Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyāgraha with the “Hindu” Notion of Ahiṃsā?

Abstract The purpose of this article is to unearth the genealogy of M. K. Gandhi's “non-violence,” the cardinal principle of satyāgraha. Previous works considered that Gandhi's concept of non-violence was essentially derived from the “ancient” Hindu–Jain precept of ahiṃsā (non-killing) common in the subcontinent. On the contrary, I will, by examining Gandhi's primary texts in Gujarati, Hindi, and English, demonstrate the following: (1) during Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa (1893–1914) where he led his first satyāgraha campaign, he never associated the term ahiṃsā with satyāgraha; (2) his satyāgraha campaign was initially explained with the trans-religious and cosmopolitan concepts of Tolstoy and the nirguṇ bhaktas; (3) Gandhi first began to use the term ahiṃsā as a nationalist slogan linked with satyāgraha immediately after his return to India in 1915; (4) the English translation of ahiṃsā as “non-violence” was eventually coined by Gandhi after 1919 during his all-India satyāgraha campaign.


Introduction
It is well acknowledged that M. K. Gandhi (Mohandās Karamcand Gāndhī, 1869-1948, one of the most prominent political leaders in colonial India, promoted the Hindu-Jain traditional notion of ahim  sā in his native tongues of Gujarati and Hindi/Hindustani, rendering it "non-violence" in English, throughout the nationalist struggle in the subcontinent. 1 Gandhi labelled his anticolonial campaign satyāgraha (truth-force). 2 This term, originally invented by Gandhi during his twenty-one-year South African sojourn, denoted a philosophy as well as a method of mass agitation that prohibited use of violent means. After 1915, Gandhi consistently argued that the principle of ahim  sā was the very foundation of "Indian" or "Hindu" culture and therefore his all-India satyāgraha campaign against the British Raj must be firmly rooted in it.
To the best of my knowledge, it has been almost accepted as a truism that Gandhi's idea of ahim  sā/non-violence, the cardinal principle of satyāgraha, essentially originated from his childhood experiences  in the Princely States of Porbandar and Rajkot, the western and the central regions of the Kāt hiyāvād peninsula respectively, both infused with the religio-cultural ethos of ahim  sā. 3 Yet such genealogical understandings of Gandhi's notion of ahim  sā/non-violence credulously internalize his nationalist self-narrative, which was invented after he reached his late forties. 4 Although it is impossible to completely deny the psychological impressions of Gandhi's childhood, which are substantially subjective matters, 5 it is crucial for us to acknowledge that he almost never underscored the positive value of the term ahim  sā in both public and private spheres until around 1915.
Rather than dwell upon the influences of his early life obtained from the "ancient" culture common in his homeland, in this article I will emphasize that Gandhi's experiences in South Africa (1893-1914 were vital. There, Gandhi led his satyāgraha campaign  for the first time and peacefully combated racial discrimination against Asian immigrants by cooperating with people of diverse religio-cultural backgrounds, including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews. During these years, Gandhi was exposed to trans-religious as well as universalist ideas. His principle of satyāgraha was by no means articulated using the word ahim  sā or "non-violence" (although he did claim to deny the use of "violence.") 6 Instead, it was chiefly expressed using concepts that appeared in the works of Leo Tolstoy and the late medieval nirgun  bakhti poets. Finding a deep conceptual commonality between the putative "West" and "East," Gandhi cherished his cosmopolitan vision. It was only later that Gandhi, now a matured politician of forty-five, first began to explain, while emphasizing its Hindu religiosity, the central 2 Satyāgrah(a) is Gandhi's neologism which etymologically means āgraha ("holding firm") onto satya ("truth") in Gujarati, Hindi, and Sanskrit. From the 1920s onwards, Gandhi started to translate the concept into the English words "non-violent (civil) disobedience" and "non-violent resistance." virtue of satyāgraha by using ahim  sā (and the term "non-violence" four years later). Although Gandhian-like ethico-humanist interpretations of ahim  sā became prevalent among both scholars and civil rights activists after India's independence, "Vedic" and "Brahmanical" conceptions of the term, featuring aspects such as a high-caste vegetarian diet and cow worship and entailing communal implications, were conspicuously common among Hindu nationalist reformers in the pre-Gandhian era. 7 Gandhi's decision to utilize the word ahim  sā immediately after his return to India in 1915 indicates his important intellectual evolution as a nationalist leader of the subcontinent. It also points to his tactical need to secure moral-financial support from primarily well-to-do vānīyās, the dominant Jain/ Hindu mercantile caste in Ahmedabad, in order to establish and run his satyāgraha āśram in Kocrab. 8 Finally, from 1919 onwards, Gandhi began to translate the term ahim  sā into the English and religiously neutral word "non-violence" during the beginning stage of his all-India nationalist campaign. This lesser-known genealogy behind Gandhi's self-narrative of ahim  sā/non-violence will eventually provide us with a crucial insight, allowing us to relocate Gandhian thought from the Indian-Hindu nationalist framework to a broader global cosmopolitan context. 9 The multifaceted process of how Gandhi, in an apparently almost ad hoc 7 See notes 24, 25, 26, 58 below. The development of the ethical meaning of ahim  sā as "abstention from killing/injuring animals/living beings" was generally considered to have originated in anti-Brahmanical movements such as Buddhism and Jainism and appeared around the fifth century BCE. These movements opposed the slaughter of animals in Vedic rituals. See Lambert Schmithausen, "Aspects of the Buddhist Attitude towards War," in Houben and van Kooij, Violence Denied, 45-68, at 33-8; Schmithausen, "A Note on the Origin of Ahim  sā," in Ryutaro Tsuchida and Albrecht Wezler, eds., Harānandalaharī (Reinbek, 2000), 253-82, at 253; and Hanns-Peter Schmidt, "The Origin of Ahim  sā," in Louis Renou, Mélanges d'Indianisme à la mémoire de Louis Renou (Paris, 1968), 625-55. There seems to be, however, a semantic transition as the principle and custom popularly infiltrated the subcontinent during the medieval period. As it became assimilated into mainstream Hinduism, the concept of ahim  sā, though understood differently in various Hindu sects, seems to refer primarily to vegetarian diet as a higher-status attribute, as well as to "the protection of Mother Cow" (gau-raks ā). See Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (London, 1988), 131;Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (California, 1994), 43-4;Madelaine Biardieu, "Ancient Brahmanism, or Impossible Non-violence," in Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout, and Eric Meyer, eds, Violence/Non-violence: Some Hindu Perspectives (New Delhi, 2003), 85-104; D. F. Jatavallabhula, "Ran  ayajā: The Mahābhārata as a Sacrifice," in Houben and van Kooij,Violence Denied, It should be noted that although Jainism was initially developed as an anti-Brahmanical movement (see note 7 above), as time passed, the former was incorporated into the complex caste systems of orthodox Hinduism. Particularly in the western part of India where Jain cultural influences were strong in spite of the relatively small population, Jain vān  īyās are regarded as being as high in status as brāhman  s due to their socioeconomic prominence in the region. See Amit Thorat and Omkar Joshi, "The Continuing Practice of Untouchability in India: Patterns and Mitigating Influences," Economic & Political Weekly 55/2 (2020), 36-45, at 40; John Cort, "Jains, Caste and Hierarchy in North Gujarat," Contributions to Indian Sociology 38/1-2 (2004), 73-110. 9 Many previous historiographies have discussed Gandhian thought within the "elitist" nationalist framework, often connecting it with Hindu religiosity. See Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, 1968); David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics (Cambridge, 1976); Bipan Chandra, "Study of the Indian National Movement," Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 1, 22-40; Bipan Chandra, Aditya Mukherjee, and Mridula Mukherjee, India after Independence 1947-2000(New Delhi, 1999; Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London, 1993); Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography," in Guha, manner, began to use the English rendering "non-violence" for ahim  sā during the all-India nationalist campaign will also explain how he struggled to gain popular support from Indian Muslims.
