2025 Annual Gandhi Lecture - Scaling Up Satyagraha: Miscalculation and Discovery by Karuna Mantena
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.
Speakers
Karuna Mantena is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). She specializes in political theory with research interests in the history of political thought, the theory and history of empire, South Asian intellectual history, and postcolonial democracy. Karuna is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), which analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. She is currently finishing a book on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence.
- Humanity