Gandhi and about 78 companions departed Sabarmati Ashram bound for the coastal village of Dandi, launching a 24-day march that became the most visible act of civil disobedience in India's independence struggle. The tax on salt, a substance every Indian needed, symbolized colonial control over daily life, and Gandhi's simple act of making it himself electrified a nation.
Gandhi was 61 years old when he picked up his walking stick and left the ashram at dawn, telling reporters he would not return until India had won freedom or he was dead. He chose salt deliberately: it was something every household needed and could not legally produce without paying a British tax, making the law absurd and universally resented.
By the time the marchers reached Dandi on April 5th, thousands had joined the procession, and newspapers worldwide were covering it daily. On April 6th, Gandhi bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt from the beach, breaking the law in the simplest possible gesture. Tens of thousands of Indians followed suit across the subcontinent, manufacturing illegal salt in open defiance.
The march produced no immediate policy change and Gandhi himself was arrested weeks later, but it reshaped world opinion. American newspapers ran front-page photos of the elderly man in a homespun dhoti walking past staring villagers, and the image of nonviolent resistance to empire became a template later studied by civil rights organizers from Montgomery to Soweto.
Key people: Mahatma Gandhi