Before moving on to a genealogical analysis of Gandhi's concept of ahim  sā/nonviolence, I should note one essential reason for the lack of scholarship on this subject. An almost insurmountable amount of historical materials pertinent to the topic exist and require multilingual analysis. There are voluminous documents written by Gandhi primarily in three languages (Gujarati, Hindi, and English), 10 amounting to more than 100,000 published pages, including editors' translations, compiled in the three versions of Gandhi's Collected Works. These are, namely, the eighty-two volumes of the Gujarati version of the Collected Works entitled Gāndhījīno Aks ardeh: Mahātmā Gāndhīnām  Lakhān  o, Bhās an  o, Patro Vagereno San  grah (1967-92, hereafter GA); the ninety-seven volumes of the Hindi version entitled Sampūrn  Gāndhī Vān  gmay (1958-94, hereafter SGV); and the hundred volumes of the English version entitled The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1956-94, hereafter CWMG). 11 Most previous works, barring a few exceptions, 12 have failed to examine when, where, or in what context the terms ahim  sā and "nonviolence" exactly appeared in Gandhi's writings. 13 To earnestly confront this absence in past scholarly works, this article will chronologically examine all the ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1 (New Delhi, 1982), 1-8;and Gyan Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919-22," in ibid., 143-97. 10 During his sojourn in South Africa, he published his weekly journal Indian Opinion in Gujarati, English, Tamil, and Urdu. Gandhi had a certain level of command of Sanskrit and Urdu as well. He further tried to learn Telugu and Bengali. See Tridip Suhrud, Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues (Shimla, 2012), 2. 11 Tridip Suhrud has cautiously reported that in the revised and digitized version of CWMG and SGV published in 1999, there can be found hundreds of omissions, non-transparent reediting, and flaws. See Tridip Suhrud, "'Re-editing ' Gandhi's Collected Works," Economic and Political Weekly 39/46-47 (2004), 4967-9. Considering these, in this article I will solely rely upon the previous versions of CWMG and SGV published between 1956/1958and 1994. I have also confirmed the authenticity of these older versions in my personal email correspondence with Suhrud on 20 Dec. 2015. 12 As far as I am aware, there are three works which have explored the terminological origin of Gandhi's concept of ahim  sā. These are Eijiro Hazama, "The Origin of Political Ahim  sā: A Study of Gandhi's Thought andExperience from 1909 to 1915," Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 23 (2011), 7-30; David Hardiman, "Ahimsa: Shifting Meanings in Indian History," in Hardiman, Nonviolence in Modern Indian History (Telangana, 2017), 8-33;andHardiman, The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905-19 (London, 2018), 159-70. The present article is owing to Hazama's article which differs from Hardiman's with respect to the following three points explained in the next, the third, and the fourth sections: (1) exactly when Gandhi began to employ the concepts of ahim  sā and non-violence, (2) what were the central concepts other than ahim  sā to explain Gandhi's satyāgraha in South Africa, (3) why and how Gandhi started to use the word ahim  sā in both private and public documents. See also notes 14, 58, 66 below. 13 Although the importance of using Gandhi's Gujarati materials has already been noted by Erikson, Gandhi's Truth, 60;and B. Parekh, "Gandhi and His Translators," Gandhi Marg 8 (1986), 163-72;Parekh, Gandhi's Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, 1989), 7, there are still only a few works which have utilized Gandhi's Gujarati writings, such as Suhrud, Gandhi in Two Tongues; Skaria, Unconditional Equality; Anthony Parel, ed., "Hind Swaraj" (Cambridge, 1997); Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (Cambridge, 2006); Hardiman, "Ahimsa"; Hardiman, The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom. materials available in GA, SGV, and CWMG in order to demonstrate the terminological as well as conceptual genealogy of Gandhi's idea of ahim  sā/non-violence.
Gandhi's initial uses of the terms of ahim  sā and "non-violence" This section shows when, where, and how the words ahim  sā and "non-violence" appeared in Gandhi's writings in the three languages; that is to say, Gujarati, Hindi, and English. According to GA, SGV, and CWMG, except ten references in Hind Svarāj written in 1909, the word ahim  sā (or its adjective form ahim  sak which also means "practitioner(s) of ahim  sā") appears only twice during Gandhi's South African period, both times written in Gujarati in his private letters (see Table 1 below, which lists the documents until 1919, the year when Gandhi first used the English word "non-violence"). As the table below shows, references to ahim  sā in the Gujarati script ( ), the Hindi/Devanagari scripts (अिहं सा), and Roman letters ("ahimsa") rapidly increased from 1915 onwards.
