The Salt March: 24 Days to Dandi, the Beatings at Dharasana and the Deal That Divided India

Dandi, a fishing village on the Gujarat coast, a little after dawn on 6 April 1930. The tide is out. A thin, bald man of sixty, wrapped in a hand-spun dhoti, walks down to the water’s edge with a crowd behind him. He has just bathed in the sea. Now he bends and picks up a lump of salty mud from the shore.

That is the whole act. No speech at the water, no flag, no weapon. Under British law it is a crime: in India, salt belongs to the government, and only the government may make it or sell it.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had walked about 385 km, for 24 days, to commit that crime in front of the world’s newspapers. Within weeks people were boiling seawater on beaches from Karachi to Bengal, the jails were overflowing, and an empire that had laughed at the idea of a salt protest was clubbing unarmed men at a salt works while an American reporter counted the wounded.

This is the story of that march: why salt, who walked, who was beaten, who was hanged in the same season, and who refused to march at all. It is also the story of the deal that ended it, which many of Gandhi’s own followers called a surrender, and of what historians think it really won.

When the Congress met at Lahore in December 1929, it dropped its old demand for dominion status and voted for Purna Swaraj, complete independence. On New Year’s Eve, Jawaharlal Nehru raised the tricolour on the bank of the Ravi. The party then handed Gandhi the job of deciding how to fight. Everyone expected something big: a tax strike, a boycott of land revenue.

He chose salt. His colleagues were baffled. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wanted a land-revenue boycott. Nehru was unsure. The Calcutta paper The Statesman wrote that it was ‘difficult not to laugh’. Lord Irwin told London that the prospect of a salt campaign did not keep him awake at night.

Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.Gandhi, 1930

Gandhi saw what the clever men missed. Salt was the one tax that every Indian paid, rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, in every meal. The Salt Act of 1882 gave the government a monopoly on making and selling it. Families on the coast could see salt drying in the sun at their feet and were forbidden to scoop it up. The duty in 1931 stood at one rupee four annas a maund, and the salt tax brought in about 8 per cent of the Raj’s tax revenue.

The tax had a long and ugly history. In the 19th century the East India Company and then the Crown had guarded it with a customs line of thorn hedges that stretched for more than 2,000 miles across India, patrolled by thousands of men. Lord Reading’s government had doubled the duty in 1923.

There was another reason. Gandhi had called off his last national campaign, Non-Cooperation, in 1922 after a mob burned policemen alive at Chauri Chaura. Salt was a law anyone could break peacefully, in public, with their own hands.

On 2 March 1930 Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy. The letter began ‘Dear Friend’ and did not mince words. ‘I hold the British rule to be a curse,’ he wrote. He compared the Viceroy’s pay, over Rs 700 a day, with the average Indian’s income of under two annas. He listed demands, among them the end of the salt tax, and said that unless Irwin acted, he would begin breaking the salt laws on the 11th.

He sent it with a young English Quaker, Reginald Reynolds, so nobody could say it was a threat from an enemy. Irwin did not meet him. His secretary replied that the Viceroy regretted Gandhi was planning a course that would plainly break the law and endanger the public peace.

On the same day, 2 March, far to the south, another campaign began. At Nashik, B.R. Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits to the gates of the Kalaram temple to demand the right to enter. The gates stayed shut. Hold on to that coincidence; it matters later in this story.

On the morning of 12 March, Gandhi walked out of Sabarmati Ashram on the edge of Ahmedabad with a bamboo staff and 78 marchers behind him. He had picked them himself, from the ashram, not from the Congress. Most were in their twenties. A roster of the marchers lists the youngest, Vitthal Liladhar Thakkar, as 16.

They came from most of India: Gujarat above all, but also Maharashtra, the United Provinces, Kutch, Kerala, Rajputana, Sindh, Bengal, Nepal. The roster lists three from Punjab, among them Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal. It lists two Muslims and one Christian from Kerala, called Titus. Gandhi’s son Manilal walked too. There were no women. Gandhi had decided this march would be men only.

