The Mahatma's Message: Gandhi's Contributions to the Art and Science of Communication (Report‪)‬

On April 4, 1930, "a balding, diminutive, bespectacled, dhoti-clad barrister-cum-journalist [Mahatma Gandhi] completed a much publicized and anticipated 241-mile walk from his ashram in Sabarmati" to Dandi,1 a coastal town in Western India known for its salt deposits.2 Accompanied by tens of thousands of fellow marchers, and leading a moving column of people that some estimated was 2-3 miles long, Gandhi had set out on this march with 78 hand-picked followers 24 days previously. Gandhi and his fellow marchers, donning the homespun garb of the Indian peasantry, looked like a brigade of peace soldiers, armed with the philosophy of satyagraha ("insistence on truth") and an open transparent mission: to defy the oppressive British tax laws on the production and consumption of salt in India. The next morning, on April 5th, Gandhi scooped up a lump of mud and salt from the beach, raised his hand, and claimed it as his own. The crowds roared, and cameras clicked. In that moment Gandhi had broken the British-imposed salt ordinance. This symbolic gesture signaled to the tens of thousands on the beach at Dandi, and hundreds of thousands, on beaches along India's 4,000 mile-long coastline, to collect saltwater in vessels, and boil it to produce one's own salt.