Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

energy to force all India to forsake foreign textiles for the rough cotton khadi spun by millions of spinning-wheels. Convinced the misery of India’s countryside was due above all to the decline in village crafts, he saw in a renaissance of cottage industry heralded by the spinning-wheel the key to the revival of India’s impoverished countryside. For the urban masses, spinning would be a kind of spiritual redemption by manual labour, a constant, daily reminder of their link to the real India, the India of half a million villages.

      The wheel became the medium through which he enunciated a whole range of doctrines close to his heart. To it, he tied a crusade to get villagers to use latrines instead of the open fields, to improve hygiene and health by practising cleanliness, to fight malaria, to set up simple village schools for their offspring, to preach Hindu-Moslem harmony: in short an entire programme to regenerate India’s rural life.

      Gandhi himself gave the example by regularly consecrating half an hour a day to spinning and forcing his followers to do likewise. The spinning ritual became a quasi-religious ceremony; the time devoted to it, an interlude of prayer and contemplation. The Mahatma began to murmur: ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’ (God) in rhythm to the click – click – click of the spinning-wheel.

      In September 1921, Gandhi gave a final impetus to his campaign by solemnly renouncing for the rest of his life any clothing except a homespun loincloth and a shawl. The product of the wheel, cotton khadi, became the uniform of the independence movement, wrapping rich and poor, great and small, in a common swathe of rough white cloth. Gradually Gandhi’s little wooden wheel became the symbol of his peaceful revolution, of an awakening continent’s challenge to Western imperialism.

      Splashing through ankle-deep mud and water, on precarious, rock-strewn paths, sleeping endless nights on the wooden planks of India’s third-class railway carriages, Gandhi travelled to the most remote corners of India preaching his message. Speaking five or six times a day, he visited thousands of villages.

      It was an extraordinary spectacle. Gandhi would lead the march, barefoot, wrapped in his loincloth, spectacles sliding from his nose, clomping along with the aid of a bamboo stave. Behind him came his followers in identical white loincloths. Closing the march, hoist like some triumphant trophy over a follower’s head, rode the Mahatma’s portable toilet, a graphic reminder of the importance he attached to sound sanitation.

      His crusade was an extraordinary success. The crowds rushed to see the man already known as a ‘Great Soul’. His voluntary poverty, his simplicity, his humility, his saintly air made him a kind of Holy Man, marching out of some distant Indian past to liberate a new India.

      In the towns he told the crowds that, if India was to win self-rule, she would have to renounce foreign clothing. He asked for volunteers to take off their clothes and throw them in a heap at his feet. Shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, hats, coats cascaded into the pile until some men stood stark naked before Gandhi. With a delighted smile Gandhi then set the pile ablaze, a bizarre bonfire of ‘Made in England’ clothing.

      The British were quick to react. If they hesitated to arrest Gandhi for fear of making him a martyr, they struck hard at his followers. Thirty thousand people were arrested, meetings and parades broken up by force, Congress offices ransacked. On 1 February 1922, Gandhi courteously wrote to the Viceroy to inform him he was intensifying his action. Non-co-operation was to be escalated to civil disobedience. He counselled peasants to refuse to pay taxes, city dwellers to ignore British laws and soldiers to stop serving the crown. It was Gandhi’s non-violent declaration of war on India’s colonial government.

      ‘The British want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine-guns where they have the weapons and we do not,’ he warned. ‘Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on a plane where we have the weapons and they have not.’

      Thousands of Indians followed his call and thousands more went off to jail. The beleaguered governor of Bombay called it ‘the most colossal experiment in world history and one which came within an inch of succeeding’.

      It failed because of an outburst of bloody violence in a little village north-east of Delhi. Against the wishes of almost his entire Congress hierarchy, Gandhi called off the movement because he felt his followers did not yet fully understand nonviolence.

      Sensing that his change of attitude had rendered him less dangerous, the British arrested him. Gandhi pleaded guilty to the charge of sedition, and in a moving appeal to his judge, asked for the maximum penalty. He was sentenced to six years in Yeravda prison near Poona. He had no regrets. ‘Freedom,’ he wrote, ‘is often to be found inside a prison’s walls, even on a gallows; never in council chambers, courts and classrooms.’

      Gandhi was released before the end of his sentence because of ill-health. For three years, he travelled and wrote, patiently training his followers, inculcating the principles of nonviolence to avoid a recurrence of the outburst that had shocked him before his arrest.

      By the end of 1929, he was ready for another move forward. In Lahore, at the stroke of midnight, as the decade expired, he led his Congress in a vow for swaraj, nothing less than complete independence. Twenty-six days later, in gatherings all across India, millions of Congressmen repeated the pledge.

      A new confrontation between Gandhi and the British was inevitable. Gandhi pondered for days waiting for his ‘Inner Voice’ to counsel him on the proper form of that confrontation. The answer proposed by his ‘Inner Voice’ was the finest fruit of his creative genius. So simple was the thought, so dramatic its execution, it made Gandhi world-famous overnight. Paradoxically, it was based on a staple the Mahatma had given up years before in his efforts to repress his sexual desires as part of his vow of chastity: salt.

      If Gandhi spurned it, in India’s hot climate it was an essential ingredient in every man’s diet. It lay in great white sheets along the shore-lines, the gift of the eternal mother, the sea. Its manufacture and sale, however, was the exclusive monopoly of the state, which built a tax into its selling price. It was a small tax, but for a poor peasant it represented, each year, two weeks’ income.

      On 12 March 1931, at 6.30 in the morning, his bamboo stave in his hand, his back slightly bent, his familiar loincloth around his hips, Gandhi marched out of his ashram at the head of a cortege of 79 disciples and headed for the sea, 241 miles away. Thousands of supporters from Ahmedabad lined the way and strewed the route with green leaves.

      Newsmen rushed from all over the world to follow the progress of his strange caravan. From village to village the crowds knelt by the roadside as Gandhi passed. His pace was a deliberately tantalizing approach to his climax. To the British, it was infuriatingly slow. The weird, almost Chaplinesque image of a little, old, half-naked man clutching a bamboo pole, marching down to the sea to challenge the British Empire dominated the newsreels and press of the world day after day.

      On 5 April, at six o’clock in the evening, Gandhi and his party finally reached the banks of the Indian Ocean near the town of Dandi. At dawn the next morning, after a night of prayer, the group marched into the sea for a ritual bath. Then Gandhi waded ashore and, before thousands of spectators, reached down to scoop up a piece of caked salt. With a grave and stern mien, he held his fist to the crowd, then opened it to expose in his palms the white crystals, the forbidden gift of the sea, the newest symbol in the struggle for Indian independence.

      Within a week all India was in turmoil. All over the continent Gandhi’s followers began to collect and distribute salt. The country was flooded with pamphlets explaining how to make salt from sea water. From one end of India to another, bonfires of British cloth and exports sparkled in the streets.

      The British replied with the most massive round-up in Indian history, sweeping people to jail by the thousands. Gandhi was among them. Before returning to the confines of Yeravda prison, however, he managed to send a last message to his followers.

      ‘The honour of India,’ he said, ‘has been symbolized by a fistful of salt in the hand of a man of non-violence. The fist which held the salt may be broken, but it will not yield up its salt.’

      

       London, 18 February 1947

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