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This discussion will focus on the non-violent protest on March 12, 1930, Gandhi's Salt March, through the lens of body politics and how as a social choreography this movement provoked immediate reaction and response from surrounding bodies within the community.
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Civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. Civil disobedience is generally regarded as more morally defensible than both ordinary offences and other forms of protest such as militant action or coercive violence. The Civil disobedience movement of India was a unique attempt where ordinary people accepting the leadership of Gandhi, in a non-violent way stood against the might of the British Empire. This event shook the foundation of the British Empire and also made a wide spectrum of people to accept a single goal: swarajya or self-rule. But therein lay the uncertainty; while Gandhi believed swarajya was inner transformation of Indians, other congress leaders thought it was either collapse of British administration or gaining of dominion status. To common man it was either complete independence or at least dominion status and a euphoria that they were into something very important. But when the collective effort of the people that cut across their regional, linguistic, caste and religious differences was not rewarded with either Independence or dominion status it led to fissures within congress and marred the image of the leader who took them through the movement. It also resulted in Gandhi moving away from the party he led for a period of nine years. The paper attempts to study the movement from one of its major centers and tries to understand what is important in a mass movement, the means or the end or both? Keywords: Civil disobedience, Satyagraha, Non-violence, Leadership, Dominion status, Gandhi.
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Gandhi was a special figure in the history of movements for social transformation, and as such has been the subject of countless studies – most recently by activist-scholars and students of civil resistance seeking to identify the key lessons that can be applied to more contemporary nonviolent movements for peace and justice. As such they have tended to focus on the large-scale satyagraha campaigns initiated by Gandhi in the Indian freedom struggle, such as the Salt March of 1930 that inaugurated a mass civil disobedience campaign and the 1942 ‘Quit India’ campaign. Less attention has been paid to exploring the significance and contemporary relevance of the other major dimension of Gandhi’s approach to transformation – constructive action to lay the foundations of new ways of living (what has been called by more recent generations of activists as pre-figurative politics).
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