Satyagraha

Mahatma Gandhi leading the famous 1930 Salt March, a notable example of satyagraha.

Satyāgraha (from Sanskrit: सत्याग्रह; satya: "truth", āgraha: "insistence" or "holding firmly to"), or "holding firmly to truth",[1] or "truth force", is a particular form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. Someone who practises satyagraha is a satyagrahi.

The term satyagraha was coined and developed by Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)[2] as early as 1919.[3] Gandhi practised satyagraha as part of the Indian independence movement and also during his earlier struggles in South Africa for Indian rights. Satyagraha theory influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s and James Bevel's campaigns during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, as well as Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid in South Africa and many other social-justice and similar movements.[4][5]

  1. ^ http://www.gandhifoundation.net/about%20gandhi6.htm "Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that the is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, peace, and gave up the use of the phrase 'passive resistance', in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word 'satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase."
  2. ^ Uma Majmudar (2005). Gandhi's pilgrimage of faith: from darkness to light. SUNY Press. p. 138. ISBN 9780791464052.
  3. ^ "satyagraha". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  4. ^ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/525247/satyagraha "Gandhi’s satyagraha became a major tool in the Indian struggle against British imperialism and has since been adopted by protest groups in other countries." Date accessed: 14 September 2010.
  5. ^ [1] Archived 5 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine "In this respect Satyagraha or non-violent resistance, as conceived by Gandhi, has an important lesson for pacifists and war-resisters of the West. Western pacifists have so far proved ineffective because they have thought that war can be resisted by mere propaganda, conscientious objection, and organization for settling disputes." Date accessed: 14 September 2010.

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