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The present article seeks to critically probe Gandhi’s civilisational view of Indian society and politics both from his few articulate and many hidden statements at different stages of his life. His civilisational view is, therefore, analysed from a variety of perspectives: its origin, direction, advocated methods and long-time impact on Gandhian thought, philosophy and activities. It is presumed that such an analysis of Gandhi’s political philosophy with special reference to his civilisational view may clarify some of the mysteries associated with his much cited and often criticised ‘strategies’ of political activity. The article has three parts. The first dwells on the background of Gandhi’s civilisational critique and touches on some of its contents from the political standpoints. The second probes into the many meanings of civilisational politics both from Gandhi’s articulate and hidden statements on the subject. The third reviews the impact of Gandhi’s civilisational politics on the course and strategy of his political action, and its legacy for the future. The underlying idea is that satyagraha in the Gandhian philosophical context is most intelligible when viewed from the short- and long-term perspectives of civilisational politics.

Following Mahatma Gandhi is inspiring. But at the same time, it also brings certain feelings of guilt because one needs to follow not only his politics but also his ethics and thinking. Today neither Gandhi nor Gandhism has survived, not in our economy, not in our politics and certainly not in our society. Still, in the little things that surround us, somehow the idea of Gandhi remains alive. People who belong to the dalit, adivasi communities, farmers and labourers from the unorganised sector have shown their courage, commitment and confidence to fight their battles and continue their understanding of satyagraha and Gandhi. But times are changing. Casteism and communalism are now compelling everyone to fight a new freedom movement. What kind of satyagraha is needed to deal with these concerns? One effective way is through non-party people’s movements that necessarily define and re-define their own politics. These mass organisations have to challenge themselves to deal with the reality of not only casteism and communalism, but also that of the current development paradigm. Our next step is also to minimise consumerism to save nature, people and their livelihood.

It is a common view to say that satyagraha was conducted by a person like Gandhi who was brought up in a cultural setting familiar with the concept of self-suffering and non-violence. But it would be a mistake to judge the Gandhian satyagraha in terms of cultural background. The recent global history of non-violent action has shown us clearly that satyagraha is a seed that can grow and flourish in other cultures and religions as well. Among the followers of Gandhi in the twentieth century who successfully launched their own satyagraha against racial, religious and economic injustice and struggled for human rights are names such as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Benigno Aquino and Aung San Suu Kyi. The trans-Indian experience of satyagraha assumes that non-violence in its broadest sense remains exemplary as a political action and is transferable as a human experience from one tradition of thought to another, making it universally applicable as a method of action.

The article addresses the impact of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas in the US, Latin America and Africa, especially on important political figures. The influence of Gandhi’s ideas in Latin America started very early in the twentieth century. By 1930 and perhaps even earlier, important Latin American intellectuals began to refer to Gandhi, one of whom was José Carlos Mariátegui. Gandhi’s non-violent struggle also had a great impact in America, particularly in the 1950s and the 1960s, the years of peak resistance against the Jim Crow laws––a collection of state and local statutes that legalised racial segregation which had existed for about 100 years from the post-Civil War era until 1965. In the twenty-first century, the Satyagraha philosophy motivated those who were involved in the struggle for human rights, the defenders of indigenous peoples and those fighting against globalisation. We can include among them the Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize awardee Adolfo Pérez Esquivel whose work in the defence of human rights and non-violent resistance forcefully showed the influence of Gandhi and his powerful legacy.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis, a journal of the ‘darker races’ that was the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was among the earliest African American intellectuals to take a strong interest in Gandhi. However, the African American press, represented by newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, was as a whole prolific in its representation of the Indian Independence movement. This article, after a detailed consideration of Du Bois’s advocacy of Gandhi’s ideas, analyses the worldview of the African American press and its outlook towards the movement in India. It is argued that a more ecumenical conception of the ‘Global South’ ought to be sensitive to African American history, and I suggest that African American newspapers played a critical role in shaping notions of the solidarity of coloured peoples, pivoting their arguments around the Indian Independence movement and particularly the satyagraha campaigns of Gandhi.

