Modern Era · South Asia · Politics

1930

Gandhi's Salt March

March 12, 1930

Mohandas Gandhi, sixty years old and thin as a reed, walked 240 miles from Sabarmati to the Gujarat coast and scooped up a handful of salt in defiance of the British salt tax. Eighty thousand Indians were arrested in the civil disobedience that followed. The act was absurd, theatrical, and devastating. The Raj never fully recovered its moral authority.