Their humiliation had to be avenged, and so it was: the street where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted was sealed off and Indians had to crawl if they wished to make their way in or out of the lane. A flogging post was set up to whip sense and discipline into those Indians who might think otherwise. Gandhi would go on to describe "the crawling lane" as the site of a national humiliation.When the firing at Jallianwala Bagh stopped, Dyer did not stop to render aid to the wounded. The city was under martial law, and what the British described as "disturbances" had rocked other parts of the Punjab. Demonstrators were strafed from the air; this initiated a new phase in colonial warfare, and George Orwell in a scintillating essay noted the corruption of the English language entailed in describing such brutal suppression as "pacification". O’Dwyer, who signalled his approval of the actions taken by Dyer in Amritsar, was quite certain that the Punjab had been saved from a dire situation that recalled the rebellion of 1857-58. Indeed, in the months ahead, the spectre of 1857 loomed over the debates that raged on the measures taken by the British to contain the disorder.1919 was, however, not even remotely akin to 1857, if only because the Indian National Congress was now a formidable organisation and, moreover, the British had failed to fully comprehend that politics had entered into the phase of plebeian protest. Hundreds of people had been killed in cold blood, all because Dyer, by his own admission, had sought to "teach a lesson" to "wicked" Indians" and create a "wide impression" of the costs of defying lawful authority.The idea of "fairness" and the notion that the British had instituted a regime of "law and order" that offered Indians deliverance from "despotism" had long been the principal pillars of colonial rule, and an enquiry into a massacre that threatened to stain the good name of the British was all but inevitable. It came in the form of the Disorders Inquiry Commission, presided over by William Hunter of Scotland.Both O’Dwyer and Dyer chafed at the enquiry, and many Britishers in India resented the intrusion into Indian affairs from London. The theory of "the man on the spot" was one of the cornerstones of colonial governmentality. Dyer had been confronted with what he perceived to be a mutiny-like situation, and as the "man on the spot", he alone knew what was required to create a suitable effect. Armchair politicians in Britain had no business to impugn the judgement of experienced officers. Their humiliation had to be avenged, and so it was: the street where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted was sealed off and Indians had to crawl if they wished to make their way in or out of the lane. A flogging post was set up to whip sense and discipline into those Indians who might think otherwise. Gandhi would go on to describe "the crawling lane" as the site of a national humiliation.When the firing at Jallianwala Bagh stopped, Dyer did not stop to render aid to the wounded. The city was under martial law, and what the British described as "disturbances" had rocked other parts of the Punjab. Demonstrators were strafed from the air; this initiated a new phase in colonial warfare, and George Orwell in a scintillating essay noted the corruption of the English language entailed in describing such brutal suppression as "pacification". O’Dwyer, who signalled his approval of the actions taken by Dyer in Amritsar, was quite certain that the Punjab had been saved from a dire situation that recalled the rebellion of 1857-58. Indeed, in the months ahead, the spectre of 1857 loomed over the debates that raged on the measures taken by the British to contain the disorder.1919 was, however, not even remotely akin to 1857, if only because the Indian National Congress was now a formidable organisation and, moreover, the British had failed to fully comprehend that politics had entered into the phase of plebeian protest. Hundreds of people had been