This article attempts to explore the connection between Gandhi’s spiritual quest, of which abstinence was a major component, and his politics. Gandhi was a deeply religious person. His politics, however, was secular in that it had little to do with the politics of religious identity. He would have found the notion of engaging in the politics of religious identity revolting, something that is borne out by his political practice. It was at the moment of the greatest crisis during the final phase of the anti-colonial struggle that he articulated his position with great clarity, and then went on to give it meaning through his presence in the countryside of Noakhali, and the refugee camps of Delhi. The influences of the social milieu of his early life in Saurashtra, and the colonial condition, shaped his world view in significant ways. The concrete everyday experiences of his early life are useful for comprehending his ideas about austerity as a moral ideal. There was a close link between austerity and the endeavour to achieve control over the palate. Besides, the story of his long association with his childhood friend Sheikh Mehtab is revisited, in the light of recent research, to see how it might allow a better understanding of this link.

Meaning is a key foundation of human life. We yearn to make our life meaningful and have a proper understanding of the meaning of words and worlds, which help us in blossoming of life rather than being trapped in labyrinths of confusion and annihilated in varieties of killing and destruction. But this fundamental yearning for meaning has always been under stress in different periods and epochs of human history. In our contemporary world, we are also going through stress, vis-à-vis the work of meanings in our lives, which is part of a global crisis of meaning. Our global crisis of meaning has multiple genealogies. Our contemporary crisis of meaning has its roots in both the way we relate to language and our worlds, which is discussed in this article. It also discusses how we can cultivate new movements and circles of meaning generation. This is linked to vision and practices of upholding our world and regenerating our earth. I then link processes of meaning generation to processes of coming together of people as well as soul, what is called Lokasamgraha in Indic tradition. I discuss how the global crisis of meaning calls for new cosmopolitan movements as well as building a planetary Lokasamgraha.

Lifeworld is a multi-dimensional concept and reality in philosophy, social sciences and in our practice of living. The present essay explores its different meanings and interpretations starting from Edmund Husserl to Jurgen Habermas in the European intellectual tradition and Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, J.N. Mohanty and Margaret Chatterjee in the Indic traditions. It rethinks the Habermasian idea of colonisation of the lifeworld and argues how we need Gandhian struggles for overcoming this. It argues how lifeworld is a field of satyagraha as it exists in the midst of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. It also argues how lifeworld is a field of lokasangraha—a gathering of people which is also related to atmasangraha—a gathering of souls. With and beyond Habermas, it argues that lifeworld is not only a field of reason but also of intuition and striving for the spiritual in the midst of many rational and infra-rational forces at work in self, culture and society. The essay then links the challenges of lifeworlds to the challenge of living words in our lives—words which give birth to new words and worlds going beyond stasis, stagnation and death of language, culture, self and society. Lifeworld is a field and flow of living worlds which have both a pragmatic and a spiritual dimension. The essay explores the border crossing between pragmatism and society and looks at lifeworlds and living words as fields of spiritual pragmatism.

This essay primarily concerns itself with attempting to retrieve contributions of some of the local and regional leaders of the Champaran Satyagraha Movement who have largely been left out by the existing literature. Further, it draws upon some of the unexplored archival sources as well as some vernacular literatures, mainly Hindi besides memoirs as well as newspaper reports have been used for the study. Yet, one faces huge constraints of evidences to find answers to many pertinent questions, which emerge after delving into the subject. This essay has been able to cull out significant information about the contributions of Pir Munis, mostly through the memoirs of the Hindi literatures and Hindi newspaper, Pratap. There is still a need to trace out many other sources to find out details about many other local leaders, who have been mentioned in this essay. Besides retrieving the roles played out by the local leaders and vernacular intelligentsia at great personal risks of state repression, this essay brings out that the agrarian problems of Champaran still suffers from something which has been inherited as a legacy during the colonial era, and even after seven decades post-independence many issues remains unresolved.

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most influential mythmaker. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical precedents. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls. One consequence of this contemporary canonization of Gandhi’s narrative, however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally motivated it. This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience. By placing Gandhi’s genealogy in the context of his critique of modern civilization, as well as his formative but often-overlooked encounter with the British women’s suffrage movement, it reconstructs Gandhi’s paradoxical notion that sacrificial political action is the fullest expression of self-rule. For Gandhi, Socrates and Thoreau exemplify civil disobedience as a fearless practice of fidelity to truth profoundly at odds with liberal conceptions of disobedience as fidelity to law.

As Irom Sharmila Chanu breaks her sixteen-yearlong fast on August 9, 2016, struggle for peace in India’s Northeast seems to have turned a full circle. On the one hand, her battle against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958—the law that empowers even a noncommissioned army officer to open fire on a civilian and in the process kill her with impunity, that is to say, without ever being tried in a court of law—by all accounts made her the “iron lady” and “the Face of Manipur” to the world. On the other hand, notwithstanding her indefinite fast—widely believed to be emblematic of the “collective moral outrage” against the Act—persistent appeals made by a host of national and international human rights groups, eminent public intellectuals, and the recommendation of the respective Committees in favor of repealing it, the Act remains very much in force in parts of Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast even after fifty-eight years of its enactment, resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians. This article seeks to explain the implications of this paradox for peace politics in the region. Why does Sharmila have to take the otherwise painful and albeit difficult decision of breaking her fast even when there is little sign of repealing the Act? Insofar as she takes the difficult decision of breaking her fast, she realizes that her prolonged fast becomes subjected to a variety of technologies of governance: first, by calling for the complete sacrifice of her private life, second by turning her fast into a public spectacle rendering it both “unsuccessful” and necessary—significantly both at the same time—and finally by inculcating in her and in many of us the intense desire of pursuing peace through the established political institutions, particularly electoral institutions.

This is a portrait of the anti-apartheid struggle for freedom in South Africa by Maniben Sita, a follower of Gandhi, who adopted satyagraha to oppose injustice. In 1946–47, Maniben organised a women’s contingent to demonstrate against the restrictive laws that were being promulgated to curb Indians’ access to land and trading rights. As executive member of the Transvaal Indian Congress and later in the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s she continued her advocacy of justice for all. She was sent to prison several times during her long involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle. She is recognised as one of South Africa’s heroines and her portrait hangs in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg.

This article highlights the key concepts of Gandhi’s philosophy of Satyagraha and its intellectual origins by drawing extensively on his formulations of the right to civil disobedience and non-cooperation with unjust laws. This is followed by a detailed examination of the relevance of Gandhi's idea of Satyagraha. The author concludes that Gandhi’s practice of Satyagraha provides us with a desperately needed alternative in the 21st century.

This piece is based on a conversation the author had with lawyer and human rights activist from Pakistan, Hina Jilani, in May 2016. It captures Jilani’s account of the ‘Satyagraha’ she has waged in her lifetime for the rights of women in her country; and as she narrates her story, she interweaves it with the ‘Satyagraha’ that shaped the women’s movement in Pakistan. One can read here about Jilani’s struggle for truth, for a human rights consciousness in a political climate of military regime; and how she challenged courts in the country to step outside the realm of conventional law and extend justice to women and girls. And in the process, learn that her struggle for truth has been intertwined with that of the women’s movement in the country.

This photo essay illustrates how women played an active role in the Satyagraha movements during and before the independence of India. The photographs have been sourced from the National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

The author argues that the mainstream US feminist historical documentation framework—the feminist waves—have organized feminist history to primarily record historical events that involve high status women (i.e white middle-class cisgender women). This paper dissects the feminist waves to suggest that their key events and actors represent the centering of a socially privileged group. The author analyzes the framework to understand the ways in which the waves may encourage this privileging—largely through the erasure and exclusion of the personal and political truths of the most vulnerable feminists and their satyagraha against intertwining inequalities at the grassroots.

One often comes across women and men who are satyagrahis without being part of any movement. This is a piece on such satyagrahis: to celebrate them and to think about the ways and means in which satyagraha unfolds, and inspires. The article narrates stories of four different people who decided to follow the path of resistance – against the mainstream current – to be able to stand up to their own conviction and beliefs. The article argues that these and probably thousand of others who are practicing some or the other aspect of satyagraha in their daily lives, are also satyagrahis. It is time to celebrate the survival and flourishing of satyagrahi instincts of common people who are living and also dying in some cases – for their principles and conviction. This is their search for and insistence on truth, and indeed a tribute to Gandhi’s satyagraha.

