Salt, Protest and Public Health in Modern India

Miles Taylor, Tanuja Kothiyal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040890202
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book explores the central role of salt in modern Indian history through eleven specially commissioned essays from an international range of scholars. Down to 1947, the British controlled the production, distribution and sale of salt in India. Salt was taxed, with the burden falling disproportionately on the poor. By the early 20th century, salt yielded the largest revenue of all commodities taxed by the Government of India. When Mohandas Gandhi sought to mobilize the Indian poor against colonial rule in 1930, he chose a march from Ahmedabad to the sea-salt producing coastline of Gujarat as an act of civil disobedience, projecting the Indian struggle for independence to an unprecedented global audience. Using salt as a lens, these essays reconstruct how one of life's necessities remained a central issue of public policy in both colonial and independent India, exploring the entangled histories of colonial state making, economic policies, individual ambitions, legal entanglements, protest and public health.

This volume will be invaluable for students, researchers and scholars interested in South Asian studies, Economic History and Public Policy. The book covers broad subject areas including colonial administration, taxation and revenue systems, civil disobedience movements, economic nationalism, public health policy, and the social and cultural significance of essential commodities in shaping state-society relations in modern India.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of South Asian Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Salt, Protest and Public Health in Modern India
• 1 A Precarious Trade: The English East India Company and Its Interventions in the Balasore Salt Trade
• 2 Monopoly, Excise and the Salt Supply Conundrum in British India
• 3 Salt, Sovereignty and Law in Colonial India: The Case of Rajputana Salt in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 4 The Ungrudging Indian: The Political Economy of Salt in India, c. 1878–1947
• 5 From Colonial India to Semi-Colonial Republican China: Imaginaries and Realities of Civil Service and State-Building in Salt Administration, 1912–45
• 6 Salt and the National Imaginary: The Photojournalism of the Dandi Satyagraha
• 7 Self-Sacrifice, Suffrage and Socialism: Gandhi and the Mobilisation of Women, 1930–31
• 8 Setting India on the Wrong Path: Robert McCarrison’s Goitre Research, 1906–35
• 9 Salt Workers in Contemporary South India: Change and Continuity
• Salt: An Afterword
• Index