Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi (1869–1948) lived a remarkable life. Born in India, he left for England in 1888 to train as a lawyer, later moving to South Africa where he experienced profound racial discrimination. He eventually returned to India in 1914 as a “self-confident, proud, deeply religious, and well-known political leader” (9).

Ghandi is perhaps best known for his method of non-violent resistance: satyāgraha.

Violence . . . Tended to generate an inflationary spiral. Every successful use blunted the community’s moral sensibility and raised its threshold of violence, so that over time an increasingly larger amount became necessary to achieve the same results. (67)

Ghandi’s alternative to violence was to raise his soul-force through fasting before using that power to resist unjust laws and cultural norms through non-violence disobedience.

If you’re a Christian and this sounds familiar, know that Ghandi was deeply impressed by the cross as the ideal of self-sacrificing love. However, don’t mistake Ghandi for a Christian. Born into a sect of Hinduism, his modernist perspective on knowledge led him to pick and choose which religious traditions suited his reason.

Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series does it again. This volume is a rich yet brief overview of a person who changed history.

Parekh, Bhikhu. Ghandi: A Very Short Introduction. 1997. Oxford UP, 2001. Very Short Introductions 37.