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Gandhi breaking the salt laws by picking up a lump of natural salt at Dandi, 8:30 a.m.
April 6, 1930. Photographer unknown. GandhiServe
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had sought to prepare the ground for the renewal of the movement
that would deliver India from colonial servitude. He had searched his
and sale of salt, and by 1878 a uniform policy on salt, which criminalized
mind for some action that might ignite the nation and serve as the
both the private manufacture of salt and the possession of salt not
throughout India.
I regard this tax [on salt], Gandhi thus wrote to Irwin, to be the most
cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow human
movement is essentially for the poorest in the land the beginning will
beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine.
menter with foods, had been seeking for years to minimize if not
eliminate the use of salt in his own dietand this is decades before
which India had been impoverished and bled under colonial rule,
reserving his most detailed analysis for the salaries paid to Indians and
told his London audience in May 1891, when Gandhi was but 22 years
pointing out that while the average Indian earned less than two annas
old, who live upon one-third of a penny a day. . . . These poor people
per day, or one-eighth of a rupee, the British Prime Minister earned Rs.
have only one meal per day, and that consists of stale bread and salt, a
180 per day, while the viceroy received Rs. 700 per day; more tellingly,
heavily taxed article. We are not surprised, then, that on February 27,
the prime minister of Britain received 90 times more than the average
1930, in his first lengthy critique of the salt tax, Gandhi defended his
Britisher, but the viceroy received much over five thousand times
decades ago: Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest
necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live
which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the
maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the
most inhuman poll tax that the ingenuity of man can devise.
If the British were not prepared to combat the various evils afflicting
India under colonial rule, Gandhi pronounced himself ready to
commence a fresh campaign of civil disobedience. As he went on to
inform Irwin, he intended to break the salt lawsa gesture that no
doubt must have struck Irwin as bizarre, considering that Gandhis
own colleagues in the Congress Working Committee responded with
incredulity when he first broached the idea with them in mid-February.
Salt had very much been on Gandhis mind since he was a young man:
though he may not have been possessed of the scientific findings on
salts critical role in transmitting electrical nerve impulses, Gandhi
had struck upon the fact that it is essential in maintaining a properly
functioning body, even more so in a hot climate where the risks of
dehydration are acute. The first mention of the salt tax in India in
Gandhis work appears in 1905; strikingly, he described the salt tax as
not a small injustice in Chapter 2 of Hind Swaraj, a work that he
penned in 1909 and which has ever since been viewed as the principal
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Lord Willingdons Dilemma, ca. 1931. Published in the Hidustan Times with the caption
The Government of India have hardly locked Gandhiji in than they turn round and find
that for the one Gandhiji locked in, there are thousands outside.
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miles to the sea and break the law. A practitioner of satyagraha has
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five miles each morning at a pace so brisk that Shirer, at less than half
his age and in fair shape from skiing and hiking in the Alps below
Vienna, could scarcely keep up with the Mahatma. It is said that the
roads were watered, and fresh flowers and green leaves strewn on the
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path; and as the satyagrahis walked, they did so to the tune of one of
Gandhis favorite bhajans,Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram. On the morning
of April 6, which marked the anniversary of the commencement of the
1919 agitation against the repressive Rowlatt Acts, and the initiation of
the country into the methods of nonviolent resistance, Gandhi arrived
at the sea at Dandi. Narayan Khare offered mellifluous renderings of
Gandhis favorite bhajans, including Vaishnavajana to; short prayers
were offered; and Gandhi then addressed the crowd before wading into
the water. Precisely at 6:30 AM he picked up a small lump of natural
salt. He had now broken the law; Sarojini Naidu, his close friend and
associate, shouted: Hail, deliverer! No sooner had Gandhi violated
the law than everywhere others followed suit: within one week the
jails were full, but the marchers kept coming. Images of disciplined
nonviolent resisters being brutalized by the police mobilized world
public opinion in favor of Indian independence. Though Gandhi
himself would be arrested, many Indians appeared to have thrown off
the mental shackles of colonial oppression.
It has been suggested by some historians that nothing substantial was
achieved by Gandhi through this campaign of civil disobedience.
Gandhi and Irwin signed a truce, and the British Government agreed
to call a conference in London to negotiate Indias demands for
independence. Gandhi was sent by the Congress as its sole representative, but these 1931 negotiations proved to be inconclusive, particularly
since various other Indian communities had each been encouraged by
the British to send a representative and make the claim that they were
not prepared to live in an India under the domination of the Congress.
Yet never before had the British consented to negotiate directly with
the Congress, and Gandhi met Irwin as his equal. In this respect, the
man who most loathed Gandhi, Winston Churchill, understood
the extent of his achievement when he declared it alarming and also
nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now
posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked
up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and
conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on
equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Even
Nehru was to come to a better appreciation of Gandhi following his
march to the sea, since many Indians now appeared to understand that
the nation had unshackled itself and achieved a symbolic emancipation. Staff in hand he goes along the dusty roads of Gujarat, Nehru
had written of Gandhi, clear-eyed and firm of step, with his faithful
band trudging along behind him. Many a journey he has undertaken
in the past, many a weary road traversed. But longer than any that
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have gone before is this last journey of his, and many are the obstacles
in his way. But the fire of a great resolve is in him and surpassing love
of his miserable countrymen. And love of truth that scorches and love
of freedom that inspires. And none that passed him can escape the
for the goal is the independence of India and the ending of the
exploitation of her millions.
The picture of Gandhi, firm of step and walking staff in hand, has
endured longer than almost any other image of him, and it is through
this representation that the Bengali artist Nandalal Bose sought to
immortalize Gandhi. The Salt March remains perhaps the most potent
example of both the power of concerted nonviolent resistance and the
intuitive strategies of satyagraha. Gandhi sought in various ways to
insert the body into the body politic, and he was always alert to the
meaning and potential of symbols. An inveterate user of trains, Gandhi
was yet alive to the idea that a persons feet were enough to take him
wherever he wanted. He also readily opened himself up to criticism: for
instance, in hand-picking his marching companions, he had purposely
omitted women even though they were full and active members of his
ashram community, and many indeed served as his closest associates.
Gandhi took the view that the presence of women might deter the
British from attacking the satyagrahis, and that no such excuse should
be available to the state if it wished to offer retaliation. Behind this lay
Gandhis distinction between nonviolence of the strong and nonviolence of the weak, but his thinking was also informed by a certain
sense of chivalry, such that any triumph of nonviolence was diminished
if the playing field was not level. When Gandhi waded into the sea at
Dandi, thousands joined in: the young and the old, believers and
nonbelievers, and as many women as men. A revolution had been
launched, one that Time Magazine recognized when, in anointing
Gandhi their Man of the Year in 1930 over Stalin and Hitler, it invoked
the little brown man whose 1930 mark on world history will undoubtedly loom largest of all. Decades later, Bayard Rustin, a Quaker and a
principal architect of the 1963 March on Washington, and other leading
activists of the Civil Rights Movement acknowledged that Gandhis
march to the sea had given them all the cues they needed to launch
the most significant civil rights demonstration since Gandhi led the
Indians to freedom. One suspects that generations to come will be
reading about Gandhis Dandi Marchwith perhaps a pinch of salt.
Opposite page Nandalal Bose (India, 18821966), Dandi March (Bapuji), 1930. Linocut
on paper, 111/2 71/8 inches (29.5 18.2 cm). National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
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Above Walter Bosshard (Swiss, 18921975), A Group of Volunteers Arrives at the River,
1930. Gelatin silver print, dimensions. Credit line
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spell, and men of common clay feel the spark of life. It is a long journey,