Additionally, as can be seen in Table 1, the English term "non-violence" was first used by Gandhi on 18 April 1919, the day on which he announced the temporary suspension of the first all-India satyāgraha campaign, known as the Rowlatt Satyāgraha or had  tāl, due to the outbreak of a series of riots in north and western India. 14 From this day onwards, he began to use the word "non-violence" as an English rendering of ahim  sā during the anticolonial nationalist struggles. According to H. Bodewitz, Gandhi's use of the term ahim  sā as "policy of rejecting violent means" is a purely modern interpretation. "Non-injury" or "non-killing" rather than "non-violence" is a more common translation for the term ahim  sā from a philological perspective. It should be noted that the word "non-violence" cannot be found in English dictionaries published before the Gandhian era. 15 It is possible to say Gandhi was the most influential, perchance the first, person to consciously coin the English term "non-violence," and translated the Sanskrit word ahim  sā into it.
Below, Gandhi's use of the word ahim  sā/ahim  sak in each document in his South African period will be explored, but first I would like to look at Gandhi's initial ten references to the term in Hind Svarāj. Hind Svarāj was Gandhi's first and only book to provide an exhaustive exposition of his understanding of the essence and philosophy of satyāgraha. Excluding the preface, the book contains twenty chapters. Along with the idea of satyāgraha, the book also deals with Gandhi's wide-ranging 14 The word simultaneously appears in the "telegram to G. A. Natesan" and the "press statement on the suspension of civil disobedience" written in English on 18 April 1919. CWMG, 15: 243-4. In the latter material, Gandhi explained the meaning of the term "ahimsa" (in Roman letters) with the word "nonviolence" in parentheses. This is the first occasion where Gandhi translated the word "ahimsa" into the English "non-violence." Yet Hardiman, "Ahimsa," 8, has pointed out that Gandhi's first instance of using the English term "non-violence" was considered to be Gandhi's article published in 1920. The article is likely to be Gandhi's "The Doctrine of the Sword" (11 Aug. 1920) in Young India. However, the English word "non-violence/non-violent" can be found forty-five times at least in CWMG from 18 April 1919 to 11 Aug. 1920. Hardiman nevertheless also provides a note about Gandhi's reference to the term on 18 April 1919 in a footnote of his newer book of 2018. Hardiman, The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 159 n. 1. 15 Henk Bodewitz, "Hindu Ahim  sā and Its Roots," in Houben and van Kooij, Violence Denied, 17-44, at 17. critical views on modern civilizations, colonial political economy, communalism, and national education in order to show why he considered satyāgraha the only true means to achieve Indian svarāj (home rule, self-rule).
What is most striking in terms of our ongoing discussion is that Gandhi never used the word ahim  sā in Chapter 17, entitled "Satyāgraha: Ātmabal ," 16 which is considered to be "the most important chapter in the whole book." 17 In it Gandhi straightforwardly explains the core meaning and significance of satyāgraha and its contributing concepts (as further considered in the next section of this article). If the word ahim  sā was not used in this chapter, where in Hind Svarāj did Gandhi deploy it? The word appears once towards the end of Chapter 9, "The Condition of India (Cont.): Train" ("Hindustānnī Daśā [Cālu]: Relveo"), 18 where he critically examines the modern scientific revolution (particularly the invention of the train) in England during the nineteenth century. After this, the word appears nine times in Chapter 10, "The Condition of India (Cont.): Hindus and Muslims ("Hindustānnī Daśā [Cālu]: Hindu-Muslmān"), 19 in the context of a discussion on Hindu-Muslim communal tension in India. 20 Let us see how exactly the word is used in these two chapters. Hind Svarāj is written as a supposed dialogue between a "reader" (a radical Indian revolutionary) and an "editor" (Gandhi himself) of the weekly journal Indian Opinion, which was published by Gandhi in South Africa. 21 While the former aims to achieve Indian svarāj by radical military means, the latter tries to persuade the former that violent methods are improper for achieving the "true" Indian svarāj. In the ending section of Chapter 9, there is a discussion about the communal conflict in India and the reader questions the editor as follows: "It is said that Hindus and Muslims have bitter enmity (hād  ver) … Hindus worship the cow, [and] Muslims kill (māre) her.
[Therefore,] Hindus are ahim  sak, [and] Muslims are him  sak [the adjective form of the term him  sā (killing, injury) which also means "practitioner(s) of him  sā"]. Thus, in every step, there are differences [between them], and how are these [problems] resolved and how can India become one [nation]?" 22 The editor answers, saying, "Thinking fundamentally, no one is ahim  sak, because we [all] harm living beings ( jīvnī hāni) … [If we] think ordinarily, many Hindus are meat-eaters (mām  sāhārī), therefore, they are not regarded as ahim  sak … If such, it is completely odd [to say] that the one is him  sak and the other is ahim  sak, therefore, they cannot be together." 23 As can be seen here, Gandhi referred to the word ahim sak in relation to the Hindu customs of vegetarian diet and cow protection. He explained that these customs were generally acknowledged as the cause for the communal tension between Hindus and Muslims. 18 HS, 91-8. 19 HS, 99-118. 20 It is striking to note that the words ahim  sak in these two chapters were translated by Gandhi himself into the English "non-killing," or he simply used "Ahinsa" in Roman letters in "Indian Home Rule" (1910) (he did not use the spelling "ahimsa" in the first edition). "IHR," 43, 47. Moreover, throughout the whole book Gandhi never connects the English concept of "violence" with the Gujarati term him  sā. When Gandhi explained the superiority of satyāgraha as the "soul-force" (ātmabal ) to any "violent" means such as armed force promoted by Indian revolutionaries, he used various Gujarati words such as mārāmārī, mārī, mārphād  (HS, 170-72, 180, 182, 188); humlo (HS, 186); śarīr bal  (HS,187,193); dārūgol o (HS, 249); hathiyār(bal ) (HS,178,180,181,185,200); hāni (HS, 178); dārūgol ā(bal ) (HS, 179, 249); topbal  (HS, 195-6, 261); and talvārnā bal  (HS, 201). 21 As we will see in the next section, Hind Svarāj was written on the return journey to South Africa after Gandhi's four months of lobbying activity in London in 1909. Gandhi met young Indian revolutionaries whom he called "anarchists" in London. When writing the perspective of the "reader" in Hind Svarāj, Gandhi was surely mindful of his encounter with them. 22 HS, 97-8. 23 HS, 112-13.
