Remembering the 80 unsung heroes of Mahatma Gandhi's Dandi March

 

Dandi March was a giant stride in India’s freedom struggle. Little, however, is known about the 80 people — around 50 of them in their 20s and eight in their teens — who accompanied Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as he set off on March 12, 1930, for the 24-day, 338-km-long trek to defy the British-imposed salt tax.

The Mahatma’s unknown foot soldiers dispersed soon after they arrived at the Dandi seashore on April 5,1930.

 

Now, an effort is being made to identify them and give a face to each of those unsung heroes

Forty sculptors — nine of them foreigners — are working on a ‘National Dandi March Memorial’, on the IIT Bombay campus, recreating an important chapter of Indian history with the help of blurred photographs, oral descriptions and old newspapers

 Once the project is complete, in 2015, 80 life-size statues and a 15-feet-tall Gandhi statue will be installed on a 15-acre land opposite Saifee Villa where Gandhi halted for a night at the end of his Dandi March

Note

 The Salt March, also mainly known as the Salt Satyagraha, began with the Dandi March on March 12,1930, and was an important part of the Indian Independence Movement.

It was a direct action campaign of tax resistance and non-violent protest against the British salt monopoly in colonial India and triggered the wider Civil Disobedience Movement

Mahatma Gandhi  led the Dandi march from Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad to the coastal village of Dandi, located at a small town called Navsari in the State of Gujarat

As Mahatma Gandhi continued on this 24-day, 240-mile (390 km) march to produce salt without paying the tax, growing numbers of Indians joined him along the way.

 When Mahatma Gandhi broke the salt laws at 6:30 am on April 05,1930, it sparked large scale acts of  Civil Disobedience against the British Raj Salt Laws by millions of Indians.

The campaign had a significant effect on changing world and British attitude towards Indian independence and caused large numbers of Indians to join the fight for the first time.