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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data available

ISBN 978‑1‑­338-​­70199‑9

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Printed in Italy 183

First edition, September 2024

Book design by Maithili Joshi

To Librarians, the Keepers of Truth
“You may call me a Salt Thief . . .”

— ​­ Mahatma Gandhi,
from his speech delivered on
April 26, 1930, at Chharwada, India,
which inspired the title of this book.
Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms, and looks which are
Weapons of an unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,

Let them ride among you there;
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew;
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away:
Then they will return with shame,
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable n u m b e r !
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you:
­a n y —​­
ye are m t h e y a r e f e w.

Selections from
The Masque of Anarchy,
Percy Bysshe Shelley
 Mohandas Gandhi

Abbas Tyjabi Kasturba Gandhi

 Jawaharlal Nehru Sarojini Naidu

Edward Frederick Lindley Manilal Gandhi

Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax,
known as Lord Irwin
 C h a p t er 1

T
he imperial train steamed through the early morning fog on
December 23, 1929, toward New Delhi. The mist was so thick
that a bystander would scarcely be able to make out the ­white-​­and-​
­gold carriages as they rumbled over the tracks. On board was Lord
Irwin, the viceroy of India, and his family, on their way to the city’s
central railway station. From there, they would be shuttled by car
to the viceroy’s recently completed official residence in the heart
of the city.
At that very moment, ­t wenty-​­year-​­old Bhagwati Vohra huddled
in wait by the gray walls of a ­sixteenth-​­century fort overlooking
the Jumna River, under a steep embankment over which the train
would have to run. Vohra was a member of the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association, an organization that saw violence as a
necessary tool to free its country from British rule. In a manifesto
called “The Philosophy of the Bomb,” its members vowed, “We
shall have our r­ evenge—​­a people’s righteous revenge of the tyrant.
Let cowards fall back and cringe for compromise and peace. We
ask not for mercy, and we give no quarter. To Victory or Death!”

1
 N e a l B a s c o m b

Vohra checked his watch. It was 7:30 a.m., and he knew he should
soon be hearing the viceroy’s train, which was scheduled to arrive
at its destination, three miles away, at 7:40. Vohra held ready in his
hands a remote electrical trigger. Running from the trigger was an
insulated wire, shallowly buried in the ground, stretching the two
hundred yards to the explosives he had placed earlier on the rail.
He needed only to twitch his finger to set off the bomb.
It was almost impossible to see anything through the fog. If
Vohra was to kill Irwin, as was his intention, his timing would
have to be perfect. Detonate the explosives too soon, and the train
would have time to stop, escaping derailment and pitching down
the slope into jungle. Detonate too late, and Irwin’s carriage may
have already passed. Vohra would have lost his chance to strike a
blow against the hated British Raj of India.

By that point, the British in one form or another had been a fixture
in India for over three hundred years. On August 24, 1608, the ­f ive-​
­hundred-​­ton galleon Hector arrived in a port on India’s western
shores, near Bombay. Its captain, Sir William Hawkins, was there
to establish a depot on behalf of the East India Company, an entity
officially chartered by the English Crown, to exploit trade in
the region. The Mughal emperor, Jehangir, who ruled over one
of the richest empires the world had ever known, stretching across
the vast Indian subcontinent, gave Hawkins permission to do so.
Jehangir had thrown wide the doors to an economy that produced
a quarter of the world’s goods.

2
 The S a lt Thief

As Shashi Tharoor described in his history Inglorious Empire,

India was “the glittering jewel of the medieval world” at the time.
American minister J. T. Sunderland, who long studied India as well,
detailed how glittery indeed:

Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the

civilized ­world—​­nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain
and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or
­beauty—​­had long been produced in India. India was a far greater
industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or any
other in Asia. Her textile ­goods—​­the fine products of her looms,
in cotton, wool, linen and ­silk—​­were famous over the civilized
world; so were her exquisite jewellery and her precious stones
cut in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics
of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine
works in ­metal—​­iron, steel, silver and gold.
She had great a­ rchitecture—​­equal in beauty to any in
the world. She had great engineering works. She had great
merchants, great businessmen, great bankers and financiers.
Not only was she the greatest shipbuilding nation, but she had
great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to
all known civilized countries. Such was the India the British
found when they came.

