Revision summary
UP lawyers at Allahabad, led in public memory by Motilal Nehru, boycotted courts and councils. Kashi Vidyapith and the Aligarh Jamia beginning were the educational boycott. Towns ran Khilafat–Congress hartals and cloth picketing. Awadh peasants made the movement rural. Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur ended the all-India campaign.
Model answer
Introduction
Non-cooperation (1920–22) turned Uttar Pradesh into a laboratory of lawyer boycotts, national schools, town hartals, and peasant unrest. The State’s role is both the Congress–Khilafat street and the Awadh countryside that ended, for Gandhi, at Chauri Chaura.
Body
Towns, lawyers, and schools
- Allahabad (Prayagraj) was a command post: Motilal Nehru gave up his practice; Jawaharlal and other Home Rule veterans organised the boycott of councils, titles, and foreign cloth.
- Banaras and Aligarh supplied the educational boycott: Kashi Vidyapith (1921) and the early Jamia Millia stream (begun at Aligarh in 1920) were UP answers to government colleges.
- Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, and Gorakhpur ran hartals, picketing of liquor and cloth, and Khilafat–Congress joint processions that made the movement bilingual and urban.
Peasants and the breaking point
- The Awadh kisan wave—Baba Ramchandra, the Awadh Kisan Sabha, and the overlapping Eka movement in Hardoi–Sitapur–Unnao—pushed non-cooperation beyond the vakil class into bedakhli and rent questions.
- Chauri Chaura (Gorakhpur district, 4 February 1922), where a crowd burnt a police station, was the UP event that led Gandhi to suspend the movement at Bardoli.
- That sequence is the State’s distinctive role: mass entry plus the violence that closed the all-India campaign.
Limit of the role
- UP did not invent non-cooperation; it executed it at scale and then supplied the shock that ended the first satyagraha phase.
- After suspension, many of the same UP lawyers walked into the Swaraj Party (1923), which is the aftermath, not the movement itself.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD Al[Allahabad lawyers] --> NCM[Non-cooperation UP] Kv[Kashi Vidyapith] --> NCM Av[Awadh kisan Eka] --> NCM NCM --> CC[Chauri Chaura 1922] CC --> Halt[Gandhi suspends]
Conclusion
Uttar Pradesh’s role in Non-cooperation was to staff the boycott from Allahabad and Banaras, to join Khilafat in the towns, to radicalise Awadh peasants, and, at Chauri Chaura, to force Gandhi to halt. The State was both engine and emergency brake.
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Next question in the 2023 paper (Q9). View answer →
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Why is Chauri Chaura central to UP’s role?
It was the local violence in Gorakhpur district that Gandhi used as the reason to call off the national movement.
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Was Non-cooperation only urban in UP?
No. Awadh kisan and Eka agitation made it rural; towns supplied lawyers, students, and hartals.
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