Just a grain of salt? Symbolic construction during the Indian nationalist movement

Abstract

On 12 March 1930, a feeble middle-aged man left his home in small village in north west India to walk more than 240 miles down the subcontinent's western coast to a fishing town called Dandi. Dressed in a shawl of simple white cloth, he began with a party of seventy-eight men and women, intending to pause daily at villages and rural centres along his route to spread a message of social solidarity and collective action. His twenty-four day pilgrimage was destined to conclude at Dandi's seaside coast, where he planned to illegally distil salt from the seawater. This article is about salt. The man was Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian nationalist leader, who in the autumn of 1930 used salt as a weapon of anti-colonial defiance, transforming this basic household condiment into a symbol of national unity.