The column covered about 10 miles a day, through four districts and 48 villages. The first night they stopped at Aslali, where about 4,000 people came to hear him. Villagers watered the dusty roads and strewed them with leaves. The Statesman reported 100,000 people lining the road out of Ahmedabad; at Surat, about 30,000 turned out.

Every evening he spoke. He called the salt tax inhuman and the march a poor man’s struggle. He asked village officials who served the government to resign. Reporters and newsreel cameramen followed the walk, and the world began to watch.

The government watched and did nothing. Irwin had decided that arresting Gandhi on the road would only make a martyr of him.

The marchers reached Dandi on 5 April. That evening Gandhi wrote a short message for the press: ‘I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.’

The next morning came the lump of salty mud. Sarojini Naidu, standing near him, is said to have called out ‘Hail, Deliverer!’ Gandhi is widely reported to have said that with this he was shaking the foundations of the British Empire. Then he urged everyone, everywhere, to make salt.

They did. Within days, crowds were boiling seawater in pots on beaches and in city streets and selling the packets openly. In the south, C. Rajagopalachari led a march from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the east coast, made salt and was arrested. In Bombay, on the same 6 April, women led by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay lit stoves on Chowpatty beach and boiled seawater.

Gandhi then announced his next target: the government salt works at Dharasana, about 40 km south of Dandi. That was too much for the Viceroy. Around midnight on 4–5 May, police came to the camp at Karadi, near Dandi, and woke him. He was taken to Yerwada jail near Poona under a regulation of 1827 that allowed detention without trial.

By then the arrests had begun in earnest. The government’s own count is the one most histories use: more than 60,000 people jailed by the end of 1930. Nationalist accounts and later histories give about 90,000 for 1930–31; Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh, says Bengal alone supplied some 15,000 prisoners by an official estimate. Ordinances gagged the press and banned the Congress.

Not all of India stayed calm, and both sides used that. In Peshawar on 23 April, after the arrest of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, leader of the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgars, troops fired on an unarmed crowd in the Qissa Khwani bazaar. The Times gave the official toll as 20 dead; local and nationalist accounts put it in the hundreds. Two platoons of the Royal Garhwal Rifles, Hindu soldiers under Havildar Major Chandra Singh Garhwali, refused to go into the city against the crowd. They were court-martialled and given terms of up to eight years.

In Sholapur, a mill town in Bombay Presidency, crowds attacked police posts in May after Gandhi’s arrest, and two policemen were killed. The government declared martial law. Four men, Mallappa Dhanshetti, Kurban Hussain, Jagannath Shinde and Shrikisan Sarda, were hanged in Yerwada jail on 12 January 1931.

And in Chittagong on 18 April, Surya Sen’s young revolutionaries raided the government armouries. That was not Gandhi’s way at all, and they never claimed it was.

Punjab joined in its own fashion. Baba Kharak Singh, president of the SGPC, refused to join unless the Congress flag carried the Sikh colour, saffron. Master Tara Singh, who replaced him as the Akalis’ leader in 1930, took the other road: after the Peshawar firing he led a jatha of about 100 Akalis towards Peshawar in sympathy and was arrested at Lahore.

The first column for Dharasana was led by Abbas Tyabji, a white-bearded retired judge of 76. He was arrested before he got there. So the job passed to Sarojini Naidu, poet, wit and former president of the Congress.

On the morning of 21 May about 2,500 volunteers gathered in front of the salt works. Around it ran ditches and barbed wire, and behind the wire stood about 400 Indian police under a handful of British officers. Naidu spoke to the volunteers before they set out. They would be beaten, she told them, and they must not hit back.

Although Gandhi’s body is in prison, his soul goes with you.Sarojini Naidu at Dharasana, as reported by Webb Miller

Then the columns walked forward in silence. Webb Miller of United Press was watching from a few yards away. The police, he wrote, rushed the marchers and rained blows on their heads with steel-shod lathis. The front rank went down. Then the next rank stepped up, and went down too.

without even raising their arms to ward off the blowsWebb Miller, United Press, 21 May 1930

Stretcher-bearers carried the injured to a hut that served as a hospital. Men who sat down in protest were kicked and dragged into the ditches. In his first dispatch Miller put the injured at 260. In his memoir, I Found No Peace, he wrote that he counted 320 wounded at the hospital, many unconscious with fractured skulls, and that two men had died. Naidu was arrested that day.

British telegraph officials in India held up his story. Miller threatened to expose the censorship, and it went out. It ran in some 1,350 newspapers around the world, and Senator John J. Blaine read it into the record of the United States Senate. The United Press headline over it still called the volunteers ‘natives’.

Irwin’s version was rather different. He wrote to King George V that the police had tried to hold back, and that a good many people had suffered minor injuries as a result.

Gandhi had kept women off the road to Dandi. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay argued with him, and lost. Then the women came anyway.

Once the salt was broken, women joined the movement in numbers India had never seen. They boiled salt on beaches, picketed liquor shops and foreign-cloth stores, carried the banned papers, marched, and went to jail. Kamaladevi led some 500 people to raid the Wadala salt depot in Bombay on 16 April. She is remembered for trying to sell packets of ‘freedom salt’ at the Bombay Stock Exchange, and she spent most of a year in prison.

For many, it was the first time a woman of a respectable family had been seen shouting slogans in a street, let alone arrested in one. Historians count the salt campaign as the moment women became mass participants in the freedom struggle.

Edward Wood, Lord Irwin, is easy to cast as the villain, and he did preside over the beatings, the ordinances and the jails. But the British case deserves to be heard in its own words, and Irwin was not the hardest man in that government.

In October 1929 he had announced that dominion status was the natural goal of India’s constitutional progress, and offered a Round Table Conference in London. His own Conservative party attacked him for it. Weeks later, in December 1929, revolutionaries of the HSRA tried to blow up his train near Delhi. To him, the Congress had been offered a conference and had chosen the street.

Not every Indian who wanted the British gone wanted to follow Gandhi to the sea. Three sets of critics stood apart, each for reasons that were serious then and still are.

Ambedkar. The man who had stood at the shut gates of the Kalaram temple on 2 March did not join the salt campaign. He went instead to the First Round Table Conference in London, which the Congress boycotted, to speak for the depressed classes. On 20 November 1930 he told it that British rule had done little to end untouchability: in the old days his people could not enter temples, and they still could not. Under the British, he said, they were not marching on.

instead of marching on, we are only marking time.B.R. Ambedkar, Round Table Conference, London, 20 November 1930

He was no friend of the Raj. He told the same conference that only a government of the people, for the people and by the people could lift his community, and he backed dominion status with safeguards. His quarrel was with the claim that the Congress, led by caste Hindus, spoke for the untouchables. By his account, Gandhi had refused to back the Kalaram satyagraha and condemned it.

The revolutionaries. To Bhagat Singh and his comrades of the HSRA, mass non-violence was too slow, and too easily called off at a leader’s word. After their attack on Irwin’s train, Gandhi had written ‘The Cult of the Bomb’; they replied with ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’. In the spring of 1930 Bhagat Singh was on trial in Lahore while the salt was being boiled. Our long read on Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev tells how their story collided with Gandhi’s in March 1931.

The Muslim League. Outside the North-West Frontier, where Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars took the beatings, Muslim participation was low. In Bengal, Banglapedia notes, early Muslim support fell away after riots in Dhaka and Kishoreganj in 1930. The Muslim League did not join. Jinnah, who had urged the conference on Irwin and Ramsay MacDonald, sat at the Round Table in London. To many Muslim leaders the Nehru Report of 1928 had already shown that the Congress would not meet their demands; Jinnah’s Fourteen Points of 1929 were his answer to it.

There were Muslims in the campaign all the same: two among the 78, Abbas Tyabji at the head of the Dharasana column, and the Pathans of Peshawar who stood in front of the machine guns.

In late January 1931 the government let Gandhi and the Congress leaders out of jail. On 17 February he walked up the steps of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, in his dhoti and shawl, to talk to Irwin. They met eight times, for about 24 hours in all.

In London, Winston Churchill was beside himself. It was ‘alarming and also nauseating’, he said, to see Gandhi striding half-naked up the Viceregal steps to parley on equal terms with the King-Emperor’s representative.

