All the talk about marginalized people during class Wednesday made me think hard about oppressed minorities - not the Mayans in Mexico, whom I knew/know little about, but about the minorities I have studied: the Cherokees, the Algonquians, the Wampanoags. It also made me think about a different kind of Indian, those Indians who did not take up weapons but instead peacefully worked their way in from the margins: people who actually reside in India.
When a people are on the margins of society, they have a voice; it just is jumbled, confused, lacking a single coherent direction. The government can hear a rumble, but it is easy to ignore; there needs to be an instrument of the people, a trumpet, if you will, who can amplify and focus the message of the masses, choose certain symbols and phrases to hammer home, and turn a disgruntled populace into a force of destiny. One such counter-elite, and his campaign, was Mahatma Gandhi’s “Salt Satyagraha” – the Salt March. “Satyagraha” roughly means “truth-force”, and it was the non-violent resistance tactic that Gandhi chose during India’s independence movement. Gandhi’s vision of success through non-cooperation with a corrupt state culminated in his march, from March 12 to April 6 of 1930, in resistance of the Indian Salt Taxes. Since 1835, Imperial Britain had been imposing ever-harsher taxes on salt in colonial India. Tax rates were outrageously high on imported salt, but salt had to be imported, because it was illegal for Indians to sell or produce salt. This was particularly egregious because salt was abundant naturally at the coast. Salt, a necessity of life, was kept from the impoverished Indian multitudes by high fences at the coasts that prevented them from finding it, and by high Imperial taxes that kept them from buying it. Gandhi, therefore, selected wisely when he made the salt tax the primary issue of his first act of Satyagraha. Indian leaders were skeptical, thinking Gandhi should have picked a more salient bone to pick, like a land-revenue boycott (Gandhi, 2010). However, Gandhi the counter-elite had made a brilliant choice, because salt turned out to hold tremendous symbolic significance for the Indian people. Salt was something all Indians cherished and needed; it was something that washed up on their shores in large quantities; and yet what rightfully belonged to the Indian people had to be passed through a greedy, foreign middleman. Indian nationalism was inflamed in a way it had never been before. When Gandhi illegally took up a piece of salt from the coast, surrounded by media and proclaiming “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire,” he inspired Indians to take their subcontinent back. Millions of Indians began to illegally make and buy salt, openly rebelling against the British oppressors; over 50,000 were imprisoned (The 1930 Salt March, 2010). So passionate for their nationalistic cause were these Indians that they were willing to face British machine guns without violence on their own part. When India eventually gained its independence, it owed no small thanks to the efforts of Gandhi to remind Indians that their land belongs to them - and for reminding them that people on the margins do not have to dwell there.
Anti-imperialism is a touchy topic. But, I ask you, are you aware that after years of holding power, the Ghandi regime became increasingly corrupt and oppressive. He is even as stating toward the end of his life that "...if I had guns it sure would have been easier." Yeah, so much for not being a hypocrite, Ghandi. The new Indian government became protectionist and highly regulated. It wasn't until the early 90's that India began to reopen to foreign competition and become prosperous without years of British help as they had had under imperialism.
ReplyDeleteI was not here making a commentary on the relative transparency or "goodness" of Gandhi, or on Imperialism, or even on India. I was simply noting the excellent job Gandhi did rallying a marginalized population and bringing it to prominence, a fact that would be hard to deny. And besides, whether Gandhi was a hypocrite or not, he inspired people like Marin Luther King Jr. directly with his Satyagraha concept, which continued to work effectively with American marginalized groups (as everyone who has ever gone to an American public school knows very well).
ReplyDeleteBut, how shall we classify marginalization? Whose fualt is it? Perhaps we should stop blaming the "Establishment" or the powerful members of society for the plight of the disenfranchized and poor? Maybe, just maybe, those who have become marginalized have become so through there own inaction?
ReplyDeleterawr.
ReplyDeleteBut how did any "inaction" on the part of the Indian people bring about an incredible unfair salt tax? There was absolutely no reason for the tax - regardless of any benefits British Imperialism may have brought about on the subcontinent, the taxes on salt that Britain imposed from 1835 on were gratuitous, unnecessary, and wholly for keeping a downtrodden people downtrodden. It wasn't as though by "working harder" Indian poor could overcome that tax on an essential, absolutely necessary part of life - this wasn't a welfare type situation, where if only the Indians WANTED to they could climb up the ladder. And heck, even though in many, many cases the tax devastated the wallets of poor Indians - the tax, and the uprising against it, was NOT about the money. It was about something BELONGING to India - salt, salt that washed up on the shore, salt that any person should have been able to collect - being separated from the people by FENCES, fences built by people who lived on a tiny island a continent away. How is that type of economic marginalization and repression of national identity by a foreign people the "fault" of anyone but the foreigners? I don't understand how the salt tax could be seen as anything but oppressive, and I don't understand how it was the fault of the Indians that this type of tax was levied against them.
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