Sublime

India's political news after World War I was driven largely by Gandhi, whom the poet Rabindranath Tagore had christened "Mahatma," the Great One. Since leaving South Africa, Gandhi had become, through his various campaigns for swaraj, or self-rule—independence from Britain—a household name in India. Gujaratis took inordinate pride in seei

A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka.

"What student is he who will continue to study at such a time?" Gandhi asked a crowd on March 17, two weeks before the march passed by Narotam's hometown. "Today I ask them to leave schools and come out on the battlefield and become mendicants for the sake of the country ... The final battle has to be waged."

He settled on salt. "History has no instance of a tax as cruel as the salt tax," Gandhi declared; through it, "the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless." The issue was not only taxation, though the tax was heavy, working out by his account to 2,400 percent over the sale price.

Thousands of villagers gathered along the route to see the Mahatma and support the movement. Walking ten to twelve miles a day, Gandhi gave rousing speeches and recruited volunteers. He urged village headmen to resign their posts and cease cooperating with the British government. He promoted other elements of his agenda: spin khaadi and boycott for

It became "shameful," Gandhi wrote, to refer to such nonviolent resistance using English words. His newspaper held a contest, and the technique was renamed satyagraha, "force which is born of Truth and Love," or "soul force." South Africa's Indians were trying out and developing the strategies that would become Gandhi'

In one dramatic moment in 1906, Gandhi had gathered hundreds of Indians who together vowed, before God, to resist draconian regulations that required all Indians to be registered and fingerprinted like criminals and that allowed police officers to search houses and demand domicile certificates at any time, on punishment of deportation. They burned