Holding firmly to truth is the literal sense of satyagraha, the word Mohandas Gandhi settled on in South Africa for the method he spent the rest of his life testing. Its rules are simple to state and hard to keep: break an unjust law openly, refuse violence of any kind, and accept the penalty, so that suffering is taken on rather than inflicted. The name came out of a reader competition in his weekly Indian Opinion. A relative proposed sadagraha, firmness in a good cause, and Gandhi changed it to make the meaning plainer. For years he called it passive resistance in English, then dropped the phrase because others, the suffragettes among them, had used it for campaigns that allowed violence.
Nothing in his early life pointed this way. He trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the bar in June 1891, at twenty-one, then failed to make a practice in Bombay because he could not bring himself to cross-examine a witness. In 1893 he took a legal job in South Africa. At Pietermaritzburg station he was put out of a first-class compartment, for which he held a ticket, because he was not white, and he spent the night in the waiting room. He later wrote that running back to India would have been cowardice, and that he resolved to try to root out the disease of colour prejudice and to suffer hardships in the process. In 1904 a friend, Henry Polak, gave him John Ruskin's Unto This Last for a train journey from Johannesburg to Durban; Gandhi did not sleep that night and decided to change his life according to the book. That year he moved his paper to the Phoenix Settlement, a farm fourteen miles from Durban. He later rendered the book into Gujarati as Sarvodaya, "the welfare of all".
The method first appeared as a vow. In 1906 the Transvaal drafted an ordinance requiring every Indian over the age of eight to register and give fingerprints, and on 11 September some three thousand Indians met at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg and resolved to go to prison rather than submit. Gandhi dated satyagraha from that meeting. Three years later his book Hind Swaraj gave it a theory: India's real master was modern civilisation, not the English, and self-rule began as rule over oneself. Means and ends, he argued, cannot be separated; a watch taken by force, bought, or received as a gift becomes in each case a different thing.
He came home in 1915, at forty-five, and two years later won concessions for indigo farmers in Champaran, in Bihar. Non-co-operation followed in 1920, and in 1930 he walked with volunteers for more than three weeks, from Ahmedabad to Dandi on the Gujarat coast, to make salt in defiance of the salt laws. Martin Luther King Jr. said he was particularly moved by the Salt March and the fasts, and he used Gandhi's methods in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56.
The sharpest objections came from Indians. In 1921 Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, argued that bonfires of foreign cloth burned what the poor needed to wear, and later that the spinning wheel had become a cult that asked no one to think. In 1934 Gandhi called the Bihar earthquake a divine chastisement for untouchability, and Tagore protested that the view was unscientific. B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the untouchable castes, held that the Hindu scriptures themselves sustained caste. In 1932 Gandhi fasted in prison against separate electorates for untouchables, and Ambedkar, who had demanded them, signed the Poona Pact that took their place. When Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste appeared in 1936, Gandhi answered it in his weekly Harijan with "A Vindication of Caste".
Gandhi had begun by saying that God is Truth and later reversed it: Truth is God. He spent Independence Day 1947 in Calcutta, fasting and spinning, while the country was partitioned. On 30 January 1948 Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist from Pune, shot him at a prayer meeting in Delhi.