The British Empire’s administration of India during the twentieth century operated under economic principles that favored Great Britain. The Indian economy existed largely for the enrichment of the mother country, with Indian salt explicitly managed for the benefit of Cheshire, England.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the British East India Company had expanded its holdings in India, eventually establishing a sophisticated bureaucracy and acquiring influence over local princes. Following an open revolt in 1857, the British Crown took over the direct governance of much of India.
Centuries before the British arrived, under India’s first great empire (founded by Chandragupta Maurya around 300 B.C.), salt manufacture was already subject to state control, supervised by an official called a lavanadhyaksa through a system of licensed fees.
However, the British implemented a stringent monopoly that generated extreme bitterness.
The British goal was to make the salt tax profitable and to eliminate smuggling. By the mid-nineteenth century, a system known as the Customs Line was established around Bengal, requiring salt to pay a duty to cross. In the 1840s, the East India Company built a thorn hedge, fourteen feet high and twelve feet thick, on the western side of Bengal to prevent the entry of contraband salt. After the British government assumed direct control following the 1857 uprising, this Customs Line expanded arbitrarily, snaking 2,500 miles across India, from the Himalayas down to Orissa. This line, which employed 12,000 people by 1870, was primarily dedicated to the enforcement of the salt tax.
The British government lobbied Parliament to repress domestic salt production in India to remove competition for sales in the Bengal market. In 1836, duties on domestically produced salt were made equivalent to those on imported salt, ensuring the government received the same revenue regardless of the source. This British policy proved devastating to Orissa, where salt had been made for at least 5,000 years.
The tax burden on impoverished Indians became overwhelming. At a public meeting in Orissa in 1888, it was pointed out that poor Indians had a tax burden thirty times greater than people in England. The tax on salt was termed “an unjust imposition of an imperial character” because the salt was imported from abroad.
Act II: The Political Crucible and the Malangis
The British salt policies wreaked havoc on local Indian salt workers, known as the malangis. Historically, these workers had operated under coastal chieftains (Zemindars), selling the salt they manufactured for meager wages and paying a high rent for the use of coastal salt flats.
The malangis lived hard lives in villages adjacent to the salt fields. Families worked the salt fields together, including men, women, and children. Some men traveled from distant villages and lived in temporary huts near the works for five months of the year.
The commissioner of Orissa, A. J. M. Mills, warned the colonial administration that reducing salt production would turn the peasants against the British, as the people in salt areas knew no other economic activity. Nevertheless, in 1863, the British government announced its intention to halt local salt production, instructing agents to end salt manufacture as quickly as possible.
The abandonment of salt manufacture contributed directly to a famine in Orissa in 1866, where the greatest loss of life occurred among the malangis because they had no crops of their own to rely on for food. Later, the British started their own plant to make kartach salt, aiming to provide cheap salt and jobs, but the plant was so successful that Liverpool salt could not compete. The government closed the plant in 1893, concluding that outperforming British salt was against the rules.
Public political resistance against the salt policy began in Cuttack, Orissa, in February 1888, organized by the Utkal Sabha party. Protesters argued that revenue lost from repealing the salt tax could be compensated by raising the income tax and discontinuing the recruitment of foreign people to the Indian civil service.
In 1923, the British proposed doubling the salt tax to balance the budget, a proposal the Indian Legislative Assembly refused to support but which Viceroy Lord Reading approved by decree anyway. By 1927, the Assembly voted to halve the tax, though the British government did not comply. The British government generally did not take the issue seriously. Lord Winterlon, the undersecretary of state for India, assured the British government that there was no reason for concern about the salt issue. However, others in Parliament warned that the hardship caused by the tax was leading to civil unrest and could lead to “another Irish situation”.
