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Yet his superiors failed to condemn him and many of his compatriots hailed him as ‘the saviour of India’, the man who single-handedly prevented a second Mutiny. For though the Indian Mutiny had happened more than 60 years earlier it still loomed large in the consciousness of the British and in this respect Dyer was very much a man of his time — and place. When he went out to India as a young army officer, he wasn’t venturing into a foreign land but returning to the country of his birth and early upbringing; his father ran a successful brewery business in Simla. Behind the mask of the stiff soldier was a lonely individual who felt threatened by the prospect of radical change in what he saw as his homeland and lashed out accordingly.
Prior to Amritsar, Dyer’s record as an officer was patchy; he had the gift of inspiring loyalty among his subordinates, particularly the Sikhs in his regiment, the 29th Punjabis, with whom he developed a remarkable rapport; but he was awkward with his equals and a prickly and difficult subordinate himself. He was physically brave and had a good enough brain to get him into Staff College. But as Collett shows in a detailed account of his first independent command, on the borders of Persia, Baluchistan and Afghanistan during the first world war, he was dangerously ambitious. Instead of confining his activities to neutralising the German agents who were active in the region, in line with his orders, he started an expensive and inconclusive campaign against tribes he perceived as hostile and ended up doing more harm than good — all out of vanity.
Collett has two major difficulties with his subject. One is a paucity of letters and diaries of the sort biographers usually rely on; the other is an understandable lack of sympathy for the man. As his title suggests, Dyer is no hero in his eyes. But he leans over backwards to be fair, praising what there is to praise in Dyer’s conduct and relationships, and pitying the broken man living out his days in sickness and isolation in the alien English countryside. While the need for a biography of Dyer on quite such a 19th-century scale as this may be questioned, Collett has produced a thoroughly researched, well-written and insightful account of his life and disproportionate influence on 20th-century Anglo-Indian relations.
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