My father said no to Bapu

A son writes about an adamant dairy specialist, the only Christian among the Dandi marchers

- THOMAS TITUS

ONE MORNING IN March 2005, the phone rang in my Bhopal home. The caller was Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of the Mahatma. “I want you to do what your father did long back. Do join us on our march to Dandi,” he said. I promised him that I would be there.

On reaching Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, I spotted my father’s name in The Dandi Marchers list there. I could feel the warmth of his presence in the ashram, and the stories he had told me came rushing back into my mind. My father, Theverthundiyil Titus, better known as Titusji, had lived there for five years. He was the only Christian among 81 salt satyagrahis who marched to Dandi 90 years ago.

Starting from Sabarmati on March 12, 1930, they had taken 25 days to walk 388km to the coastal village of Dandi, where they made salt on April 6. Re-enacting the historic march in 2005, we followed the same hallowed route they had taken.

At Dandi I recalled my father telling me how Mahatma Gandhi in his dhoti had waded into the Arabian sea and picked up a lump of salt, which he then sold to a rich Indian. His followers, including my father, boiled sea water in large vessels to make salt, thus breaking law. They were beaten with steel-studded police lathis, put in a goods train to Bombay and then taken by truck to Yerwada jail in Pune. Gandhiji was spared. He was, however, jailed after a month for instigating millions of others to break the salt law.

My father was 25 at that time. He was the fourth child of a small farmer of Maramon village in central Travancore. He joined a newly opened English medium school at class eight, and after his matriculation, became a teacher at another school 30km away at a handsome salary of 018 a month. On weekends, the 16-yearold teacher walked home through dense jungles, lighting his path with a candle burning in a coconut shell. Wild elephants mercifully ignored him.