Last Updated : 14 August 2012 at 23:25 IST
A handful of salt was all that needed…
As the droplets of the sea dripped through the chasm in his fingers clutched on to some (unrefined, non-iodized) salt, the very seats of the mightiest empire ever built shook like it were an earthquake. In a moment (absent mobile phones, Internet or TV media), Indians were united by a single goal that bound them together not only for that tick of time; but forever: freedom.
India in its truest and vivid sense was born after 5000 years of trundling journey, then and there!
And all it took was some salt and a man; some vital commodity and a human being.
“Salt Satyagraha began with the Dandi March on March 12, 1930, and was an important part of the Indian independence movement. It was a direct action campaign of tax resistance and nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly in colonial India, and triggered the wider Civil Disobedience Movement.
This was the most significant organized challenge to British authority since the Non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, and directly followed the Purna Swaraj declaration of independence by the Indian National Congress on January 26, 1930.” extols Wikipedia.
But Salt Satyagraha is preceded in time by another episode of Satyagraha which warrants some attention: the Indigo Satyagraha. If Gandhi was consummated by the former, he was actually baptised by the latter.
The indelible indigo imprint
Indigo is a now an airline for many of us…
Ask your grandmother, she would say indigo is a commodity, was more or less an erstwhile Ujala, a piece of which used in right proportion with water would dye the clothes.
In the early 20th century in Champaran, the hotbed of indigo cultivation, farmers were being asked to pay exorbitant sums in taxes with indigo practically whisked away from them for low prices. Needless to say, they were mired in poverty and entrenched in ever growing frustration.
Gandhi intervened and soon intensive protests began to mark the days. But Gandhi noticed something his very soul revolted against: lack of cleanliness amongst the people; especially women who were dressed in saris full of dirt.
Gandhiji notes in his autobiography:
So I told my wife to ask them why they did not wash their clothes. She spoke to them. One of the women took her into her hut and said: 'Look now, there is no box or cupboard here containing other clothes. The sari I am wearing is the only one I have. How am I to wash it? Tell Mahatmaji to get me another sari, and I shall then promise to bathe and put on clean clothes every day.
Nothing could have influenced Mahatma more than that, for he notes:
In countless cottages in India people live without any furniture, and without a change of clothes, merely with a rag to cover their shame.
Once, Gandhi, on meeting King George of England and Queen was subsequently asked by journo if he had enough clothes on—Gandhi was wearing his typical loin cloth and shawl at the meeting—replied: "The King had enough on for both of us."
It all started with Champaran or perhaps farther back in time when Gandhiji simply let his turban cloth drift away in a river, so that, a lady at the other end of the river could take it and cover herself.
That was Gandhi…and only he could have delivered us this great independence! And it would have been a different story all together had it not been for the salt or the indigo.
In fact, Einstein had said of Mahatma Gandhi, "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."
Don’t you think that Einstein was advising us to take Mahatma Gandhi with a pinch of salt; not least because we cannot trust Gandhi’s words, but mostly because we cannot believe in the existence of that man without ever, you know, taking a pinch of salt?
Jai Hind!
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