Journal of Mohandas K. Gandhi

May 1, 1930 – Yerwada Jail, Pune

The Grain and the Flame

This morning, the jailer told me the harvest has begun early in some villages. “The heat came quickly,” he said, “but the fields held strong.”

There was something in his voice — not resignation, but wonder. I asked him if he had ever sown seeds. He shook his head. “Only pulled weeds,” he said.

I smiled and replied, “That, too, is part of freedom.”

I have heard from letters passed through cloth and code that villagers in Punjab now mark their grain sacks with salt. A hand-drawn spiral in white, no larger than a rupee. A quiet emblem — but to those who know, it speaks: This food is ours. This land is ours. This dignity is ours.

No government stamp. No tax. Just the symbol of a people who have remembered they are not subjects, but souls.

In a prison courtyard nearby, I witnessed a peculiar sight: a group of prisoners, young men, pacing in a circle. As they walked, one of them whispered lines of a poem. Another repeated it. And so the circle became a wheel of verses turning in silence.

Later, a guard told me they do this every morning. It is their form of prayer — of protest. I nodded. It reminded me of the charkha. All things that revolve — the wheel, the seasons, the human spirit — carry the power of return.

And perhaps that is what the British fear most: that India is returning to herself.

I meditate now not to escape this place, but to listen better. In the stillness, I feel voices ripple through the nation. Not shouts, but murmurings — of farmers refusing to pay the salt tax, of mothers naming their newborns Azadi, of merchants placing bowls of salt beside their ledgers.

We have no army. And yet we advance. We have no throne. Yet each hut is becoming a parliament of resolve.

Yesterday, the moon rose large and copper-red over the prison yard. It reminded me of a story from my youth: a village where the people believed the moon was a witness to all injustice, and that one day, when it turned fully red, the truth would be revealed.

I wonder if that time has come.

I am not alone here. Not truly. The silence of this place is full — full of footsteps across fields, of whispered prayers in jail cells, of children learning new alphabets: not just letters, but symbols of defiance and hope.

A child in Madurai wrote in chalk:

“My father says salt is now sacred. I think it always was.”

Yes, child. You understand better than most.

Freedom does not begin in palaces. It begins in the palm — in what we eat, what we make, what we refuse.

I have no mirror in this cell. But I know my face is changing. Not from age alone, but from purpose. Purpose carves lines more deeply than time.

And though my body is thin, I feel strong. Not with muscle, but with the weight of every village that now stands straighter, every woman who now speaks louder, every boy who now dares to say: I am not afraid.

Let the British hold their trials. Let them write their reports. Let them count arrests like trophies.

We count footsteps. We count prayers. We count grains of salt and truth.

And we march on.

M.K. Gandhi

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