VII
In the first week of January 1930, Winston Churchill wrote to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, urging him to stand firm against Gandhi and the Congress. (Churchill was then out of office, having finished a long stint as chancellor of the exchequer.) With most of Ireland already gone, and the British position ‘being liquidated’ in Egypt, Churchill hoped that at least ‘upon the supreme issue of India the British Empire will arise in its old strength’.
Irwin received very different advice from C.F. Andrews, who asked him to reach out to Gandhi, and encourage his policies of khaddar promotion so as to lessen India’s dependence on foreign goods. The situation in India, commented Andrews, was ‘a part of the infinitely larger question of the acknowledgement of racial equality. Until that comes, we ourselves can only expect the present friction to continue.’53
Irwin was not as committed a defender of British imperial supremacy as Churchill; nor as vigorous an advocate of complete racial equality as Andrews. His betwixt and between position is nicely expressed in a letter he wrote on 21 January to his friend Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times of London, and like Irwin a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. Here, Irwin complacently observed that ‘the net result of the Lahore [Congress] proceedings has been to give a greater impetus to moderate opinion than I have seen since I have been in India. They [the Moderates] are really getting their coats off and setting to work to propaganda, and organise, and collect money, and fight the Congress at every point.’
That the Moderates were any more in a position to recover ground was wishful thinking. The radicals, led by Gandhi and the younger Nehru, had now captured the nationalist imagination. As the day of the commencement of the Dandi march drew nearer, Lord Irwin became somewhat less complacent. On 6 March, he wrote to another Fellow of All Souls that ‘our affairs are not going too badly if only Gandhi would leave them alone. But he is doing his utmost to make them impossible. What an enigma the man is!’54
Six days later, Gandhi began his march to the sea. This created great excitement in different parts of India, duly captured in the fortnightly reports of the provincial governments. Madras told Delhi that in their bailiwick, ‘the opening of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign has completely overshadowed all other issues’. Bombay told Delhi that the march had ‘created great excitement both in Gujarat and elsewhere. In Ahmedabad particularly the interest is very keen and persons from that city continue to attend Gandhi on his march and at his meetings.’55
The officials on the spot were agitated by the impact of the march on the public consciousness. Irwin, ensconced in his palace in New Delhi, was less worried. In the third week of the march, he wrote to his spiritual preceptor, Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Gandhi is continuing his theatrical march to the coast, but so far is arousing a good deal less excitement than he had anticipated. And I am quite certain that we have been right not to arrest him so far.’
Irwin had just met the Moderate politician V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, who thought that Gandhi wished above all to be a martyr. Irwin had also heard from others that Gandhi ‘has sought to model his life and thought on Our Lord; and in his present march he had a pony led behind in case he wanted to ride, which some say was also with the idea of reproducing New Testament history [where Jesus, in his Second Coming, was to be accompanied by the angels of heaven riding white horses], but this strikes me as far-fetched’.56
For the viceroy, then, Gandhi was an object of curiosity, a subject for study, but not—or at least not yet—a political threat. The same day that he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Irwin wrote to the secretary of state for India that the government’s refusal to arrest Gandhi so far ‘has been an embarrassment to his plans’.57
VIII
One reason the viceroy was sceptical of the march’s effects may have been the newspapers he was reading. The two major British-owned newspapers in India were the Statesman of Calcutta and the Times of India of Bombay. The first called the march ‘a childishly futile business’; the second, speaking likewise of the ‘futility of Mr. Gandhi’s campaign’, claimed the salt tax protected the poor from rapacious middlemen, which is why even free countries, such as Japan, had a state monopoly on the production and sale of salt.58
Also disparaging about Gandhi’s march were visiting British reporters. A correspondent for the Daily Telegraph claimed that ‘no one would be more disappointed than Mr. Gandhi if his expectations of his arrest before he has travelled quarter of the distance to be covered, are not fulfilled’. Gandhi was apparently travelling through a part of India ‘which is unsafe for Europeans to traverse but doubts are expressed if the arrest of Mr. Gandhi would really cause more than a few hours excitement, and momentary tumultuous cheers’.59
The American newsmagazine Time shared this low estimation of Gandhi and his march. It spoke with disdain of Gandhi’s ‘spindly frame’ and his ‘spidery loins’. The magazine was even less impressed by his wife Kasturba, ‘a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu’. The crowd that sent off Gandhi from the ashram was described by Time as ‘swirling [and] jabbering’, the incoherence of the event captured in a volunteer band that ‘raised their horns and blared a few bars of “God Save the King” before they realized their mistake and subsided in brassy confusion’.
On the first day of the march, claimed Time, ‘Mr. Gandhi’s head and legs began to ache’ as, ‘haggard and drooping’, he reached that night’s destination. The next morning, as the walk continued, apparently ‘not a single cheer resounded’ in the villages they passed. Yet, ‘Saint Gandhi called his lovely procession to a halt, gazed up and down the silent, empty street, addressed the blank windows of slumbering houses’. At the end of the second day’s walking, Gandhi ‘sank to the ground’. At this stage, the magazine did not believe that ‘the emaciated saint would be physically able to go much further’.60
The view of the nationalist press was very different. The Pratap of Kanpur, the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta and the Bombay Chronicle all saw the march in epic and mythic terms. So did some individual patriots. An anonymous versifier in the United Provinces compared Gandhi to Lord Krishna, drinking the milk of goats rather than cows, stealing salt rather than butter, plying the charkha rather than playing the flute.61 The entrepreneur Prafulla Chandra Ray likened the salt march to the exodus of the Israelites under Moses, while Motilal Nehru compared it to the march of Lord Ram to Lanka.62
IX
On 1 April, Gandhi walked into the ancient trading town of Surat, where he was met by a delegation of mill owners (who naturally warmed to his boycott of foreign cloth). That evening, he addressed a ‘mammoth meeting’ on the river sands, attended by more than 100,000 people. At this meeting, 170 village headmen presented copies of their letters of resignation to Gandhi.63
On the 3rd morning, the marchers left British territory for the first time to enter the native state of Baroda. ‘A new feature in the meetings held in villages from Surat onwards’, ran one report, was ‘that a good many Mahomedans…attend the meeting daily’. At Dhaman village, ‘a Maulvi addressing the meeting ensured Gandhiji that the Muslims would not lag behind their Hindu brethren in fighting for Swaraj’. Gandhi, in response, spoke of the solid support extended to him by Muslim satyagrahis in South Africa.64
Gandhi and party spent the night of the 3rd in Navsari. The town was crowded ‘with sightseers and bands of volunteers from distant parts. Mr. Gandhi and his party were received amidst tumultuous scenes of enthusiasm. Indeed it seems as if this little town in the Gaekwar’s territory is vowed to outshine the British subjects in its reception to the pilgrims.’65
The march had now entered its last day. An eyewitness left behind this vivid description of Gandhi on the road to his final destination, Dandi:
When I saw him on the morning of the 4th [of April] he was coming briskly up the straight road towards Vijalpur….The red sun had just risen over the roof of the railw
ay station, and his bare face and body was golden and transfigured, in the light of morning. A large crowd was behind him and the eighty and odd volunteers were lost in it. It was a quick pace, between running and walking…It did not seem to me he was using his staff to any purpose. He was not particularly leaning upon it. He seemed strong, lean like a lathe and fleet of foot. The municipality had watered the road very efficiently. The country road was cool and frank and beautiful. It struck me there were many ways of walking and that any other but this would have looked ridiculous. Supposing he had led the procession at slower pace, like a gipsy pedlar or a mandarin, how incongruous it would be. I realised what a consummate artist-realist the old man must be. The breathless walk made you see how urgent and downright and final was his call and his message. He did not tarry for the road-side honours from devotees. He passed on after a lady had placed a kum-kum on his forehead and a man had showered rose-water.66
On the 5th, Gandhi reached the village where he planned to break the salt laws. A correspondent of the Bombay Chronicle, accompanying the marchers, wrote that ‘the simple and tiny village of Dandi now looks like a city. The route between Navsari and this village is full of visitors, many of whom have come from long distances. Drinking water is being carried to Dandi from neighbouring villages in bullock carts. A number of shops selling eatables have been opened for the convenience of the visitors.’
