Salt (52 page)

The British responded to the crisis by starting their own plant to make kartach salt. The object was to furnish locals with cheap salt while providing them with jobs. It was so successful that Liverpool salt could not compete, and so, in 1893, the government closed down the plant. Outperforming British salt was against the rules.

Once the plant was closed down, the malangis starved, while salt, their traditional cash crop, was lying at their feet in sparkling crusts, waiting to be picked up and sold. But even scraping salt off the surface of the flats was a severely punishable offense. The people of Orissa were forbidden from any activity connected with salt making. They left their starving wives and children and went to other parts of India looking for work, living in crowded, unsanitary conditions as they struggled to earn enough from menial labor to send some money to their families. In time, the malangis disappeared from Orissa, and anyone there who was poor was now deprived of salt.

T
HE FIRST PUBLIC
meeting in India to protest salt policy took place in Orissa in February 1888, organized by the Utkal Sabha political party in Cuttack, a river port on the River Mahanadi. It was pointed out that impoverished Indians had a tax burden thirty times greater than did people in England. The tax on salt was termed “an unjust imposition of an imperial character,” because the taxed salt was all imported from abroad. The government was urged to raise the income tax and save money by discontinuing the recruitment of people from abroad to the Indian civil service. These savings, the protesters at the Orissa meeting argued, would compensate the government for the loss of salt tax revenue.

In the early twentieth century, British salt policy was attacked in provincial legislatures throughout India. In 1923, to balance the budget, the government proposed doubling the salt tax. The Indian Legislative Assembly refused to support this proposal. But the British approved it anyway by decree from Viceroy Lord Reading. In 1927, the Legislative Assembly voted to halve the salt tax— though many had called for its complete abolition. The British government did not comply.

In the Indian Legislative Assembly of 1929, Pandit Nilakantha Das, a member from Orissa, demanded the revival of salt making in Orissa and a repeal of the salt tax. The government argued that the salt tax was the only contribution to the state that poor people ever made.

The British government was not taking the issue seriously. Lord Winterlon, the undersecretary of state for India, assured the British government that there was no reason for concern about the salt issue. Not everyone in England agreed. In British Parliament, Sir Henry Craik argued that the salt tax was causing serious hardship in India and that this hardship was leading to civil unrest. Some suggested that the revenue from the salt tax was not worth the threat that unrest posed to the British Empire. Labour members warned that the salt tax could be leading them into another Irish situation in India.

In 1930, Orissa seemed near open rebellion.

And so, contrary to popular belief today, it was not an entirely original idea to focus rebellion on salt, when that idea was seized upon by an entirely original man named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

G
ANDHI WAS BORN
on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, a small west coast town, capital of a princely state of the same name, on the Gujarat peninsula, not far from the Rann of Kutch. This is one of the reasons that, when he wanted to stage a salt rebellion, he chose this region and not Orissa on the opposite coast. Gandhi said that he felt closest to the salt makers of Gujarat.

When he was growing up in Porbandar, malangis were not a part of his immediate world. He belonged to the Vaisya caste, the number three caste, below the ruling classes but above workers.
Gandhi
means “grocer,” but Mohandas’s grandfather, father, and uncle had all served as prime minister to the Prince of Porbandar. It was a small state, and its rulers exercised petty and arbitrary authority over the people while serving British rulers obsequiously. The humble house where Mohandas was born, still standing on the edge of town, testifies to the lack of wealth and position of a Porbandar prime minister. Mohandas’s marriage, which was arranged when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. In violation of his family’s religious code, he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous English.

Gandhi was a tiny man of peculiar passions and eccentric theories about sexual desire, diet, and bodily functions. Well into old age he conducted “experiments” with young women he asked to lie naked with him through the night to test his resolve to abstain from sex. He displayed a mischievous sense of humor. It is said that when asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “I think it would be a great idea.”

But Gandhi did not preach the superiority of Eastern culture. He said, “It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.”

He was influenced not only by his Hindu upbringing but by Jainism, which forbids the killing of any creature and whose priests wear masks over their mouths to ensure that they do not accidentally inhale an insect and kill it.

He traveled abroad, studying law in London. Visiting Paris, he gave his impression of the new Eiffel Tower: “The Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets.”

