Foundation
When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, he set up a community at Kochrab, on the edge of Ahmedabad, modelled on the settlements of Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm that he had founded in South Africa. Its members took vows of truth, non-violence, celibacy, control of the palate, non-stealing, non-possession, and the removal of untouchability. When he admitted a family from an untouchable caste, some of the ashram's Ahmedabad supporters withdrew their funding, and Gandhi was prepared to move into the untouchable quarter; an anonymous donation saved the community. In June 1917 the ashram moved to a site on the west bank of the Sabarmati, chosen in part, Gandhi said, because it lay between a jail and a cremation ground.
Life at the ashram
The ashram was a working community. Its members spun and wove cloth, farmed, kept dairy cattle, and ran a school, and they shared the cleaning of latrines, which Gandhi treated as a test of commitment to equality. Gandhi lived in a small house called Hriday Kunj with his wife Kasturba. From the ashram he directed the Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918, the campaigns of the non-cooperation movement and the work of his journals, Young India and Navajivan. Visitors included political leaders, journalists and foreigners, such as Madeleine Slade, the English admiral's daughter who took the name Mirabehn.
The Salt March
On 12 March 1930 Gandhi set out from the ashram with seventy-eight followers to walk to Dandi on the Gujarat coast, about 390 kilometres away, to make salt in defiance of the British salt tax. He vowed not to return to the ashram until India was free. He reached Dandi on 6 April. The march began the civil disobedience movement and drew worldwide attention.
Gandhi did not return to live at Sabarmati. In 1933, after the government seized the property of satyagrahis, he disbanded the ashram, and it was later handed over to bodies working for the uplift of the untouchables. He made his base at Sevagram, near Wardha, from 1936.
The memorial
The ashram buildings were preserved, and a museum designed by the architect Charles Correa, a series of open pavilions of brick and tile, opened in 1963. In the 2020s a government plan to redevelop the ashram precinct on a larger scale was criticised by Gandhians and historians, including members of Gandhi's family, as threatening the simplicity of the site, and was challenged in court.
Further reading
- Guha, Ramachandra. Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World. Alfred A. Knopf, 2018
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Chandra, Bipan. India's Struggle for Independence. Penguin, 1989
See also
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was an Indian lawyer and political leader who developed satyagraha, a method of organised nonviolent resistance, and led the campaigns that became central to India's independence movement before his assassination in 1948.
- Salt March — The Salt March was a 24-day protest walk led by Mohandas Gandhi in March–April 1930 from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, where he broke the British salt law by producing salt from seawater, opening the Civil Disobedience Movement.
- Non-Cooperation Movement — The Non-Cooperation Movement was a mass campaign of boycott and civil disengagement from British institutions launched by Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress in 1920 and called off in early 1922.
- Ahmedabad — Ahmedabad is a city on the Sabarmati in Gujarat, founded in 1411 by Sultan Ahmad Shah I as the capital of the Gujarat sultanate, later a Mughal provincial capital and a great textile centre, and the home of Gandhi's Sabarmati ashram.
- Indian independence movement — The Indian independence movement was the sustained political, social, and armed struggle against British colonial rule that culminated in the independence and partition of British India into India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.