Satyagraha, literally "holding firmly to truth", is the method of non-violent resistance developed by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in South Africa and later used in India's freedom struggle, in which the resister accepts suffering to change the opponent's heart.
Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893 as a lawyer and experienced racial discrimination himself. In 1906, when the Transvaal government proposed a law requiring Indians to register and carry passes, Indians resolved at a mass meeting in Johannesburg to refuse to obey it and to accept the penalties. Gandhi wanted a name for this kind of struggle that did not carry the sense of weakness he felt in "passive resistance". Through a contest in his journal Indian Opinion, the word sadagraha was suggested, and he adapted it to satyagraha.
His ideas drew on many sources: the Gita, Jain and Vaishnava traditions of non-violence, Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience, Tolstoy's writings on non-resistance and Ruskin's Unto This Last. After returning to India in 1915, he tested the method in local struggles before using it nationally.
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