Suddenly, there were new words to decipher. Mohandas was his name, and yet everyone called him ‘Mahatma’. He was ‘Gandhi’, but sometimes ‘Gandhiji’. His cause was ‘Swaraj’, even if ‘swadeshi’ also served as an occasional substitute. And he talked of ‘satyagraha’, ‘ahimsa’, ‘brahmacharya’, and the ‘hartal’ with a fluent certainty. This was the language of ‘Gandhism’ or ‘Gandhi-ism’, although, somewhat confusingly, the eponymous rebel specifically rejected the possibility that such an ‘–ism’ might ever exist.

What did it all mean?

‘Satyagraha’ was the most frequently cited of these concepts. This was the Mahatma's neologism to describe the methods of non-violent protest. As he explained in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi sought out this new vocabulary in dissatisfaction with the political idiom of the English. Westerners talked of ‘passive resistance’, and this was a label at first deployed by Indian protesters, too. But Gandhi felt that the customary term was most often ‘narrowly construed’: it conventionally signified a method of the ‘weak’ or ‘helpless’, merely forced into supplication by the absence of arms or the restriction of the ballot. Nominally ‘passive’ campaigns, such as those led by the suffragettes, had encompassed acts of terrible destruction. Moreover, the connotation of passivity was also apt to mislead: the movement Gandhi led was emphatically ‘not passive’, but called for ‘intense activity’. It was animated by a positive attachment to the values of love and truth.