Jallianwala Bagh

The garden was, in 1919, a walled patch of waste ground used for public gatherings, bounded on most sides by the backs of houses with no other exit. On 13 April, Baisakhi day, several thousand people — many unconnected to the political protests then roiling Amritsar over the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of local leaders — had gathered for a public meeting when Dyer's troops entered and fired without dispersal warning. Official British estimates at the time put the dead at 379; Indian National Congress inquiries and most subsequent historians place the toll considerably higher, into the range of 1,000 or more, with many additional deaths from a well inside the garden where people jumped to escape the gunfire. The massacre became a turning point in the independence movement — Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest, and Udham Singh, who was present as a young man, later assassinated Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who had endorsed Dyer's actions, in London in 1940. The site passed into Indian government trusteeship after independence under the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Act of 1951, and a 2019 renovation for the massacre's centenary added an immersive sound-and-light gallery and restored the bullet-marked walls to greater visibility.

The site is a memorial to a mass killing, not a photo backdrop, and the Trust's on-site staff will ask visitors taking selfies at the well or the bullet-scarred walls to be more restrained; loud conversation and running children are common but out of step with the place. The Martyr's Well, where many died jumping to escape gunfire, is fenced with a low wall and glass panel — do not climb onto it for photographs. Footwear stays on throughout, unlike at the adjoining Golden Temple, but the two sites share a boundary wall and many visitors do both in the same barefoot stretch by removing shoes only for the temple side. The narrow entry lane is one-directional at peak hours to manage flow; do not push against the crowd to double back for a photograph.

Walk the entry lane slowly rather than treating it as a corridor to get past — pausing at the marked bullet holes in the brick, roughly at chest and head height, is what converts the visit from a garden stroll into an understanding of the actual event. The 2019 gallery uses a 360-degree projection and recorded testimony that runs about 15 minutes and is worth the extra time even for visitors in a hurry elsewhere in the old city. The site is a two-minute walk from the Golden Temple's northern gate and from the Partition Museum at Town Hall, making a logical three-stop morning sequence: Partition Museum first for historical framing, Jallianwala Bagh second, Golden Temple third. Early morning light (before 09:00) is markedly better for photographing the preserved bullet marks, which are otherwise in shadow for most of the day.