Place · Salt March village · India
Dandi
The Gujarat coastal village where Mohandas Gandhi ended the 24-day, 385-kilometre Salt March from Sabarmati on 6 April 1930 by stooping to pick up a lump of natural salt from the beach — the symbolic breach of the British salt monopoly that triggered the Civil Disobedience Movement. The Salt Act taxed something everyone used and the sea made free, so Gandhi chose it as the law that could be broken by an old man bending down in public, forcing the colonial state to arrest him or let the law collapse. About sixty thousand Indians followed him into jail within three months, and the campaign gave the independence movement its first undeniably mass mobilisation.
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.920, 72.700
Connections (6)
- CampaignMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Twenty-four days and three hundred and eighty-five kilometres ended at Dāndi on 6 April 1930 with a handful of natural salt. The grievance was chosen for its smallness: everyone eats salt, the sea makes it free, and the state charged for it. Sixty thousand arrests followed within months. Nehru among others thought the choice of salt trivial until it worked, which is the clearest evidence that the tactic's logic was not obvious even to the people running the movement.
- Historical routeDharasana
Dāndi and Dharasana are eight weeks apart in the same campaign. After the salt was lifted at Dāndi, the movement marched on the Dharasana saltworks in May 1930, where Webb Miller's wire report of unresisting marchers being clubbed in rows carried the campaign into the American press. Sarojini Naidu led the Dharasana marchers after Gandhi's arrest, and Miller's dispatch was held up by British censors in India before he got it out through a neutral cable office.
- Succession in timeCellular Jail, Andaman Islands
Transportation to the Andamans and the salt march are the two answers the freedom movement gave and the two the state gave back. The Cellular Jail was built in 1906 for those who used force; Dāndi in 1930 was the method that made force unnecessary, and its marchers were jailed in ordinary prisons by the tens of thousands.
- Journey legSabarmati Ashram
Three hundred and eighty kilometres in twenty-four days, from the ashram gate to the sea, with seventy-eight chosen marchers and a press corps that grew as it went. Gandhi picked salt because the monopoly taxed something everyone used and anyone could gather, so the law could be broken by an old man bending down — which made the state's response the only story. Some sixty thousand arrests followed in three months.
- PrecursorJohannesburg
Gandhi worked out satyagraha in Johannesburg between 1906 and 1914, running the Transvaal permit campaign against the Asiatic Registration Act that fingerprinted and registered Indians as a separate racial category. In September 1906 at the Empire Theatre he took the mass oath of refusal that founded the method, and the Transvaal campaign and the 1930 Salt March work identically: the law chosen was one an ordinary person could break in public without injuring anybody, the breach was announced in advance, and the arrests were the point. Three thousand men in a Johannesburg theatre in 1906 scaled to sixty thousand arrests across India in the three months after Dandi.
- CampaignSarojini Naidu
Sarojini Naidu led the Dharasana salt works raid in May 1930 after Gandhi's arrest, with Manilal Gandhi beside her, telling the volunteers they must not raise a hand even to ward off blows. Column after column walked into police lathis and was carried away with fractured skulls. Webb Miller's wire report ran in more than a thousand newspapers and did more damage abroad than the salt march itself.
On these journeys
- Reform, education & the national movement
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
- The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India
Sources
Salt Satyagraha records
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