More East India Company ships arrived, depots expanded along

the vast coastline, and profits surged from trade in tea, spices,

3
 N e a l B a s c o m b

sugar, fabric, salt, and other commodities. “Trade, not territory”

was the calling card of the East India Company, and it succeeded
brilliantly.
But greed, the collapse of the Mughal Empire, infighting among
local rulers, and a lust for control eventually prompted the company
to bring military power to bear. In 1757, General Robert Clive led
800 British soldiers and 2,220 sepoys (Indian infantrymen) through
blinding rain to defeat a nawab (a sovereign Muslim ruler) and his
50,­000-​­strong army outside the Bengal village of Plassey. Afterward,
the East India Company accelerated their seizure of territories and
began building an empire of their own on the subcontinent.
Within a century of arriving on its western shores, as one
historian noted, “a company of traders was metamorphosed into
a sovereign power, its accountants and traders into generals and
governors, its warehouses into palaces, its race for dividends into
a struggle for imperial authority. Without having set out to do so,
Britain had become the successor to the Mughal emperors who had
opened to her the doors of the subcontinent.”
Using wile, duplicity, and often pitiless force, traders from the
small island nation of Great Britain ruled over 320 million people
of both tremendous wealth and extreme poverty, people who
spoke in scores of languages, inhabited hundreds of native states,
divided themselves among social castes, and practiced a variety of
religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism,
Christianity, and more, and prayed to Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, and
Jesus, among others.

4
 The S a lt Thief

A century later, in 1857, a mutiny of Indian sepoys against

the East India Company led to widespread revolt against the
occupiers, one fueled by steep taxes, annexation of princely
states, British domination of textiles and other industries, high
unemployment, and famine. Atrocities were committed on both
sides, but the British displayed remarkable cruelty in their crushing
of the rebellion. They wiped out whole villages, bayoneting the
defenseless and even tying rebels to the mouths of cannons before
firing the weapons.
The mutiny ended with the exile of the last Mughal emperor,
Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was chiefly a symbolic figure at
that point. In the wake of the violence, the British Parliament
dismantled the East India Company and took governing control
of India, establishing the British Raj (which means “rule”). The
Government India Act of 1858, enacted by Parliament, codified this
structure, officially making India a colony of Britain, and Queen
Victoria the empress of India. Authority over this vast expanse of
humanity was exercised through the Crown’s appointed viceroy.
At his command were roughly 2,000 members of the Indian Civil
Service, predominantly individuals who had graduated from the
best British schools.
The viceroy also oversaw the 10,000 British officers of the Indian
Army, who were in charge of 60,000 British regular soldiers and
200,000 native troops. These were small numbers in the face of
hundreds of millions of Indians, but one viceroy after another
followed the same playbook that had cemented Britain’s rule of

5
 N e a l B a s c o m b

India in the first place. At its heart was the doctrine of divide and
conquer.
First, the British continued to allow some princely states to
exist. These states were directed by the princes but protected
militarily by the British. One government report likened them
to “breakwaters to the storm which would otherwise have swept
over us in one great wave.” Second, the British seeded dissension
and anger between the large Hindu and Muslim populations to
prevent a unified resistance. Third, they doled out benefits to those
who served the Raj, whether as headmen in villages or other public
servants. These benefits included generous salaries, influence,
status, titles, and the right to land revenues. Fourth, but not least,
they made false promises that the Indian people would have a
say in how their country was governed by allowing consultative
legislative bodies and political parties to exist.
Foremost among these parties was the Indian National Congress,
formed in 1885. Populated mostly by Indian lawyers, journalists,
and public servants, it was originally a moderate secular institution
that met yearly to draft resolutions to ­reform—​­but not ­eliminate—​
­the Raj. Its delegates primarily wanted the British to help with the
pervasive poverty in India and to lessen the burden of taxes.
They considered themselves the “loyal opposition” and sent their
resolutions to the viceroy to consider at his discretion.
Into the twentieth century, the Indian National Congress
gradually became a more nationalistic body (albeit still secular),

6
 The S a lt Thief

and its members perceived India’s many separate provinces and

former kingdoms as a single country. And they wanted to have a
much greater say in how it was governed. Some of the Congress’s
more strident members, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, pushed to end
willing cooperation with the British. As he said at a Congress
meeting in 1902, “Though downtrodden and neglected, you must be
conscious of your power of making the administration impossible if
you but choose to make it so. It is you who manage the railroad and
the telegraph, it is you who make settlements and collect revenues.”
For some, speeches and resolutions were not enough. The
British needed to go, and go now, and the Congress was not going
to achieve that. In the 1890s, groups of these individuals turned to
terrorism and to killing the British occupiers. In 1912, a series of
assassination attempts on government officials prompted the
decision to move the capital of the British Raj from Calcutta,
where a radical independence movement was on the rise, to Delhi.
Architects from London designed a new city of wide, t­ree-​­lined
avenues and classical stone buildings next to the twisting narrow
lanes of the old city.
On December 23, 1912, the viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge,
rode atop an elephant through a suburb of Delhi, in a ceremonial
procession marking the transfer of the capital. Revolutionaries
threw a bomb in his path, and he was lucky to survive the attack.
Now, eighteen years to the day after that assassination attempt,
construction was completed on the new viceregal palace, Viceroy’s

7
 N e a l B a s c o m b

House, in New Delhi. An official opening ceremony was planned

for that very ­day—​­as was another bombing.

