Three Accounts of One Week: Judging Sources on the Non-Cooperation Movement
A Class 10 student in Ludhiana is preparing a project on the Non-Cooperation Movement in her district. She has collected three accounts of one week in November 1921, when volunteers picketed a liquor shop and a shop selling imported cloth in her town.
Source A (District Police report, 1921): 'A mob of about 400 persons, led by two local pleaders, forcibly closed both shops. Two constables were injured. Seventeen persons were arrested.'
Source B (local nationalist weekly, 1921): 'Thousands of volunteers, including many women, peacefully persuaded shopkeepers to shut their shutters. The police lathi-charged a quiet gathering and took away innocent people.'
Source C (her great-grandmother's recollection, recorded in 2023): 'We sat outside that shop and sang for three days. The police came only on the last day. Nobody from our lane was arrested.'
Her textbook gives one short paragraph on the movement's spread in Punjab and mentions no local events.
1. For the number of arrests and injuries, which source should she rely on, and for what should she use the other two? Justify by the nature and purpose of each source.
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Rank the sources by what each was made to do, not by which one sounds fairest.
- Source A is the only contemporaneous official record, and it was created for a purpose that forced accuracy on certain facts: arrests, injuries to constables and dates fed into prosecutions and can be checked against jail registers, court files and police gazettes. So for numbers arrested and injured it is the strongest of the three. But its vocabulary ('mob', 'forcibly') is the language of the prosecuting state, and 'about 400' is an officer's estimate, not a count.
- Source B is reliable for the repertoire of the movement - picketing, women's participation, the use of songs and persuasion - because a local weekly reported what its own readers were doing. It is weak on numbers ('thousands') and silent on any coercion by picketers, because its purpose was to win sympathy.
- Source C is reliable for experience and sequence (three days, singing, the timing of the police arrival) but memory recorded a century later reshapes dates and numbers and often leaves out what a family prefers to forget.
Conclusion: use A for arrests and injuries, B for participation and methods, C for everyday texture - and never one alone, because each is strong exactly where another is weak. A good project states this division of labour explicitly rather than pretending the sources agree.
2. The sources disagree about whether the crowd was violent. Rather than choosing one account, explain three ways she should investigate the disagreement, and what a good conclusion would look like.
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Investigate the disagreement instead of dissolving it.
- Corroborate with an independent record. Jail admissions, court proceedings, police gazette notices, municipal records and rival newspapers (loyalist as well as nationalist) were produced by different institutions with different interests. If seventeen people really were arrested, a jail register or court file will show it; that settles the arrest figure without trusting either narrator.
- Read for provenance and audience. Ask who wrote each account, for whom, how soon after the event, and what it needed to prove. A police officer justifying force, an editor building a readership and a grandmother entertaining a great-grandchild are answering different questions.
- Interrogate the words. 'Violence' is a contested label. Closing a shutter under social pressure is coercion even if no blow is struck; a lathi charge can be described as 'restoring order'. Collect several family memories, not one, so that Source C is not a single voice standing for a whole neighbourhood.
A good conclusion reads like this: 'The sources disagree because the police report records legal categories, the newspaper records persuasion, and family memory records participation; on the balance of corroborated evidence, picketing occurred over three days, arrests took place, and the extent of lathi injuries cannot be settled from these sources.' That explains the disagreement and still reaches a defensible finding.
3. Her teacher warns that a project which only repeats the textbook paragraph will score poorly. State what the three sources together add that the textbook paragraph cannot, and one historical question that none of them can answer.
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What the sources add:
- Locality and names. The textbook describes Punjab in general terms; the sources place the movement in a specific town, in a specific week, with pleaders, shopkeepers and constables.
- Method. They show how the boycott worked - picketing, singing, persuasion of shopkeepers - not just that it happened.
- Social depth. Source B and Source C bring in women, whose participation a paragraph on leaders and dates typically omits.
- Conflict and doubt. The textbook paragraph is smooth; the sources contain a disagreement about violence, which is itself evidence of how the Raj and the nationalists each wanted the event remembered.
- The link between national and local. They allow her to test the textbook claim against one verifiable local case rather than accept it.
What none can answer: none of the three can establish the total number of participants in Punjab, or whether the All-India leadership intended or approved this kind of local picketing. A police report counts only what it policed, a newspaper counts for effect, and one family's memory covers one lane. Answering that question needs district-wise official statistics and Congress correspondence, and a good project says so openly as a limitation.