Gandhi’s conception of non-violence was unique in having martial and maternal elements. He drew upon the mythological figure of the noble warrior but he also stressed maternal capacity for love and endurance. The virtuous self-suffering woman and the Kshatriya warrior were the ideals that Gandhi shared with his militant Hindu nationalist opponents. By bringing together these two ideals in the combative non-violent soldier, Gandhi tried to invert his opponents’ hierarchy of values. He proposed that dying without enmity towards the adversary is more courageous than killing. The truth-force required to subdue the enmity of the adversary is generated from within oneself by overcoming fear, desires and attachments. Because of the male-centric nature of this overcoming, Gandhi’s break with the militant nationalists remained incomplete. The diverse elements drawn from various traditions did not blend in the figure of the non-violent soldier because Gandhi’s interpretations of these past ideas remained influenced by the masculinist anxieties of contemporary nationalism.

Despite Anglican Christianity’s frequent close association with the state, there have always been some, inspired by Christianity’s founder, who have taken a more independent line, none more strikingly so than two English missionaries in India, C.F. Andrews and Verrier Elwin, who broke with prevailing loyalties and in the strength of profound friendships with Gandhi, identified with Indian interests and nationalist aspirations during the half century prior to Indian Independence.

Amar Chitra Katha (‘Immortal Picture Stories’) is the leading Indian comic book series, with 440 mythological and historical titles and sales of over 86 million issues. In 1989, after twenty years of publishing success, the producers of this series decided to release two issues on the world-renowned Indian politician and activist, Mahatma Gandhi. But Gandhi, best known for his technique of non-violent civil resistance, presented a formidable challenge: How to depict the Mahatma, paragon of peace and non-violence, in a visual medium that is notorious for its action and violence? This article examines the relationship between text and image in these comics, and draws upon interviews with authors and artists, to better understand the contested memory of Gandhi in India today as well as the contested concept of non-violence.

This article explores why it is so difficult to imagine a state without an army. It considers Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, conventional accounts of the sovereign state and the right to legitimate violence, Gandhi's concept of satyagraha, Gandhi's Constitution for a Free India, and Gandhi's understanding of the art of the possible. It concludes with a reading of Gandhi and the sacrificial politics of founding in India.

This article attempts to create the space for rethinking the politics and ethics of consumption by initiating dialogues with Swadeshi movements and Gandhi in order to transform the spaces ofproduction transcending the concern for consumption choices. Analysing the history of Swadeshi movements in pre-independence India, especially Bengal, and drawing inspiration from Gandhi 's Swadeshi movement and his principles of swaraj and satyagraha, an attempt has been made here to provide an aesthetic, ethical and spiritual foundation for the present version of the Swadeshi drive in India, which is substantively immersed in the logic of market capitalism and mindless consumption. The article explores pathways of improvement of quality of life, experi ences in happiness and fulfilment, both individual and collective, by creating a culture of self-development, responsible consumption and community building efforts on the basis of sharing and concern for others.

Christian thought on the resolution of conflicts rests on a strong predisposition against violence and a determination to discourage outbreaks of violence, limit the means used, and bring the conflict to as speedy an end as possible. Less attention has been given to the psychological and social roots of violence, the moments of transition from violence to diplomacy and reconciliation, and alternative ways of conflict resolution. These three areas are explored with special reference to the use of sanctions, the WCC’s Programme to Overcome Violence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Gandhian Satyagraha, and the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Such measures should be judged against the same criteria as are used in relation to violence and war.

India's struggle for independence is of tremendous importance in the history of anti-colonial movements. The nationalist movement set the precedent of achieving independence through non-violence and thus a whole new philosophy based on ahimsal was born. The culmination of the movement in the partition on religious grounds of a country as big and culturally diverse as India was also significant. However, arguably the most important aspect of this movement for Independence from a historical point of view was that it saw mass participation by Indian women, women who had till then been confined to the domestic sphere. The contribution of women to the Independence movement was significant. They were involved in diverse nationalist activities, both within and outside the home. Within the home they spun and wove khadi, held classes to educate other women and contributed significantly to nationalist literature in the form of articles, poems and propaganda material. Shelter and nursing care were also provided to nationalist leaders who were in hiding from the British authorities. Outside the home Prabhat feris were organized in which women from all castes and classes would walk to the local temple singing songs to rouse the nationalist and patriotic feelings ofthe people. In addition they held meetings and demonstrations, took part in satyagraha, picketed toddy and foreign-cloth shops, went to prison and also suffered brutalities at the hands of the British police. Lastly, when the nationalist leadership were in gaol, the women took over the leadership roles and provided guidance to the movement. In various writings on the nationalist movement it is argued that both the participation and leadership of women's activities was pro

