Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (15 page)

He could not have had much of a carefree childhood, coming from a family where he, his parents, and his siblings—two brothers and two sisters—had to work hard and constantly. School was a luxury in which they could not indulge. Child marriage was routine, a way to guarantee a young person's future and strengthen the web of relationships between families. Narotam's parents matched him with a girl of the same caste, Benkor, who lived just blocks away in the same village and whose father had died. They were perhaps ten years old when they circled the marriage fire.

After the wedding, Benkor went back home, as was the custom; tradition held that the girl could not go to her in-laws until she reached puberty and her in-laws paid a bride price. But years passed, and Narotam's family had no money, not even for the customary pair of thick silver anklets. Benkor waited.

The village of Gandevi had been, in earlier centuries, a prominent weaving center. But by the time Narotam was a young man, the town was emptying out. The decline of Gandevi's weaving class was of such concern that the kingdom's census bureau conducted a special report in 1931. A typical weaver, the report said, "ekes out a miserable existence," making barely eight rupees a month because of competition from machine-made cloth. One finished sari—a labor of three to five days—was worth only a rupee or two. My mother and her siblings remember their parents' tales of hard times, when the family lived from payment to payment—buying food only when a sari was finished, nearly running out by the time the next one came off the loom and was rushed to the middleman. Despite government efforts at forming cooperatives and encouraging new designs, the census report said, the village's weavers had "an air of being completely beaten."

Eighty-eight Khatri families, and about a hundred of various other castes, were still weaving in Gandevi, the report said, making for "466 workers" supporting themselves and "434 dependents." But most families were bowing to reality. Economic conditions had "forced many a weaver out of his occupation and even out of the country ... They took to other avocations like tailoring or migrated to foreign countries like Africa and the Fiji Islands." Twenty years earlier, when the census began measuring emigration, about 2,500 people from the region had gone overseas; by 1931, the figure had more than doubled, to 6,687. Africa was the primary destination; a group of two hundred Muslims left for Spain; and nearly two hundred people went to Fiji.

Narotam's family, initially, took the less expensive step of sending its sons to Bombay, as thousands of poorer families were doing. By the time Narotam was nineteen, he was working as a street tailor in the great metropolis of British India. He spent his days sitting at a manual sewing machine in a twelve-by-five-foot room that doubled as his bedroom at night. It faced the street, and he sewed blouses and trousers to order.

While jobs in the villages were scarce and poorly paid, work in the city was abundant. Thousands of peasants like Narotam joined the great migration to the new metropolises, swelling Bombay's population to one million, making it one of the largest cities in the world. The new laborers and traders came from all over northern and western India, crowding into tenements and shacks, speaking English if they could but otherwise mainly Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati.

A hundred sixty miles from home, Narotam lived with an older cousin and other working-class Gujaratis, with whom he could share language and food. Their talk would have centered around money and, increasingly in those days, politics.

India's political news after World War I was driven largely by Gandhi, whom the poet Rabindranath Tagore had christened "Mahatma," the Great One. Since leaving South Africa, Gandhi had become, through his various campaigns for
swaraj,
or self-rule—independence from Britain—a household name in India. Gujaratis took inordinate pride in seeing one of their own emerge as the nation's political and spiritual leader.

In 1929, when Narotam was a twenty-year-old street tailor, Gandhi was a sixty-year-old activist who was facing a delicate choice. Some of his fellow leaders in the Indian National Congress were urging a war for independence. Gandhi, too, wanted swaraj, but only by nonviolent means. He believed that India could gain freedom by appealing to the noblest part of the British soul—if and only if Indians held firm to the moral high ground.

In January 1930, Gandhi wrote that he was "furiously thinking" night and day. The country was ripe for a mass movement, he believed, and he was seeking an issue that could unify all Indians. It would have to be something that affected all, without regard to privilege or region or religion; it would assert a right that was so obvious and natural as to be incontestable; and it would provide a way for every Indian to break the law with little effort.

He settled on salt.

"History has no instance of a tax as cruel as the salt tax," Gandhi declared; through it, "the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless." The issue was not only taxation, though the tax was heavy, working out by his account to 2,400 percent over the sale price. Indians were also forbidden to harvest or sell it on their own, those privileges being reserved for the government monopoly that produced it in India or imported it from Britain. A massive infrastructure of tax and customs officials enforced the law, which was one of the oldest sources of revenue; at one point in the mid-1800s, an immense barrier consisting mostly of a thorny hedge ran down the center of the country for 1,500 miles, patrolled by twelve thousand officers whose job was to prevent illicit salt from traveling between parts of India. In a nation surrounded on three sides by sea, restricting salt was not only difficult but seemed, to Gandhi, ludicrous. In an open letter to the viceroy, Gandhi wrote, "The illegality is in a Government that steals the people's salt and makes them pay heavily for the stolen article."

He closed by politely informing the viceroy that unless the tax was repealed, civil disobedience would begin March 11, 1930. Gandhi and a group of followers would walk west from their ashram to the Arabian Sea, where they would "steal" salt from the British-owned saltworks and from the ocean itself. The route of 241 miles would take twenty-four days, passing through the rural districts of Gujarat—just a few miles from Narotam's hometown.

In the traditional Hindu view of life, adolescence is not about raging hormones, wild haircuts, or bad attitudes. It is a serious time, built on celibacy and spiritual learning. Out of childhood, a young man becomes a
brahmachaarin:
literally, student of the soul, of god, and of ultimate reality.

Narotam had spent his teenage years not in such study but in work, saving what he could to send back to his parents in the village. His father had finally taken out a loan for Benkor's dowry and brought her home, at the shockingly old age of twenty. Narotam went back to Gandevi to settle down. The villages, like Bombay, were astir with news of the salt march, in local dailies and in Gandhi's own Gujarati weekly,
Navajivan,
or "new life."

