Dandi march: The author of this book retraced Gandhi’s path to understand present-day Gujarat

[The year] 2019 marked the 150th centenary celebrations of MK Gandhi’s birth, and anticipated the 90th anniversary in 2020 of the Dandi March, held in some quarters to be the apogee of his political career. My project was a simple one: in February 2019, alongside two dear comrades, cultural researcher Chirag Mediratta, and medical doctor Sushmit Prabhudas, I walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad, retracing the route of the Salt March, in reverse.

This route – the “Dandi Pāth” – is the setting against which I set out to explore what I believe to be the story of modern Gujarat.

We walked this route of just under 400 kilometres over the course of 25 days, covering anywhere between 16 and 29 kilometres a day, stopping at one place mid-morning, and elsewhere for the night following a dusk-time walk, much as the original band of Marchers did in 1930.

Why? Because Gujarat has come to be described as something of a social laboratory – more specifically, in the words of the (former) Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Praveen Togadia, “the laboratory of Hindutva”. Over the past few decades. I was keen to engage with this Gujarat, but I also wanted to see if there remained in it any competing visions to these epistemes: memories of the region’s prior avatar as the base that served as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his “experiments” with truth, non-violent civil disobedience, satyagraha, mass political communication, and more, during the heyday of the Indian Nationalist Movement in the early-20th century.

In 1930, Gujarat was also the site of one of the most enduring chapters of this Movement, the Dandi March and subsequent Salt Satyagraha, undertaken to contest what Gandhi held to be the most unjust tax levied on Indians: the British Indian government’s tax on that most essential of all food articles, salt. The March saw Gandhi leave his Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad with a band of 78 dedicated marchers (the last two to make up the front ranks would join them from Matar, two days into the walk).

Together, they wound their way across nearly 400 kilometres of varying terrain to get to the sleepy coastal town of Dandi, where they broke the law by “making” their own salt.

As alluded to above, my intention was to explore two main themes: to see what (if anything) remained of the Salt March in cultural memory and oral history; and perhaps even more importantly, to attempt to discern the shape of this Gujarat I now inhabit but have little access to the rich lived inner realities of, owing to my multiple positions – along religious / caste / class / educational / urban-location lines – of privilege. This made my endeavour one which forced upon me simultaneously and competingly insider and outsider – what ethnography would call emic and etic – positionalities.

As Kottak defines it, “the emic approach investigates how local people think”; how communities make sense of their world from inside-out. The etic or “scientist-oriented” approach on the other hand shifts the focus from “local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist (or specialist)”.

I was born in Gujarat, speak Gujarati, and have lived in this state for most of my life: this makes me an insider. However, since I am not Hindu (and therefore caste-bound), not male, and an English-speaking, urban location based academic to boot, this makes me an outsider, constantly forced to account for my “self” in the place I have for so long called home. The number of times en route people began conversations assuming I was a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) attests to this “othering”.

I would proceed to disabuse them of this fallacy in chaste Gujarati, only to have them insist it simply had to be true: by day twenty-two on the road, it may as well have been, because I stopped feeling the need to correct them.

Gandhi has always been many things to many people – the catholicity of his learning, philosophy, and world-view ensure this – and I argue that in addition to the many descriptors that came to surround him (some of which he even came, over time, to inhabit) during the course of his lifetime and even more so after it, he was also an astute proto-semiotician: a man who keenly understood the need to find symbols able to cut across the myriad caste-class-gender-religion and other fault lines which have traditionally marked the region known today as the nation-state of India, but which corresponds historically to an agglomeration of cultural imaginations, variously administered regions, and erstwhile kingdoms or feudal modalities.

For this reason, I hold that it is both impossible – as well as deeply reductive and even a sort of epistemic violence – to speak of India or Indians in the singular, as if these signifiers could possibly contain monolithic signifieds.

The reason I propose that Gandhi was a proto-semiotician is that he chose elements or objects which were quotidian, and elevated them into “causes” around which a community could begin to cohere. In other words, he took symbols from our everyday lives, and charged them with the capacity for new connotative signification.

Salt was one such marker, since every living being needs it for their survival. That this choice was a strategic one is clear: the salt tax accounted for merely a fraction of all tax revenues collected by the British in India in any given year. Land and forest taxes accounted for significantly more, which is why the Indian National Congress (1885) was more than a little taken aback when it was salt that Gandhi decided to go after in 1930…

Harmony Siganporia is an Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at MICA-India.

Excerpted with permission from Walking from Dandi: In Search of Vikas, Harmony Siganporia, Oxford University Press.