Word: satyagraha
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...miles north of Bombay. It was in Ahmedabad that Gandhi set up his chief ashram (model community). The shrewd, industrious Gujaratis (Gandhi was one himself) gave his independence movement its first mass following. In Ahmedabad last week two of Gandhi's most effective weapons against the British-satyagraha (soul force) and fasting-rose up to plague the new nation they had created...
Throughout India, the land of Gandhi's satyagraha (peaceful soul force), a tide of violence was on the rise. Never far be neath the surface since January's Bombay riots, in which hundreds of people were killed, it broke again with a sudden and terrible fury in the blaze of India's consuming summer heat...
...large meeting of Indians heard Gandhi describe the consequences of the first pledge to disobey the Black Act. Each man, he said, must be willing to undergo the fight in complete isolation, if necessary, or else the pledge is meaningless. This is one of the basic principles of Satyagraha: success depends not upon numbers but upon individual firmness. The audience responded, Satyagraha was born, and Gandhi and hundreds of others went to jail for the first time...
...Indians to register voluntarily. Why not register, he told them, if we do it freely? Gandhi was the first to register, but he was brutally clubbed by one of his own countrymen who felt registration would sacrifice principle. To Gandhi, this trust in Smuts' word was the essence of Satyagraha, for "the Satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear," he wrote. "Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the Satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed...
Gandhi could turn from constructive service to civil disobedience overnight, depending on his acute awareness of the temper of the people, whether in South Africa or in India. His fasts and his spinning and his marches all were attuned to what he knew the Indians would respond to. Satyagraha, under Gandhi's quiet leadership, was hard to stop, for in the minds of Indians, he had effectively changed Truth into Action. When the leaders and supporters of the Montgomery boycott plan the rest of their current campaign, a few additional thoughts on Gandhi's Satyagraha--its strength, its limited goals...