Biography | Mahatma Gandhi — The Ashram Gate He Left at 6.30 for the Salt Sea

People treat the Salt March as a coastline event that began at Dandi.

The first step was this gate on the Sabarmati.

Gandhi had lived at the ashram, on the west bank of the river outside Ahmedabad, since 1917. Hridaya Kunj, the small cottage he shared with Kasturba, still stands inside the compound.

On the morning of 12 March 1930 he came out of his room at 6.10, prayed, checked his watch, and at 6.30 began walking south with seventy-eight ashram inmates in rows of three.

The planned route was 241 miles, through the villages of Kheda, Broach and Surat, to the tidal flats at Dandi. The party reached Dandi on 5 April. At 8.30 the next morning Gandhi lifted a lump of natural salt and broke the government's salt law.

He had said he would not return to the ashram until swaraj. He did not come back to live here.

The grounds are a national monument. The later museum block is the work of Charles Correa. The pin is the ashram from which the column walked, not the museum added in 1963.

Photo: S.K. Desai, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons