On 13 April 2026, the 106th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, a set of voices that colonial rule once tried to erase is finally being heard again — not through official records, but through the words of those who lived through its aftermath.

These are not the voices of well-known leaders or writers, but are more immediate and personal accounts written by ordinary Indians who documented what they saw, felt and endured in the days following the tragedy. 

A historian’s 30-year search

For decades, these writings remained buried in archives, labelled “dangerous” and kept out of public memory — until historian and archivist Rajwanti Mann took on the mammoth task few historians attempt, spending nearly three decades tracing fragments across colonial records to bring back the voices that had been erased.

Released in November 2025, her book, Jallianwala Bagh ki Karahein (Cries of Jallianwala Bagh), is not a conventional retelling of the event. Instead, it pieces together a scattered archive of banned Hindi literature including poems, plays, pamphlets, and songs, written in the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Amritsar.

A former Deputy Director of the Haryana Archives and now a Senior Academic Fellow at the Indian Council for Historical Research, Rajwanti Mann did not........

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