History Of Indian Freedom Struggle By — G Venkatesan

Thatha’s own story began in 1930. He was a young man, twenty-two, with calloused hands from the loom. When he heard that Gandhiji was marching to the sea to make salt at Dandi, a fire lit in his belly. Our village didn't have a sea; it had a muddy tank. But the leader of our local Congress committee, a fiery teacher named Subramaniam, announced, "We will break the Salt Law here. We will dig the mud and boil it."

Thatha was eventually arrested a year later for shouting "Vande Mataram" outside a British cloth shop. He spent six months in a prison cell so crowded that men slept sitting up, back-to-back. But he smiled when he told me this. "The British thought jail was punishment. For us, it was university. I learned to read the Bhagavad Gita there. I learned that we were all brothers—a Muslim from Peshawar, a Sikh from Amritsar, a lawyer from Madras. The British chained our bodies, but inside that cell, they unchained our minds." history of indian freedom struggle by g venkatesan

He said he did not shout or dance. He simply sat down, took a pinch of the earth from the roadside, and placed it on his tongue. He closed his eyes. "It tasted sweeter than any salt I ever made," he told me. Thatha’s own story began in 1930