On 5 April, after reaching Dandi, Gandhi gave a statement to the Associated Press. He first complimented the government ‘for the policy of complete non-interference adopted by them throughout the march’. He said he would commence civil disobedience at 6.30 a.m. the next morning. Explaining the significance of the date, he remarked that ‘6th April has been to us, since its culmination in [the] Jallianwala [Bagh] massacre, a day for penance and purification’. The reference was to the first hartal against the Rowlatt Act, held on 6 April 1919, an event which first brought Gandhi to countrywide attention.67
X
Dandi lay eleven miles from Navsari, the birthplace of Gandhi’s early mentor Dadabhai Naoroji. In normal times, the village had a population of about two hundred souls, mostly fishermen. Its excellent climate and sea breeze had attracted a few rich people who built bungalows, including Gandhi’s host, Nizamuddin Vasi, a prosperous cutlery merchant in Bombay.
This little village had now ‘become a place of pilgrimage’, with an ‘unending stream of visitors’ flowing into it because it was the first battlefield of Gandhi’s campaign around salt. Dandi had only two wells, so plenty of water was bussed in from outside for Gandhi, his party, and the now very large body of sympathizers who had come here directly.
A hundred government officials, among them excise inspectors and policemen, had reached Dandi to keep watch on Gandhi. The villagers had refused to give them accommodation, so they camped outside in tents. A reporter talked to the policemen, ‘and the surprise of it was that these agents of Government have not yet got a clear idea themselves about their task. They are waiting for eleventh-hour instructions from their headquarters.’68
Also in Dandi was the poet Sarojini Naidu. Back in February, she had (privately) mocked the idea of a struggle around salt. But as the march gained attention and acclaim, she decided she must be at hand to watch its climax.
On the night of the 5th, Gandhi had an oil massage and slept soundly (as usual). The next morning he awoke at 4.30, and after prayers, led a group of marchers towards the sea. Entering the water to sounds of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’, he proceeded to pick up lumps of natural salt lying in a small pit. The others followed him, even as Sarojini Naidu, addressing Gandhi, shouted: ‘Hail, law breaker!’69
Mrs Naidu’s words were to be flashed around the world by the reporters covering the event. They are still widely quoted. Less well known are her private thoughts, expressed in a letter to her daughter shortly after her famous public salutation. Here Mrs Naidu remarked:
The little law breaker is sitting in a state of ‘Maun’ [silence] writing his article of triumph for Young India and I am stretched on a hard bench at the open window of a huge room that has 6 windows open to the sea breeze. As far as the eye can see there is a little Army—thousands of pilgrims who have been pouring in since yesterday to this otherwise deserted and exceedingly primitive village of fishermen.
Mrs Naidu continued:
I wish you were here though you could not even have reached here alive. The road from Navsari is dreadful and here one cannot walk a yard without sinking in wet salt-bogs! And the food! Yesterday a mess worse than dogs’ food was served up but from today there is nothing but volunteer rations: Channa and some Gur! However, I have a huge bedroom and a cleanish bathroom—God be praised!70
The (mostly) young and (mostly) male journalists who came to Dandi were less fussy than Mrs Naidu, more willing to camp in the open, and use the fields to relieve themselves. Their focus was on getting the news of Gandhi’s defiance out into the world. After the Mahatma broke the salt laws, no fewer than 700 telegrams were sent out from the post office nearest to Dandi, at Jalalpur. This extraordinarily heavy traffic had been facilitated by the postmaster general of the Bombay Presidency, who had sent several signalmen to supplement the skeletal staff at Jalalpur.