Aboard the train, in the fifth carriage from the locomotive, Lord
Irwin was seated beside his wife, daughter, and several key staff
members. He had a good deal on his mind. Edward Frederick
Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, known as Lord Irwin, was
a member of an old, respectable family from York in northern
England. His people had the good fortune to own land that was
veined with coal, and at the start of the Industrial Revolution,
they suddenly found themselves fabulously rich. When Edward
was born, in 1881, it was without a left hand. Doctors later fitted
him with a prosthetic in the shape of a clenched fist. Despite his
handicap, he avidly participated in sports and riding horses.
Tragically, he lost all three of his older brothers to the scourge
of disease. “All my hopes and joy are bound up in you,” his father
wrote to him, burdening a young Edward with tremendous
expectations. Schooled at Eton, then at Oxford, Edward lived up
to those expectations through hard work and upstanding morals.
Wealthy, smart, well connected, and well married, there seemed no
limit to his success. However, his political career always seemed
to fall short of his rival and contemporary, the dynamo Winston
Churchill.
As viceroy of India, Irwin had hoped to make his mark and to
serve his country well. However, now into his third year in the

8
 The S a lt Thief

role, he had made scarce progress in taming the Indian people’s

resistance against the British. Irwin feared that India was already
on the verge of a major revolt. On that morning’s agenda, after the
formal opening ceremony for Viceroy’s House, was a meeting with
a group of leading Indian political figures, among them Mohandas
­Gandhi—​­or, as many of his countrymen called him, “the Mahatma”
(Great Soul). Irwin aimed to lower any expectations these Indian
nationalists might have of their country obtaining “dominion
status,” the state of autonomy within the British Commonwealth
enjoyed by Canada and Australia, any time soon.
No doubt it would be a tough conversation, one made even
tougher by the fact that there was no single unified approach toward
India even from his own government. Tensions were rife between
conservatives and liberals in Parliament over how much political
power to cede to Indians, to say nothing of rival visions among British
officials in Delhi and among the various provincial governments.
The viceroy had to navigate all these competing currents.
Lord Irwin heard a dull boom. He thought there must have
been an explosion and put down the book he was reading. Then
there was a shudder throughout the carriage, followed by a drift
of smoke. Clearly, somewhere, a bomb had detonated. Screams of
terror erupted, and a military officer ran toward him.
Moments before, when Bhagwati Vohra triggered the detonator,
the dining car had just passed over the rail to which the bomb was
attached. The explosion tore through the corridor between the

9
 N e a l B a s c o m b

dining car and the third carriage, where a team of stenographers

were working. The floorboards in the passageway mushroomed
upward, and the heavy p­late-​­
glass windows in the adjoining
carriages shattered. A sleeper compartment splintered into pieces.
Amazingly, nobody was seriously injured in the initial blast. The
bomb also carved a ­t wo-​­foot gap in the railroad track. By a stroke
of good ­fortune—​­or God’s hand, as the religious Irwin likely
­believed—​­the wheels of one carriage after the next jumped the
gap in the rail, keeping the train, and its many passengers, from
careening off the side of the severe slope. Onward the viceroy’s
train continued through the fog, and Vohra made his escape before
the police arrived on the scene.

10
 The S a lt Thief

At New Delhi’s central railway station, Lord Irwin stepped down

from his carriage, shook hands with the officials awaiting him on
the platform, and folded his ­six-​­foot-​­five frame into an idling car.
“Lucky no harm had been done,” he declared to reporters, playing
down the assassination attempt. As King George V’s representative
in India, he could not appear shaken by what the British press were
to call “a dastardly outrage” in their reports, particularly at the
very time Indian nationalists were calling for independence.
Right on schedule, Irwin’s car pulled up at the bottom of the
steep white steps leading to the new Viceroy’s House, where an
honor guard of mounted horsemen in ­scarlet-​­and-​­gold uniforms
stood at attention. Time to get on with the business at hand.

11
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