Gandhi's Salt March

When the British Empire controlled India, it used legislation like the salt tax to control the population. Learn how Gandhi's non-violent salt march triggered a wave of protest leading to Indian independence in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor kand Skinner, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Hey,
they're Candice. Hey, Jane. You know, a couple of months ago,
we did a podcast about the civil rights movement, and

(00:24):
what's interesting about Martin Luther King Jr's ideals is that
they weren't entirely unique to him. He actually got a
lot of his inspiration from Gandhi. And we really should
have honored Gandhi as as being the man who planned
at the seed of non violent protest in King's mind,
but we didn't. So we're going to backtrack a little

(00:46):
bit and talk about Gandhi and one of his most
successful campaigns and really one of the most successful campaigns
in history because it served to incite what would be
the tail end of the Indian revolt against British lighting overall. Yeah,
and we started talking about that a little bit with
the podcast on the East India Company. We mentioned the
Sepoy rebellion, uh, and we also said that the fight

(01:09):
for Indian independence probably deserves its own podcast, and I'm
starting to think it deserves many podcasts, because um, what
we're gonna talk about today is only a small fraction
of that fight. But going back a little bit to
the Sepoy rebellion that happened in eighteen fifty seven, and
it was sort of a revolt against the East India Company,
which was sort of Britain's sanctioned monopoly over the trade

(01:31):
in that area, and it had by this time gotten
a very oppressive rule over India, and the Sepoys, who
were soldiers in the army for the East India Company,
their Indian soldiers revolted at that time, but unfortunately that
revolt failed. More than that. Afterwards, the British decided to
dissolve the East India Company and instead would rule India directly,

(01:55):
and this started the raj and direct British governance of
the Indian subcontinent created very very much a hostile environment
between the Indians and the British because their own culture
was essentially oppressed by these new administrative policies that the
British brought in, and the British instilled all sorts of

(02:17):
taxes and laws to govern these people and keep them
under their thumb. And one of the items that they
taxed was salt. And it may sound irrelevant to us today,
this idea of taxing salt, because many of our doctors
tell us to reduce our salt intake eight low sodium
versions of our favorite foods. But um in India, especially

(02:39):
the climate being so hot and humid and contributing to
so much sweating, salt was incredibly necessary as an additive.
So a long time ago, when people used to hunt animals,
they would get most of their salt from raw meat.
And then as people shunned the sort of hunter gatherer
lifestyle for more permanent establishments on farms and turned to

(03:00):
a diet of meat and plants, they had to add
salt to their diets. Because salt is very necessary in
our bodies in order to orchestrate electrical impulses of fire
among our nerves, and it's considered a great way to
generate revenue for governments throughout the course of history to
tax salt because people need it not only for sustenance,

(03:21):
but also is a preservative. And this is before at
the dawn of refrigeration. Of course, um people have just
been using salt for years, and so the idea of
the British coming into India and taxing salt, which is
so necessary to the culture, was seen as a great
tool of oppression over the people. Yeah, because their their

(03:41):
diet is chiefly vegetarian. There's part of religious rules as well,
so so obviously they needed supplementary salt. In particular, like
you said, the government's historically taxed it. If you remember
back to our podcast on the Front Revolution, this was
actually one of the biggest things that caused that as well.
The salt tax there was known as a good bell
and people actually tried to get rid of it for

(04:03):
a while during the French Revolution. After that um took place,
but by Napoleon's time they actually had to reinstitute it,
and so most countries by that time we're still using
the salt tax. Ironically, however, the UK was one of
the first countries to get rid of their own salt
tax um, not really because of protests against it, but
because it became assault became an important mineral in the

(04:27):
Industrial Revolution for economic reasons. So at this time a
very important historical figure emerges Gandhi, and he was born
Mohandas Gandhi, but he became so revered by the people
that they called him Mahatma Gandhi, and essentially a mahatma
means great soul, and he did have a really great soul.

(04:48):
He preached nonviolence and peaceful protests, and he believed and
the idea of civil disobedience. And we mentioned that Martin
Luther King got a lot of his ideas from Gandhi,
and Andy in turn got many of his ideas from
Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thorreau. Thorreau, of course, is
very famous for his essay on civil disobedience. But you

(05:11):
could also say that, um, even though you can see
these roots, like Gandhi was really the first one to
to really put it in play, and he he promoted
what was at that time a very revolutionary idea. I mean,
you never have a country overthrowing its government through peaceful
uh means only. I mean, that's just incredible to think about.

(05:31):
And so accounts of his protests, you can see that
the way that the British forces respond to these non
violent campaigners who are doing sit ins or hunger strikes,
it's it's really horrifying the idea of them being beaten
into submission. But they're already pretty submissive because they're protesting
by peaceful means. Anyway, it was just astounding, and Gandhi

(05:53):
really thought that this could work. So um, as we mentioned,
the salt text was a major issue and it became
a major symbol of British Prussian and Ghandi himself saw
it as a particularly hurtful for the poor man. And
so these were the reasons why he set out on
a salt march. And he set out from a place
called Sabermadi Ashram, which was one of his dwellings, and

(06:18):
he uh he set out with about seventy eight other people,
although more joined along the way because the the whole
trip was about two and forty miles, and uh covered
between ten and fifteen miles a day. Uh So that
makes it um about twenty four a day march. And
it's it's pretty incredible to think Gandhi was sixty one

(06:38):
years old by this time and he was not in
the best of health. But I've read historians say that
like he was actually walking so fast that some other people,
younger people were actually um having trouble keeping up with him.
He was such like an energetic and devoted man, obviously,
and so as he passed through different villages on his
way to the Arabian Sea. He would incur edge officials

