Shin-Kickers From History: Gandhi’s March to the Sea
The American Revolution had the Boston Tea Party; the Indian independence movement had Gandhi's salt march.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British government in India had a heavily taxed monopoly on the production and sale of salt. It was illegal for anyone to make or sell salt. If a peasant who lived near the sea picked up a piece of natural salt, he could be arrested.
In 1930, Gandhi used the issue of the salt tax to turn non-violent protest against British rule into a mass movement. The Indian independence movement had long focused on British laws that concerned middle and upper class Indians, such as discrimination against Indians who applied for government jobs. Gandhi argued that the salt tax was an example of British misrule that affected all Indians.
Gandhi began his campaign against the salt tax on March 2 with a letter to Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, announcing his intention of breaking the salt laws. Ten days later he began a 240-mile march to the sea with seventy-eight followers--carefully chosen to represent a cross-section of India.
Crowds gathered along the route to cheer the marchers on. The international press followed them, reporting their progress each day to a watching world. More protestors joined the march each day. By the time Gandhi reached the shore, twenty-five days later, several thousands protestors marched with him.
Gandhi spent the night of April 5th in prayer with his followers. Early the next morning, he waded into the surf, then walked along the beach until he found a place where the evaporating water had left a thick crust of salt. He picked up a lump of natural salt and urged Indians to resist the tax by manufacturing their own salt.
People across India responded to the Mahatma's call for civil disobedience. Villagers all along India's coastline went to the beach to make salt. Volunteers from the nationalist movement openly sold illegal salt in the cities and distributed pamphlets telling people how to make salt. Over the course of a month, the police arrested tens of thousands of people for salt-related crimes and protests. True to Gandhi's principles, his followers did not resist arrest, even when the police beat them with clubs. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 4 and held without trial or sentence until January. News of the Mahatma's arrest led to more protests--and still more arrests.
With salt protests breaking out all over India, the British government was forced to negotiate with Gandhi. On March 5, 1931, Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi-Irwin pact, ending the salt protest. Indians were now allowed to collect salt for their own use. Gandhi and other political prisoners were released. More important, the British scheduled a conference in London to discuss changes in Britain's rule of India.
Gandhi's 240 mile march had brought India one step closer to independence.
Victorian People
Asa Briggs' Victorian People first crossed my path again when A. Scott Berg unexpectedly quoted Briggs in his new biography of Woodrow Wilson.* (Coming soon to a blog post near you.) Soon I was stumbling over it everywhere--a phenomenon I've commented on before. When I needed to check a quick fact about the Crimean war and wanted to avoid a special library run, I gave in and pulled Victorian People off the shelf. I was immediately sucked in. Quite frankly, the library trip would have been quicker.
In Victorian People, sub-titled A Reassessment of persons and themes, 1851-1867, Briggs sets out to understand what he describes as the "social balance" of the high Victorian period--a term that he immediately and appropriately qualifies. His work is in many ways a response to Lytton Strachey's iconoclastic Eminent Victorians. Strachey's work, published in 1918, is an act of rebellion against his immediate forebears. He indulges in a bit of hero-bashing: not only showing his selected "specimens" warts and all, but possibly making the warts a little bigger than warranted.** Like Strachey, Briggs considers a selection of "specimens": his own slate of eminent Victorians who made a contribution to the character of their time. Unlike Strachey, Briggs enjoys the distance of time. His Victorians are neither ridiculous nor veiled with period charm, but serious and interesting characters. Rather than choosing heroic figures like Florence Nightingale and General Gordon, Briggs considers social critics, chroniclers, reformers, and exemplars of social values. Men like John Bright, Samuel Smiles and Thomas Hughes.**
So far, Brigg's companion study, Victorian Cities has left me alone. I suspect it's just a matter of time.
* A salutary reminder that Wilson, linked irrevocably to World War I and an architect of the 20th century, was a child of the Victorian era. People very seldom fit neatly into one historical era. Even Victoria was a child of the Georgian period.
**Transforming the art of biography in the process. If you haven't read Eminent Victorians you've missed a sharp-penned treat.
***Yep, all men. Mr. Briggs, b. 1921, is a product of his time.
The Allure of the Archives
The tagline for History in the Margins reads "A blog about history, writing, and writing about history." (If you're reading this through e-mail you may never have seen it. Click on the title of the post and look at the top of the page. It's worth doing at least once because my blog design is beautiful.*) So far I haven't talked much about the process of writing in these pages--historical or otherwise. Today I'm going to stick my toes in the historiographical waters.
French historian Arlette Farge is known for her ability to evoke the everyday world of eighteenth-century France. In her classic work, The Allure of the Archives, originally published in 1989 and now translated for the first time into English, she pulls the curtain aside and shares what it's like to work with the raw materials on which her writing is based.
The Allure of the Archives combines elements of memoir, how-to-manual, and musings on the nature of history as a craft into an elegant whole. Farge moves effortlessly from the physical realities of working in the archives ("Whether it's summer or winter, you freeze") to the excitement of discovering a 200-year-old pouch of seeds attached to a letter as evidence to the philosophical challenges of constructing meaning from recorded fragments. She shares the feeling of dust-stained fingers, the exhaustion of copying, and the frustration of deciphering illegible texts. Abstract questions of historiography and practical discussions of how to organize archival research are lightened with often very funny vignettes of Farge's experiences working in the judicial Archives of the Bastille: from plotting to get the best seat in the reading room to navigating French bureaucratic mazes.
In less talented hands, this material would be no more than an academic work, interesting only to other academics. In fact, The Allure of the Archives is lyrical, suspenseful, and humorous in turn. Farge has created a fascinating account of how historians work that will appeal to scholars and history buffs alike.
* Thanks to the brilliant and patient ladies at Sumy Designs.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers