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A century later, the organisational innovations behind Gandhi’s movement offer many lessons for contemporary freedom movements seeking to transform society.

Gandhi is one of the most revered public figures of the 20th century. Yet, for all of his renown, Gandhi’s actual strategies for promoting social change in India are much less known.

Some people think of him as a spiritual figure who led through moral persuasion alone. Others have heard of the most famous acts of civil disobedience undertaken by him and his followers, protests that have been celebrated widely and dramatized in Hollywood movies. While others picture him as a political figure, sitting at the negotiating table across from officers of the British Empire.

All of these ideas reflect aspects of Gandhi’s political life.

However, each portrait by itself is incomplete.

At the end of 1930, India was experiencing disruption on a scale not seen in nearly three quarters of a century — and it was witnessing a level of social movement participation never seen before.

A campaign of mass non-cooperation against imperial rule had spread throughout the country, initiated earlier that year when Mohandas Gandhi and approximately 80 followers from his religious community set out on a Salt March protesting the British monopoly on the mineral.

Before the campaign was through, the world would see more than 60,000 people be arrested, with as many as 29,000 proudly filling the jails at one time.

Among their ranks were many of the most prominent figures from the Indian National Congress, including politicians that had once been reluctant to support nonviolent direct action.

Not only were Indians illegally producing salt and staging blockades of government salt works, but, as the effort grew, the campaign adopted a rich array of additional tactics.

Hundreds of thousands of villagers refused to pay land and timber taxes. Civil servants resigned from government, with as much as a third of local officials in one district of Gujarat declaring that they would leave their posts. All while activists maintained an organised boycott of British imports.

In the words of one historian, major textile centers including Calcutta, Bhagalpur, Delhi, Amritsar and Bombay, “came to a virtual standstill for part or most of 1930 as a result of [strikes], picketing and self-imposed closures by businessmen.”

Observers near and far could sense the historic magnitude of the moment.

In England, Winston Churchill, then a conservative member of Parliament, railed furiously at what he perceived as his government’s incompetence in properly defending the empire.

British officials within India were similarly distressed.

Sir Frederick Sykes, the governor of Bombay, wrote to his superiors in May 1930: “It is now necessary frankly to recognize the fact that we are faced with a more or less overt rebellion … and that it is supported either actively or passively by a very large section of the population. We have, for one reason or another, practically no openly active friends.”

One police commander described his district as: “Virtually in a state of war for a substantial part of the year.”

How did the Indian independence movement get to this point of success?

What type of organising had allowed for this uprising to take place?

What strategy had led to such widespread and co-ordinated disobedience?

In truth, it was not one strategy, but the combination of several. A large part of the political genius of Mohandas Gandhi lay in his ability to bring disparate strategies together.