(07:00):
to resign from their posts, and he would encourage other
people to join him in his march. So, after his
two forty mile trek, when he reached the Arabian Sea,
he did something that by government standards was criminal and
incredibly insolent. He actually gathered as salt from the ground,
and he encouraged everyone else to do the same. Yeah,

(07:21):
and that's one thing that's amazing about the salt text
we should mention is that you couldn't buy salt without
the text, but you couldn't gather your own salt from
the sea water from a natural deposit along the sea
that was that was an illegal act. So Indian laborers
who worked on the coast, especially sometimes they would labor
near huge natural deposits of salt, and at the end
of the day they would have to go into town

(07:43):
and actually pay for something that they could have gotten
on their own from the land that was surrounding them.
So the idea of collecting your own salt was incredibly
revolutionary and it led to thousands of arrests for Gandhi's followers.
It's really interesting to think about what what was going
on in Gandhi's mind when he came up with this

(08:03):
idea of assault march, because you know, he didn't have
to walk, you know, and I mentioned he wasn't in
the best health and he could have just taken a
train or a car to the coast to pick up
some salt. Really, in crude terms, it was a big
publicity stunt, really, and he knew what he was doing.
He knew how to work uh publicity in the media
to to make his point. And this is what was

(08:23):
so effective about it is that, like I mentioned, um,
he cover tended to fifty miles a day, and this
is a kind of relatively slow, not only because he
stopped in villages like you mentioned, but also because he
wanted to give the media chances to catch up make
their story of the day. And um, the New York
Times actually covered it almost daily. And uh, this is
one of the things that made it so incredibly effective.

(08:45):
And long before at the Salt March and N Gandhi
had had a pretty extensive political career. He started out
with the law practice and what was then Bombay and
it failed and so an Indian firms sent him to
a post in South Africa, and in South Africa, Indians
were so poorly mistreated, especially those of the lowest cast

(09:06):
that he started campaigning for human rights and political rights.
And twenty years he spent in South Africa, and when
he came back to India, he joined the campaign to
get Indian independence from the British government, and the Indian
National Congress actually appointed him to an executive position in ninete.

(09:29):
But his tactics didn't really work against the British because
they were so violent that Gandhi, I think, for a
while started to recollect his ideas and really reevaluate how
he was going to accomplish his goals. And so after
he was imprisoned by the government, he gave up on
politics and he said, you know what I'm done. And

(09:50):
you know, it's funny because Thomas Jefferson said the same thing.
He was done with politics, and then he went on
to become the President of the United States. I can't
believe Gandhi and uh so by when Gandhi was released
from prison, he was trying to give up this life
of politics, but he was so deeply ingrained what was
happening in his country and he cared so much and

(10:12):
was so innovative in his ideas, and the people revered
him to such a high level that he couldn't not
do anything. And so, like Jane was saying, it's sixty
one years old, it's it's not like this was a
ripe time in his life to launch revolution. But he did.
And he wrote a letter to um a Lord Irwin,

(10:33):
who was the vistroy of India, and he actually asked
Irwin to abolish the salt tax. And he told him
that if he wouldn't, he was going to go on
this march because this was part of Gandhi's ideology. He
was going to make his intentions clear. He was going
to do it in a very peaceful way. And um
pretty brave thing it was. And not only that he
actually wrote to Irwin, I regard this tax to be

(10:55):
the most iniquitous of all from the poor man standpoint,
and what it his protest against salt so unique, and
I think what really brought him back into the political
spheres that he attached to this idea and if he
was using the Salt March as a sort of a
media campaign, as your suggesting, Jane, salt was the perfect
thing to protest because no matter your level in society,

(11:18):
whether you were the richest of the rich or the
poorest of the poor, you had to have salt. And
whether you have the money or you didn't have the money,
certainly you were irritated that you're paying for something that
was growing in natural deposits around you. So thought was
that thought was the word. And like you said, Gandhi
was a pretty important public figure at this time, and
so after he wrote this letter to Irwin, Um, Irwin

(11:41):
pretty much he knew what Gandhi was gonna do. He
could have just gone and arrested him before he started this,
but that in and of itself would have caused such
an uproar um because Gandhi was such an important public figure.
And this is what also made some of Gandhi's other
campaigns so effective as well. Um, you probably heard of
his camp like hunger strikes in prison and during that time,

(12:05):
you know, you might think, well, you know, hunger strike,
what does it matter if? Like what what did the
British care if Gandhi kills himself? You know, but it
was very important to the British because it would have
embarrassed them, Um a lot. If if Gandhi died of
hunger in this in this strike against British oppression, especially since,
like you mentioned, the rest of the world was watching

(12:25):
at this point. He had everyone's eyes on him. And
you can even see the photographs of his march, and
he's wearing very humble attire. He's wearing all loin cloth
and a shawl and some very cheap looking glasses, and
you know, he's obviously a man who shunned all material possessions,
and with this great sense of peace and purpose, he's marching,

(12:49):
gathering his followers and essentially turning the tides on the
war for Endian independence that had long ago sort of
been concluded with the British saying no, this isn't gonna happen.
And and he was able to change a lot of
people's minds and get enough people on board to subvert
um the government and Irwin and Gandhi actually signed a

(13:10):
pact that legalized the collection and manufacturer of salt, and
then the government later lifted the salt tax after the
pact was signed about a year later. Yeah, So that
made it one of his most successful campaigns known to history,
and it was one stepping stone in the ultimate independence
that India got in so a salty and very rich history.

(13:34):
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(13:54):
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(14:16):
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