The Dandi March: Why Did So Many Women Participate?

The Dandi March and the following Civil Disobedience movement launched by Gandhi was a turning point for women’s participation in nationalism. While earlier movements like the Bengal Partition Protests were constricted to a particular region, or like non-cooperation mostly saw the participation of the middle-class elite, women from all sections of society and from all over the country emerged from their homes and joined the salt satyagraha. 

Beginning of the movement

In February 1930, following the breakdown of talks with Lord Irwin, Gandhi announced he would launch a salt satyagraha by marching from Sabarmati to Dandi. Originally no women had been included in the march. Khurshedben Naoroji and Margaret Cousins protested against this decision, but Gandhi remained firm. 

According to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya Gandhi wished to exclude women from the march, but it was the Congress Committee that barred women from the satyagraha itself; she went to Gandhi, asking him to make a special appeal to women to join the movement, which she took to the Congress Committee, forcing them to withdraw their veto and choose women to lead satyagrahas across the country. 

The Dandi March

The Dandi march began on the March 12th  and ended on April 6th. Along the route, Gandhi and his fellow satyagrahis stopped at twenty-four villages, where he urged women to step out of their homes and make salt. For the first time since the birth of the nationalist movement, women from all social classes, from all over the country participated, breaking the salt law, organising protests and picketing shops. 

‘Women young and old, rich and poor, came tumbling out in their hundreds and thousands, shaking off the traditional shackles that had held them so long.’ Out of the over 80,000 people arrested during the Salt Satyagraha, more than 17,000 were women. 

Why did so many women participate? 

One reason for the mass participation of women is of course the gradual efforts of the women’s movement and Gandhi’s integration of women, however the subject of this satyagraha: salt was a key factor. 

As penned by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom, ‘The salt satyagraha must stand out as not only unique but as an incredible form of revolution in human history. The very simplicity of this weapon was as appealing as intriguing. So far as women were concerned it was ideally tailor-made for them. As women naturally preside over culinary operations, salt is for them the most intimate and indispensable ingredient.’ 

Civil Disobedience 

Separate women’s organisations- the Desh Sevika Sangh, Nari Satyagraha Samiti, Ladies’ Picketing Board and more were set up to mobilise and organise women’s processions, pickets and prabhatpheris. In the countryside, the government reacted to protests by confiscating household goods, implements and land, which they then auctioned. Women organised boycotts of auctions, forcing goods to be sold at laughably low prices. Women satyagrahis, some with babies in arm camped outside the homes of those who did buy goods, occupying their houses or going on stay-in hunger strikes as strategies to exert social pressure and force buyers to return goods. 

Written by: Devi Sankhla