Gandhi’s Salt or Dandi March heading to the sea, 1930

A concise open-access teaching resource featuring essential selections from Gandhi on the philosophy of nonviolence. The book includes: a preface, brief explanatory notes, supplementary boxes containing related philosophical material, images and videos, an appendix on post-Gandhian nonviolence, questions for reflection/discussion, and suggestions for further study.

2021 – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948)—often addressed by the respectful “Gandhiji,” the reverential “Mahatma” (Sanskrit for “Great Soul”), or the affectionate “Bapu” (Gujarati for “father”)—is widely regarded as the father of nonviolence. 1 His birthday, October 2, is commemorated as the International Day of Nonviolence.

Of course, Gandhi was not the first to advocate nonviolence as a form of resistance to injustice. He drew on an expansive range of earlier sources, most notably the Jain religion, his own Hinduism, Christianity, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (469/470– 399 BCE), the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, the US transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the Russian novelist and essayist Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910), and the English writer, philosopher, and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900).

Gandhi’s significance lies in synthesizing and building on these sources, developing new methods of nonviolent resistance, advocating for and publicizing these ideas and methods in writings and speeches, and putting them into practice on a massive, coordinated scale in South Africa and India, thereby providing a template on which many future nonviolent activists would model their own campaigns.

Most prominent among those he influenced was Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), a Baptist minister, activist, and spokesperson for the US civil rights movement. King studied philosophy, sociology, and theology as an undergraduate and in seminary, which prepared the way for his enthusiastic embrace of Gandhi’s ideas upon encountering them during doctoral studies. King then absorbed Gandhi’s writings, traveled to India to pay homage, and imported the Gandhian philosophy into the US context, where he adapted it to his Christianity, systematized and refined it, presented it to the public in an eloquent, powerful new voice, and wielded it in his fight for justice and against what he termed “the Triple Evils” of poverty, racism, and militarism.

Although Gandhi and King are no longer with us, the Gandhi-King paradigm lives on today in nonviolent resistance movements all over the world.

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Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence

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