Salt

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Light Writing on the Lathi Raj: Bombay, 1930–31’, History of Photography 45, nos. 3–4 (2021): 304–19.2. ‘Salt March 90th Anniversary Exhibition’, accessed July 3, 2023, http://www.gandhisaltmarch90.com/.3. On Vedaranyam, see David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad: Nationalist Politics in South India, 1919–1937 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977): 118–23.4. J.T. Marten, Census of India, 1921, Vol. II, India, Part II: Tables (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1923): 200.5. The image of the Golas (salt-makers) in Rajasthan was published in The People of India, Vol. 4, ed. J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye (London: W.H. Allen, 1869): see British Library (BL) Online Gallery, photo 15/10 (43). Other informative images of Indian salt-making can be found (for Sambhar Lake in Rajasthan in the 1870s) in BL Online Gallery photos 355/1(58) to (61); and in C.F. Strickland, ‘“Salt Making” in India’, Scientific American 144, no. 4 (1931): 260–61.6. ‘Archaeological Survey of India Collections’, British Library, Collection Guides, accessed July 3, 2023, https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/archaeological-survey-of-india-collections.7. This diversity is apparent in George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, Vol. 6, no. 2 (London: W.H. Allen, 1893): 399–430.8. See also Kate Boehme, ‘Smuggling India: Demonstrating Western India’s Illicit Export Trade, 1818–1870’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, no. 4 (2015): 685–704.9. For chemical analysis of Indian salt and the question of its purity vis-à-vis Cheshire salt, see J. M’Clelland, ‘On the Manufacture of Salt in India’, Calcutta Journal of Natural History 2, no. 6 (1841): 244–57; H. Giraud, Chemical Examiner, to Secretary, Medical Board, Bombay, November 12, 1847, F/4/2312: 119646, India Office Records [IOR], BL.10. Francis Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987): 9, 103–11.11. Speech at Khadi and Village Industries Exhibition, Lucknow, March 28, 1936, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 62 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1975): 298, emphasis mine.12. W. Ainslie, Materia Indica, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1826): 371; Times of India, January 18, 1875: 2.13. Report on the Administration of the Salt and Continental Customs Department of the Bombay Presidency, 1874–75 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1875): 6.14. Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 7 (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1909): 228–36.15. Consider, for instance, the 26,000 head of Banjara cattle, laden with salt, leaving the Kharaghora salt works in Gujarat during 1875–76, perhaps the last occasion (before famine and the railways finally wrecked their trade) when such huge numbers were possible: Report on the Administration of the Salt and Continental Customs Department of the Bombay Presidency, 1875–76 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1876): 15.16. J. Campbell, Assistant Surveyor-General, to Chief Secretary, Madras, September 11, 1841, F4/2019: 90462, IOR.17. Indian Tariff Board, Written Evidence Recorded during Enquiry on the Salt Industry, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1930).18. ‘[T]he salt makers of the Rann [of Kutch] are a notoriously troublesome set of men’: Salt Report for the Whole Presidency of Bombay for 1863–64 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1864): 86.19. Salt Report for the Whole Presidency of Bombay for 1869–70 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1864): 64; Report on the Administration in the Bombay Presidency, 1874–75 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1875): 24.20. In the wake of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in 1931, consideration was given to reviving Orissa’s salt trade. One argument against this was the negative impact of cyclones and other environmental factors that militated against solar evaporation: C.H. Pitt, Report on the Investigations into the Possibilities of Salt Production in Bengal and Bihar and Orissa (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1932).21. For high costs and declining resources in Bengal’s salt production, see Sayako Kanda, ‘Environmental Changes, the Emergence of a Fuel Market, and the Working Conditions of Salt Makers in Bengal, c. 1780–1845’, International Review of Social History 55, supplement 18 (2010): 123–51.22. The previous year’s figure was 258,350: Report of the Administration of the Salt Department of the Bombay Presidency, 1921–22 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1923): 9.23. Francis Day, The Fishes of Malabar, Vol. 8 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1865): xv–xx; Times of India, March 3, 1876: 3; Times of India, April 23, 1878: 3; William Robert Cornish, Reports on the Nature of the Food of the Inhabitants of the Madras Presidency (Madras: United Scottish Press, 1863): 39–40.24. However, in 1863, Agurias were said to be reluctant to work at Fatehpur in the Rann of Kutch because they could find more remunerative employment elsewhere: Salt Report, 1863–64, 12.25. James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, 1837): 69.26. Report on the Administration of the Salt, 1874–75, 15; Report of the Administration of the Salt Department in the Bombay Presidency, 1918–19 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1919): 6.27. G.W. Steevens, In India (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 2nd ed., 1899): 308–11.28. Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘The Environmental Costs of Irrigation in British India: Waterlogging, Salinity, Malaria’, in Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, ed. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995): 237–59; Katrina Proust, ‘Salinity in Colonial Irrigation: British India and South-Eastern Australia’, Australian Geographer 39, no. 2 (2008): 131–47.29. See, for example, John Murray, ‘On the Use of Saline Enemata in Cholera’, Madras Quarterly Medical Journal 1, no. 2 (1839): 216–28.30. Cornish, Reports, 35–44; Report on the Diet of Prisoners and of the Industrial and Labouring Classes in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1865); Report of the Indian Jail Conference Assembled in Calcutta in January–March 1877 (Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1870): 142.31. Report on the Administration of the Salt Department in the Bombay Presidency, 1872–73 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1874): 11.32. Report on the Diet, 130. Others criticised the excessive use of ‘condiment salt’: J.W. Johnston, A Contribution to the Dynamics of Racial Diet in British India (Edinburgh: Machlachlan & Stewart, 1876): 5–7.33. W.R. Aykroyd, Note on the Results of Diet Surveys in India (Simla: Indian Research Fund Association, 1939); V.R. Khanolkar, ‘Notes on a Programme of Work for a Study of Water and Salt Requirements in Indians’, in Report of the Second Meeting of the Clinical Research Advisory Committee, New Delhi, 29 November 1945, Indian Research Fund Association, IOR, V/26/850/9.34. See, for example, Times of India, February 12, 1878: 2; Times of India, May 8, 1884: 3

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