Mohandas K. Gandhi

Gandhi held that satyagraha, holding firmly to truth, and ahimsa, refusing to injure, were obligations rather than tactics, binding whether or not they produced a result, and the ashram he ran was built to make that claim practical. Its residents took a set of vows that went well beyond nonviolence: truth, chastity, non-possession, not stealing, control of the palate, fearlessness, physical labour for a living, the use of locally made goods, equal respect for all religions, and the removal of untouchability. Daily prayer drew readings from more than one scripture. The point of the arrangement was that a political method has to be lived somewhere before it can be asked of anyone else.

His reading of texts was his own and he said so. He treated the Bhagavad Gita as an allegory of the struggle inside a person rather than as a licence for war, which is not how the tradition had generally read it, and he acknowledged the objection. The Jain environment of his Gujarati childhood shaped the seriousness with which he took injury to any living thing. The Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy and Ruskin all left marks. He described the whole of his own life as a series of experiments with truth, a phrase that concedes the possibility of getting it wrong.

The strongest criticism came from inside India and was theological as much as political. B. R. Ambedkar argued that calling the excluded castes Harijans, children of God, softened a structure that needed dismantling, and that the reform Gandhi wanted left the caste order itself standing. Their disagreement came to a head over separate electorates for the depressed classes, which Gandhi opposed by fasting and which produced the Poona Pact of 1932 with reserved seats instead. Ambedkar accepted the terms and did not accept the argument, and he later left Hinduism for Buddhism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah made a different objection: that a movement speaking in a Hindu religious idiom could not represent Muslims, however sincerely it wished to.

He fasted repeatedly against communal violence, most notably during the killings that accompanied partition, and he was shot in Delhi in January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, who held that he had conceded too much to Muslims and to Pakistan. The method outlived him unevenly. It was studied closely by the American civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King Jr. reworked it in an explicitly Christian frame, while in India itself the reputation has never stopped being contested, which is what usually happens to a figure whose claims were religious and whose arena was a state.