Mohandas Gandhi

What is satyagraha?

Satyagraha is Gandhi's name for his method, and it means truth-force or soul-force. Picture the usual options when someone treats you unjustly. Hit back, run, or give in. Satyagraha is a fourth one. You refuse the injustice openly, you refuse to hate the person enforcing it, and you take the suffering that follows rather than pass it on. That last part is the engine. Gandhi held that a person can be brought out of an error by patience and sympathy, never beaten out of it. What looks like truth to you may look like error to them. He worked the method out in South Africa and then used it against an empire.

• Satyagraha transforms conflict by appealing to conscience, not by using coercion or physical force.
• Willingness to accept suffering rather than inflict it builds moral authority and speaks to opponents' humanity.
• Systematic phases (negotiation, preparation, notice, action) make resistance strategic, not reactive.

Listen to the story “Civil Disobedience”

What was the Salt March?

Making salt from the sea was against the law in British India, so in 1930 Gandhi walked to the sea. He set out on 12 March with a small group and reached the coast at Dandi in Gujarat on 6 April, about 240 miles later. He was sixty. Then he bent down and picked up natural salt from the beach. That was the whole act. It broke a law that everyone could see was petty, in public, and it was small enough for anyone near a coast to copy. This is what satyagraha looks like when it works. Not a speech about injustice, one visible act that makes the injustice impossible to explain away.

What did Mahatma Gandhi teach?

Gandhi taught three things that lock together. Satya is truth, and he turned the usual sentence around. Not God is truth, but truth is God. Ahimsa is nonviolence, and he took it further than the tradition he grew up in. It covers what you think and what you say, not only what your hands do. Satyagraha is the method the first two produce. Truth-force, he called it, or soul-force. You resist an injustice without hating the person holding it up, and you accept suffering rather than hand it out. He wrote about all of it in Hind Swaraj (1909) and in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927).

What is ahimsa?

Ahimsa is usually translated as nonviolence, and Gandhi thought that translation was too small. In the Hindu and Jain traditions he grew up with, it meant not doing harm. He made it active. It starts in the mind. The violence in a fist begins before the fist moves, so ahimsa means refusing to finish that motion in thought, in speech, and in action. It also asks something harder than restraint. You have to keep real compassion for the person wronging you while standing firmly against what they are doing. Gandhi held that this takes more courage than fighting, not less.