As a matter of fact, such communal debates revolving around the customs of Hindu vegetarianism and cow protection were prevalent particularly among the nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals associated with Arya Samaj. For instance, Dayānand Sarasvatī, a founder of Arya Samaj, wrote in his 1875 book Gokarun  ānidhi that cow protection was the essential tradition of Vedic Hinduism. Although Dayānand did not use the word ahim  sā, he identified a Hindu as a raks ak (protector) and a Muslim as a him  sak (killer) because of the latter's meat consumption when he elaborated upon Hindu-Muslim tensions. 24 A decade after the death of Dayānand, Arya Samaj split into two parties due to conflict between the members concerning the relevance of maintaining a vegetarian diet. Those members who held a secularist perspective in favor of meat-eating were acknowledged as the "cultured" or "college" party, whereas those against it were regarded as the mahātmā party, the special epithet given to revered saints or sages. 25 Gandhi's discussion of cow protection (gāynī raks ā) in Hind Svarāj reflects the prevalence of this issue at the time. 26 In the other documents covered, as mentioned above, there were only two which included the word ahim  sā in Gandhi's South African period. Both of these were Gujarati private letters written in 1914. These letters were addressed to Gandhi for eating many types of food will vanish away … Twenty years ago in London, too, I must have done so and I could have lived on an ahim  sak diet [ahim  sak khrāk]." 28 In these letters, Gandhi used the word ahim  sā in relation to his daily diet for reducing desires. What should be noted here is that Gandhi, as can be seen in the letter to Chaganlal, viewed the habit of drinking milk as being as harmful as meat-eating. Such an idea was contrary to the general Hindu perception of milk as a sacred 24 Svāmīdayānandsarasvatīnirmith  , Ath Gokarun  ānidhi (Dillī, 1875), 5-9. 25 The Imperial Gazet of India, vol. 20 (Oxford, 1908), 290-91. See also Swami Shraddhanand, The Arya Samaj and Its Distractors: A Vindication (n.p., 1910). 26 HS, 110. It should be noted that Vivekananda also referred to the doctrine of "non-killing" in his bestknown work Raja Yoga (1896), which Gandhi read intensively both in South Africa and in India, but only in relation to the five yamas in the Yogasūtras of Patañjali, a cannon text of the Yogadarśana, one of the major schools of the orthodox Vedic philosophy. Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga (Calcutta, 1908) drink. 29 The discussions in both letters are focused on Gandhi's personal concerns; he never raised topics such as satyāgraha or other political issues in these missives, although his dietary or personal interests were intrinsically connected to his ideas of the body politic. 30 So far, we have seen how the term ahim  sā was used in Hind Svarāj and two private letters. It is clear that a careful examination of Gandhi's South African writings reveals that he only used the word in relation to practicing vegetarianism or cow protection. It is highly significant that Gandhi never officially employed the term ahim  sā to explain the virtues of satyāgraha in South Africa. Moreover, the letters cited above were both written during the last year of Gandhi's South African sojourn. This strongly indicates that throughout his twenty-one-year stay in South Africa, the concept of ahim  sā did not occupy a central place in either his public or private experimentations ( prayogo).

How did Gandhi explain the central principle of satyāgraha in South Africa?
The previous section demonstrated that Gandhi never used ahim  sā/ahim  sak in relation to satyāgraha during his South African period. If this was the case, then what words or concepts did he employ to promote his satyāgraha campaign?
The most crucial source for addressing this question is again Hind Svarāj. As has already been pointed out, Gandhi explained the meaning and significance of satyāgraha in Chapter 17 of the work. It begins with a question from the reader: "Do you have any historical evidence for satyāgraha or ātmabal  [the force of ātmā (soul, spirit, self)] that you are talking about? … It is still confirmed that without physical violence [mārphād  ] an evildoer does not live righteously." To answer this, the editor explains as follows: A poet Tulsīdās jī sang as follows: To me, this line seems to be a maxim (śāstravacan) … Dayābal  [the force of compassion], it is ātmabal , and it is [also] satyāgraha. And, the evidence of this bal  [force] is visible in every step. 31 Here, Gandhi quotes Tulsīdās's popular poem and explains the fundamental principle of satyāgraha using the concept of dayā. 32 Indeed, the word dayā was one of the central concepts employed to explain the ideological basis of Gandhi's satyāgraha in South Africa in both the Gujarati and Hindi languages. 33 Gandhi, more often than not, insisted that "dayā is the root of all religions" and emphasized the uttermost importance of the concept. 34 Other than dayā, Gandhi also used the word prem (love, affection, kindliness) or prembal  (the force of prem) as an alternative concept for dayā, dayābal , and ātmabal . 35 An analogous idea of dayā expressed in the lines quoted above can also be found in Moks amāl ā (1887), a book written by Jain ascetic Śrīmad Rājcandra that Gandhi read extensively during his South African sojourn. 36 Yet Gandhi never mentions the influence of Rājcandra or Jainism in Hind Svarāj.
As argued in the introduction to this article, Gandhi possessed a good command of three languages: Gujarati, Hindi, and English. Gandhi himself translated and published the English translation of Hind Svarāj under the title Indian Home Rule (1910) just after the publication of the original. This English translation is essential to understanding how Gandhi translated the Gujarati concepts of dayā and prem into English. He consistently replaced the words dayā and prem with 31 HS, 182.

32
It should be noted that in Tulsīdās's poems, the terms dayā and prem are far more frequently used than ahim  sā. For instance, in Rāmcaritmānas, the word ahim  sā appears in only one line in the "Uttar Kān  d  " as an ancient Vedic principle, as follows: "The highest religion in the Vedas is known as ahim  sā [Param dharm Śruti bidit ahim  sā]" (Uttar Kān  d  , 120: 11). Tulsīdās's digitized texts of Dohāvalī, Kavītāvalī, Gītāvalī, Vinay-Patrikā, and Rāmcaritmānas are available on websites created by Professor Hiroko Nagasaki of Osaka University at http://hin.minoh.osaka-u.ac.jp/etext.html, and at GRETIL at http://gretil. sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil.html#Kavya. I am grateful to Professor Nagasaki and Professor Kiyokazu Okita for information about various available e-texts. 33 IO, 23 Feb. 1907, 11 May 1907, 3 Aug. 1907, 26 Nov. 1910, 9 Aug. 1913GA, 12: 105-6, 317-18. 34 IO, 3 Aug. 1907, 26 Nov. 1910, 9 Aug. 1913GA, 12: 105-6, 317-18. It is noticeable that such an expression seemed to be common among not only north Indian Vais n  av saints, but also south Indian Lin  gāyat saints. The twelfth-century saint Basav, the founder of Lin  gāyatism, said in Vacanas: "What is that religion wherein there is no mercy? It is mercy that is wanted for all creatures. It is mercy that is the root of religion." P. G. Halkatti, trans., "Vachanas Attributed to Basava," Indian Antiquary: A Journal of Oriental Research 51 (1922), 7-12, at 10. See also note 36 below. 35 HS, 184-5. 36 Hazama, "The Making of a Globalized Hindu," 713-17; Ajay Skaria, "'No Politics without Religion' of Secularism and Gandhi," in Vinay Lal, ed., Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (New Delhi, 2009), 173-210, at 178. It is striking to note that Rājcandra, who is considered to have inspired Gandhi's life significantly, stressed dayā much more frequently than he did ahim  sā. See Śrīmad Rājcandra, Moks amāl ā (Agās, 2010), 70-71, 81-3, 116-17. Most saliently, Rājcandra expressed the first Jain mahāvrat by using the word dayā instead of ahim  sā (ibid., 200). He only once referred to the word ahim  sā (i.e. ahim  sādik) in this book (ibid., 115). With regard to the five letters addressed to Gandhi from Rājcandra during the 1890s, the latter only used the words ahim  sā (i.e. ahim  sādī dharm) once in the first letter. M. Kalārthī, ed., Śrīmad Rājcandra ane Gandhījī (Amdāvād, 2000), 202. the English word "love," 37 and the terms ātmabal  and prembal  with "soul-force" and "love-force" respectively. 38 In the appendices of both Hind Svarāj 39 and Indian Home Rule, 40 Gandhi listed twenty books and essays which fundamentally impacted him before he wrote Hind Svarāj/Indian Home Rule. The first six works are all by Leo Tolstoy. The concepts of "love-force" and "soul-force" are, as far as Gandhi acknowledged, core principles in Tolstoy's writings. 41 En route to India in 1914, he explained the relationship between the essence of his South African satyāgraha campaign and Tolstoyan thought as follows: [I] endeavoured to serve my countrymen and South Africa, a period covering the most critical stage that they will, perhaps, ever have to pass through. It marks the rise and growth of Passive Resistance, [42] which has attracted worldwide attention … Its equivalent in the vernacular [i.e. satyāgraha], rendered into English, means Truth-Force. I think Tolstoy called it also Soul-Force or Love-Force, and so it is. 43 Among all Tolstoy's works, The Kingdom of God Is within You (1894) and "A Letter to a Hindoo" (1908) had a particularly significant impact in Gandhi's thought formation. 44 Gandhi later confessed that the former book became one of the three crucial sources that influenced his life most. 45 The fact that Gandhi directly corresponded with Tolstoy just before writing Hind Svarāj should not be disregarded. 46 From July to November 1909, Gandhi was staying in London as a member of the Indian delegation and lobbied for South Asian resident rights. In the imperial capital, Gandhi met young Hindu revolutionaries associated with the India House established by Śyāmjī Kr s n  a Varmā. Gandhi dismissively recognized those who resorted to revolutionary violence to fight against 37 "IHR," 69-70, 72-3, 98. However, in the works of Tolstoy listed by Gandhi in Hind Svarāj, there cannot be found the terms "soul-force," or "love-force" either. Tolstoy instead uses expressions such as "the spiritual force(s)," "the force of the consciousness," "moral force," "law of love," and "a dim consciousness in his soul of the higher law of love towards God." Leo Tolstoy, "The Kingdom of God Is within You," in Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (London, 1960), 1-460. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts these forces with "physical/animal force" and "armed force." Gandhi's exposition on the dichotomic understanding between satyāgraha as "soul-force"/"love-force" and "violent means" as "physical force"/"armed force" (see note 20 above) in Hind Svarāj is vastly analogous to Tolstoy's. 42 Gandhi initially used the English term "passive resistance," but he later declared that the name was inappropriate (IO, 11 Jan. 1908). Gandhi emphasized that the participants in his campaign were by no means "passive" due to their strong reliance on the "active" force of inner most "soul/ātmā." See DASI, 131. British colonialism as "anarchists" and "modernists." 47 It is historically momentous that among these Hindu fundamentalist revolutionaries, Gandhi met V. D. Sāvarkar, who is widely believed to have persuaded Madanlāl D  hīn  grā to murder Sir Curzon-Wyllie on 2 July 1909, just eight days prior to Gandhi's arrival in London. 48 Numerous public discussions among these revolutionaries seeking to justify D  hīn  grā's assassination followed. 49 Gandhi was "both shocked and profoundly stirred" as he talked with these young Indians in London. 50 Simultaneously, Gandhi also read Tolstoy's "A Letter to a Hindoo," which was printed in Free Hindustan, a political journal edited by Tāraknāth Dās, a prominent Indian intellectual residing in Canada. Gandhi was deeply impressed by Tolstoy's ideas of "non-resistance" (Tolstoy never used the word "non-violence") and the "law of love." Gandhi was convinced that his satyāgraha campaign should solely depend upon such Tolstoyan principles. After reading the essay, he immediately wrote a letter to Tolstoy, introducing his campaign in South Africa and asking Tolstoy for permission to translate the essay into Gujarati and publish it in Indian Opinion. 51 Then, while returning to South Africa from London on board the steamship RMS Kildonan Castle between 13 and 30 November 1909, Gandhi dashed off Hind Svarāj within ten days and also completed the Gujarati translation of "A Letter to a Hindoo." 52 This series of events clearly shows how present Tolstoy's influence was in the writing of Hind Svarāj. 