Place · Gandhian ashram · India

Sabarmati Ashram

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

23.060, 72.580

Connections (7)

• Gandhi ashramsSevagram / Wardha

  Gandhi left Sabarmati for Dandi in March 1930 having vowed not to return until India was free, and he never did return to live there. From 1936 he based himself at Sevagram near Wardha — chosen because it was in the geographical centre of the country, in a village with no electricity, and because he had decided the constructive programme in the villages mattered more than the campaigns. Most of the Congress humoured him about that.

• Monastic foundationMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Sabarmati was Gandhi's base from 1917 to 1930, run on manual labour, spinning and a vow against untouchability that cost the ashram most of its funding when he admitted a Dalit family. He left on 12 March 1930 saying he would not return until India was free, and did not.

• Succession in timeCellular Jail, Andaman Islands

  Sabarmatī and the Cellular Jail are the two faces of the same struggle in the same decades: an ashram in Ahmedabad running a mass movement in the open, and a purpose-built island prison in the Andamans holding those the state had decided not to argue with. Both are now national memorials.

• Life routeJohannesburg

  Gandhi kept a law office in Johannesburg from 1903, published Indian Opinion, and in September 1906 at the Empire Theatre took the mass oath against the Asiatic Registration Act that began satyagraha as an organised method. He chose the word by competition in his own newspaper because passive resistance sounded to him like the weapon of the weak. He brought the method back to India in 1915 and built Sabarmati around it; everything from Champaran to Dandi is a continuation of what was worked out in the Transvaal.

• Journey legDandi

  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.

• Architectural modelPhoenix Settlement

  Phoenix near Durban and Tolstoy Farm outside Johannesburg are where the ashram was invented as a political instrument: a settlement where everyone did manual work, took the same allowance, ate together across caste and religion, and trained for civil disobedience. Sabarmati in 1917 and Sevagram in 1936 are the same institution rebuilt in India, and the rule about latrine cleaning — which cost him volunteers in both countries — was carried over unchanged.

• Site withinAhmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval

  Gandhi founded the Sabarmati Ashram on the west bank of the Sabarmati in 1917 and ran it for thirteen years, making the city his base for the civil disobedience movement that reshaped the twentieth-century subcontinent. From here he set out on the Dandi March of 1930. The ashram also made Ahmedabad the headquarters of the Gujarat Vidyapeeth (1920) and of the textile-mill worker organising that produced the Majoor Mahajan Sangh. Industrial Ahmedabad and nationalist Ahmedabad are, by 1920, one city with one river between the mills on the east bank and the ashram on the west.

On these journeys

• Reform, education & the national movement
• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
• The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India

Sources

Sabarmati Ashram records

• Wikipedia