Little Kamlesh was all of 8 yrs old in April 1930. As a young child growing up in a small village in the village of Orma in Gujarat, he did what all other boys his age did growing up. His daily activities included reluctantly going to his school, Gujarat Vidyapeeth and spending the mandated quota of 4 hrs there (primarily due the fear of him being caned by his Baba if he bunked classes), running back home for a quick lunch after which he would join his friends in the daily raid of the guava orchard near his home. Life was simple, life was fun, life was uncomplicated.
However, for almost a year now, Maa and Baba were constantly at each others’ throats fighting almost all the time they were at home. The only reason for this internal strife over the last year and a half was the Salt Tax that the British had imposed on all citizens in India. Although the 1882 Salt Act gave a monopoly to the British to collect and manufacture all salt in the country, the fact that they had gone ahead and raised the tax on salt very recently meant that this essential commodity had now been elevated to the status of a luxury for the common Indian man.
Maa, who was in charge of handling all household expenditure kept asking Baba for more money than was usually allocated in the budget, as the price of salt had increased manifold due to the high taxes on salt, and Baba who used to work as a schoolteacher at the same school in which Kamlesh studied expressed his inability to increase the monthly budget allocated for groceries. Initially though Baba had cut down on all unnecessary expenditure to meet the increasing prices of salt, but as time went by and the authorities didn’t show any signs of bringing down the salt taxes, he was unable to meet his wife’s constant demands for more money. And this in turn led to daily fights in the household.
Although Kamlesh was only 8 yrs old, he was smart enough to understand that the simple white commodity, salt was causing a lot of tension at home. He had also overheard Baba telling Maa that the Indian National Congress had publicly issued the Purna Swarajya (complete declaration of Independence) more than a year ago in December 1929 and also that they had chosen to initiate a civil disobedience movement against the British using The Salt Tax as the first official mandate to boycott. Even his 8 yr old brain could figure out that this could prove to be beneficial as far as bringing the prices of salt down, which in turn would ensure that Maa and Baba did not fight as often on this topic.
On April 5, 1930, a large congregation of people gathered at the Gujarat Vidyapeeth grounds at around 3 PM. Although school had left for the day, Kamlesh and his friends had stayed back playing in the grounds. When the crowd started trickling into the ground, they realized that something unusual and interesting was going to happen that day, and they picked vantage viewing points on some of the branches of the big banyan tree in the school courtyard and watched the crowd pour in.
By around 2 hrs, the ground was full of people, when suddenly the crowd parted to make way for a bespectacled frail old man walking with the help of a stick. He was dressed in an extremely austere manner with just a dhoti and another white garment draped around his shoulders quite loosely. As the crowd parted, they also started shouting slogans which he couldn’t quite comprehend due to all the noise.
When the old man started speaking, the crowd went completely silent. He addressed the crowd and the battery of reporters covering the gathering. He informed them that the next morning, he would go to the seashore at Dandi, which was around 3 Kms from Orma and would make salt, breaking the British monopoly over the commodity.
Kamlesh couldn’t wait for the next dawn, in fact, so much so that he hardly slept that night. He woke up early at around 4.30 AM in the morning and started pestering Baba to take him to the school grounds from where the old man and the crowd would march to the seashore. He wanted to be there when the old man would make salt so that he could finally see an end to the regular tiffs that his parents were having nowadays.
When he reached the school grounds with his father, he saw that the old man had just finished his morning prayers and was about to start off to the seashore. He overheard him asking somebody the way to the seashore. Upon hearing this Kamlesh immediately went up the old man and took his stick in one hand and started leading him to the Dandi seashore.
When the old man reached the seashore, he knelt down, picked up a lump of salty mud and declared “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British empire.” Kamlesh then knew that his Maa and Baba would not fight over salt prices anymore.
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Although this story has real historical events as its backdrop [Link to Wikipedia article], the same has been embellished with a lot of fiction. Consequently, no offense is meant to any person living or dead.
This story was prompted by the picture below which probably is not related to this incident in any form or fashion.