The pact was signed on 5 March 1931. Civil disobedience was suspended. Political prisoners were freed, except those convicted of violence, and confiscated property was returned. Peaceful picketing of liquor and foreign-cloth shops was allowed. People living near the coast could collect and make salt for their own use. The Congress agreed to attend the next Round Table Conference.

What Gandhi did not get mattered as much. The salt tax itself stayed. There was no inquiry into police violence, which the Congress had demanded. And there was no reprieve for Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, who were hanged in Lahore on 23 March. When Gandhi reached the Karachi Congress days later, young men met him with black flags.

Nehru, deeply depressed, wrote of a great emptiness, as of something precious gone almost beyond recall. Subhas Chandra Bose was sceptical, until he toured the countryside and saw the crowds cheering the man who had made the Viceroy negotiate.

On 29 August 1931 Gandhi sailed for England on the SS Rajputana, the Congress’s only delegate to the Second Round Table Conference. He stayed among the poor at Kingsley Hall in the East End and visited Lancashire mill workers whose jobs the cloth boycott had hurt. Asked whether he had been underdressed for tea with the King, he is said to have replied that the King had enough on for both of them.

The conference, from 7 September to 1 December 1931, broke on the rock Ambedkar had pointed to. Gandhi claimed that the Congress spoke for all of political India, and that the untouchables were Hindus, not a separate minority. Ambedkar demanded separate electorates for them. The Muslim, Sikh and other delegations wanted their own guarantees. Nothing was agreed.

Gandhi came home empty-handed in late December. Irwin had gone; the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, had no interest in talking. On 4 January 1932 Gandhi was arrested again and civil disobedience resumed. Banglapedia puts the number who courted arrest in the second round at nearly 120,000. In August 1932 Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award gave the depressed classes separate electorates; Gandhi fasted against it in Yerwada, and on 24 September Ambedkar signed the Poona Pact, trading separate electorates for reserved seats. In 1934 the Congress called off civil disobedience.

The salt tax outlived the campaign by 13 years. It was finally abolished in 1947 by the interim government led by Jawaharlal Nehru, whose finance member was the Muslim League’s Liaquat Ali Khan.

Judged by its own demands, the campaign lost. The salt law survived. Independence did not come for 17 more years. Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, scholars of strategic non-violence, called 1930–31 a British victory in which Gandhi gave away the store. Louis Fischer, Gandhi’s biographer, wrote in 1950 that technically and legally nothing had changed.

Judged by what people believed afterwards, it won a great deal. A senior British official, Sir Charles Innes, wrote that England could hold India only by consent; after Dharasana, that consent was harder to find. Time magazine named Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930. Nehru called the salt campaign the high-water mark of his time with Gandhi. The historian Judith Brown, author of a major biography of Gandhi, judged that civil resistance was a crucial part of the setting in which Britain decided when and how to leave.

The honest verdict sits between. The march won no law and lost the argument over who spoke for India. It also made the Raj negotiate as an equal and showed the world, through one American reporter’s notebook, what the Raj was prepared to do to unarmed men.

Strip away the legend and the Salt March is still astonishing. A man of sixty took the most ordinary thing in an Indian kitchen and turned it into a question the empire could not answer: why may a poor fisherman not pick up the salt at his feet?

It did not free India, and it did not speak for every Indian. Ambedkar was right that a campaign led by caste Hindus could not simply claim his people. The Muslim League’s distance was a warning the Congress did not heed. The revolutionaries were right that Gandhi’s pact left three young men to hang. And Irwin, who sent the police to Dharasana, was also the Viceroy who sat across a table from a man in a dhoti and treated him as an equal, which no Viceroy had done before.

Twenty-four days, 385 km, a fistful of mud. Eighteen years later, the man who picked it up was shot dead in Delhi by a Hindu nationalist (our long read on Gandhi’s assassination tells that story). Salt is free in India today. The quiet courage of the men in the front rank at Dharasana, who walked into the lathis and did not lift a hand, still asks every one of us what we would have done.