WALKING FROM DANDI: In Search of Vikas by Harmony Siganporia. Oxford , University Press, Delhi, 2022. 310 pages
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robably few other figures in modern history have lived their life as openly and transparently as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Be it his autobiography or the hundred volumes of his Collected Works, there are no aspects of his life and living, his thinking, doubts and convictions that have not been laid bare for all to dissect. Little surprise that Gandhi also remains one of the most studied of public figures, one whose ability to excite attention has not dimmed over time, not just in older generations but equally younger scholars and activists who continue to mine his writing and action to engage and make better (and hopefully deeper) sense of the many issues that continue to confound us: social and economic equity, living in harmony with nature, the relationship between the individual and the community, possible frameworks for peaceful inter-community living – and the list can be expanded. But possibly, nothing is more important than his idea of freedom and truth and the constant need for experimentation to evolve a more satisfactory balance between the inner and outer life, even if it means going against the tide of tradition or contemporary consensus.
Again, it should come as no surprise that the 150th anniversary of his birth gave impetus to a fresh spate of commentary and activity, both official and otherwise. In this crowded universe Walking from Dandi by Harmony Siganporia stands out as an unusual, evocative and insightful meditation on what Gandhi and one of his iconic ventures – the 1930 Salt March from Ahmedabad to Dandi on the Gujarat coast – means to a young Gujarati today. Drawing upon the memorable work of Thomas Weber, On the Salt March: The Historiography of Mahatma Gandhi’s March to Dandi (Harper Collins, 1997/2009), Harmony Siganporia, with two friends, SushmitPrabhudas and Chirag Mediratta, decide to retrace the route of Gandhi’s Salt March, but in reverse – from Dandi to Ahmedabad, a route of just under 400 kilometres over 25 days, much as the original marchers had done in 1930. The ‘Dandi Path’ is the setting against which she explores the story of modern Gujarat (the Gujarat that our present prime minister takes great pride in having inaugurated), ‘and the states’ seismic shift towards espousing the narrative of vikas, abandoning in the process the possibility of a quest for swaraj.’ Simultaneously, she attempts to explore the ramifications of ‘modern Hindutva’, and whether the region still retains any of its earlier lineages as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his experiments with truth, non-violent civil disobedience and satyagraha. Finally, it is also a story of personal transformation, of how walking in the footsteps of the Mahatma can spark off changes in the understanding of one’s self and its relationship with society.
Walking from Dandi is a fascinating and deep tract; both the field notes (an ethnographic account) and the thoughts and concerns that swirl up before, during and following the walk, are captured in the introductory chapters, the conclusion and the Afterword, deploying both the experiences/encounters during the walk and the author’s training in semiotics as a researcher/teacher of culture and communication.
The Dandi March and subsequent Salt Satyagraha arguably constitute possibly one of the most enduring chapters of the Indian nationalist movement, overshadowed possibly, at least for this reviewer, by Gandhi’s last pilgrimage in Noakhali to calm communal conflagration and restore some sense of sanity and harmony in the harrowing days accompanying Partition. Following the ‘failure’ of the first non-cooperation movement (called off following the Chauri Chaura incidents), the decision to launch a struggle for the abolition of salt tax surprised many, including many of his close associates, and the British, most of whom saw this as a non-issue. But for Gandhi, the salt tax was a most unjust imposition affecting all, not merely economically but because it symbolised a deeper intrusion in the ability of common people to exercise control over a fundamental necessity; in short as ‘immoral’. Challenging it by summoning the agency of people to shake off control was visualized as the first step towards breaking the shackles of colonial domination.
It is important to remember that following the ‘breaking of the law’ through the simple act of ‘collecting’ a handful of natural salt, nearly 90,000 people across India followed his example, the movement only intensifying after Gandhi’s arrest and continuing for nearly a year.
The Salt Satyagraha also marks a ‘turning point’, most so in the participation of ordinary women, Gandhi’s chosen leaders in the movement against foreign cloth and alcohol.
We also need to understand the actual mechanics of the march – how the participants were selected (why only men), their training and preparation, the route followed, where to halt for the night, the surveys conducted in each chosen spot so that Gandhi could combine the local/village concerns to the wider issues in his evening address, and so on. Unsurprisingly, his lectures focused on not just the unjustness of the salt tax, eschewing alcohol, promoting khadi, the ‘scrouge of untouchability’ and communal violence, but also the many fault lines in the local community. There were also ‘rules’ for the marchers, much like in the Ashram. And finally, there was the communication strategy, both for people within the country and abroad.
By all accounts, the March was a success.
The chapter on ‘Walking’ merits repeated reading. Siganporia defines walking as ‘liminal’ – an act which connects two points in space and time. ‘A walker is suspended between two worlds: the old order s/he left behind, and a new one as yet un-assumed’ (p 17). She quotes Thoreau: ‘Only when we have paid our debts… when we are truly “free” – that we are ready to walk.’ In this sense, walking is a ‘full body act of independence.’ Possibly this is why so much significance is given in our tradition to walking/ yatra/pilgrimage.
Siganporia also explores the many differences between walking alone or in a group, aimlessly or for a purpose, as a man or woman, in a city or rural areas.
‘It is also only when walking that people can witness you, just as you can see them and bear witness to who they are. In seeking to understand and empower the other, one brings the self into cognitive existence; thus, also strengthen our ability to identify with another, and to refuse to identify solely with oneself.’ (p 25)
One wonders, however, the stark contrast with those in the thousands forced to walk, earlier in the aftermath of partition, and more recently, the ‘out of work’ forced out of the cities in the wake of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown that was suddenly announced, trudging back to their villages. How did this walk transform them and their view of the world that they inhabit?
Equally insightful is the discussion on Gandhi’s understanding of walking, in particular his ability to overcome the binaries suggested in semiotic theory, for instance, ‘walking alone even while surrounded by scores of people.’ Or the discussion on how Gandhi would be photographed, insisting that he would not pose and should be captured in his everyday acts – his attempt, while knowing he is being photographed, to rise above it and carry on with his routine. (The stark contrast with our ‘leader’ could not be clearer!)
Drawing upon Gandhi’s piece, ‘In Praise of Walking’ (Harijan, 20 July 1934) Siganporia asks:
‘So what did walking mean to Gandhi? How did he turn an act most bodies can engage in into a form of political communication? What was the Gandhian Walk? Were there several kinds? People walk, often purposively, but how is this leveraged into creating an optics of protest?’ (p 22)
The field notes (Chapters 4-7) are replete with pithy details – the preparation for the march; the attempt to stay in the same sites/spots where original marchers stayed; talking to villagers about what they may have heard about the Salt March and how they remember it; conversations around daily life, economic concerns, inter-caste/community relations, how the locals look at migrant workers, their aspirations and fears, how they relate to the current talk/practice of vikas promoted aggressively from the time our prime minister / then chief minister embarked on his project of Navi Gujarat.
It is clear that the world Harmony and her co-marchers had traversed is a transformed one – more urban, more interconnected, more individualistic and self-centred than the one Gandhi and his group may have engaged with. Not to say that Gandhi’s Gujarat was necessarily more appealing. For instance, in many places the salt marchers were put up, not in the village proper, but in a maidan/structure close by, possibly because the local community was uneasy with Gandhi’s appeal to eschew caste/community discord and that his group included members tat were seen as not quite kosher.
‘Gujarat was clearly willing to listen to Gandhi when it came to land revenue, and even possibly labour related issues as when he was asked to mediate the conflict between mill owners and workers in Ahmedabad in 1918, but when it came to uprooting untouchability the dubiousness and, in some cases, outright hostility with which the region confronted him became glaringly obvious’ (p 34).
It is instructive that Gujarati society has changed little; if anything, the situation is worse.
Equally significant was the relative absence of women in the public sphere, including among those who gathered to ‘watch’ the marchers or greet Gandhi, barring, of course, poor migrant workers. The lone exception was the group that collected at Sabarmati Ashram to flag off the marchers. Some accounts even compare the occasion to the citizens of Ayodhya watching Ram leaving the city en route to his vanvas. Somewhat surprisingly, though Gujarat is seen by many as a safer space for women, this seems to hold even now.
It is also instructive to read her accounts of ‘walking as a woman’ – the gaze she encounters, the difficulties of arranging for accommodation as a single woman accompanied by unrelated males, and despite her fluent Gujarati, being regularly taken for an outsider, a non-resident coming to study the locals. True, not all experiences were discomfiting, as enough individuals in most places were polite, even welcoming, curious about what this motley group was up to, and eventually, accepting though reluctantly.
It is worth underscoring why Siganporia et al. chose to march in the reverse, from Dandi to Ahmedabad. As it turned out, their starting belief that Dandi, a small town in the boondocks of the coast, would be more akin to Gandhi’s world in 1930, did not quite bear out, if the descriptions of the memorial commemorating the Salt March and the remarks of the locals is any indication. Ahmedabad, of course, symbolises the present – big roads and glitzy malls. In that sense the ‘journey’ from Gandhi’s desired swaraj to the modern Indian state’s choice of vikas tells us the story.
Nothing captures the vikas of the Gujarat model better than the reported plans of the government to ‘revitalize’ Sabarmati Ashram, to transform the Ashram into a site for the onlooker/visitor, akin to the Akshardham temple. Whatever shape the Sabarmati Ashram may assume, and no matter how many visitors it may attract, what is clear is that no longer will it remain a site of quiet reflection. Possibly Gandhi had foreseen what came eventually to be – his vision of swaraj as the collective expression of autonomous, free and disciplined individuals grounded in their communities was on the losing
side. Possibly this is why he never returned to the Ashram. Modi’s Gujarat/India only vindicates his apprehension.
Fortunately, Siganporia is no uncritical admirer of Gandhi or of the past and she leaves it to us, the readers, to make sense of how the state of Gujarat has transformed over the 90 plus years since the Dandi March and how the residents see the change.
Finally, it is worth reflecting on how the experience of ‘walking in the footsteps of Gandhi’ impacted Harmony Siganporia – both as a researcher and as an individual in freshly re-examining the compact between her self and the society in which she lives. Read another way, it is an invitation to all of us to reflect on our own walk.
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Reprinted with kind permission Tejbir Singh, editor, Seminar magazine.
Harsh Sethi is former consulting editor, Seminar, Delhi
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