Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  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.”

  They walked slowly along the dusty road, twelve miles a day, with the horizon rippling with heat. Marching in the lead, with a bamboo walking stick, was the bony, sixty-year-old Gandhi, his slow steps full of self-assurance and determination. Some grew too tired or their feet became too sore, and they retreated to carts. A horse was kept nearby for Gandhi, but he never used it.

  The march began each day at 6:30 A.M. By then, Gandhi had been up for hours, spinning cloth, writing articles or speeches. He was seen writing letters by moonlight in the middle of the night. He stopped to speak to the villagers who gathered eagerly to see the mahatma, and he invited them to join him and to break the British salt monopoly. He also preached better sanitation and urged them to abstain from drugs and alcohol, to treat the untouchables as brothers, and to wear khaddar, the homespun cloth of India, rather than imported British textiles. In the 1760s, before the American Revolution, John Adams also had urged Americans to wear homespun instead of British imports.

  “For me there is no turning back whether I am alone or joined by thousands,” Gandhi wrote. But he was not alone. Along the way, local officials showed support by resigning their government posts. The Anglo-Indian press ridiculed him; The Statesman of Calcutta said that he could go on boiling seawater indefinitely till Dominion status was achieved. But the foreign news media was fascinated by this little man marching against the entire British Empire, and people all over the world cheered his improbable defiance.

  The press reported on his power to persuade, his determination. But the viceroy, Lord Irwin, who was being informed by British agents, was convinced that Gandhi would soon collapse. He even wrote the secretary of state for India that Gandhi’s health was poor and that if he continued his daily march, he would die and “it will be a very happy solution.”

  On April 5, after twenty-five days of marching, Gandhi reached the sea at Dandi, not with his seventy-eight followers behind him but with thousands. Among them were elite intellectuals and the desperately poor and many women, including affluent women from the cities.

  Through the night Gandhi led his followers in prayer by the warm, lapping waves of the Arabian Sea. At first light, he led a few into the water for a ceremony of purification. Then he waded out and felt his way up the beach with his spindly legs to a point where a thick crust of salt, evaporated by the sun, was cracking. He bent down and picked up a chunk of the crust and in so doing broke the British salt law.

  “Hail, deliverer!” a pilgrim shouted.

  ON THE OTHER side of India, the people of Orissa decided to begin salt making even before Gandhi arrived in Dandi, and they resolved to continue whether the rest of the country followed Gandhi’s example or not. They opened a camp at Cuttack, to which volunteers from different parts of Orissa came and signed oaths vowing to dedicate themselves to resisting the salt laws. Regular meetings were held to discuss the nature and importance of the salt satyagraha. The British banned such meetings, and people giving public addresses on the subject were arrested and imprisoned.

  On April 6, 1930 at 8:30 A.M. Gandhi publicly violated British salt law by picking up a piece of salt crust in Dandi on the coast of the Gujarat peninsula. The Image Works

  A public salt making was organized in Orissa on April 6 to coincide with Gandhi’s. Locals blew conch shells and tossed flower petals to announce their day of nonviolent civil disobedience. As they traveled along the coast, their leader, Gopabandhu Choudhury, was arrested, but the group continued. On April 13, at 8:30 A.M., they reached their destination, Inchuri, where thousands turned out to watch them break the law.

  They leaned over and scooped up handfuls of salt. The police tried to forcibly remove the salt from their hands. A crowd of dissidents ran onto the beach, picked up salt, and were taken away by the police. The protests went on for days, with waves of salt makers followed by waves of police followed by more salt makers. The police called in reinforcements. Soon the jails were filled, and more and more police and protesters were rushing into Inchuri. The police staged charges, harmless but designed to scare. It didn’t work.

  The salt protests spread along the coastline. A large number of the dissidents were women. Some of the salt-making demonstrations were even organized by women. The police used clubs, but the protesters remained nonviolent. After the demonstrations were over, 20,000 people turned out to throw flowers and cheer the released satyagrahis returning home from prison.

  It took only a week for Gandhi’s ceremonious moment on Dandi beach to become a national movement. Salt making, really salt gathering, was widespread. In keeping with Gandhi’s other teachings, protesters were picketing liquor stores and burning foreign cloth. Salt was openly sold on the streets, and the police responded with violent roundups. In Karachi, the police shot and killed two young Congress activists. In Bombay, hundreds were tied with rope and dragged off to prison after the police discovered that salt was being made on the roof of the Congress headquarters.

  Teachers, students, peasants—it seemed most of India was making salt. Western newspapers covered the campaign, and the world seemed to sympathize, not with the British but with the salt campaigners. White “Gandhi hats” became fashionable in America, while the mahatma remained bareheaded.

  But the protest movement had spread to other groups that did not use the force of truth. One such group raided an East Bengal arsenal and killed six guards. When armored cars were sent against demonstrators in Peshawar, in the northwest, one armored car was attacked and set on fire. A second car opened fire with machine guns and killed seventy people.

  Gandhi sent a letter to Lord Irwin protesting police violence, which began, as always, “Dear Friend.” He then announced that he was going to march to the government-owned saltworks and take them over in the name of the people. British troops went to the village near Dandi, where the leader was sleeping under a tree, and arrested him.

  The Manchester Guardian warned the British government that the arrest of Gandhi was a costly misstep further provoking India. The Herald, the official organ of the Labour Party, also opposed the arrest of Gandhi.

  While India exploded, Gandhi sat in prison spinning cotton. As many as 100,000 protesters, including all of the major leaders and most of the minor local ones, were in prison. Congress committees were declared illegal. Still, the salt movement went on. The government tried to negotiate with the jailed leaders. Disapprovingly, Winston Churchill said, “The Government of India had imprisoned Gandhi and they had been sitting outside his cell door, begging him to help them out of their difficulties.”

  On March 5, 1931, Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi-Irwin pact, ending the salt campaign. Indians living on the coast were to be permitted to collect salt for their own use only. Political prisoners were released. A round table conference was scheduled in London to discuss British administration in India. And all civil disobedience was to be stopped. It was considered a compromise. To some, the British had won on most points, but Gandhi was pleased because he thought that for the first time England and India were talking as equal partners rat
her than master and subject.

  Irwin suggested they drink a tea to seal the pact, and Gandhi said his tea would be water, lemon, and a pinch of salt.

  Gandhi had emerged as the leading voice of Indian aspirations, and the Indian National Congress had become the primary organization of the independence movement. In 1947, India became independent, and five months later Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Hindu who mistakenly interpreted his efforts to make peace with Muslims as part of a plan to favor them. Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of a patrician lawyer who helped found the Indian National Congress, became prime minister. Nehru was once asked how he remembered Gandhi, and he said he always thought of him as the figure with a walking stick leading the crowd onto the beach at Dandi.

  IN 300 B.C., long before the British arrived, a book titled Arthasastra recorded that under India’s first great empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya, salt manufacture was supervised by a state official called a lavanadhyaksa under a system of licenses granted for fixed fees. More than a half century after the British left, salt production was still supervised by the government.

  After 1947, independent India was committed to making salt available at an affordable price. Salt production in independent India was organized into small cooperatives, most of which failed. The industry is now controlled by a few powerful salt traders. The government is supposed to look after the interests of the salt workers through the Salt Commissionerate. Across the river from Gandhi’s ashram, in Ahmadabad, Gujarat’s Salt Commissionerate stands accused by many workers of looking after the traders rather than the workers.

  The rock salt of Punjab is now in Pakistan. The west coast, Gujarat and the Rann of Kutch, has become India’s major salt producer, whereas Orissa, with only six saltworks surviving into contemporary times, is no longer an important salt-producing region. Almost three-quarters of India’s salt is now produced in Gujarat. Gujaratis, with their coastal economy, are not among India’s poorest population. But the wages in the saltworks are so low that most salt workers come from more impoverished regions. Every year, in September, thousands of migrant workers arrive in Gujarat to work seven-day weeks until the salt season ends in the spring. They often earn little more than a dollar a day. Hundreds of workers are undeclared so that the salt traders can avoid paying them social benefits and circumvent laws forbidding child labor. Many of the workers are from the lowest caste and are hopelessly in debt to the salt producers. The glare of the salt in the dry-season sunlight renders many of the salt workers permanently color-blind. And they complain that when they die, their bodies cannot be properly cremated because they are impregnated with salt.

  A storm that hit Gujarat in June 1998 decimated this cheap labor force, killing between 1,000 and 14,000 people, depending on whose count is believed. The price of Indian salt soared. But by the end of the year, the workforce had been replaced and the price had dropped back. Once again, salt could be purchased at a low, affordable price—which every Indian citizen has a right to expect.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Not Looking Back

  SOME 3,000 YEARS ago, wanting a capital in the commanding heights of the Judean hills, David conquered the fortress of Zion and built Jerusalem. Those heights have at times been a fortified high ground and at other times a peaceful gardened promenade. They offer, depending on the times, either a scenic or a strategic view of the region. Not only can a great deal of Israel be seen from here, but, on a clear day, the Moab mountains of Jordan are in view as a distant pinkish cloud. But what cannot be seen, because it is lower than the horizon—in fact, it is the lowest point on earth, 1,200 feet below sea level—is a vanishing natural wonder: the Dead Sea. The Hebrews called the sea Yam HaMelah, the Salt Sea.

  About forty-five miles long and eleven miles at its widest, the Dead Sea, with the Israeli-Jordanian border running through the center of it, seems a peaceful place, of a stark and barren beauty. A first impression might be that the area is uninhabitable, and yet, like many of the world’s uninhabitable corners, it has been converted, with a great deal of water and electricity, into a fast-growing and profitable resort.

