A Lament from the Deep South

It was the other Dandi, led by C Rajagopalachari. Salt manufacturing in this coastal town of Tamil Nadu is in a crisis

It was somewhere in the centre of town, before the small temple of Ganapati in which the idol has a finger pointing towards Sri Lanka to show Rama where his wife had been taken, that I met AS Ramamridham quite by chance. I was being shown around Vedaranyam and we had just stepped out of the temple (I couldn’t see the pointing finger because the sanctum was too dark) when he walked up to exchange courtesies with my host, A Vedaratnam.

Only towards the end of the conversation did I realise that Ramamridham, a retired school headmaster, was 91 years old. He looked old but not that old. He lived in a village about 10 km away and had come to the town that day for a bank errand. When the Vedaranyam march to flout the British salt law took place, he was seven years old. The year 1930 is a long way back, and any living witness would have to be a child then. That is also why there are probably only a few left who actually saw it. Today, Ramamridham is dressed all in white—dhoti, shirt, an angavastram over one shoulder, and a Gandhi topi complemented by a moustache also as white as snow.

Ramamridham remembers the little part that he had played in the march. People from his village had arranged food for the satyagrahis. A metaphor employed by a close relative indicates the mood of the time—Ramamridham was told that if food is offered to a god, it is prasadam and no one can prevent its serving. But the police tried, attacking those who were going to offer it. The adults ran away from there and instead asked a group of small kids to give it, assuming that they wouldn’t be assaulted. This was where Ramamridham came in, but when he went ahead, he was spotted. “A policeman told me, ‘you are just sprouting, only three leaves have come. Why do you involve yourself? You be a good son to your father and mother’.” He didn’t listen and smuggled the food in. “I was also hungry and ate some of it myself,” he says.

Vedaranyam abounds with such stories. In the town, there is a small lake, and abutting it is a pillar with neat lines of the Indian flag’s tricolour running from top to bottom. This is a memorial to a barber named Vairappan, who, it is said, took a vow that he wouldn’t serve anyone from the government because of the action it was taking against satyagrahis. A policeman came to get a shave, but because he was in plainclothes, the barber didn’t recognise him. Halfway through, the policeman revealed his identity and mocked him, asking what had happened to his vow (another version of the story says a passerby revealed the identity to the barber). Vairappan immediately left the job half done and a half-shaven policeman hauled him to court. The magistrate gave an ultimatum, and Vairappan gave him his shaving kit and said he could do it himself. He was sentenced to six months.

It is an interesting if somewhat apocryphal story, but in Vedaranyam, it is the stuff of local legend. There are more such memorials and mini museums and it is striking how this little dot at the edge of India underwent a cultural metamorphosis because of its role in the freedom movement. The man responsible for putting Vedaranyan on the map of Indian history was Sardar Vedaratnam Pillai, grandfather of A Vedaratnam.

A postage stamp released by the Indian Government to commemorate Sardar Vedaratnam’s hundredth birth anniversary shows him clean shaven, with a strong-boned face, a thick greying shock of hair, and looking very much like the patriarch of a south Indian Tamil family. His family was and remains among the leading salt merchants of Vedaranyam. In the 1920s, however, Vedaratnam was drawn more towards the freedom struggle than trade. His grandson says that when Vedaranyam was hosting a provincial Congress conference in 1929, Vedaratnam, as chairman of the reception committee, was keen on Mahatma Gandhi attending it. “When Gandhi refused, he threatened to do a satyagraha against him on the spot. Gandhi explained to him his busy schedule and instead deputed his secretary Mahadev Desai and Sardar Patel to be present,” he says.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi decided on the salt march to Dandi. C Rajagopalachari, one of Gandhi’s closest associates at the time, wanted to replicate the movement in the south. His initial desire was to undertake a march against liquor manufacturing instead of salt, but it was later decided that sticking to a salt protest would have a greater impact. The Dandi March ended on 5 April 1930; the Vedaranyam march began on 13 April. Rajmohan Gandhi, in his biography of C Rajagopalachari, Rajaji: A Life, has a chapter on Vedaranyam. He writes: ‘C.R. had decided that his marchers would walk about 150 miles from Trichy to a town on the Tanjore seaboard, Vedaranyam, which possessed convenient salt swamps and had a merchant called Vedaratnam Pillai who was willing to host a battle.’

On 13 April, 97 marchers started off at 5 am. The Collector JA Thorne had sweeping authority to arrest those who assisted in it, including suppliers of food and accommodation. He used it full measure, employing both threats and violence. The march turned out to be a battle of wills between the administration and the freedom fighters. Large numbers attended the meetings that were held along the way. Men and women, despite the danger they faced, defied government orders in unusual ways. Rajmohan Gandhi writes, ‘…at one halt bundles of food were hung on trees the marchers could not miss. Eventually, C.R. had to appeal against pampering the satyagrahis. Walking five miles in the morning and five in the evening—past rice-fields or groves of banana or coconut, with the Cauvery, flowing seaward, often by their side—they carried with them their larger message. At stops they fraternised with ‘untouchables’ and refrained from entering temples from which the latter were barred, swept village streets, and spoke up for Hindu-Muslim unity and against drink. And at two crowded meetings a day they preached the gospel of nonviolent revolt.’ On 28 April, the marchers reached Vedaranyam to be greeted by a vast assembly of people. The date earmarked to break the salt law was 30 April. Vedaratnam Pillai had arranged for their accommodation in a camp. (At present it is called Rajaji Park, a tiled enclosure with a pandal that is rented out by the municipality for functions.) Early in the morning on 30 April, Rajagopalachari and 16 of the satyagrahis walked to a spot near the coast called Edanthevar and picked up salt. They were immediately arrested and a trial was held in a nearby shed. Rajagopalachari was sentenced to six months imprisonment and sent to jail in Trichy. Inside the compartment, he had an unexpected visitor. Gandhi writes, ‘Some minutes after C.R. was put on a train for Trichy, a small white man entered his compartment and extended his hand to the prisoner. It was Thorne.’

‘To him C.R. said: ‘Your plan was bold, but you forgot that we are in our own country.’ Thorne smiled and replied, ‘Yes, we have each tried to do our best and our worst.’ Then he ordered coffee and refreshments for C.R.’

The salt shed where Rajagopalachari was tried and jailed before being sent to Trichy exists today as an office of the Salt Department. Inside, in the room where the court was set up is a line of chairs; nearby is the prison, a small room with iron bars on the door and a window that looks out to the railway line.

In the Salt Department office, I met Vijaychandran Nair and Benny George, deputy superintendents posted there. Salt is a Central subject that comes under the Commerce and Industry Ministry. At the time of independence, India was deficientin salt production; now, it exports the commodity. “The Department monitors all aspects of the lands connected with salt. Production, price monitoring [and] distribution, so that salt which is produced only in a few states is available everywhere, [apart from] export monitoring, labour welfare, etcetera,” says George.

In Vedaranyam, land is leased out for 20-year periods to salt manufacturers by the Salt Department. George says there are about 750 salt manufacturers in all, of which over 600 have small holdings of a few acres or less. In the case of such holdings, those who work the land are both owners and labourers; husband-and-wife duos who are seen working early in the morning on their land often work for the big manufacturers later in the day. When George joined the Department in the late 80s, he had been posted here. He says it was then a place of mostly thatched huts and narrow roads. But then the 2004 Tsunami ravaged Vedaranyam, and in its place came a better developed coastal town of concrete houses.

The Tsunami affected the salt pans along the coast, but it took its biggest toll on the fishing villages nearby. In the village of Arukattuthurai, I met Natarajan on the beach cleaning the engine of his boat. On the morning of 26 December 2004, he had been checking his nets there when he saw a large wave. It was only when it got closer that he sensed danger, and, taking the boat’s engine, started running. When he looked back, he saw a huge wall of water. He decided the engine was not worth dying for and dropped it to run faster. But by then, the water had overtaken him. “I managed to hang on to some shrubs, and when the force decreased, climbed a coconut tree and waited it out,” he said. Twenty-eight others, mostly children, were not so lucky and died. Most of them had come to do their morning ablutions on the beach because the village had no toilets in the houses. But the village too got better houses after the relief money poured in. The fishermen got new boats.

Ahead of the Salt Department office is a memorial pillar marking the spot where Rajagopalachari collected salt and broke the law. There is no one there in the afternoon. The salt that he picked up was something called spontaneous salt. It is created naturally—the high tide on full and new moon days brings the sea in; and after it retreats, the water collected in pockets takes a week or so to evaporate, leaving deposits of salt behind. “When the British ruled, it was illegal to even take this salt, something which is made by no one and given by nature,” says Vedaratnam.

The population of Vedaranyam is about 70,000 and at least three-fourths of all people are directly or indirectly dependent on salt. There are 2425.95 acres of salt lands whose titles rests with the Sri Vedaranyeswarar Swami temple, around which the town came up. In the 18th century, the East India Company forced the temple to lease these patches of land to them. Since Independence, the Salt Department has been their perpetual lessees. It pays Rs 4,200 annually to the temple, and, according to the salt manufacturers, collects Rs 5.5 lakh from them by subleasing the plots.

This, says M Meenakshisundaram, an ex-MLA who had represented the place thrice and is also president of the Vedaraniam Small Scale Salt Producers’ Federation, is unfair; and what is more, the Department recently raised the rent and assignment fee on the leased land by a huge proportion. But the biggest problem the salt producers face is of transport. In 2002, the Railways had stopped services to the place in order to convert the track from metre to broad gauge. Back then, 7,000 wagons of salt used to be loaded in Vedaranyam every year. That stopped abruptly and the salt manufacturers had to depend on road transport by trucks. The gauge conversion, still to be completed after 14 years, moves along at a snail’s pace with no end in sight. There is no sea port, and transport by road is both expensive and unreliable. “We need a bulk transportation system like Railways so that [salt manufacturers] can send large quantities. They are now dependent on lorries. Once the railway line comes, they can easily load some 2,200 tonnes at one go,” says Vijaychandran Nair.

Meenakshisundaram took the delay to court, which ordered the Railways to present a report every three months on the status of the work. But it has not led to any improvement. Yet, even as profits decline and disappear, the people of Vedaranyam have few other livelihood options. “The families here only depend on salt production and sale,” says Meenakshisundaram.

A few years ago, they also became odd collateral victims of the 2G and Coal Scam when India’s Supreme Court ruled that State-owned natural resources must be auctioned. Till then, the locals who leased the salt pans took it for granted that the deal would get renewed automatically after 20 years. But the change in policy means that this is no longer true. There will be an auction and whoever bids the highest tender rate will be given the salt land. The salt producers say that they have invested a lot in the land already—in the form of digging wells, making channels to get sea water in, making reservoirs to hold the water, and putting up facilities for storage, roads, electricity, pumping, transport, handling and so on. “These are all done by producers with no help from the Department,” says Vedaratnam, who is also president of the Vedaraniam Salt Manufacturers and Merchants Association.

In an open tender, there would be the danger of big corporations coming and outbidding them, says V Senthil, proprietor of Sri Magaalakhsmi Salt, whose family has 40 acres there. “All our investments will be lost,” he fears.

This year, the price manufacturers are getting for salt is very low, and this means that people in Vedaranyam are in for a difficult time. As soon as you exit the town on the road towards the coast, the salt pans unfurl. On the side of the road, you see salt pyramids. Some are covered with dried Palmyra leaves to be stored to be sold later, after the Northeast monsoon arrives in November and pushes the price up as supply falls in the absence of sunny days to dry the sea water.

The landscape is breathtaking. Salt production, it is said, is not mining but agriculture, and it is easy to see why. As far as the eye can go, there are waterlogged fields where instead of green swaying stalks, little white mounds gleam in the sun. It is afternoon and there are only some stray workers with their wooden rakes piling up the salt. Most of the toil will happen in the early morning, when it is cool and these fields come alive with men and women. Salt is corrosive and sticks to the body and it is not pleasant to be there for too long. But this is what life is like in Vedaranyam.

We go ahead on the road and enter the Kodaikarai Reserve Forest. There are an extraordinary number of monkeys on the road and it takes us past a checkpoint into the Point Calimere Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary. Suddenly, there is a rolling meadow on which black buck and spotted deer are languidly gathered in little herds. Further on, at the end of the road is the lighthouse of Point Calimere, and then the beach from which 30 km across the sea is Sri Lanka. The beach also has the remains of what is thought to be an ancient lighthouse of the Chola period, but it is just a clump of bricks about a metre high that leans backwards. You imagine the lighthouse as a leaning tower, but who knows?

And then back again to the meadow and the deer, and then, before us, walking with unhurried grace and crossing the road with nonchalance, a line of wild horses. We are soon back at the salt pans.

When the Tsunami hit, the road and the railway track had protected one side of the salt pans. Vedaratnam’s land was on the other side and he suffered a huge loss. He points to some plots abutting the roadside and says that they are prime locations where salt can easily be stored and sold. But they are empty and brown. “Those who have the lease just don’t find it viable enough to make salt,” he says. Many salt producers don’t have the capacity to stock salt and sell it later for a higher price in winter. Many are forced to go for distress sales.

For the salt producers of Vedaranyam to survive, the Railways need to start operating the line again. They need an industry here of products like soda ash and caustic soda that use salt as a rawmaterial. They need their leases to continue. And also infrastructure and tax concessions from the government. None of these looks forthcoming.

My first conversation with Vedaratnam was in the office of Kasturba Gandhi Kanya Gurukulam, the school and ashram for underprivileged girls that his grandfather had set up. Over 600 girls live there, and the school educates 1,100 more as well. It was a place that had a history to it and had witnessed the association of many great personalities like Vinoba Bhave, C Rajagopalachari and K Kamaraj. As we sat talking of the crisis that the traditional salt manufacturers are going through, Vedaratnam made a casual remark. “Our salt is dying,” he said. It was a note of sadness in a place that salt had made one of the freedom movement’s most important landmarks.

C Rajagopalacharifreedom struggleVedaranyam