A Handful of Salt

Salt is one of the simplest things in the world. Everybody needs it. In a hot country like India, where people work in the sun and sweat, it is essential for life.

In 1930, India was ruled by Britain. And under British law, Indians were not allowed to collect or sell their own salt. They had to buy it, and every packet carried a tax that went to the British government. Even the poorest family, who could afford almost nothing else, had to pay it.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to millions as Mahatma, "great soul", decided that salt would be the symbol of India's struggle for freedom.

Satyagraha

Gandhi believed in a method of protest he called satyagraha, often translated as "truth-force" or "soul-force". Its followers would break unjust laws openly and peacefully, and accept the punishment without fighting back. By refusing to use violence, they hoped to show the injustice of the law and win over the hearts of their opponents.

Some of the other leaders of India's independence movement thought salt was a strange choice. Why not protest about something bigger? But Gandhi understood that salt touched every Indian, rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, in every village. Anyone could understand a protest about salt. And anyone could join it.

Before he began, he wrote a letter to the Viceroy, the British ruler of India, Lord Irwin, explaining what he intended to do and asking for the salt tax to be removed. The Viceroy did not agree.

The march

On the morning of 12 March 1930, Gandhi left his ashram at Sabarmati, near the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, on foot. He was sixty years old. With him were seventy-eight carefully chosen followers, from many different regions and religions.

Their destination was Dandi, a village on the coast of the Arabian Sea, about 385 kilometres away.

They walked for twenty-four days, covering around fifteen to twenty kilometres a day. Gandhi carried a bamboo walking stick. At every village, he stopped to speak to the people, telling them about the salt tax, about cleanliness and the dignity of work, and asking them to join the movement for independence.

As they went, the crowds grew. Thousands of people lined the roads. Village officials resigned their government posts. Reporters from India and around the world followed the march, and newsreels showed it in cinemas abroad.

At the sea

The marchers reached Dandi on 5 April 1930. Early the next morning, after prayers, Gandhi walked down to the shore. There, he bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt, mixed with mud, from the beach.

With that small handful, he had broken the law.

It was a tiny act. But across India, millions of people followed his example. They made salt from seawater along the coasts. They sold it openly in the streets. They boycotted British cloth and British goods.

The response

The British authorities arrested tens of thousands of people. Gandhi himself was arrested in May 1930, in the middle of the night.

A few weeks later, at the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, peaceful protesters, led by the poet Sarojini Naidu after Gandhi's arrest, walked up to the salt works in rows. Police beat them with steel-tipped batons. Row after row, the protesters walked forward without raising their hands to defend themselves, and row after row they were struck down.

An American journalist, Webb Miller, was there. His report of what he saw was published in newspapers around the world, and it shocked many readers. It made people far beyond India question whether British rule was just.

By the end of the year, more than sixty thousand Indians had been imprisoned.

What it achieved

The Salt March did not end British rule. The salt tax was not abolished at once. In 1931, Gandhi and Lord Irwin reached an agreement, the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, which released prisoners and allowed people living on the coast to make salt for their own use. Gandhi then travelled to London for talks about India's future.

India finally won its independence in 1947, after many more years of struggle.

But the Salt March changed everything. It showed that a peaceful movement could unite millions of people and capture the attention of the world. It inspired later campaigns for justice and civil rights in other countries, including the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr in the United States.

Today, at Dandi, there is a memorial to the march, with statues of Gandhi and his fellow marchers walking towards the sea.

Want to read more?

Ramachandra Guha's Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World is a detailed, readable biography, with a full account of the Salt March. Thomas Weber's book On the Salt March follows the route day by day.