The South Asian Studies Council 2025 Annual Gandhi Lecture presents
Karuna Mantena, Political Science, Columbia University:
“Scaling Up Satyagraha: Miscalculation and Discovery.”
There is often an assumption of the continuity and completeness of Gandhi’s ideas, that the basic features of satyagraha came together in South Africa, and were then applied on a much larger scale in India. But satyagraha was an evolving experiment in which Gandhi was generating theory through practice. Strikingly, it was in moments of crisis that Gandhi’s most important theoretical innovations occurred. In this lecture, I will focus on one such moment: Gandhi’s first experiments in mass satyagraha (1919-1922). These campaigns would catapult Gandhi to national leadership. They also occasioned important, intense, and accelerated conceptual innovation. It was in this period that Gandhi filled out the main branches of the “tree of satyagraha”: civil disobedience, non-cooperation, and constructive satyagraha. Most remarkably, these conceptual developments were directly spurred by a series of glaring failures, namely the tendency of mass nonviolent politics to spark, devolve, and mutate into violence. Mass politics inaugurated an ongoing and persistent dilemma for Gandhian politics; that scaling up satyagraha carried within it the ever present potential of violence.