Abstract: This chapter explores the development of Gandhi's concept of non-violent resistance first against racial discrimination in South Africa and then against the British oppression of Indians’ desire for self-government in India. This idea did not evolve in a vacuum, rather Gandhi was influenced by several thinkers including Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin. From India, this idea spread across the globe and influenced movements in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. The experience of World War I provided for an opening in European societies for the concept of non-violent resistance in the 1920s and 1930s. The experience of trench warfare had called into doubt claims about European superiority and the notion of progress in general. In this context, Gandhi's non-violent resistance captivated European and North American audiences. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer actively sought an invitation from Gandhi and hoped to find ideas for the renewal of Christianity in Gandhi's teachings. After World War II and in the context of the Cold War, Gandhi's non-violent strategy attracted attention on a global scale. Faced with the possibility of nuclear war, social and political change in individual countries required non-violent rather than violent strategies. Both the civil rights fight of African-Americans and of Mexican-American farm workers for a fair and humane treatment in the United States was infused with the ideas of Gandhism. Martin Luther King, Jr. and César Chávez embraced Gandhi's strategy in the pursuit of gaining equality. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, non-violent movements across the globe challenged and toppled authoritarian governments and systems including the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe.

This chapter was first published in Thomas Adam, Intercultural Transfers and the Making of the Modern World, 1800– 2000: Sources and Context, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 111– 35. This text has been modified by the addition of endnotes.

The Birth of Satyagraha

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's exposure to racial discrimination in South Africa marked a turning point in his life and set him on his path to develop nonviolent means of resistance to European domination. After he had completed his training as a lawyer in London, Gandhi accepted in 1893 out of financial necessity a position as a legal counsel to Indian Muslim traders and merchants in South Africa.