Satyagraha

• 1. Introduction

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  Satyagraha is a philosophy of resistance built on a single, radical claim: that truth is the most powerful force in the world. Mahatma Gandhi coined the term as early as 1919, drawing on two Sanskrit roots: satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning polite insistence or holding firmly to. The word itself emerged from a competition in the news-sheet Indian Opinion in South Africa in 1906. A man named Maganlal Gandhi, grandson of an uncle of Mahatma Gandhi, first proposed the word "Sadagraha" and won the prize. Gandhi then sharpened it to Satyagraha. From that small editorial contest grew one of the most influential political philosophies of the twentieth century. Gandhi himself insisted it was not passive resistance. He called it truth-force, love-force, soul-force. What made a person choose to suffer rather than to strike back? What discipline did this philosophy demand? And how did a set of rules drafted for struggles in South Africa eventually shape movements from the American South to the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa itself?

• 2. Beyond Passive Resistance

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  Gandhi was emphatic on one point that he repeated across letters and speeches: satyagraha was not passive resistance, and the two must never be confused. He drew the distinction sharply in writing, pointing out that passive resistance, as understood and practiced in the West, had admitted of violence, as in the case of the suffragettes, and had been acknowledged as a weapon of the weak. Satyagraha, by contrast, was a weapon of the strong. It admitted of no violence under any circumstance whatsoever and insisted upon truth at every moment. Gandhi had once used the two phrases as synonyms early in his campaigns, but as his thinking deepened he abandoned that equivalence entirely. He went further: in his view the term "civil disobedience" also fell short. In September 1935, in a letter to P. Kodanda Rao of the Servants of India Society, Gandhi explicitly denied that his ideas of civil disobedience derived from Henry David Thoreau's famous essay of 1849. He acknowledged that reading Thoreau's title had led him to borrow the phrase for English-speaking audiences, but the resistance in South Africa was already well advanced before he encountered that essay. The word satyagraha, he wrote, was coined first for Gujarati readers precisely because "passive resistance" was incomplete. Martin Luther King Jr. would later describe satyagraha as "soul force" during his "I Have a Dream" speech, a phrase that carried Gandhi's original meaning forward into a new context.

• 3. The Code of a Satyagrahi

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  Gandhi founded the Sabarmati Ashram specifically to teach satyagraha, and the training he offered there was unusually precise. He published lists of principles for satyagrahis to internalize: nonviolence, or ahimsa; truth in its fullest sense; not stealing; non-possession, which he carefully distinguished from poverty; body-labour or bread-labour; control of desire; fearlessness; equal respect for all religions; and economic strategies such as boycotts of imported goods, a practice he called swadeshi. On a separate occasion he listed four essential qualities for every satyagrahi in India: a living faith in God; willingness to die or lose all possessions; the practice of weaving and spinning khadi; and abstinence from alcohol and other intoxicants. For campaigns of civil resistance, Gandhi proposed a further twelve rules of conduct. A satyagrahi must harbour no anger, yet suffer the opponent's anger willingly. A satyagrahi must never retaliate against assault or punishment, but must also never comply with an unjust order out of fear. If arrested, the satyagrahi must submit voluntarily, behave courteously in prison, obey prison regulations except those contrary to self-respect, and never fast to win conveniences whose denial does not injure self-respect. Gandhi also required satyagrahis to appreciate and obey the many ordinary laws of the state before claiming the right to disobey any specific unjust one. He described the required spirit with precision: "an honest, respectable man will not suddenly take to stealing whether there is a law against stealing or not." Mere grudging compliance was not enough. The obedience had to be willing and spontaneous.

• 4. Truth as the Foundation

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  Gandhi built his entire philosophy on a philosophical claim about the nature of reality itself. The Sanskrit word sat, from which satya derives, means "being" or "that which is." Gandhi argued that nothing exists in reality except truth. From this he drew a political conclusion: untruth, or asatya, also means nonexistent. If untruth does not exist, its victory is logically impossible. Truth, being that which is, can never be destroyed. He expressed this himself with characteristic directness: "This is the doctrine of satyagraha in a nutshell." Ahimsa and truth were, for Gandhi, inseparable. He compared them to two sides of a coin, or better, to two sides of an unmarked metallic disk: ahimsa is the means; truth is the end. Means, he wrote, must always be within our reach, which is why ahimsa is the supreme duty. This connection between means and ends was not merely rhetorical. Gandhi argued that the means to obtain an end are wrapped up in and attached to that end. You cannot use unjust means to obtain justice or violence to obtain peace without embedding that injustice into the outcome. He illustrated the logic with a practical image: if you want a watch, the means you employ determine whether what you hold afterward is stolen property, your own property, or a gift. The principle was nearly absolute, though Gandhi acknowledged in Hind Swaraj a narrow exception: sometimes, as he wrote, "poison is used to kill poison," and while machinery is bad, it can be used to undo itself.

• 5. Satyagraha Across Movements

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  Martin Luther King Jr. described his encounter with Gandhi's ideas as a turning point. He had heard of Gandhi before but had never studied him seriously. When he did, he was moved especially by the Salt March to the Sea and Gandhi's numerous fasts. King wrote that the concept of satyagraha, which he translated as truth force or love force, was profoundly significant to him. His skepticism about the power of love in social reform diminished as he read, and he came to see it as the method for social reform he had been seeking. James Bevel's campaigns during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States were similarly shaped by satyagraha theory, as was Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Scholar Judith Brown, assessing Gandhi's campaigns, noted that satyagraha is "a political strategy and technique which, for its outcomes, depends greatly on historical specificities." Gandhi himself framed success differently from conventional political thinking. The goal in satyagraha is not to defeat the opponent or frustrate the opponent's objectives. The satyagrahi's object, Gandhi wrote, is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer. The opponent must be transformed enough to stop obstructing a just end. When an opponent such as a dictator cannot be converted and must be removed, Gandhi counted that a partial success. The civil disobedience and non-cooperation practiced under satyagraha rested on what Gandhi called the "law of suffering": the endurance of suffering is the means to moral uplift, and the non-cooperation is itself a device for securing the opponent's cooperation on terms consistent with truth and justice.

• 6. Satyagraha and the Question of Genocide

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  Gandhi extended satyagraha into territory that generated his most intense criticism. Facing the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany, he publicly proposed satyagraha as a method of combating genocide. He wrote that if he were a Jew born in Germany, he would claim Germany as his home and challenge the state to shoot him or imprison him, refusing expulsion or discriminatory treatment and not waiting for others to join him first. He acknowledged the darkest possible outcome: that Hitler's calculated violence might result in a general massacre. Yet even that, Gandhi argued, could be transformed by prepared minds into a day of thanksgiving. When critics objected to this position, Gandhi published a response. He distinguished between what he had not proposed, citing two critics who said he had offered nothing new, and what he had actually pleaded for: the renunciation of violence of the heart and the active exercise of the force generated by that renunciation. He made a similar argument anticipating a possible Japanese invasion of India during World War II. He proposed unadulterated non-violent non-cooperation as a national defense, arguing that if India responded unanimously, Japanese arms could be neutralized without shedding a single drop of blood. He estimated the potential cost honestly, acknowledging it might mean the loss of several million lives. His point was comparative: the sacrifice made by the Russians and Chinese was also enormous, and India would have to pay some such price even with armed resistance. What Gandhi called "civilian-based defense" is now sometimes termed "social defence" in the literature of nonviolent strategy.