  The minerals in the Dead Sea give a strange buoyancy that entices tourists for brief dips. The sea is oily on the skin and doesn’t feel like water. This is brine that will float more than an egg. After wading in a few feet, a human body pops to the surface, almost above the water, as though lying on an air-filled float. It is a most comfortable mattress, perfectly conforming to every part of the back—what a waterbed was supposed to be. The water, if it is water, is clear, but every swirl is visible in its syrupy density. The minerals can be felt working into the skin, and it feels as though some metamorphosis is taking place. The bather is marinating.

  The Dead Sea from Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt (Volume 2) edited by Charles Wilson, 1881.

  Pliny wrote: “The bodies of animals do not sink in it—even bulls and camels float; and from this arises the report that nothing sinks.” Edward Robinson, an American professor of biblical literature, reported after his 1838 trip, with no more hyperbole than Pliny, that he could “sit, stand, lie or swim in the water without difficulty.”

  JERICHO, AN OASIS a few miles north of the Dead Sea near the Jordan River, which flows to the Dead Sea, is thought to be the oldest town in the world. Almost 10,000 years ago, Jericho was a center for the salt trade. In 1884, in the nearby Moab Mountains of Jordan, the Greek Orthodox Church decided to build a church at the site of a Byzantine ruin in the town of Madaba. Workers uncovered a sixth-century mosaic floor map, still on display on the floor of the church of St. George, showing the Dead Sea with two ships carrying salt, heading toward Jericho.

  But the sea may have been better for transporting salt than producing it. The oily water of the Dead Sea is bitter, as though it were cursed. The area is famous for curses, the most well known being the one that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The exact locations of Sodom and Gomorrah are unknown, but its residents are thought to have been salt workers and the towns are believed to have been located in the southern Dead Sea region. Since Genesis states that God annihilated all vegetation at the once-fertile spot, this barren, rocky area fits the description. But this area also has a mountain—more like a long jagged ridge—called Mount Sodom, of almost pure salt carved by the elements into gothic pinnacles.

  According to the Book of Genesis, Abraham’s nephew, Lot, lived in Sodom and was spared when God destroyed the town, but Lot’s wife, who looked back at the destruction, was turned into salt. As columns break away from Mount Sodom, they are identified for tourists as Lot’s wife. Unfortunately, they are unstable formations. The last Lot’s wife collapsed several years ago, and the current one, featured in postcards and on guided tours, will go very soon, according to geologists.

  In biblical times, Mount Sodom was the most valuable Dead Sea property. It was long controlled by the king of Arad, who had refused entry to Moses and his wandering Hebrews from Egypt. One of the most important trade routes in the area was from Mount Sodom to the Mediterranean—a salt route. Not far from Mount Sodom, in the motley shade of a scraggly acacia tree, are a few stone walls and the remnants of a doorway. They are the remains of a Roman fort guarding the salt route. A little two-foot-high stone dam across the wadi, the dry riverbed, after flash floods still holds water to be stored in the nearby Roman cistern.

  The other source of wealth in the area besides Mount Sodom, which was mined for salt until the 1990s, is the Dead Sea. A body of water appears so unlikely in this arid wasteland cursed by God that in the afternoon, when the briny sea is a cloudy turquoise mirror reflecting pink from the Jordanian mountains, the water could easily be mistaken for a mirage.

  Pliny wrote that “the Dead Sea produces only bitumen.” This natural asphalt was valued for caulking ships and led the Romans to name the sea Asphaltites Lacus, Asphalt Lake. Its water is 26 percent dissolved minerals, 99 percent of which are salts. This concentration is striking when compared to the ocean’s typical mineral conce
ntration of about 3 percent.

  The Judean desert, the below-sea-level continuation of the Judean hills, is a bone-white world of turrets and high walls, rising above narrow, deep canyons so pale they glow sapphire blue in the moonlight. The millions of small marine fossils embedded in the rock prove that this desert was once a sea bed, whose waters dried up in the heat that is sometimes more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The seemingly barren desert hides life. There are said to be 200 varieties of flowers in the Judean desert, but they bloom only briefly and only by chance does a lucky wanderer ever see one. Graceful long-horned ibex, desert mountain goats, leap over rocks. Acacia trees, which grow in the wadis, have roots that grow as deep as 200 feet and contain salt to help them draw up the water hidden underground. A shrub known as a salt bush absorbs salt from the ground into its leaves so the leaves can soak up any moisture from the air.

  The dry earth is actually laced with underground springs, some fresh, some brackish, which are easy to find because they are marked by small areas of vegetation. Each of these springs, ein in Hebrew and Arab, has its own history. This desert by a sea too salty to sustain life has attracted the margins of society. They have huddled along its life-giving springs: the adventurers, the pioneers, the dreamers, the fanatics, and the zealots. Many biblical references to going off “into the wilderness” allude to this area.

  Across the Dead Sea, the barren, rocky, Jordanian desert is browner. The eight-mile-wide fertile strip of the Jordan Valley’s east bank feeds the nation. Israel, across the river, is the land of cell phones and four-wheel-drives. Here, farmers ride on donkeys, Bedouin ride on camels, some still living in their dark wool tents, their long dark gowns elegantly furling in the desert wind.