Journal of Mohandas K. Gandhi

April 20, 1930 – Yerwada Jail, Pune

Roots Beneath the Surface

The silence before dawn is not emptiness — it is a gathering. In it, I hear the whisper of millions who have not yet spoken aloud, but who are preparing to. Their resolve stirs like sap rising through the roots of a tree, unseen yet alive. Every morning now feels as though the country is stretching before it begins to walk.

This morning, Jagan, the young prison guard, brought me news from Madurai. “They are no longer waiting for leaders,” he said. “Even the children are making salt in the fields.” There was no hint of mockery in his voice, only awe.

I asked him if they had been punished.

He looked away. “The police hesitated. What can one do when a ten-year-old kneels in the sun and says, ‘I make this for my mother’?”

I had no answer. But my heart stirred with a strange mixture of humility and pride. Ahimsa is not inherited — it is discovered anew by each generation, and often most purely by those untouched by power or fear.

Later that day, I spoke through the bars with a teacher from Bengal, briefly held in the wing adjacent to mine. His words painted scenes more vivid than any newspaper:

“In our village,” he said, “the students arrived barefoot, not because they lacked shoes, but because the shoes had been stitched in Manchester.”

He asked one of the girls, “Why do you walk like this?”

She replied, “Because my mother weeps when she buys what Britain sells.”

A boy added, “We walk with India now.”

The teacher could not continue. He wept. So did I.

This movement was never meant to be mine. It belongs to the ones who walk barefoot without shame, who give up comfort without anger, who transform obedience into conscience.

These past days I have found a strange peace in repetition. I spin each morning with thread uneven and thin. The charkha creaks, the cotton resists, but there is discipline in its rhythm. It reminds me that not all resistance is dramatic. Sometimes, it is quiet and circular, like the wheel itself — moving forward through stillness.

The British do not yet understand what grows under their feet.

They seek to measure strength by numbers, weapons, and proclamations. But this is not that kind of war.

Our revolution is not fought with rifles, but with rituals. With bread shared instead of hoarded. With salt boiled beneath the sun. With head held high when the lash falls.

In Nasik, a woman placed a white cloth over her cow and declared it “India’s spirit.” When the constables came to confiscate her salt, she stood in front of the pot and said only, “This is not for sale.”

They asked for her name.

She said, “I have none that you would recognize.”

When they threatened her, she handed them a rose. One of them took it. And they walked away.

Such stories now arrive each day — not through papers or radios, but through voices too persistent to silence.

I keep thinking of a question that haunts me even in meditation: Are we only resisting, or are we becoming?

I believe it must be both.

Freedom is not just the absence of chains. It is the presence of dignity. A country may break its bonds, and yet remain unfree if its people forget how to live truthfully.

We must learn to carry truth without pride, and resistance without hatred.

If we are to govern ourselves, we must first rule our tempers, our egos, our thirst for vengeance.

Otherwise, what will distinguish us from those who ruled with muskets and laws they did not live by?

I walk the length of my cell and pray. I do not ask for release. I ask for clarity, for courage, and for patience. I ask that my people remember not only what they resist — but what they hope to become.

A gardener waters the soil even when the seed remains unseen. He does not say, “Where is the flower?” on the third day. He trusts.

So must we.

We pour salt into our wounds and call it healing. We spin broken cotton and call it national cloth. We fall and rise, again and again — not to prove something to the world, but to remember who we are without it.

Tomorrow will bring more news. More fear, perhaps. More small triumphs.

I will sit by the barred window and listen for the wind. And perhaps I will hear, once more, the sound of bare feet walking across a village road somewhere far away — walking with India.

We do not walk alone.

M.K. Gandhi

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