Word: satyagraha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...outskirts of New Delhi, in the dingy, dungy Bhangi (untouchable) Colony, Gandhi was not jubilant, although the British were leaving at last. To him, the violence and disunity of India were a personal affront. To Gandhi, ahimsa (nonviolence) is the first principle of life, and satyagraha (soul force, or conquering through love), the only proper way of life. In the whitewashed, DDT-ed compound which serves him as headquarters, Gandhi licked his soul wounds: "I feel [India's violence] is just an indication," he told his followers, "that as we are throwing off the foreign yoke, all the dirt...
British repressive measures after World War I convinced Gandhi that the British would never willingly give India dominion status. So he organized satyagraha. This first campaign came near to unseating the British Raj. "Gandhi's was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding," admitted the British governor of Bombay...
When he changed, he went whole hog. Before joining Satyagraha Sabha (Gandhi's "League of People Holding to the Truth"), he gave up his law practice, and with it most of his income and all of its luxurious appurtenances. Life in the Nehru household became a chaos of conferences and political comings & goings, punctuated by arrivals of the police to pack Jawaharlal or his father off to jail. Says Krishna, "This was the beginning of a new life-a life of uncertainty, of sacrifice, of heartache. . . . Since then, going in and out of jail has become an incurable habit...
...lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had a political discernment of genius: in God-obsessed India the politics of liberation must take the form of a religious struggle. Doffing his European store clothes and donning a dhoti, the little man moved against the British Empire in the name of four principles: satyagraha (acceptance of Truth), ahimsa (non-violence), swadeshi (home industry), swaraj (independence). From then on, the history of Indian-British relations has been a long, painful procession of thousands of nonresisting Indian nationalists passing in & out of British jails, or under the lathis (staffs) of Britain's police...
...Cross. Gandhi still had one more weapon left. If nothing else, Gandhi's powerful personality had escaped from seven months' enforced obscurity in jail. Within his philosophical creed of Satyagraha, which calls on the power of "love and true knowledge" to overcome all difficulties, he might still hope to "melt the hearts" of his enemies...