The technique that finally worked: refuse to co-operate, accept the punishment, and make the whole apparatus look absurd. It took thirty years and it was not quiet.
28 entries on this part of the floor. 1915 CE – 1947 CE.
1930
Took a legal technique — refusing to co-operate, and accepting the punishment for it — and scaled it to a subcontinent. Spun his own cloth daily, walked enormous distances, and made an empire look absurd by declining to shout at it.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
The American agronomist whose semi-dwarf wheat, adapted locally, is credited with averting famine across South Asia. He always insisted the Indian scientists deserved most of the credit.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Was jailed repeatedly in her own right, led women's campaigns in South Africa and India, and disagreed with her husband often and effectively. Died in detention at Aga Khan Palace.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Organised the Bardoli peasants so effectively they got their tax hike reversed, then after 1947 persuaded, pressured and occasionally strong-armed 560-odd princely states into joining India. Mostly with meetings.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Gandhi's first satyagraha in India, on behalf of indigo farmers in Bihar. He was ordered to leave the district, refused, and the case collapsed. The method was now proven on Indian soil.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
A set of low buildings by the river where the residents did their own cleaning, spun their own cloth, and grew a fair amount of their own food. He left in 1930 saying he would not return until India was free, and did not.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Youngest Congress President at 35, opposed Partition to the last, and as independent India's first Education Minister set up the IITs, the UGC and the national academies. His birthday is National Education Day.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Asked the country to skip one meal a week during a food crisis and did it himself first. Coupled the soldier and the farmer in a single slogan that stuck. Died in Tashkent the day after signing a peace agreement.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Passed the Indian Civil Service exam and resigned from it, escaped house arrest in disguise, travelled to Germany and then by submarine to Southeast Asia, and raised an army — including a women's regiment — to march on India from the east.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Salt was chosen precisely because it was so small: everybody needed it, everybody was taxed on it, and nobody could argue that making it was a crime with a straight face.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Published poetry at thirteen, became the first Indian woman to preside over the Congress, led the Dharasana salt raid after Gandhi's arrest, and was the country's first woman governor.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Aged 22, ran a secret radio transmitter that moved location almost daily to stay ahead of the police, broadcasting news the newspapers were not allowed to print. Caught after three months and jailed for four years.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
The entire Congress leadership was arrested within hours, so the movement was run for months by students, workers and people in their twenties — which is why it was so much less orderly and so much harder to suppress.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
Putting INA officers on trial in the Red Fort was the single biggest miscalculation of the endgame. The defence team included Nehru in a barrister's gown, and the public reaction convinced the government the Indian Army could no longer be relied on.
Find it on the floor: Sabarmati & the Salt Road
broadcasting from nowhere · lower level
Transmitted on 42.34 metres from a set of rooms in Bombay that changed every few days. Three young people, one engineer, and a signal the government could hear but not find.
Find it on the floor: The Secret Congress Radio
hoisted at 8:00 sharp · upper level
Ordinary citizens could not fly the flag freely until industrialist Naveen Jindal won his case in the High Court; the Flag Code of 2002 opened it up, and the Supreme Court upheld the right in 2004. Now they can, and increasingly do.
Find it on the floor: The Flag Deck
15 Aug 1947
Skipped the celebrations entirely and went to Bengal, where he fasted until the rioting stopped. Mountbatten later noted that one man had done in Calcutta what an entire division could not do in Punjab.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Saffron, white, green and the Ashoka wheel — the design finalised only three weeks before, with the spinning wheel replaced by the chakra from Sarnath.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Wrote most of his best books in prison, where he spent about nine years in total. Became the first Prime Minister and spent seventeen years trying to build a scientific, secular, non-aligned state at speed.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Started acting at four, worked in five languages, and was so reliably the biggest draw on any poster that producers called her the first female superstar of Indian cinema. Comic timing that nobody has matched.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Carrying what they could lift, going to a place they had never seen, from a place that had been home for as long as anyone could remember. Both directions. Both sides.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Seventh generation of a hereditary devadasi family of musicians and dancers, and the great Bharatanatyam performer of her century. Defended the sensuality of the older repertoire at exactly the moment respectable society wanted it sanitised.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
There are people alive today who remember this journey. Ask one before it is only in books.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
The Constituent Assembly sat through the night. At the stroke of midnight, a country of some 340 million people became responsible for itself, having spent the previous two centuries being told it could not be.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Brings milk to the village collection centre twice a day and is paid on fat content, measured in front of her. That transparency is the entire innovation.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Portrayed Hindu deities so often in Telugu cinema that audiences garlanded the screen. Founded a party in 1982 and won the state within nine months.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Cyril Radcliffe arrived in July, had never been east of Gibraltar, and finished the line by mid-August. The award was published two days after independence, so for forty-eight hours nobody knew which country they were in.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947
Between ten and twenty million people moved, and somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million died. The border was drawn in five weeks by a lawyer who had never been to India, using out-of-date maps.
Find it on the floor: Midnight, 1947