Gandhi Walked 240 Miles to Pick Up a Pinch of Salt

On the morning of March 12, 1930, Mahatma Gandhi walked out of his Sabarmati Ashram outside Ahmedabad with 78 chosen followers, all dressed in the white khadi cloth of the Indian independence movement, and started walking south toward the sea. The destination, 240 miles away on the Gujarati coast, was the village of Dandi. The plan was that on arrival he would pick up a pinch of natural sea salt evaporated from the local mudflats — and break, by that small physical act, the British Empire's monopoly on salt production and the tax that monopoly funded.

The choice of issue was deliberate. Salt was a basic necessity in India's hot climate. The British salt tax, which dated from 1882, made it illegal for Indians to collect or sell their own. The tax accounted for roughly 8.2 percent of British colonial revenue and pressed hardest on the rural poor. Many Indians considered the tax obnoxious; few had thought it could be the lever of an independence movement. The British viceroy, Lord Irwin, dismissed the idea publicly: "the prospect of a salt campaign does not keep me awake at night." The Calcutta Statesman wrote, "It is difficult not to laugh."

The procession arrived in Dandi on April 6, by which point it was several kilometers long and being filmed by international newsreel crews. Gandhi waded into the surf, lifted a small handful of caked salt out of the sand, and held it up. The act was illegal under the Salt Act of 1882. He was arrested. So were Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, and roughly 60,000 other Indians over the following weeks as the campaign spread. Time named Gandhi Man of the Year for 1930. A pinch of salt Gandhi himself had collected sold at auction for 1,600 rupees — about $750 then. The salt tax survived another seventeen years.