Not Worth Your Salt Anymore

Gandhi’s march here was one of the most dramatic moments in Indian history. The villagers today want to march out

On 12 March 1930, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, along with 80 handpicked men, set out on what was perhaps his most symbolic and effective political gesture. He undertook a journey of almost 400 km on foot that lasted over 24 days, from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, to challenge the Salt Act. Very few, as it is said, were convinced of the choice of salt to kickstart a fresh round of civil disobedience. But Gandhi generated quite some momentum as he moved from village to village, speaking of social reform and poorna swaraj (complete self-rule), drawing the attention of both the locals and people in other parts of the country.

On 6 April, when Gandhi raised a lump of salty mud and produced salt in Dandi, with the famous words, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire”, it was a watershed moment in the history of India’s freedom movement. People from different communities and regions of the country participated in it, producing illegal salt and rejecting British goods, demonstrating for the first time since the non-cooperation movement of 1920—which had fizzled out after the violence in Chauri Chaura—the efficacy of non-violent resistance as a means of protest.

Eighty-four years since the Dandi March, as it came to be called, what could have happened to Dandi? Why has the cornerstone of this historic moment, perhaps even the most famous site in the freedom struggle, fallen out of the national consciousness? Does the place still exist? And, if so, in what shape?

To the people of Surat—the hub of diamond and textile manufacturing in the country—Dandi is that village. When you inquire about it, they will ask you if you mean the Dandi beach. But when you tell them ‘Dandi of Gandhi’s Dandi March’, smirks will appear on their faces.

On the road from Surat to Dandi, the route which Gandhi and his band of 80 satyagrahis walked along, you will now see at different points glittering shopping malls, the rotting corpses of road-kills that haven’t been disposed of for days, and skies that choke under the stranglehold of enormous factory chimneys. You will smell, as the journey progresses, the salt of the sea thickening in the air.

On the day of my journey, a part of the main route that connected the village to Surat was shut down for repairs, and I had to take another road. On this road, winding through periodic small bazaars and sudden forest patches where no humans could be sighted, there is no signpost that directs you to Dandi. You simply journey from the finger point of one passerby to another, travelling on a small road under a hot sun with little sign of human habitation, until you suddenly spot enormous new buildings arisen from the ground. These opulent buildings of pornographic pinks and pastel yellows with green arches stand fenced with large walls around them. I stop a man walking by and ask him, “Where is Dandi? How do I get to Gandhi’s Dandi?” He looks at me and says, “This is Dandi.”

Dandi is the place where the spirit of Gujarati enterprise meets certain death. The sea and its salt, the very elements that made Gandhi pick this place and make it famous, are curses the villagers wish they could do away with. The salt in the coastal soil makes sure nothing of value grows here, the water from the sea would flood the village—often turning it almost into an island—until bunds were built by villagers to keep it away, and there is no drinking water here, save for a pipeline that the villagers paid for and constructed a few years ago and now delivers water for 20 minutes a day from a distant dam. There are no jobs, no tourists, and no hotels to stay or eat in. There isn’t even a chai stall for a cup of tea. People collect rainwater in small ponds and grow rice on small plots of land for themselves. They wash clothes on the steps of an ever-shrinking pond. Men sit here under large banyan trees playing cards without money at stake, waiting in hope that the gloom of the present will at some point give way to a brighter future. Diyalbhai Patel, who at 83 is one of the oldest individuals in the village, says, “This is what they call a dead place.”

There is another peculiar aspect to Dandi. Most of the large buildings here are locked up. This is because the absentee residents of these buildings have migrated abroad, and each of the village’s 1,200 families is said to have absentees. The village is full of old people and children. There is almost an entire generation of inbetweens that is missing. Those who haven’t migrated dream of doing so. Even the children here want to leave. The solitary high school in the village also offers vocational courses in carpentry and welding. Those who have moved out work mostly in factories or as shopkeepers, and send money back.

People here point to buildings and refer to them by locations on the world map: the ‘London home’ or ‘Canada home’, for example, depending upon where its owner resides. Unsurprisingly, when you visit Dandi beach, you will sometimes come across a family speaking Gujarati in an American accent.

The few career-makers who have not gone abroad are involved in prawn farming and cattle rearing. But these are small businesses because very little non- saline water is available here. Strangely, no one pursues salt manufacturing here. As Sumesh Modi, a Surat-based architect who was involved in a project in Dandi says, “For a long time I thought this was the wrong Dandi. There is not a single salt pan here.”

The young men and women who have been unable to find jobs abroad wait for suitable matrimonial proposals from overseas that will help them achieve this. Koli Patels make up a majority of Dandi’s residents, and they usually want to marry someone of the same community, say locals, preferably from the same village. “If you can’t go abroad, you approach the families of those abroad who are looking for a boy or girl,” says Pranav Patel, the 26-year-old unmarried son of the sarpanch of Dandi, “In the case of boys, it will help if you are a welder, an electrician or have some experience in factories. The family of the girl will easily agree to such a match, as such boys can easily get a job abroad.” Pranav, whose efforts at moving to the Gulf with a job befitting his education in mechanical engineering have failed, then says with some alarm, “Otherwise, you are likely to be without a wife or a [foreign job].”

When I ask the principal of Vidya Mandir High School, Mohan Patel, about this phenomenon of migration, he reveals with an air of dejection that he himself could only secure 57 per cent in his class 12 board examination. When I ask him what this implies, he says, “If I had got 58 per cent, I could have pursued a diploma. After that I too could have gone abroad.”

In a strange twist of fate, the villagers of this historic place, to borrow a phrase from the freedom struggle, have become part of another Quit India Movement.

I sit with Diyalbhai in his beautiful two-storied building as he discusses the village and its transformation. He speaks of how, as a youth, he and his fellow villagers thought of Dandi as a special place, chosen by Gandhi for the 20th century’s most powerful movement, and how that idea has descended into the reality of a village with absent residents. He goes on with his lament until he is too tired to speak. His wife offers him a few pills and helps him retire to bed. He looks frail and lonely. Outside, Dajibhai Patel, an 80-year-old former station master of Valsad who had come to visit Diyalbhai from a nearby village, straps on a helmet and tells me that Diyalbhai’s only son lives in London, and rides away on a scooter.

Although much has changed in Dandi, its residents still believe that they share a special connection with Gandhi, and that they must somehow uphold his views. The village thus has never held elections for its sarpanch. Every time a new headman has to take office, the villagers meet in the park where Gandhi delivered a sermon a day before he broke the Salt law, and pick a consensus candidate. The current sarpanch, Parimal Patel, informs me that no villager has been booked for any crime for several years. There is a solitary police chowkie that is hardly ever visited. Whenever a dispute arises, it is amicably settled by the sarpanch and village elders. When I ask him of the last time anyone was arrested, he says, “I don’t know. It’s so long back. Maybe during the Dandi March.”

Of late, there have been instances of people from nearby places visiting Dandi beach and getting into altercations with each other—often, the villagers say, under the influence of alcohol, which is prohibited in Gujarat. The likes of Pranav, along with a few other young men, have formed a unit that keeps a weekend vigil on the beach, breaking up fights if they occur and telling those who are drunk to give up alcohol.

Parimal has three children. His eldest son, Pranav, wants to work in the Gulf; and his other son, 23-year-old Pranay, is home after the completion of his two- year job contract as a welder in an Abu Dhabi factory. Last year, when Parimal learnt that someone from a nearby village who worked in Montreal, Canada, was home to look for a bride, Parimal approached the family so that a marriage with his 21-year-old daughter could be arranged. No one was home when Parimal paid a visit. But the following day, the family visited Parimal and his daughter, after which the marriage was fixed. “You have to be quick with marriages here,” Pranav says of that incident with a straight face. “You can lose a good husband and a new country otherwise.”

During his youth, despite his elder brother having moved to Canada to make a career as a shopkeeper, Parimal never attempted to leave Dandi. He brought Dandi’s first car, a Maruti 800, in the late 1980s. Sensing a business opportunity, given the large number of villagers coming home on visits from abroad, he began using this vehicle to ferry people to and fro from the airport. As families started buying their own vehicles, he, like a few other men from the area, got into prawn farming. However, since one must rely on rain water for this, the operation is too small to generate the kind of income he wants. “I am not [dissuasive] when my children say they want to leave Dandi,” says Parimal, “There is nothing for them here.”

There is nothing in Dandi by way of a historical monument to celebrate Gandhi’s March except the house he stayed in upon his arrival. Owned then by a religious head of the Dawoodi Bohra sect, Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb, the house, Saifee Villa, was donated to the government in 1961 for it to be converted into a memorial. This house lay locked up and crumbling until it was renovated two years ago. According to the caretaker of this property, government officers would often use this house to host parties and sleep in. When Sumesh Modi, the architect who was employed to conserve the house, was roped in, he found the house in a derelict condition. “There were water tanks where none existed, a room had been converted into a toilet, an entire balcony had been built, and windows had been walled in… It was nothing at all like the house Gandhiji had stayed in.”

Over the course of almost a year, Modi and his team of workers renovated the place, pulling down new structures and rebuilding those that once existed. The rooms of the house now display pictures and boards detailing which part of the house Gandhi slept in and the importance of the Dandi March. But it still fails to draw visitors. The only people who appear to find it of any interest are couples from nearby areas who use the solitude of this space to pursue romantic endeavours, apart from neighbours who hang their week’s washing on the villa’s compound walls.

Also underway is a project to commemorate Dandi, along with the trail that Gandhi and the 80 others took. This project, announced in 2005, has proceeded in fits and starts and is nowhere near completion. According to some observers, this is because the Gujarat government and the UPA-led Centre were at loggerheads at that time. Falguni Desai, an architect in Surat who was part of that project, says, “Despite being initially agreed upon, for some reason or the other, the state government would put the project in limbo. Sometimes the idea wouldn’t be cleared, and sometimes they would simply ask us to wait.”

Desai had the task of building a Dandi March memorial all the way from the spot where Gandhi delivered his famous speech to the villa where he slept. She claims at least Rs 8 crore was invested in creating two buildings and setting up the foundations of a wall that would commemorate the event. “But everything just stopped,” she says. “And last year I found people even using the buildings and pissing on the walls. It is such a shame. All this money, in the name of Gandhi, simply wasted.” She complained about this, she says, but the government in Gandhinagar just blacklisted her from all state projects. She successfully fought a case against this order in the Gujarat High Court last year.

Yet, some work is on. IIT-Bombay, along with a team of sculptures and designers, has taken the lead in sculpting a statue of Gandhi and some other marchers. When this is ready, it is expected to be placed within the compound of Saifee Villa, close to the spot where he is believed to have picked up his lump of salty mud.

There is an iconic black-and- white image of Gandhi bunching up his white shawl in his left hand, with three men and a woman looking on, as his right hand gathers salt from the ground. As it turns out, this picture isn’t an image of his open violation of the Salt law at Dandi, as often thought, but of some other place after that incident.

When I visit Saifee Villa, I find two large statues of Gandhi in the compound adjoining the house. The smaller statue is a re-creation of the black- and-white picture. And the larger statue has a rather muscular Gandhi picking up a fistful of salt from a large heap. If you ask villagers, they will claim that Gandhi picked up salt at the exact spot of the smaller statue. But if you ask Gandhi experts, they will tell you this is untrue. Apparently, far from being photographed breaking the Salt law, no one knows exactly at which spot Gandhi picked up his handful of salt.

“When Jawaharlal Nehru was about to visit the spot in 1961, locals, certain that Nehru would ask where in the area Gandhi broke the law, afraid of displeasing him, agreed upon a spot,” Desai says. “Since then, everyone has come to believe this.”

Memory, as it turns out, can be a fickle creature. As most accounts of the incident go, Gandhi, on his way back to Saifee Villa after a bath, picked up a lump of salty mud and boiled it in seawater to produce salt. But some villagers reject this version. They claim that Gandhi never boiled seawater and mud. According to them, he simply picked up a pinch of salt from the ground. When I ask the villa’s caretaker Ramanbhai Chamanbhai Solanki about a large vessel hanging from a wall in the house, presumably the one Gandhi used, he says, “Oh this! This was used by a local some years back (after the new bunds kept the sea out and allowed natural salt deposits to form) to demonstrate to youngsters how salt can be created.”

Solanki also tells another interesting tale that may or may not be true, but which will certainly not find mention in any official book. Researchers claim that Gandhi chose Dandi because it was distant and allowed Gandhi to gather enough momentum as he journeyed to that point, and because the people of Dandi and nearby regions were known as fierce nationalists. Solanki, however, has another theory. “You see,” he says like an indulgent avuncular being, “People from this area were migrating long before Independence. Some of these people worked in South Africa and were acquainted with Gandhi long before he was famous. When Gandhi decided on his March, these people insisted that it culminate in Dandi.”

After spending around 10 days at Dandi in Saifee Villa, Gandhi moved further southwards and was arrested on 4 May after he had informed Lord Irwin of his plans of raiding Dharasana Salt Works. Gandhi moved on from Dandi, according to Desai, because of the harshness of this area and its paucity of drinking water. Solanki uses this information to buttress another point. “If Gandhiji couldn’t resist leaving Dandi,” he says. “Can you blame us if we do?”

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