53 What is striking here is that Gandhi's understanding of both dayā and prem enjoys an intimate mutual translatability with the Tolstoyan idea of love, not only from a terminological view point, but also in terms of a deep conceptual affinity. During Gandhi's South African residence, Gandhi discovered, along with Tulsīdās, the importance of premodern (nirgun  ) bhaktism, whose nature was universally ethical, non-communal, egalitarian, and non-elitist. 54 IO, 5 June 1909;NJ, 16 Sept. 1928. 54 The bhakti movement is essentially characterized by its "anti-scholastic" and egalitarian attitude. For example, in a famous couplet by Kabīr, it is said that "in Bhakti real Pundit is one who knows the 'dhai akshar' or two-and-half letter word prema and not the one who has spent his life pouring over 'pothis' or books." This line is quoted from Sachin Ketkar, "Translation of Narsinh Mehta's Poems into English with a Critical Introduction" (unpublished PhD thesis, South Gujarat University, Surat, 2001). I am grateful to Professor Sachin Ketkar for allowing me to use his unpublished work. Furthermore, the poem "Damodar Lake, near Girnar Hill" ("Giritl et īne Kun  d  Dāmodar") by Narsim  h Mahetā explicitly exemplifies his thoughts consisting of divine love ( prem), compassion (dayā, karūn  ā), and an egalitarian attitude towards untouchable castes (d  hed  varan  ). "There is," sings Narsim  h, "no [caste] partisanship [ paks āpaks ī] [in] particularly acquainted with the ideas of Kabair, 55 Narsim  h Mahetā, 56 and Mīrābāī. 57 Various ideas associated with dayā or prem feature much more frequently in the writings of these poets than the principle of ahim  sā. 58 Gandhi saw a conceptual commonality between the ideas of the premodern nirgun  bhaktas and Tolstoy, in whose works anti-elitist, folkish/peasantry, and/or trans-religious dispositions were salient. 59 Besides, it should also be noted that the concepts of dayā and prem, which were rendered by Gandhi into the English terms "compassion/mercy/pity" and "love" respectively, were equally common in Christian, Islamicate, and Jewish cultures. 60 IO, 13 July 1907;20 Nov. 1909;GA, 11: 81-2, 163, 168-9;12: 452. 57 IO, 2 Oct. 1909;GA, 10: 169;12: 452-3. 58 It should be noted that in works by bhakti saints such as Tulsīdās (see my note 32 above), Kabīr, Narsim  h Mehatā, and Mīrābāī, who influenced Gandhi significantly, there can hardly be found a reference to the word ahim  sā. At least, there is no reference in the digitized texts of Kabīr's Bījak in Winand M. Callewaert and Bart Op de Beeck, eds, Devotional Hindī Literature, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1991); or in the other essential texts compiled by Charlotte Vaudeville in The Millenium Kabīr-Vānī (Pondicherry, 1982), although the words dayā and prem are both present (I am grateful that Professor Hiroko Nagasaki has kindly sent me this electronic data). Instead, as J. S. Hawley has pointed out, Kabīr's concept of "the human capacity for love ( prem, prīti) (2014), 199-225, at 201. The same can be said of Narsim  h Mahetā. I could not find a single reference to the word ahim  sā in Narsim  h's Gujarati poems. I also consulted Professor Neelima Shukla-Bhatt about this. She informed me that the term ahim  sā was not found in Narsim  h's poetry. Instead, there are more "active terms" such as prem, vahāl, and upkār, which are found in many places. Personal email correspondence with Professor Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, 12 Sept. 2021; I am very grateful for her generous imparting of her expertise. Furthermore, Mīrābāī's thought also, as illustrated in Prema Abodh, contains the concepts of love/prem and "compassion." See Hawley, "Mirabai," 199-225; Parita Mukta, Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai (New Delhi, 1994), 79, 167, 212. 59 Tolstoy argued that "the law of love" is the foundation of all religions. See Tolstoy, "Letter to a Hindu," 167-8. Such an idea correlates with Gandhi's description of "the religion which resides in all religions [e badhā dharmmām  je dharm rahyo che]" in HS, 81. 60 Between 1908 and 1914, seventy-five poems written in Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi, and English were published in Indian Opinion in order to encourage participation in Gandhi's satyāgraha campaign. From a literary perspective, many of these poems followed two poetic forms: one was the "bhakti (devotional) poetry of medieval saint-poets in regional Indian languages upholding love for the divine and fellow devotees as a supreme religious value. The other was ghazal, originally a form of Arabic love poetry … that had travelled to South Asia via Persia." S. Bhana and N. Shukla-Bhatt, eds., A Fire That Blazed in the Ocean: Gandhi and the Poems of Satyagraha in South Africa, 1909-1911(New Delhi, 2011, 37. Besides, an Urdu ghazal by Sheik Mehtab, a Muslim childhood friend of Gandhi, was published in the Indian Opinion of 6 May 1911, where the concept of "compassion" was used as an important quality of both Allah and Yahweh in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Gandhi later said in 1916, "In Islam's [sacred] book, it has been said dayā should be stressed." GA, 13: 183. campaign in South Africa. 61 Considering the nature and the socio-economico-cultural context of Gandhi's campaign undertaken in South Africa, the ubiquitous concepts of dayā/compassion and prem/love were fairly appropriate for his political agenda. 62 Contrarily, the concept of ahim  sā, commonly understood as the "non-killing" of cows and practice of vegetarianism by Gandhi's contemporaries, was too specific in Hindu culture and barely possible to translate literally into Islamicate, Jewish, or Christian phraseologies. 63 It is difficult to find any plausible reason for Gandhi to use the word ahim  sā in South Africa.
How did Gandhi invent his nationalist notion of "ahim  sā" in India? In this section, I will explore specifically how and why Gandhi added the "new" word of ahim  sā to his previous cosmopolitan lexicon represented by dayā and prem after his return to India, and how and why the former eventually came to occupy a central place in his satyāgraha philosophy.
As shown in Table 1, Gandhi's first reference to the word ahim  sā after his return to India in 1915 appears in a private Gujarati letter addressed to his relative Mathurādās Trikamjī, a son of Gandhi's sister. In this letter, written a month after his arrival, Gandhi wrote, "satya, brahmacarya, ahim  sā, asteya, and aparigrah-observing [these] five yamas is mandatory for all spiritual aspirants [mumuks u]." 64 Although his gradual interest in yamaniyamas in general was visible during his last few years in South Africa (including during his journey at sea), 65 this letter is the first document in which Gandhi refers to the specific content of each yama, including ahim  sā.
