01Gorakh’s city
The town grew around the place where Gorakhnath sat in tapas, and the Gorakhnath Math is still its centre. Within a day’s ride lie Kushinagar, where the Buddha attained mahaparinirvana, and the Terai of Nepal, so pilgrims of more than one path pass through. In 1923 Jaydayal Goyandka and his friends set up the Gita Press here, and from Gorakhpur its Gitas and Ramayanas went out to the whole country. Munshi Premchand taught at the Normal School here and resigned his post in 1921 during the Non-cooperation movement, and the Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri was born in the town in 1896.
02Chauri Chaura and Bismil
On 4 February 1922 a crowd at Chauri Chaura, a market town of Gorakhpur district, set fire to the police station after the police fired on them, and twenty-two policemen died. Gandhiji called off the Non-cooperation movement within days. Five years later Gorakhpur jail held Ram Prasad Bismil, condemned for the Kakori train action of 9 August 1925. In his cell he wrote his autobiography and the poems that became songs of the freedom movement, and on the morning of 19 December 1927 he went to the gallows here. The room where he was held is kept as a memorial, and the city remembers him every December.
The life of this place
- 4 February 1922The Chauri Chaura police station is burnt; Non-cooperation is called off.
- 29 April 1923The Gita Press is founded.
- 19 December 1927Ram Prasad Bismil is hanged in Gorakhpur jail.