On 7 April—a day after Gandhi broke the law—an angry letter was dispatched to Bombay by the Government of India. Was it not a mistake, it asked, to ‘facilitate the advertisement that Mr. Gandhi and his followers no doubt desire’? The government had taken the precaution of banning the films made in the early stages of Gandhi’s march; now that act had been nullified by the Raj’s postal department’s allowing ‘correspondents to broadcast highly coloured and frequently inaccurate accounts of the success of the march’.
The postmaster general (an Indian named Bewoor) was unrepentant. His department, he told Simla, ‘could not refuse press traffic when offered by authorised correspondents. We obtain payment for this and it is our duty to dispatch the messages.’ Had Bewoor not sent additional signalmen, ‘there would have been serious complaints and I would probably have been called upon to explain why I did not take proper steps to deal with the anticipated traffic’. He tellingly added that the journalists who accompanied Gandhi ‘belong to all kinds of newspapers including the English Press’.
One pro-Raj paper, the Daily Gazette of Karachi, was outraged that facilities ‘which a benign Government has created for the convenience and advancement of the general public’, should have been used by Gandhi ‘to project his poison through the length and breadth of this great country’. It bitterly noted that Gandhi had himself once dismissed railways and the telegraph as artefacts of modernity India could do without. And now a government he opposed had allowed him to use technologies he despised ‘in furtherance of his destructive campaigns’.71
XI
As Gandhi broke the salt law in Dandi, similar breaches were taking place in other parts of India. In Bengal, volunteers led by Satis Chandra Dasgupta walked from the Sodepur Ashram to the village of Mahisbathan, seven miles from Calcutta, to make salt. In Bombay a batch led by K.F. Nariman marched to Haji Ali Point and prepared salt in the park nearby. In Tamil Nadu, C. Rajagopalachari led the campaign in Vedaranyam. Breaches of salt laws also occurred in the interior. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, the president of the United Provinces Congress Committee, led the making of salt in Kanpur’s Shraddhananda Park.72
Writing to Jawaharlal Nehru on 7 April, Mahadev Desai described the mood in Gujarat. Mahadev, holding the fort at Sabarmati while his master was on the coast, was ‘addressing meetings the like of which I have never addressed in my life. They are all models of orderliness and silence. Ten to fifteen thousand people meeting every day at 6.30 and dispersing before dark just to hear one speech and that from me who has no pretensions to being called a speaker.’
With his letter, Mahadev enclosed a pinch of salt manufactured by Gandhi at Dandi on 6 April (which had been rushed back
to Sabarmati by car). This was to ‘be kept either as a memento or sold by auction, the upset price to be not less than a thousand rupees’. Mahadev himself had just sold a packet made by Gandhi for 501 rupees; he expected Jawaharlal, with his greater charisma and appeal, to sell his for at least twice the amount.73
The news of the upsurge in Gujarat and around the country was conveyed to Gandhi. But there was one fly in the ointment; the non-participation, indeed the active hostility, of his leading comrades from the days of non-cooperation and Khilafat, the Ali Brothers. The day after Gandhi broke the law in Dandi, Shaukat Ali wrote to him that he had started his movement ‘without consulting Muslims’, and now wanted ‘to gain so much strength as to be “irresistible” and force us to be willy-nilly your camp-followers’.74
Gandhi found the letter ‘astonishing’. He replied to Shaukat that ‘I had no knowledge of the extent to which I had fallen in your estimation’. Could not his former friend see ‘that, although I may act independently of you, it might not amount to desertion? My conscience is clear. I have deserted neither you nor the Mussalmans. Where is the desertion in fighting against the salt laws and other inequities and fighting for independence.’75
Some days later, in a speech in Bombay, Shaukat’s brother Mohammad Ali declared: ‘The non-co-operation movement which was inaugurated by Gandhi ten years ago was a genuine movement to get swaraj but…the present civil disobedience movement [was] aimed at establishing Hindu Raj in India.’ Gandhi, claimed his former brother in arms, ‘had now come entirely under the influence of the Hindu Mahasabha and was not prepared for any honourable settlement with the Muslims’. Mohammad Ali urged his followers to stay away from Gandhi’s movement, adding that he himself planned to attend the Round Table Conference to place Muslim demands before the British Parliament.76
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