Salt as a metaphor for the process of exploitation?

Salt as a metaphor for the process of exploitation?

Mahasweta Devi was raised in Bengal, India, where her mother and father settled their family after the 1947 Partition of Muslim Pakistan from Hindu India. Her father was a poet and her mother was a writer while both were activists in the fight against analphabetism, which is the inability to read and write. Mahasweta Devi's short story "Salt" is printed in her collection Imaginary Maps, which was translated to English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Salt holds a special symbolic place in India literary and cultural traditions. The ancient saying, "Love like salt," is said to have originated in India. The meaning is that love that is like salt--the flavoring that makes all food palatable and that has been universally highly valued from ancient times--makes life palatable and beautiful while it adds incalculable value to living. The parable is told of an exiled daughter who teaches her king father the true value of her rejected love by secretly preparing him a feast of unsalted food; she appears to him without her disguise when he calls out for salt for his food. When this symbolism is applied to Devi's stories about the outcasts and the oppressed of the indigenous tribes of India (dalits, adivassis, denotified ones), her stories speak of the love that these rejected ones deserve that should be demonstrated through equitable political, social and economic advantages.

Salt also holds a special metaphoric place in modern Indian culture. Salt is a metaphor for British oppression and the process of exploitation during the British colonial period. Indians had always produced their own salt. Yet the British colonizers forbid the making of salt and forced Indians to purchase imported salt, which had a tax on it (like a sales tax on salt) and which cost a good deal more for Indians than salt they made themselves. In 1923, the salt tax was doubled raising even further the cost of salt. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi and his followers protested the salt tax by gathering salt encrustations from Dandi Beach in Gujarat. The salt tax, the law forbidding the making of salt by Indians and the hastening of rebellions agitating for India's independence all form the metaphor that links salt with process of exploitation.