Holistic, Evolving Aspects of Nonviolence for Bringing About Needed Social-Political Change and Important Practitioners of Nonviolence

Introduction to the Great Significance of Gandhi’s Nonviolence

While there have always been religious leaders historically who lived lives of nonviolence, as well as important individual practitioners of nonviolence in more recent periods before Gandhi—such as Leo Tolstoy in Russia (Green, 1986; Murthy, 1987; and Tolstoy and Garnett, 2006) and Henry David Thoreau in the United States (Thoreau, 2012; and other editions of his work)--modern nonviolent movements began with Mahatma Gandhi, who was the first person who led a collective movement using nonviolence for social-political change, in Gandhi’s case first against discrimination that he experienced for being Indian in South Africa, and later when he returned to India to lead India’s movement for independence from the British Empire. (See, for example, from the many writings on Gandhi’s life: Carter, 1995; Easwaran and Flinders, 3^rd Ed., 1997; Gandhi and Fischer, 2002; Gandhi and Brown, Eds., 2008; Gandhi and Mahadev, 1993; and Johnson, 2005.) All later practitioners of collective movements of principled and spiritually-based nonviolence, as part of a whole philosophy of how one lives one’s life, go back to Gandhi as their inspiration. Gandhi was nominated five times for a Nobel Peace Prize before he was murdered in 1948—an irony for someone so committed to nonviolence. (The same happened to Martin Luther King.)