The English summer season in 1930 was a troubled one for the British Empire. Within the 1930 Ashes collection, legendary Australian cricketer Don Bradman tore into English bowling, scoring 974 runs (a document nonetheless on) with such ferocity that it humiliated the hosts within the Western hemisphere. Contemporaneously, within the grand halls of the Viceroy’s home in Delhi, negotiations with Indian leaders examined the nerves of Lord Irwin within the Japanese hemisphere. Simply three months earlier than Bradman’s exploits, Mahatma Gandhi had set out on his legendary march to the Arabian Sea, scooping up a fistful of salt at Dandi, declaring defiance towards an unjust tax. To the English, each bat and their crown jewel gave the impression to be conspiring towards their vaunted status.
For the world, the Dandi March was a masterstroke of political theatre. Salt, an on a regular basis necessity, grew to become a logo of oppression and considered one of liberation. Gandhi’s alternative of salt was genius: he reworked the Indian Nationwide Congress from an city debating membership right into a mass motion. However whereas most histories have framed the salt difficulty in financial or political phrases, little or no has been mentioned in regards to the physiological actuality of salt starvation and its tragic penalties in colonial India.
Salt past symbolism
Salt just isn’t merely a condiment: sodium chloride is indispensable for human survival. It maintains the steadiness of fluids within the human physique, regulates blood strain, and permits muscle tissue and nerves to operate. Heavy sweating throughout handbook labour drains salt relentlessly in scorching, tropical climates like that of India. Disadvantaged of salt, the physique can’t preserve its sodium ranges, resulting in hyponatremia, which is a situation marked by fatigue, cramps, weak point, confusion, and in extreme circumstances, loss of life.
Diarrhoeal diseases, frequent in 18th and Nineteenth-century India as a consequence of poor city sanitation, worsened issues. Every bout of diarrhoea can strip the physique of crucial sodium reserves. With out replenishment, rehydration fails, and what begins as “bowel complaints” can finish in loss of life. Trendy drugs acknowledges this by putting salt on the coronary heart of oral rehydration solutions (ORS). However in colonial India, taxed salt usually lay past the attain of the poorest households.
Economics of deprivation
Beneath the Mughals, salt was flippantly taxed at round 2.5 % for Muslim merchants and 5% for Hindu merchants. The British, nevertheless, turned salt right into a income machine. After Robert Clive established the Unique Firm in 1765, the East India Firm loved monopoly rights. Wholesale costs doubled, with tax usually accounting for two-thirds of the ultimate value. By the Nineteenth century, a maund of salt might price round 5 rupees, whereas an agricultural labourer earned barely three or 4 rupees a month.
A household required about 40 kilos of salt yearly to stay wholesome. To purchase this a lot, a employee needed to spend 2.5 to three.5 months of earnings. For peasants, that meant residing on a perpetual salt deficit. Salt consumption in taxed areas of Bengal was generally as little as 8 kilos per grownup per yr, in comparison with 13 kilos in areas with untaxed salt. At its peak, the salt tax contributed 8 to 10 % of British India’s common income, a staggering determine for a single important commodity, a income that was extracted by depriving Indian our bodies of what they wanted.
Famines magnified this tragedy. In the course of the famine of the 1800s till until 1943, tens of millions of deaths had been formally recorded, although later estimates advised many extra. Measuring each day salt consumption is tough, and in colonial instances, the signs of hyponatremia had been largely unrecognised, usually misattributed to obscure illnesses, making correct attribution of salt-related deaths elusive. There was no remission on salt responsibility even throughout the famine years. Salt starvation then, was each a hidden trigger and an aggravating consider mortality.
To present the British the good thing about the doubt, sodium as a chemical component was remoted solely in 1807 by British chemist Humphry Davy, and the scientific understanding of hyponatremia got here a lot later (mockingly, within the Thirties). Colonial directors didn’t totally grasp that taxing salt was not simply an financial imposition however a direct physiological assault on human our bodies. But it’s equally true that had they recognized, little may need modified. For the empire, income mattered greater than Indian lives, and racial disdain usually blunted compassion.
Gandhi’s perception
In figuring out salt, Gandhi elevated the wrestle for freedom to a battle for survival. It was Gandhi’s brilliance that recognised salt because the pivot between physiology and politics. By selecting salt, he struck the place each Indian, be it the farmer or employee or housewife, felt the ache. No summary argument about British misrule might mobilise the lots like a handful of salt. His Dandi March in March 1930 was each symbolic and sensible. It was an assault on a tax that drained our bodies as a lot because it stuffed imperial coffers.
Salt right now
Salt remained taxed for many years in impartial India, although by no means with such cruelty. With the Items and Companies Tax (GST) introduction in 2017, salt was lastly exempted from tax, symbolically recognising its political and historic weight.
At present, the issue just isn’t salt starvation however salt excess. Excessive sodium consumption fuels hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. Like a lot of the trendy world, India struggles with the results of processed food laden with salt. The story of salt in India is that of a cycle of deprivation and extra. Had Gandhi been alive right now, he may need marched not from Sabarmati to Dandi, however maybe from Dandi to Gandhinagar, urging taxation. Salt, that almost all atypical substance then, tells us a rare story of the empire, resistance, and well being.
(Dr. C. Aravinda is an educational and public well being doctor. The views expressed are private. aravindaaiimsjr10@hotmail.com)
Printed – September 25, 2025 06:24 pm IST