Among different forms of 'nonviolent direct action', an extensive taxonomy for which has been provided by Gene Sharp (1959), Gandhian satyagraha occupies a unique place. This is due to both historical and substantive reasons. A factor analysis of the ingredients of different forms of nonviolent direct action (Chatterjee and Bhattacharjee 1971) shows that satygraha has high loading on Factor III which the authors identify as 'something like active principled striving toward total transformation' of the individual, group, community, or state. Satyagraha has second highest loading on Factor I, identified as 'some sort of absolutist stand toward moral-ethical commitment to nonviolence'. This emphasis on total transformation, on dynamism, and on unswerving commitment to nonviolence may have contributed to some of its success in historical reckoning. First Gandhi and then Martin Luther King have demonstrated the value of nonviolent satyagraha as an effective weapon for correcting untenable positions, when obtaining redress through constitutional means is slow, difficult, or beset with hurdles. In recent times social scientists have started taking an interest in analyzing the processes underlying satyagraha. Some members of the 'strategic community' who utilize approaches from game theory, decision theory, and general systems theory in elucidating complex social processes have also tried to apply such methods for a deeper understanding of the satyagraha process. The present paper, while reviewing some of these attempts to analyze the strategic aspects of satyagraha, seeks to show that more sophisticated effort is required for finding the most appropriate game model for Gandhian satyagraha. Some of the observations will be supported with empirical evidence, collected by the author, on a series of three satyagrahas resorted to by a group of encroachers in a government grazing reserve in Angarkata in north-eastern Assam. A brief account of the three Angarkata satyagrahas is given in the Appendix. For a fuller account, the reader may refer to a report by Chatterjee and Sudarshan Kumari (1969); a short journalistic rendering has been published by Chatterjee (1970).

Introduction Nonviolent action for the resolution of conflicts in both political and social arenas has a long history. In spite of Gandhi' development of Satyagraha1 the most systematic and developed mode of nonviolent action and its dramatic use in India, astonishingly little attention has been paid to the processes involved in the workings of a satyagraha. Most of the writers on satyagraha have operated on two levels. They have either concerned themselves with a philosophical elaboration of the meaning of Satyagraha or have sought to analyze it purely in terms of the role played by its chief architect Mahatma Gandhi. One result of this has been an accentuation of the religio-ethical interpretations of satyagraha and the development of a stereotype which attributed the success of satyagrahas to the profound religiosity of the Indian people. This paper seeks to explore the satyagraha from the point of view of these thousand of rank and file satyagrahis who, along with their leaders, contributed to its success. Although nonviolent action comes through distinctly as a purely religio-ethical category through Gandhis writings, an attempt will be made to understand it as a sociological and social-psychological category.

In Gandhi's theory of peace, human values take great prominence. Nonviolence (ahimsa) is a way of life rather than a tactic, and, together with the search for truth (satyagraha), makes the difference between passive submission to injustice, and an active struggle against it. This struggle excludes both physical violence and casting the opponent in the role of enemy, and hence presupposes compassion and self-criticism. The notion of welfare to all (sarvodaya) also sees peace as incompatible with exploitation or inequality of wealth. Peace is not seen as an end state, but as a continuous revolutionary process, where ends cannot be separated from means.

Attenborough's movie furnishes a vivid portrayal of Gandhi's forceful, nonviolent, loving "search for truth." The unfolding of this strategy for Satyagraha demonstrates a set of values that provides a foundation for a humanistically oriented theory of personality. Most important, the artistic success of Gandhi underscores the continuing relevance of the values of Satyagraha for contemporary political and interpersonal affairs.

The recent centenary of Gandhi's birth has rekindled an interest in his theory of satyagraha, usually translated as 'non-violent resistance'. Glowing eulogies elevating Gandhi to near the stature of a saint simultanously praise his very this-worldly use of non-violent techniques for social and political change. Satyagraha is often seen as the hope of the future, a long-awaited means of peaceful conflict resolution. There is no denying that satyagraha has been successful. Yet the question of why and how satyagraha works has not been dealt with analytically.' How could such a tactic work at all in this era of so-called power politics? How can a group get what it wants by inflicting punishment not on the enemy but on itself? What are the analytic features of satyagraha as a tactic? These questions are important, for even if Gandhi the saint cannot be analyzed (or even imitated), perhaps Gandhi the tactician