With Gandhi, the notion of nonviolence attained a special status. He not only theorized on it, he adopted nonviolence as a philosophy and an ideal way of life. He made us understand that the philosophy of nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak; it is a weapon, which can be tried by all.
Nonviolence was not Gandhi’s invention. He is however called the father of nonviolence because according to Mark Shepard, “He raised nonviolent action to a level never before achieved.” ¹ Krishna
Kripalani again asserts “Gandhi was the first in Human history to extend the principle of nonviolence from the individual to social and political plane.” ²While scholars were talking about an idea without a name or a movement, Gandhi is the person who came up with the name and brought together different related ideas under one concept: Satyagraha.

Gandhi saw violence pejoratively and also identified two formsof violence; Passive and Physical, as we saw earlier. The practice of passive violence is a daily affair, consciously and unconsciously. It is again the fuel that ignites the fire of physical violence. Gandhi understands violence from its Sanskrit root, “himsa”, meaning injury. In the midst of hyper violence, Gandhi teaches that the one who possess nonviolence is blessed. Blessed is the man who can perceive the law of ahimsa (nonviolence) in the midst of the raging fire of himsa all around him. We bow in reverence to such a man by his example. The more adverse the circumstances around him, the intenser grows his longing for deliverance from the bondage of flesh which is a vehicle of himsa…³Gandhi objects to violence because it perpetuates hatred. When it appears to do ‘good’, the good is only temporary and cannot do any good in the long run. A true nonviolence activist accepts violence on himself without inflicting it on another. This is heroism, and will be discussed in another section. When Gandhi says that in the course of fighting for human rights, one should accept violence and self-suffering, he does not applaud cowardice. Cowardice for him is “the greatest violence, certainly, far greater   than bloodshed and the like that generally go under the name of violence.” ⁴For Gandhi, perpetrators of violence (whom he referred to as criminals), are products of social disintegration.  Gandhi feels that violence is not a natural tendency of humans. It is a learned experience. There is need for a perfect weapon to combat violence and this is nonviolence.Gandhi understood nonviolence from its Sanskrit root “Ahimsa”.  Ahimsa is just translated to mean nonviolence in English, but it implies more than just avoidance of physical violence. Ahimsa implies total nonviolence, no physical violence, and no passive violence. Gandhi translates Ahimsa as love. This is explained by Arun Gandhi in an interview thus; “He (Gandhi) said ahimsa means love. Because if you have love towards somebody, and you respect that person, then you are not going to do any harm to that person.” ⁵   For Gandhi, nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than any weapon of mass destruction. It is superior to brute force. It is a living force of power and no one has been or will ever be able to measure its limits or it’s extend.Gandhi’s nonviolence is the search for truth. Truth is the most fundamental aspect in Gandhi’s Philosophy of nonviolence. His whole life has been “experiments of truth”. It was in this course of his pursuit of truth that Gandhi discovered nonviolence, which he further explained in his Autobiography thus “Ahimsa is the basis of the search for truth. I am realizing that this search is vain, unless it is founded on ahimsa as the basis.” ⁶ Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.For nonviolence to be strong and effective, it must begin with the mind, without which it will be nonviolence of the weak and cowardly.  A coward is a person who lacks courage when facing a dangerous and unpleasant situation and tries to avoid it. A man cannot practice ahimsa and at the same time be a coward. True nonviolence is dissociated from fear.  Gandhi feels that possession of arms is not only cowardice but also lack of fearlessness or courage. Gandhi stressed this when he says; “I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice but true nonviolence is impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.” ⁷ In the face of violence and injustice, Gandhi considers violent resistance preferable to cowardly submission. There is hope that a violent man may someday be nonviolent, but there is no room for a coward to develop fearlessness.
As the world’s pioneer in nonviolent theory and practice, Gandhi unequivocally stated that nonviolence contained a universal applicability. In his letter to Daniel Oliver in Hammana Lebanon on the 11^th of 1937 Gandhi used these words: “ I have no message to give except this that there is no deliverance for any people on this earth or for all the people of this earth except through truth and nonviolence in every walk of life without any exceptions.”⁸ In this passage, Gandhi promises “deliverance” through nonviolence for oppressed peoples without exception. Speaking primarily with regards to nonviolence as a libratory philosophy in this passage, Gandhi emphasizes the power of nonviolence to emancipate spiritually and physically. It is a science and of its own can lead one to pure democracy.

It will be good here to examine what Stanley E. Jones calls “the centre of Gandhi’s contribution to the world”. All else is marginal compared to it. Satyagraha is the quintessence of Gandhism. Through it, Gandhi introduced a new spirit to the world. It is the greatest of all Gandhi’s contribution to the world.

Satyagraha (pronounced sat-YAH-graha) is a compound of two Sanskrit nouns satya, meaning truth (from ‘sat’- ‘being’ with a suffix ‘ya’), and agraha, meaning, “firm grasping” (a noun made from the agra, which has its root ‘grah’- ‘seize’, ‘grasp’, with the verbal prefix ‘a’ – ‘to’ ‘towards). Thus Satyagraha literally means devotion to truth, remaining firm on the truth and resisting untruth actively but nonviolently. Since the only way for Gandhi getting to the truth is by nonviolence (love), it follows that Satyagraha implies an unwavering search for the truth using nonviolence. Satyagraha according to Michael Nagler literally means ‘clinging to truth,’ and that was exactly how Gandhi understood it: “clinging to the truth that we are all one under the skin, that there is no such thing as a ‘win/lose’ confrontation because all our important interests are really the same, that consciously or not every single person wants unity and peace with every other”⁹  Put succinctly, Satyagraha means ‘truth force’ , ‘soul force’ or as Martin Luther Jr would call it ‘love in action.’ Satyagraha has often been defined as the philosophy of nonviolent resistance most famously employed by Mahatma Gandhi, in forcing an end to the British domination. Gene Sharp did not hesitate to define Satyagraha simply as “Gandhian Nonviolence.”¹⁰
Today as Nagler would say, when we use the word Satyagraha we sometimes mean that general principle, the fact that love is stronger than hate (and we can learn to use it to overcome hate), and sometimes we mean more specifically active resistance by a repressed group; sometimes, even more specifically, we apply the term to a given movement like Salt Satyagraha etc. It is worthwhile looking at the way Gandhi uses Satyagraha.