UPPSC 2022 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 97 of 150

Correct — A, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore had been knighted in the Birthday Honours of 1915, two years after the Nobel Prize for Literature. When news of the firing at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 reached him in full, he wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, renouncing the honour — the letter is conventionally dated 30 May 1919. Its argument is the reason the act is remembered: he wrote that 'badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation', and asked to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of his countrymen who were 'liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings'. The renunciation mattered because of who made it. Tagore was the most internationally celebrated Indian alive, and his letter carried the news of Amritsar into British and world opinion at a moment when the administration in Punjab was still under martial law and reporting was suppressed. Note that the question is specifically about a knighthood: several other Indians protested in other ways, and the option list is built out of exactly those near-misses.

• (b)Shankaran Nair — The strongest distractor by far, and it deserves respect rather than dismissal. Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair did protest the massacre, and at real cost — he resigned in 1919 from the Viceroy's Executive Council, the only Indian member, and later fought a celebrated libel action brought by Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, over his book on the subject. But resigning an office is not the same act as returning a title, and he did not renounce his knighthood. UPPSC itself tested this precise distinction in 2025, asking who resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council over the massacre; the answer there was Sankaran Nair.
• (c)Md. Ali Jinnah — Jinnah did resign a British-created position in 1919 — he left the Imperial Legislative Council — but his resignation was in protest at the Rowlatt Act, the emergency legislation whose passage preceded and provoked the Punjab agitation, not at the massacre itself. He held no knighthood to return.
• (d)Rameshwar Singh — No renunciation of an imperial honour in protest at the 1919 massacre is recorded for him. The act described in the question is documented for one person only, and the name is placed here simply as a plausible-sounding titled figure of the period.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919, Baisakhi day, when Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched troops into an enclosed ground in Amritsar where a large crowd had gathered in defiance of a proclamation, blocked the only substantial exit and ordered sustained firing without warning. The immediate context was the Rowlatt Act, which extended wartime emergency powers of detention without trial into peacetime and triggered Gandhi's first all-India satyagraha, and the arrest and deportation of the local leaders Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew. The aftermath ran through martial law across Punjab, the Hunter Committee inquiry, Dyer's removal from command without further punishment, and a shift in Indian opinion that made the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22 possible. Protest took many forms: Tagore returned his knighthood, Sankaran Nair resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council, and Gandhi returned his Kaisar-i-Hind medal in 1920 at the start of Non-Cooperation.

The examiner is testing precision about which person performed which act, so the useful discipline is to file each protest with its exact form. Tagore returned a knighthood; Sankaran Nair resigned an executive office; Jinnah resigned a legislative seat, and over the Rowlatt Act rather than the massacre; Gandhi returned a war-service medal, and a year later. All four are real acts of protest in the same period, which is why an imprecise memory of 'someone gave back an honour after Jallianwala Bagh' is not enough. It is also worth separating the trigger from the event, because UPSC has asked that directly: the Rowlatt Act produced the agitation, and the massacre was the response to the agitation. Tagore's own relationship with imperial honours was consistent — the renunciation letter is a document worth reading in full, because it argues from dignity rather than from politics, which is why it travelled so far.

• Rabindranath Tagore was knighted in 1915, two years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
• He renounced the knighthood in a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, following the massacre of 13 April 1919; the letter is conventionally dated 30 May 1919.
• The letter's central line — that 'badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation' — is its most quoted passage.
• Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council in 1919 over the massacre and later contested a libel suit brought by Michael O'Dwyer, but he did not return his knighthood.
• Gandhi returned his Kaisar-i-Hind medal in 1920, at the launch of the Non-Cooperation Movement — a separate act of protest, later and of a different kind.

• Substituting Sankaran Nair for Tagore — Nair resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council, he did not return a knighthood
• Attributing Jinnah's 1919 resignation to the massacre; it was over the Rowlatt Act, and from the Imperial Legislative Council
• Confusing Tagore's renunciation of the knighthood with Gandhi's return of the Kaisar-i-Hind medal, which came in 1920

UPPSC asks 1919 as person-to-act recall and has now come at it from both directions — who returned the knighthood in 2022, who resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council in 2025 — so the safest preparation is to hold the whole cast and each person's specific act. UPSC has asked the same knighthood question almost verbatim and also tests the causal chain, especially which measure provoked the agitation that ended at Jallianwala Bagh.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in a letter addressed to which of the following?

  • (a)Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy of India
  • (b)Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab
  • (c)Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India
  • (d)Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer

  Answer(a) Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy of India — the letter of protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was addressed to the Viceroy, conventionally dated 30 May 1919.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Consider the following acts of protest connected with the year 1919 and match each with the person who performed it: returning a knighthood; resigning from the Viceroy's Executive Council. The correct pairing is

  • (a)Sankaran Nair returned the knighthood; Tagore resigned from the Executive Council
  • (b)Tagore returned the knighthood; Sankaran Nair resigned from the Executive Council
  • (c)Jinnah returned the knighthood; Gandhi resigned from the Executive Council
  • (d)Gandhi returned the knighthood; Jinnah resigned from the Executive Council

  Answer(b) Tagore returned the knighthood; Sankaran Nair resigned from the Executive Council — Jinnah's 1919 resignation was from the Imperial Legislative Council and over the Rowlatt Act, and Gandhi returned the Kaisar-i-Hind medal in 1920.