In South Africa he became the leader of a movement to secure civil rights for Indians. Imprisoned for his efforts, he read Henry David Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience
in the appropriate setting—a jail cell. Along with Buddhist and Jainist writings, Thoreau was to have an enormous influence on him. He was struck by Thoreau’s assertion: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

His adversaries continually underestimated him because it seemed improbable that millions would follow such an odd man. Gandhi’s approach to civil disobedience was always nonviolence, but he objected to the phrase “passive resistance.” It was not enough to be nonviolent. The adversary had to be opposed in such a way that he would not feel humiliated or defeated. He said that the opponent must be “weaned from error.” Seeking a name for his brand of resistance, he took a suggestion from his cousin, Maganlal Gandhi:
sadagraha
—firmness in a good cause. Mohandas changed
sada
to
satya
, which means “truth.” Gandhi would resist with
satyagraha
—the force of truth, a force that, he said, would lift both sides.

In all he did, Gandhi displayed an inner confidence. He was certain that his cause was right, and because it was right it would prevail. His quiet self-assurance made him a man of constant surprises—making sudden decisions and steering unexpected courses of action. When World War I broke out, this pacifist who fought British colonialism announced his support for the British war effort, thereby completely confusing his followers. Just when he appeared to be denouncing the Industrial Revolution and its machinery, he suddenly confessed his affection for Singer sewing machines. “It is one of the few useful things ever invented, and there is a romance about the device itself.” Louis Fischer, his biographer who knew him personally, wrote, “A conversation with him was a voyage of discovery: he dared to go anywhere without a chart.”

The other most famous Indian of his day, Nobel Prize–winning novelist Rabindranath Tagore, a tall and eloquent aristocrat, is credited with giving Gandhi his famous title,
mahatma
, the great soul, or as he put it, “the great soul in beggar’s garb.”

I
N 1885, THE
Indian National Congress was founded in Bombay by mostly high-caste intellectuals, including even a few Englishmen. Originally, some were even in favor of continuing British rule. But gradually they became the leading force in the independence movement. It was Gandhi who made the Indian National Congress and the cause of Indian independence a mass movement. One of the primary tools in accomplishing this metamorphosis was the
salt satyagraha
, the salt campaign.

The idea of a salt satyagraha had its beginnings in the 1929 Indian National Congress session in Lahore. While salt had become a burning issue in a few regions, it was not at the time a national issue, and despite a smoldering rebellion in Orissa and a few other places, most of Gandhi’s colleagues were barely aware of it. Many in the Congress, even those closest to Gandhi, were baffled by his idea of focusing the independence movement on salt. But Gandhi argued that it was an example of British misrule that touched the lives of all castes of Indians. Everyone ate salt, he argued. Everyone, in fact, except Gandhi himself, who had renounced the eating of salt and at the time had not touched it in six years.

On March 2, 1930, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin, viceroy of India:

If you cannot see your way to deal with these evils and my letter makes no appeal to your heart, then on the twelfth day of this month I shall proceed with such co-workers of the ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the salt laws. I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil. The wonder is that we have submitted to the cruel monopoly for so long.

The viceroy expressed his regret at Gandhi’s decision to break the law.

The ashram to which Gandhi referred was in Gujarat, across the Sabarmati River from the city of Ahmadabad. It was an ashram for
satyagrahis
—people committed to the force of truth—and Gandhi had pointed out to his followers when they settled there that they were conveniently located close to the Ahmadabad jail, where they would be spending much of their time. The prophecy was accurate.

Jainism was popular in the area, which meant it became a refuge for the pests others exterminated but Jainists would not harm. It was swarming with snakes. Gandhi lived on the ashram in a small room the size of a prison cell. In fact, prison cells were a small adjustment in Gandhi’s way of life. He even commented that he could get more reading done in prison.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi and seventy-eight selected followers left the ashram with the intention of walking 240 miles to the sea at Dandi, where they would defy British law by scraping up salt. A few were not from the ashram, including two Muslims and a Christian and two men from the lowest, untouchable caste. Gandhi intended the group to be a cross section of India, but he refused to allow women marchers out of what he termed “a delicate sense of chivalry.” He explained: “We want to go in for suffering, and there may be torture. If we put the women in front the Government may hesitate to inflict on us all the penalty that they might otherwise inflict.”