QUEEN EXPRESSES REMORSE OVER 1919 MASSACRE AT INDIAN SITE.

Byline: John F. Burns The New York Times

In an act of contrition for Britain's colonial past, Queen Elizabeth came to this Punjab city Tuesday and paid 30 seconds of silent homage at the site of the Amritsar massacre of April 13, 1919, one of the British Empire's darkest days.

The queen removed her shoes and laid a wreath of white and gold marigolds at a pink granite memorial at Jallianwala Bagh, the walled garden where Brig. Reginald Dyer, a British general administering martial law in Amritsar, ordered 50 soldiers to open fire on a crowd of about 10,000 unarmed Indians protesting an extension of World War I detention laws.

A British commission concluded at the time that the fusillade killed 379 people and wounded more than 1,100, while an independent Indian inquiry impaneled by Mohandas Gandhi, the independence leader, estimated that 1,000 had died. Reports at the time said Dyer, after the massacre, had made Indians crawl along a street where two Englishwomen had been attacked, and ordered others to be whipped.

The incident galvanized the Indian freedom movement. After Jallianwala Bagh, Gandhi's formula of nonviolent resistance caught fire across India, sidelining conservatives who had argued for pragmatic cooperation with the British. In later years, Indian historians came to see the Amritsar massacre as a crucial juncture in the struggle for India's independence from Britain, which came at midnight on Aug. 14, 1947.

At a state banquet Monday night, the queen, 71, said: ``It is no secret that there have been some difficult episodes in our past - Jallianwala Bagh, which I shall visit tomorrow, is a distressing example. But history cannot be rewritten, however much we might sometimes wish otherwise. It has its moments of sadness, as well as gladness. We must learn from the sadness and build on the gladness.''

Stepping back at the ceremony Tuesday, the queen stood stock still, then briefly bowed her head, as she did last month when the cortege carrying the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, passed before members of the royal family outside Buckingham Palace on its way to Diana's funeral. This tour of India and Pakistan, planned months ago to mark the 50th anniversary of the two nations' independence, is the queen's first public engagement since the funeral.

Like everything touching on Britain's imperial past here, the ceremony Tuesday touched off a babel of opinions. Most of these were tinged by the larger judgments many Indians have made - some resentful, some nostalgic, many somewhere in between - about the 200 years in which Britain expanded from a trading toehold on the coast north of Bombay to a vast domain whose riches helped Britain become the world's dominant power for the century before World War I.

Some Indians delighted in the fact that the granddaughter of King George V, Emperor of India at the time of the massacre, had acknowledged the wrong done at Jallianwala Bagh. But others were angry that the queen had stopped short of the more explicit apologies that Japanese and German leaders have offered for atrocities in World War II.

In her 15-minute tour of the massacre site, the queen made no statement, and signed a leather-bound visitor's book with her formal signature, ``Elizabeth R,'' with no comment. Prince Philip, her husband, also signed tersely.