The second reference to the idea of ahim  sā after Gandhi's return can be found in his English speech at the Students' Hall, College Square, in Calcutta, under the 61 Ebrahim Mahida, History of Muslims in South Africa: A Chronology (Durban, 1993), 39-42; Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893-1914(New Delhi, 2006Judith Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915-1922(Cambridge, 1972 Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Discourse, revised edn (New Delhi, 1999), 186; Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi and His Jewish Friends (London, 1992). 62 See my note 60 above. Such a cosmopolitan perspective was shared by his Muslim supporters. AK, 113-16; Bhana and Shukla-Bhatt, A Fire That Blazed, 21-3, 30-34. 63 See notes 24, 25, 26 above and 117 below. Recent scholarships on early modern South Asia have, however, revealed that during the reign of the Mughal dynasty, classical Sanskrit texts such as the Mahābhārata and various Upanis ads were widely translated into Persian. Jainism was also generously patronized. See Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge, MA, 2020); Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York, 2016); Truschke, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of a Muslim Past (New York, 2021). Yet none of the works, as far as I am aware, have yet discussed whether there was any fixed Persian translation for ahim  sā. I have personally consulted Professor Supriya Gandhi regarding this matter. She has told me that at the end of the Chāndogyopanis ad in Dara Sukhoh's Persian translation, ahim  sā is rendered as something like "not killing and not doing harm." She has also taught me that in the modern context, the Urdu-speaking Muslims who engaged with Gandhi would have perhaps been more familiar with a concept such as sulh  -i kull rather than any specific equivalent of ahim  sā. I am very grateful that she has generously imparted her expertise to me. Our email correspondence was from 3 to 4th Nov. 2021. presidency of P. C. Lyons. 66 In this speech, Gandhi was reported to have spoken upon the principle of "abstention from himsa" as follows: [H]e [Gandhi] must say that misguided zeal [among students] that resorted to dacoities and assassinations could not be productive of any good. These dacoities and assassinations were absolutely a foreign growth in India … The religion of this country, the Hindu religion, was abstention from himsa, that was to say, taking animal life. That was he believed, the guiding principle of all religions. 67 The context of the above speech was this. Shortly after his arrival in India, Gandhi was strictly keeping his promise to G. K. Gokhale; he promised to travel around the subcontinent for a year without engaging in any political action or speech, instead only acquiring firsthand knowledge of his homeland. During the initial phase of his travel, he encountered young enthusiastic students at College Square in Calcutta, whom he regarded as radical "anarchists" fired by the prevailing Hindu fundamentalist zeal. Gandhi was vastly apprehensive about this "misguided youth," who believed that violent resistance to the Raj was a primal duty for them. Gandhi could not but deliver the above address, temporarily putting aside his promise to Gokhale in order to direct the students away from using such "nefarious means" incompatible with the essence of "Hindu religion." Promptly after this speech, Gandhi wrote a letter to Maganlal Gandhi in Gujarati, declaring that he "came to know in an extremely clear manner in Calcutta" that "the foundation of satyāgraha [satyāgrahano pāyo] is ahim  sā." 68 The letter demonstrates that the above speech in Calcutta was a transformative moment in Gandhi's intellectual evolution where he first developed a firm conviction that ahim  sā was the cardinal precept of his religious politics. From this juncture onwards, Gandhi began to increasingly promote the concept of ahim  sā, which had previously only been used by his contemporaries to denote the cultural habit of vegetarianism or cow worship, explaining it as the core of Hinduism, professedly the national religion. By so doing, he attempted to replace the rampant Hindu fundamentalist belief in revolutionary violence with his new pacifist interpretation of ahim  sā. 69 Yet an additional point with regard to the above speech requires further consideration. As we have seen in the previous section, in one of his critical moments in 66 This speech was originally given in English on 31 March 1915 and the report was published in Amrita Bazar Patrik of 1 April 1915. This material should be considered the first occasion when Gandhi used the concept ahim  sā as the core nationalist principle. Hardiman, "Ahimsa," 27-8, however, has written work that the first instance of Gandhi applying the term ahim  sā after his return to India could be attributed to his speech at a reception hosted by his own caste, the Modh Baniyas, in Bhavnagar on 9 Dec. 1915. Yet in Hardiman's newer The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 164-5, without any reference to his earlier argument, he writes differently that Gandhi's speech at St Stephens College in Delhi on 13 April 1915 was the first instance. Both dates are at any rate inaccurate, as shown in Table 1. Gandhi had already begun to employ the idea of ahim  sā, as evidenced in his speech at the Students' Hall, College Square, in Calcutta, which was at least two weeks prior to the speech in Delhi, as I will argue below. London, Gandhi met young "anarchists" fueled by Hindu rebellious fervor. However, at that stage, in order to counter their arguments, Gandhi, while writing Hind Svarāj, promoted the universalist and egalitarian concepts of dayā and prem represented by Tolstoy or the late medieval nirgun  bhaktas, which were considered to be equally translatable into various religious traditions. In contrast, when Gandhi encountered the students in Calcutta in 1915, inspired by Hindu fundamentalism, he advocated the notion of ahim  sā, whose "Hindu" disposition was underlined. Indeed, after 1915, Gandhi began to insist that "ahim  sā is the root of all religions." This sentence exactly echoes his previous expression using the word dayā in South Africa: "dayā is the root of all religions." 70 He further insisted that dayā was in fact merely a "limb/part [an  g]" of the cardinal principle of ahim  sā, emphasizing the latter's supreme position. 71 Why did Gandhi not continue to use the terms dayā and prem as the ultimate virtues of satyāgraha, 72 instead beginning to deploy the term ahim  sā? In 1909, when he encountered analogous Hindu radicals, he still relied on the former terms to explain satyāgraha, not the word ahim  sā.
