Gandhi developed satyagraha ("holding onto truth") as an active, disciplined practice of nonviolent civil resistance, distinct from passive submission, first tested among the Indian community in South Africa and later deployed against British colonial rule in India. In "Hind Swaraj" (1909) he criticized modern industrial civilization as itself a form of violence and argued for swaraj - self-rule meaning both national political independence and individual ethical self-governance grounded in the principle of ahimsa (nonviolence).
Intellectual setting
Gandhi synthesized the Bhagavad Gita, Jain ahimsa, Tolstoy's Christian pacifism, and Thoreau's civil disobedience while developing satyagraha through two decades of organizing among Indian communities in South Africa before applying it to campaigns against British rule in India from 1915 until independence in 1947.
Key ideas
Satyagraha
Gandhi held that satyagraha, or truth-force, is an active, disciplined form of nonviolent resistance in which the resister willingly accepts suffering to expose injustice and appeal to the opponent's conscience, sharply distinguished from mere passive non-resistance.
Swaraj as political and ethical self-rule
In "Hind Swaraj," Gandhi argued that genuine self-rule requires not only political independence from colonial power but individual moral self-discipline, and that modern industrial civilization's pursuit of ever-expanding wants is itself a source of violence incompatible with true swaraj.
Legacy
Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance profoundly shaped twentieth-century anti-colonial and civil rights movements worldwide, directly influencing Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement, and remains foundational to modern theories of nonviolent political action.