Act III: The Rock and the Soul
Mohandas Gandhi was born in Porbandar, Gujarat, a region where salt has been made for thousands of years. He belonged to the Vaisya caste, ranking below the ruling classes but above workers, and was not immediately familiar with the salt workers (malangis). His family held positions of authority, with his grandfather, father, and uncle serving as prime minister to the Prince of Porbandar, a small state noted for its rulers’ obsequiousness toward the British.
Despite his later reputation for simplicity, Gandhi struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, including experimenting with meat-eating in the hope it would make him strong like the English. In 1929, Pandit Nilakantha Das, an assembly member from Orissa, demanded the revival of local salt making and the repeal of the salt tax, sparking the decisive confrontation.
Gandhi announced his march to the sea to violate the British salt law. The march commenced daily at 6:30 a.m.. As he traveled, Gandhi spoke to villagers, urging them to break the British salt monopoly, practice sanitation, abstain from drugs and alcohol, treat untouchables as brothers, and wear khaddar (homespun Indian cloth) instead of British imports.
On April 6, 1930, at 8:30 a.m., Gandhi publicly broke the British salt law by picking up a piece of salt crust in Dandi, located on the coast of the Gujarat peninsula.
The act of civil disobedience immediately spread across India. Public salt making was organized in Orissa to coincide with Gandhi’s march, starting on April 6. Their leader, Gopabandhu Choudhury, was arrested, but the group continued, reaching their destination, Inchuri, on April 13, where thousands watched them break the law. Soon, it seemed most of India was making salt, including teachers, students, and peasants.
Act IV: Aftermath and The Enduring Struggle
The salt campaign drew international attention. Western newspapers covered the campaign, and global sympathy was with the Indian campaigners, not the British. White “Gandhi hats” became fashionable in America, even though Gandhi himself remained bareheaded.
The protest, however, spread to groups that did not adhere to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence (satyagraha). Violence erupted, including a raid on an East Bengal arsenal that killed six guards. When armored cars were deployed against demonstrators in Peshawar, one car was attacked and set on fire, leading a second car to open fire with machine guns, killing seventy people.
Gandhi sent a letter protesting the police violence to Lord Irwin, beginning, as was his custom, “Dear Friend”. Gandhi announced his intent to march on and take over a government-owned saltworks, leading to his subsequent arrest near Dandi.
Negotiations eventually led to the Gandhi-Irwin pact. When asked to drink tea to seal the agreement, Gandhi famously replied that his tea would be water, lemon, and a pinch of salt.
Gandhi emerged as the leading voice for Indian aspirations, and the Indian National Congress became the primary organization of the independence movement. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the first prime minister, said he always thought of Gandhi as the figure with a walking stick leading the crowd onto the beach at Dandi. India gained independence in 1947.
Decades later, the struggle over salt continues, albeit in a different form. Independent India was committed to providing salt at an affordable price. The industry was organized into small cooperatives, most of which failed, and is now controlled by a few powerful salt traders.
- Gujarat became India’s major salt producer, now accounting for almost three-quarters of the nation’s salt.
- The rock salt of Punjab is now in Pakistan. Orissa is no longer an important salt-producing region, with only six saltworks surviving.
- Despite Gandhi’s principles, salt workers, many from the lowest caste, remain deeply impoverished. They are often hopelessly in debt to the salt producers, earn little more than a dollar a day, and work seven-day weeks during the season.
- The glare from the salt in the dry-season sunlight causes many workers to become permanently color-blind. They also complain that their bodies, impregnated with salt, cannot be properly cremated upon death.
- The post-independence government implemented an iodine requirement for salt, which some perceived as a new form of government control, particularly impacting small, poor producers who could not afford to meet the standards. Though the ban on noniodized salt was repealed in September 2000, under pressure from Hindu nationalists and Gandhians, the historical debate over the citizens’ right to make their own salt remains. A 1998 storm that hit Gujarat killed between 1,000 and 14,000 people, depending on the count, but the workforce was quickly replaced, and salt prices dropped back to affordable levels by the end of the year.