On April 6, 1930, on the coast of Dandi, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a handful of salt that shook the mighty British Empire. What followed was a nation-wide civil disobedience of salt laws, non-payment of taxes, boycott of courts, resignation from Government posts, and picketing of liquor and foreign-cloth shops.
On May 21, 1930 Sarojini Naidu led a band of 2000 Satyagrahis towards the Dharasana Salt Works. As each column of marchers came towards the police cordon, the police set upon the non-resisting Satyagrahis with their steel tipped lathis until they fell down. The injured would be carried away on make-shift stretchers and another column would take their place, only to be beaten to pulp and get carried away. Not an arm was raised in self-defence, and by 11 am, when the temperature in the shade was 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the toll was 320 injured and 2 dead.
The Salt Satyagraha was a catalyst for a rich variety of forms of defiance. Women who had never stepped unescorted out of their homes, women who had stayed in purdah, young mothers and widows and unmarried girls, became a familiar sight as they stood from morning to night outside liquour shops, quietly but firmly persuading the customers and the sellers to mend their ways.
A simple mill worker of Mumbai, Babu Genu, went into freedom's history by sacrificing his life in the Swadeshi campaign launched in December 1930. He threw himself in the path of a truck carrying foreign textiles and was crushed to death as a British sergeant drove the vehicle over his body. Mumbai paid tribute to this brave patriot by taking his body in a procession several miles long, and naming after him the road in the Kalbadevi area where the sacrifice was made.
Photo Courtesy : Balbir Singh Sr.'s Personal Collection