Gandhi’s Salt March: Paradoxes and Tensions in the Memory of Nonviolent Struggle in India

On 12 March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi, accompanied by 78 followers embarked on a march of more than 200 miles from his Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad to the seaside village of Dandi to commence a nonviolent campaign whose goal was to defy the salt tax and the British Government’s monopoly over salt collection and manufacturing. ‘Next to air and water’, Gandhi explained, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. … There is no article like salt outside water by taxing which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax that ingenuity of man can devise. (Gandhi, 1999b, p.