Thousands of villagers gathered along the route to see the Mahatma and support the movement. Walking ten to twelve miles a day, Gandhi gave rousing speeches and recruited volunteers. He urged village headmen to resign their posts and cease cooperating with the British government. He promoted other elements of his agenda: spin khaadi and boycott foreign cloth; include "untouchables" in all aspects of society; close down the liquor stores. He told Gujaratis to seize the moment to lead their nation into freedom. He asked the warrior caste to take up its age-old profession, this time on the battlefield of nonviolent struggle. And he told young men like Narotam to spend their brahmachaarin period in the movement, rather than in the schools and industries run by the British. They were to examine their souls as they fought for the soul of their country.

"What student is he who will continue to study at such a time?" Gandhi asked a crowd on March 17, two weeks before the march passed by Narotam's hometown. "Today I ask them to leave schools and come out on the battlefield and become mendicants for the sake of the country ... The final battle has to be waged."

On April 3, the marchers spent the night in Navsari—just twelve miles north of Narotam's village. Nine thousand gathered to hear Gandhi speak, according to the police; fifty thousand, said the pro-independence newspaper. Navsari's population was less than twenty-five thousand, but people came from all the villages around. The speech was given in the dry reservoir bed, the Milky Lake, the only open place in town large enough for such a crowd.

And perhaps it was here, a day's walk from the coast, that Narotam joined the movement. In a family of weavers descended from warriors, what did it take for one young man to leave the tiny hamlet of Gandevi, where even today cow-dung dust rises from the unpaved streets, and begin walking toward the sea? He left behind a disapproving father, a worried mother and wife, and an infant daughter they had named Sarasvati, after the goddess of wisdom and learning.

***

The marchers were prepared to be arrested, beaten, even killed; as a grim reminder, their pilgrimage was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Jallianwala massacre in Calcutta. There, a British general had ordered his soldiers to fire on a stadium full of unarmed men, women, and children, killing hundreds. The debacle made the general a sort of populist hero in the British press, and he was never convicted of any crime.

Now, Gandhi expected to be arrested at any moment. To ensure that the volunteers would remain nonviolent even in his absence, and as part of their spiritual training, he insisted on strict discipline throughout the march. The rules were many. They would start walking at 6:30
A.M.
, break at 8
A.M.
for prayer and a meal, walk several miles before dinner, then walk again until nightfall. They would sleep outdoors. They would not drink alcohol. They would wear homespun khaadi at all times—an order that resulted in shortages, to which enterprising factory owners responded with counterfeit, machine-made versions of the rough cloth.

They would eat food supplied by local people, which was to be "the simplest possible," Gandhi wrote in his instructions to the villages along the route. "Sweets, even if prepared, will be declined. Vegetables should be merely boiled, and no oil, spices, and chillies, whether green or dry, whole or crushed, should be added or used in the cooking ... The people should incur no expense on account of betel leaves, betel-nuts or tea for the party."

As they neared Dandi, conditions became even more ascetic. The size of the march was growing, and supplies were scarce. Gandhi gathered the volunteers for prayer at 4
A.M.
on April 3 and told them, "We shall have to use water as if it was milk." Food, too, was to be rationed, with each meal consisting of a small amount of puffed rice, gram flour, and boiled water with a spoonful of butter and sugar. He added, "Another piece of information I have received is that the Government intends to use fire-engines to stop us. We have prepared ourselves for death from cannons and guns, compared to which this is nothing ... You must bear in mind that not one of us will retreat. I do not think the Government will be so cruel, but we must be prepared."

All the while, volunteers were expected to follow the nineteen-point code of nonviolent behavior: "1. A Satyagrahi, i.e., a civil resister will harbour no anger. 2. He will suffer the anger of the opponent. 3. In so doing he will put up with assaults from the opponent, never retaliate..."

***

Upon arriving at the coast on April 5, Gandhi walked along the beach. "Dandi itself has a tragic history," he wrote. "As I walk about the otherwise beautiful peace-giving shore and listen for the heavenly music of the gentle waves, I see about me wasted human effort in the shape of dilapidated embanked fields without a patch of vegetation. These very fields, immediately the hateful salt monopoly is gone, will be valuable salt pans from which villagers will extract fresh, white sparkling salt without much labour, and it will give them a living as it did their ancestors."

The Arabian Sea lapping up against Dandi's shore is so saline that the satyagrahis of 1930, in order to make salt, had only to pick up the natural deposits that lay drying in tide pools. On the morning of April 6, Gandhi bent over, seized a fistful of muddy salt from the ground, and declared the beginning of "the war against salt tax." All over India, people began gathering and making illegal salt.

The government's response was muted at first, so Gandhi set his sights on a bigger target: the Dharasana Salt Works, with its piles of salt shining behind barbed wire. The press had begun calling him "the salt robber," but he told his followers, "Real robbery will consist only in plundering yonder heaps of salt."

And then he was arrested.

With that, the nation was aflame. At mass demonstrations all over India, people lit bonfires of foreign-made cloth. Students walked out of classrooms, whole villages refused to pay taxes, women picketed liquor stores, and officials quit their government posts. In Bombay and Karachi, tens of thousands of people rallied around symbolic pans of drying saltwater. And a steady stream of patriots was rushing toward the sea.

Gandhi's arrest did not stop the marchers from moving ahead to Dharasana. New leaders stepped up and led the raid on the saltworks.

Narotam was one of the first to jump the barricades.

UPI reporter Webb Miller, witnessing one of the confrontations, filed the real version of the news report that had brought me, as an eleven-year-old watching the Hollywood version, to tears: