The Salt Thief

On December 23, 1929, twenty-year-old Bhagwati Vohra, a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, detonated a bomb beneath the train carrying Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, as it approached New Delhi. The blast tore through the dining car two carriages ahead of Irwin's compartment, but the train wheels jumped the gap in the damaged rail and no one was seriously injured. Bascomb uses the assassination attempt to open a history of British involvement in India, tracing it from the arrival of the East India Company, a British trading corporation that expanded into colonial rule, through military conquest and the establishment of the British Raj in 1858. The British maintained control through divide-and-conquer strategies, stoking division between Hindus and Muslims and rewarding those who served the regime. The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, gradually evolved from a moderate reform body into a more nationalist organization.

Lord Irwin, born Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, was a wealthy, Oxford-educated aristocrat in his third year as viceroy. He downplayed the attack and proceeded to Viceroy's House, where he had a meeting scheduled with Indian political leaders, including Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi arrived by third-class train, a startling figure in white homespun cloth called khadi. Accompanied by Congress leader Motilal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, head of the All India Muslim League, Gandhi refused to attend the upcoming Round Table Conference in London unless Britain committed to immediate dominion status, the degree of self-governance enjoyed by Canada and Australia. Irwin urged participation, but Gandhi was unmoved, and the meeting ended without resolution.

Bascomb traces Gandhi's life from his birth in 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, through his legal studies in London and his transformative decades in South Africa. After being ejected from a first-class train carriage for refusing to move to lower-class berths despite holding a valid ticket, Gandhi developed a resistance method he called satyagraha, meaning "truth force": declaring opposition to an unjust law, breaking it, and calmly suffering the consequences. His philosophy drew on the Bhagavad Gita, a foundational Hindu scripture; the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence; the Bible; and the writings of Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin. He renounced material possessions and returned to India to fight for his compatriots' freedom.

At the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress in late December 1929, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the son of Motilal Nehru, declared as newly elected Congress president that dominion status was no longer sufficient. On December 31, Gandhi argued for a resolution declaring the goal to be purna swaraj, complete independence from Britain, to be achieved through civil disobedience. At one minute after midnight, the Congress passed the resolution.

Back at his communal settlement near Ahmedabad, Gandhi spent weeks deliberating the form civil disobedience should take, haunted by the violent disasters that had derailed his earlier campaigns. In mid-February 1930, he revealed his answer: The campaign would focus entirely on the salt tax. Attendees were flabbergasted, but Gandhi's reasoning was clear. The Indian Salt Act of 1882 forbade Indians from collecting salt along their own coastline without paying a tax to their foreign rulers. Nothing showed the injustice of the Raj more starkly.

On March 4, Gandhi sent a letter to Lord Irwin calling British rule "a curse." Irwin received conflicting advice: governors urged arrest, while Winston Churchill, a British politician who favored a hard line against Indian resistance, demanded toughness. Irwin decided to wait. Gandhi then revealed the plan for his campaign: a 220-mile march from his ashram to the seashore at Dandi, where marchers would break the law by picking up salt. He selected seventy-nine marchers from diverse backgrounds but excluded women, fearing they might be assaulted by government troops. His son Manilal was among those chosen.

On March 12, the Salt March began. Kasturba, Gandhi's wife, placed a tilak, a ceremonial mark, on each marcher's forehead. Gandhi led the column southward through crowds that swelled to over seventy thousand. The early days were difficult: receptions waned, marchers fell ill, and Gandhi struggled with rheumatism. A turning point came on March 29, when Gandhi delivered a "searchlight" speech at the village of Bhatgam, confessing the marchers' failures of discipline and the burden they had imposed on destitute villages. Discipline tightened, Muslim communities began appearing, and by the time the marchers reached the city of Surat, one hundred thousand people attended Gandhi's address.

On April 6, at the tiny fishing village of Dandi, Gandhi walked barefoot to the sea and scooped up a handful of mud mixed with salt. "With this salt, I am shaking the foundations of the empire," he declared. Sarojini Naidu, the poet and nationalist leader, called out, "Hail, lawbreaker!" The campaign spread rapidly across India. Arrests multiplied, but for every satyagrahi, or nonviolent resister, imprisoned, more stepped forward. International coverage intensified, and violence erupted in several cities, with Indian infantry units in Peshawar refusing orders to fire on unarmed marchers.

On April 26, Gandhi announced his intention to raid the government-run Dharasana Salt Works. Lord Irwin reinstated press censorship and ordered Gandhi's arrest. On May 5, officers arrived at Gandhi's camp. He requested hand spindles for spinning yarn in prison and was transported to Yerwada Central Jail. Leadership of the movement passed to Abbas Tyabji, a seventy-six-year-old former chief judge, who was immediately arrested, and then to Naidu. On May 21, Naidu addressed 1,570 volunteers: "You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten, but you must not resist." Webb Miller, an American journalist and the only one present free to report without British censorship, watched as columns of volunteers advanced on police armed with lathis, heavy steel-tipped batons. "Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows," Miller reported. Manilal led the second column and was beaten repeatedly before being arrested. Two volunteers died and scores were hospitalized. British censors intercepted Miller's dispatch, but after he threatened to file from another country, they relented. The report was published in over 1,350 American newspapers.

By early summer, close to 100,000 civil resisters crowded the jails, and Time named Gandhi its Man of the Year. In January 1931, Gandhi was released. The death of Motilal Nehru on February 6 convinced Gandhi to pursue dialogue with the viceroy. Over six days of negotiations, the two leaders hammered out the Gandhi-Irwin Pact: Congress would attend a second Round Table Conference, civil disobedience would be suspended, imprisoned satyagrahis would go free, repressive ordinances would be lifted, and peasants could harvest salt for personal use. Independence, however, was not addressed. American journalist William Shirer wrote that the question was now "not of whether the British were willing to grant independence to India, but of how and when."

Gandhi attended the Second Round Table Conference in London later that year, but the British followed their divide-and-conquer playbook, and the talks accomplished nothing. Fifteen more years of resistance followed. On August 15, 1947, India gained independence, though Partition triggered the migration of fifteen million refugees and nearly one million deaths. On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist. Naidu served as governor of the United Provinces, becoming India's first woman to hold high office, before dying in 1949. Manilal continued fighting racial discrimination in South Africa, carrying the scars from Dharasana for the rest of his life. In the epilogue, Bascomb traces the global legacy of Gandhi's methods: Martin Luther King, Jr. credited Gandhi as his primary inspiration, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa considered themselves his disciples, and nonviolent movements from the Philippines to Eastern Europe drew on his example. Bascomb acknowledges Gandhi's human failings while affirming the enduring power of nonviolent resistance as a blueprint for political change.