Gandhi’s Salt March
Gandhi walks 390 kilometres to the sea to boil a pinch of salt in defiance of the British monopoly—and all India follows.
On 12 March 1930 Mohandas Gandhi with seventy-eight companions sets out from his ashram near Ahmedabad and in twenty-four days reaches the sea at the village of Dandi; on 6 April he picks up a lump of salt from the shore, breaking the law under which salt in India may only be bought from the state. Salt is what everyone needs, and that is the point: across the country people boil salt, refuse to pay the tax, boycott English cloth; the police beat the unarmed, as at the raid on the Dharasana salt works, and they do not strike back. Tens of thousands are arrested, Gandhi among them. This is satyagraha—"holding to truth", the non-violent resistance he had worked out in South Africa. In 1931 the viceroy Irwin makes a pact with Gandhi, and he goes to the conference in London. Independence will come seventeen years later, but it was with the Salt March that India and the world came to believe an empire could be defeated without arms.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, letters and speeches of March–April 1930 — the letter to the viceroy and the route to Dandi
Scholarship
- history of the Indian national movement — the dating to 12 March–6 April 1930 and the pact of 1931
Basis: documents and evidence.