated piece of inhumanity towards utterly innocent and unarmed men, including children, and unparalleled for its ferocity in the history of modern British administration".In these letters, Gandhi acknowledged two errors in the report that had been brought to his attention by an "esteemed friend". He sends to "The Manager, The A[ssociated] P[ress], B[om]bay" - the journalist A. C. Chaterjee - the two corrections and requests, "will you please circulate the enclosed to the Press". He opens the corrections "M. K. Gandhi writes" and signs and dates them at foot. He amends his statement that four Europeans were killed in the massacre, when "the number should be seven", and that the convicted protester Kundan Lal was "sentenced to face transportation for life for waging war", when he was acquitted. Gandhi apologizes for these errors, explaining that they "were due to the extraordinary difficulty under which the report went

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