We are not going to turn back.
M. K. Gandhi, 10 March 1930
In December 1920, Gandhi predicted Indian independence for ‘next year’, if everyone followed the path he had mapped out for liberation from British rule: non-cooperation extending gradually into all sectors of activity, civil disobedience in progressive stages, pursuit of ever-increasing economic autarchy, and above all a refusal to respond violently to the repressive acts that would inevitably accompany that seditious campaign. After making this prediction, Gandhi travelled the length and breadth of India, preached traditional cotton-weaving methods, and organized bonfires to burn imported fabrics.
But the British stood firm, and the main effect of that incautious announcement from the Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) was to unleash a huge wave of arrests. Nevertheless civil disobedience had made a good start, and here and there the instructions were followed: strike pickets to be placed outside alcohol outlets, imported textiles to be boycotted, court summonses to be ignored. But eventually violence broke out and, after a confrontation with the forces of order causing deaths among the demonstrators, an angry mob set fire to a barracks, burning some twenty policemen alive. Gandhi reacted as he had to the Amritsar massacre in 1919: he called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and decided on a personal fast – a gesture he made a number of times in his life – assuming personal responsibility for the deaths, and exculpating the violent rioters.
A decade later (after a spell in jail, and a resumption of his long peregrinations in India campaigning against the exclusion of Untouchables, promoting women’s rights and teaching basic hygiene), Gandhi in January 1930 again decided to defy the Empire, and launched a new non-cooperation campaign. But he was less confident in his approach this time, unsure of how to start, how to give the most publicity to a calm and massive refusal to obey. He confessed to the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, who visited him on 18 January: ‘I see no light among the shadows that surround me.’
What he called his ‘small voice’ soon spoke up, though, telling him to march to the sea and gather salt. Gandhi had decided on a new satyagraha:* the march for salt. The strategy was a double one: to denounce the salt tax, as the prelude to a more radical dissidence, and to stage the condemnation in the form of an immense mass march. The British held a monopoly on harvesting salt. No one was permitted to trade in it or even extract some for personal use. There was even recourse to destruction of deposits when natural salt was found close to populations who might take it for their own use. Salt: a free gift from the sea, a humble but indispensable foodstuff. The injustice of the tax was immediately obvious to all, and simply stating it was enough to underline its scandalous unfairness. The second stroke of genius was the organization of a slow mass march to the coast: a walk from the ashram† at Sabarmati to the Dandi salt marshes, on the seashore near Jalapur.
Gandhi had long valued the spiritual and political benefits of walking. In London, as a very young man, he had walked regularly, five to fifteen kilometres most days, attending his law lectures and finding vegetarian restaurants. Those walks helped him to live up to the three vows he had made to his mother when leaving India (no women, no alcohol, no meat), to test their solidity and measure his own constancy. Gandhi had always set great store by vows made to himself or others, those formal commitments to give up this or that practice, this or that behaviour. He could only see them as final. And he had always cultivated personal discipline and self-control. Walking facilitates that decided relation with the self which is not of the order of undefined introspection (something better suited to a reclining posture on a sofa), but of meticulous self-examination.
While walking, you hold yourself to account: you correct yourself, challenge yourself, assess yourself. Later, working as a lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi continued to walk, regularly covering the thirty-four kilometres between the Tolstoy farm and Johannesburg. In the struggle he led in Natal, he again tried out a political dimension of walking. While defending the rights of South African Indians subjected to vexatious measures or unjust taxes, in 1913 he organized, instead of simple demonstrations to occupy public space, a number of marches several days long. The idea was to protest without violence, while trying to get arrested. Gandhi decided to organize marches leading from one province to another (Natal to the Transvaal) without obtaining the compulsory travel pass, thus mounting civil disobedience on a massive and visible scale, but collective and peaceful. On 13 October 1913, Gandhi accordingly took the lead of an immense marching crowd: more than 2,000 strong, walking barefoot, feeding themselves with a little bread and sugar. The march lasted a week. Gandhi was soon arrested, and 50,000 Indians immediately came out on strike. General Smuts was forced to negotiate, and signed with Gandhi a series of agreements in the interests of Indian communities.
In February 1930, now sixty years old, Gandhi formed the plan for the salt march. It was a dramatic construction, a collective epic. He assembled around him a nucleus of reliable militants, satyagrahis he had trained personally, on whose self-discipline and self-sacrifice he could depend. Seventy-eight militants were gathered for the expedition, the youngest aged sixteen. On 11 March, after evening prayer, Gandhi addressed a crowd of thousands requiring all his followers, in the event that he was arrested himself, to pursue the civil disobedience movement without him, calmly and peacefully. He set off at half past six the following morning, his long walking staff (a thick iron-bound bamboo) in his hand, surrounded by followers dressed like him in hand-woven cotton cloths, not quite eighty of them. When they reached the sea forty-four days later, they numbered several thousand.
As the days passed a routine became established: rise at six in the morning for prayers, meditation and chanting. Then, after ablutions and a meal, the procession would set off. Villages along the route took on a festive air; the roads were watered and scattered with leaves and flower petals to comfort the walkers’ feet. Each time Gandhi would stop, calmly start to speak and urge people to cease all cooperation with the Empire: to boycott imported goods, to resign from any appointment as an official representative of the Empire. Above all, not to respond to provocation: to accept in advance the blows that would rain down, and allow themselves to be arrested without resisting. It was an immense success. Foreign correspondents followed the march by the day and sent it echoing round the world. The viceroy of India was at a loss for an answer. Gandhi’s daily routine was immutable: prayer in the morning, walking through the day, hand-spinning cotton in the evening, writing articles for his journal at night. On 5 April, after walking for more than a month and a half, he came at last to Dandi, on the sea, and spent the night praying with his disciples. In the morning, at half past eight, he walked to the ocean, bathed in it, returned to the beach and performed in front of the assembled thousands the forbidden gesture by stooping and picking up a piece of salt, while the woman poet Sarojini Naidu cried: ‘Hail, Deliverer!’
In the conception and accomplishment of that huge march one can discern several spiritual dimensions, all linked to Gandhi’s convictions.
For a start, the slowness of the march constitutes a rejection of speed: the Mahatma’s mistrust of the machine, accelerated consumption, mindless productivism. In a tract (Hind Swaraj) dating from November 1909, written on the ship taking him from London to South Africa, Gandhi attacks modern civilization. As well as a defence of non-violence, the text appears to be a defence of tradition, an apologia for slowness. For Gandhi, the real opposition wasn’t between East and West, but rather between a civilization of speed, machinery and the accumulation of forces and one of transmission, prayer and manual labour. Which doesn’t imply, however, that the choice is between the inertia of tradition and the conquerors’ dynamism, but rather between two energies: the energy of the immemorial and the energy of change. Gandhi’s choice was not between conservative torpor and adventurous boldness, but between calm force and perpetual agitation, the quiet illumination and the blinding flash.
Gandhi liked to think of that tranquil energy as maternal, feminine. For centuries in traditional societies, slow walking was the preserve of women: they would trek to distant wells to draw water, or set off down the paths to find plants and herbs. Men favoured violent expenditures of strength, appropriate to hunting: sudden attacks, short but very fast chases. Walking with Gandhi nurtured the slow energies of endurance. With walking, you are far removed from the lightning action, the fine deed, the exploit. It is done with that humility Gandhi loved: constant reminder of our gravity, our weakness. Walking is the condition of the poor. Humility, however, is not quite the same as poverty. It is the quiet recognition of our finiteness: we don’t know everything, we can’t do everything. What we know is nothing compared to the Truth, what we can do is nothing compared to Strength. And that recognition puts us in our proper place, locates us. In walking, far from any vehicle or machine, from any mediation, I am replaying the earthly human condition, embodying once again man’s inborn, essential destitution. That is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity. And there remains something proud in walking: we are upright. Humility in Gandhi’s sense expressed our human dignity.
Walking also fitted with the theme of simplification he pursued all his life, taking the paths of non-possession (aparigraha). All the way from well turned-out young gent to the ‘half-naked fakir’ mocked by Churchill, Gandhi pursued his quest for stripping back in every area of life: clothing, housing, food and transport. From his early days in London wearing a greatcoat, double-breasted waistcoat and striped trousers, carrying a silver-knobbed walking stick, he gradually simplified his attire until in his last years he was dressed only in a loincloth of hand-woven white cotton. In South Africa, he left his comfortable rooms in Johannesburg to live on community farms, doing his full share of domestic chores. He made it a point of honour to travel only in third class, and by the end of his life ate nothing but fresh fruit and nuts. This simplification of life enabled him to go faster, straighter, more dependably to the essential. Walking is of a perfect simplicity: one foot in front of the other, there’s no other way of advancing on two legs. But beyond that, the simplicity had a political aim. To live above your needs, Gandhi warned, is to be already exploiting your neighbour.
The task was to get rid of everything that might pointlessly encumber, embarrass, obstruct. Walking – marching – promoted an ideal of autonomy. Gandhi always set great value on indigenous crafts, produced locally. He gave the spinning-wheel a new lease of life, making it a duty to weave by hand every day. To work with your hands is to reject exploitation of others. The concept of marching fulfilled by itself the double ideal contained in the term swadeshi, employed by Gandhi to call on Indians to boycott British textiles, alcohol and manufactured goods. It signifies both ‘proximity’ and ‘autarchy’. During a march, you make contact with people living their daily lives: you pass the fields where they work, and in front of their houses. You stop and talk. Walking is the right speed to understand, to feel close. Apart from that, you depend on yourself alone to advance. Given that you are up to it, your will alone is in charge, and you await only your own injunction. Neither machine nor fuel. Especially as walking can seem positively nutritious. Gandhi experienced that in the long 1930 march, when he arrived, after more than 390 kilometres on foot, looking more radiant than he had when he started.
Finally, Gandhi promoted through the marching movement a dimension of firmness and endurance: to keep going. That is essential, because walking calls for gentle but continuous effort. To suggest the sort of campaigns he hoped to wage, Gandhi at a political meeting in South Africa had invented a new word to describe his style of action: satyagraha. Satyagraha is the idea of force and truth rolled into one, the idea that one should be anchored firmly to truth as to a solid rock. Walking calls for determination, tenacity and willpower. Accordingly, during his years of struggle among the community structures he had set up here and there, Gandhi had managed to train some disciples along these lines. The key virtue of the satyagrahi is internal self-discipline. It means being ready to take blows without returning them, go quietly when unjustly arrested, and suffer humiliation, slander and insult without replying. The mastery needed is double-sided: an ability to repress outbursts of rage and indignation, but also to weather moments of discouragement or cowardice; to remain calm, immobile, serene, sure of yourself and of the truth. Walking drains anger away, it purifies. When the satyagrahis reached the sea their indignation had been purged of hatred and anger: all that remained was a calm determination to break the law, because the law was unjust and iniquitous, making it a duty to transgress it, with the firmness and calm of prayer.
That perfect self-mastery is the precondition for a perfect love of all beings and for non-violence: ahimsa. This lies at the heart of the doctrine. Gandhi’s non-violence wasn’t a passive withdrawal, neutral resignation or submission. It gathered in a single sheaf, displayed in a single posture, all the dimensions identified above: dignity, discipline, firmness, humility, energy. Non-violence wasn’t a simple rejection of force. It was more a matter of opposing physical force with the force of the soul alone. Gandhi did not say: make no resistance when the blows rain down, when the brutality redoubles. He said almost the opposite: resist with your entire soul by standing up for as long as possible, never surrendering any of your dignity, and without showing the slightest aggression or doing anything at all that might restore, between the whipper and the whipped, any reciprocity or equivalence in a community of violence and hate. On the contrary, show immense compassion for the one who is beating you. The relation should remain asymmetric in every respect: on one side a blind, physical, hate-filled rage, on the other a spiritual force of love. If you hold firm, then the relation is reversed; physical force degrades the one who uses it, who becomes a furious beast, while all human qualities are reflected in his prone victim, raised to a state of pure humanity by the attempt to lay him low. Non-violence puts violence to shame. To continue beating someone who opposes physical brutality with pure humanity, simple dignity, is to lose your honour and your soul there and then.
So it was with the next, terrible march, on which the satyagrahis set off in May 1930 to take possession of the Dharasana salt works in the name of the people. Gandhi had taken care to inform the viceroy in a letter of the march and its purpose, adding that the abrogation of the salt tax would be enough to cause its cancellation. But he was arrested, and unable to take part in the projected peaceful occupation of the salt pans. Four hundred police officers, armed with steel-tipped clubs, waited in the marshes. The satyagrahis slowly advanced, refusing to disperse. On reaching the police line they were savagely attacked, beaten to the ground and replaced by the next rank, beaten down in its turn. The satyagrahis didn’t even try to protect themselves with their arms, but took the blows on their heads and shoulders. The police were seized with fury and some marchers were beaten to death on the ground. An American journalist, Webb Miller of the United Press Agency, witnessed the carnage and described the silent, determined advance of the satyagrahis ‘walking with firm tread, head high’, before falling. A painful silence punctuated only by the thud of batons on flesh, breaking bones and a few involuntary groans. Several hundred were injured.
But the political gains of the 1930 movement didn’t live up to expectations, or to the grandeur of the act. The Gandhi–Irwin pact (February 1931) was limited to minor concessions, and the London conference attended by Gandhi that September produced no decisive progress. When World War II broke out in 1939, India was still largely a subject country. Independence only came in August 1947, and at the cost of the partition of India and Pakistan – the worst of solutions, for Gandhi, who had always hoped for freedom in unity and brotherhood.
Gandhi never stopped walking all through his life. He attributed his excellent health to the habit. He walked to the very end. The final years of his life saw his dream both fulfilled and destroyed: freedom with disintegration. When Britain was seriously preparing to abandon its Indian possessions, in the late 1940s, the rivalries between religious communities, hitherto exploited by the British to divide and rule, became intensified and soon exploded in violence, leading to unprecedented massacres between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
In the winter of 1946 Gandhi took up his pilgrim’s staff once more, to travel on foot through two regions ravaged by hatred (Bengal and Bihar), to walk from village to village in the hope that here and there, by talking to everyone and praying for all, he could revive the principles of love and fraternal unity. Between 7 November 1946 and 2 March 1947 he passed through several dozen villages, always on foot. He walked because he wanted to make it clear that destitution was peaceful. He rose every morning at four to read and write, spun his daily measure of cotton, led prayers open to all, reciting Hindu and Muslim texts to show their peaceful convergence, and walked onward. He set off each morning chanting Rabindranath Tagore’s terrible lines:
If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
if they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou unlucky one, open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou unlucky one,
trample the thorns under thy tread,
and along the blood-lined track travel alone.
In September 1947 Gandhi performed ‘the miracle of Calcutta’: his simple presence, and announcement of a fast, were enough to extinguish the explosion of hatred that was ravaging the city. Independence had been proclaimed in August, and the announcement of Partition had provoked an unprecedented surge in inter-communal violence.
Gandhi died at the hands of a fanatical Hindu assassin on 30 January 1948.
The enduring image is that of an old man of nearly seventy-seven, walking all day leaning on the shoulder of his young niece, holding his pilgrim’s staff in the other hand, going on foot from village to village, from massacre to massacre, supported by his faith alone, dressed like the poorest of the poor, underlining everywhere the reality of love and the absurdity of hatreds, and opposing the world’s violence with the infinite peace of a slow, humble, unending walk.
The same image was retained by his indefatigable companion Nehru, the first leader of independent India. When he thought of Gandhi, what he most remembered was the salt march. As he wrote, back in 1930:
Staff in hand, he goes along the dusty roads of Gujarat, clear-eyed and firm of step, with his faithful band trudging along behind him. Many a journey had he undertaken in the past, many a weary road had he traversed. But longer than any that have gone before is this last journey of his … the goal is the independence of India and the ending of the exploitation of her millions.
* As we shall see later, this expression, meaning roughly ‘truth-force’, designates a collective action undertaken in determined fashion but rejecting in advance any recourse to violence.
† This term designates communal structures, organized around rules and principles based on his thought, that Gandhi had set up to further his work and train disciples.