Walking to Dandi by Harmony Siganporia, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad, retracing the route of Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March, in reverse. She walked this route of just under four hundred kilometres under twenty-five days much as Gandhi and the original band of marchers had done in 1930. The 'DandiPath' is the setting under which she explores the story of modern Gujarat, tracing the contours of the state's seismic shift towards espousing the narrative of vikas, abandoning in the process even the possibility of a quest for swaraj. Hindutva, and this book is an effort to explore this theme, even as it attempts to unearth whether there remain any competing epistemes to it: memories of the region's prior avatar as the setting against which Gandhi puts into practice his 'experiments' with truth, non-violent civil disobedience, satyagraha, and mass political communication. This project investigates what, if anything, remains of the Salt March in modern Gujarat's cultural memory even as it attempts to outline the State's current lived reality, filling out the contours of the 'single story' of vikas with which it has come to be so closely associated. | Walking to Dandi by Harmony Siganporia, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters