Freedom Struggle of Uttar Pradesh: Leaders and Events

No province carried more of the national movement than the United Provinces, today's Uttar Pradesh. The revolt of 1857 opened at Meerut and had its fiercest centres at Lucknow, Kanpur and Jhansi; the Congress held some of its biggest sessions at Allahabad and Lucknow; the revolutionaries of the nineteen twenties worked out of Kanpur, Lucknow and Banaras; and the men and women who led free India, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Lal Bahadur Shastri, came out of this ground. For an exam the chapter is a list of places with a date and a name attached to each, so learn it that way.

1857: Meerut, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi

The immediate spark came from the province. Mangal Pandey, a sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry who belonged to Nagwa in Ballia district, attacked his officers at Barrackpore in March 1857 and was hanged. On 10 May 1857 the sepoys at Meerut rose, released their imprisoned comrades and marched to Delhi, and from that day the revolt spread across the Doab and Awadh. The province was already bitter because Awadh had been annexed in 1856 by Lord Dalhousie on the plea of misgovernment, and its ruler Wajid Ali Shah sent to Calcutta.

The Congress years: Allahabad and Lucknow

Allahabad became a political capital in its own right, the city of Motilal Nehru and of Anand Bhawan, and the birthplace in 1889 of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Congress session of 1916 at Lucknow produced the Lucknow Pact, the agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League in which separate electorates were accepted, and it also brought the Moderates and the Extremists back together. In the same year Madan Mohan Malaviya founded the Banaras Hindu University. When the Simon Commission was boycotted in 1928, Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Ballabh Pant faced the lathi charge at Lucknow; Pant later became the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Non-cooperation, Chauri Chaura and the peasants of Awadh

The Non-cooperation movement of 1920 was joined in the province to the Khilafat agitation, in which the Ali brothers, Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali of Rampur, were the leading voices. In the countryside of Awadh the Kisan Sabha under Baba Ramchandra carried the movement to the tenants from 1920, and the Eka or unity movement followed in Hardoi and Barabanki in 1921. The turning point came on 4 February 1922 at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district, where a crowd burnt a police station and twenty-two policemen died; Mahatma Gandhi withdrew the Non-cooperation movement by the Bardoli resolution days later.

The revolutionaries: Kanpur, Kakori and Alfred Park

The Hindustan Republican Association was organised at Kanpur in 1924, with Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Ram Prasad Bismil among its founders, and was reorganised in 1928 as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Its best known action was the Kakori train robbery of 9 August 1925 near Lucknow, carried out to fund the party. In the trial that followed, Bismil was hanged at Gorakhpur jail, Ashfaqullah Khan at Faizabad, Roshan Singh at Naini in Allahabad and Rajendra Lahiri at Gonda in December 1927. Chandra Shekhar Azad, who had rebuilt the party, was surrounded and died fighting at Alfred Park in Allahabad on 27 February 1931.

Quit India and the leaders the province gave

In August 1942 the Quit India movement produced parallel governments in several places, and in the province Ballia was held for a few days under Chittu Pandey, who is remembered as the Sher-e-Ballia. Azamgarh and Ghazipur saw the same kind of rising. Beyond the movement itself, the province supplied an unusual share of national leadership: Jawaharlal Nehru and Motilal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri of Mughalsarai, Purushottam Das Tandon and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai of Allahabad and Barabanki, Acharya Narendra Deo, and Ram Manohar Lohia of Akbarpur. In 1963 Sucheta Kripalani became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the first woman to head a state government in India.