In order to answer this question, it is essential to examine various entangled historical contexts. One reason for the terminological and conceptual shifts can be explained through Gandhi's growing awareness of a national language and religion. In January 1915, Gandhi reached Bombay from South Africa. Swiftly after his arrival, Gandhi, who had already earned his name as an acclaimed patriot, 73 obtained a number of invitations to speak at welcome meetings convened by various intellectuals, politicians, entrepreneurs, and religious leaders in the subcontinent. 74 One of the most important receptions was a garden party presided over by M. A. Jinnah, then the president of the Gurjar Sabha, in Bombay on 14 January 1915. 75 Once present, Gandhi was displeased to find that all the participants, including Jinnah himself, were giving their speeches solely in English. When his turn came, Gandhi, dressed in a traditional Kāt hiyāvād  ī garment, daringly gave his speech in Gujarati and Hindi, insisting that the svarāj movement must be undertaken using their mother tongue(s) and be rooted in "Indian" culture. 76 It is intriguing to note that during Gandhi's South African years, he consistently wore the style of dress of an indentured laborer. Upon returning to India, he promptly amended this fashion, arraying himself instead in Kāt hiyāvād  ī clothes that conveyed his willingness to represent the "beautiful manners and customs of India." 77 Gandhi emphasized that it was essential to "proceed to our goal [of svarāj] in our own eastern ways and not by imitating the West, for we are of the East." 78 70 CWMG,13: 45,GA,69,88. 71 GA, 13: 36. See also Gandhi's Gujarati article entitled "Ahim  sā versus Dayā" in Navjīvan (NJ, 31 March 1929). 72 Gandhi did continue to use dayā and prem throughout his life, but the emphasis changed. 73 Gandhi's civil rights struggle in South Africa had been enthusiastically reported on in a Gujarati local newspaper, Prajābandhu. Makrand Mehta, "Gandhi and Ahmedabad," Economic and Political Weekly 40/4 (2005), 291-9, at 294-5. the Phoenix Settlement and the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa. 89 Gandhi needed to carefully choose the most appropriate place to establish his settlement and secure financial backing to live together with his forty members. Having informed Gokhale of his plan around the time of his return to India, the latter had promised to provide Gandhi with all the necessary money from his India Servant Society. 90 Gandhi's feelings of joy and relief at this juncture were immense: "My heart swelled. I thought that I was released from the business [dhandho] of collecting money, so I became very happy [rājī], and now I would not have to live with those responsibilities." 91 However, an unexpected incident occurred. Gokhale abruptly passed away during a fainting fit on 15 February 1915, only a month after extending his generous offer.
Gandhi began to look for a new patron. In his search, he considered locations such as Haridwar, Calcutta, and Rajkot before eventually deciding to establish his communitarian settlement in Ahmedabad. 92 He justified his choice on the ground that in Gujarat he would, being a Gujarati himself, "be able to make a fullfledged service to the country through Gujarati language." 93 Yet, if this was his only reason, why did he not choose Rajkot or Porbandar, where he had actually grown up? Except for a short trip to take a matriculation examination during his boyhood, Gandhi had no experience of staying in Ahmedabad. 94 Indeed, as Riho Isaka has pointed out, these Princely States in Kāt iyāvād  had a distinct linguo-cultural history apart from north Gujarat whose center was Ahmedabad. 95 Gandhi's core motive for choosing Ahmedabad was, as Gandhi wrote, that it was the "capital" of Gujarat and the center of commerce. He confessed that "there was a hope that wealthy people [dhanād  hay loko] here will be able to give more monetary help [dhannī vadhāre madad]." 96 Indeed, Gandhi's first contact in his search for donations was Śet h Man  gal dās Girdharlāl, a well-known Ahmedabad mill owner and a member of the Ambālāl family, the wealthiest and most successful Gujarati Jain plutocracy. 97 Gandhi sent him a detailed estimate of expenditure amounting to approximately six thousand rupees per year. 98 Other than Girdharlāl, Gandhi had also sought financial and moral support from businessmen and people like Govindrāo Āpājī Pāt īl and Jīvan  lal Varajlāl Desāī in Gujarāt Sabhā. 99 When considering the meaning and implication of Gandhi's need for financial backers, it is essential to bear in mind that his potential patrons were vān  īyās who 89 SGV More specifically, Śet h Man  gal dās Girdharlāl was the husband of Līnā Man  galdās, daughter of Ambālāl Sārābhāī. 99 Mehta, "Gandhi and Ahemdabad," 296.
held an economically as well as politically dominant position in Ahmedabad. Additionally, these vān  īyās, in tandem with brāhman  s in the area, were intimately linked with Vais n  av Hindu cultural traditions, particularly Svāminārāyan  and Jainism, in which the principle of ahim  sā was a central doctrine. 100 In this respect, Makrand Mehta has pointed out that by embracing the slogan of ahim  sā, "Gandhi had cultivated cordial relations with Ahmedabad millowners, particularly the banias [vān  īyās] belonging to his caste and sect." 101 Yet Gandhi was not only keen to lean into the philosophical aspect of the Ahmedabadis' religious doctrine; he was also highly flexible when it came to adapting religious ceremonies familiar to his supporters. For instance, according to Gandhi's Gujarati diary entry for 20 May 1915, just five days prior to the establishment of the āśram, he performed vāstu, a common ritual performed among Gujarati Hindus when they move to a newly built house. 102 In the ritual, a pot is filled with water and carried to the house by either an unmarried girl or a woman whose husband is alive. During the house construction, which requires digging operations, people believe that numerous insects are killed. Therefore they perform the ritual so that the gods will forgive their sin. Gandhi was flexible in the face of his new environment and willing to undertake religious ceremonies which, as Mehta wrote, "must have delighted all the Ahmedabad Hindus." Therefore "Gandhi's strong commitment to Hinduism and ahimsa won for him the cooperation of the rich Hindu and Jain sections of Ahmedabad." 103 However, his successful acts of assimilation do not mean that Gandhi was immune to the difficulties inherent in dealing with these donors, since they were, in some respects, very conservative, orthodox, and even communalistic. 104 Their strong prejudice, for instance, towards members of untouchable castes was apparent and explicitly incompatible with Gandhi's basic moral sensitivity. Gandhi thus had to defend the conceptual gap between his own humanist understanding of ahim  sā and the prevalent cultural perceptions of it among Hindus and Jains in Gujarat. 105 There was a time of crisis just a few months after the establishment of the āśram when Gandhi completely lost his financial support due to his reception of untouchables into his āśram. Girdharlāl was inflamed by this incident, considering the āśram "polluted." Since Gandhi did not want to change his attitude, he finally decided to leave the āśram and live in the untouchable colony in town. Yet, on the verge of shutting down the āśram, Gandhi was saved by an anonymous industrialist who was later revealed to be Ambālāl Sārābhāī. 106 Despite the fact that 100 See note 8 above. Williams, Introduction, 24, 159; Williams and Trivedi, Swaminarayan Hinduism, 43. 101 Mehta, "Gandhi and Ahemdabad," 296. 102 GA, 13: 158; Mehta, "Gandhi and Ahmedabad," 296. 103 Mehta, "Gandhi and Ahmedabad," 296. Gandhi's manifestation of varnaśram, one of his āśramvrat (vows of āśram), which indicates his incorporation of the four-varn  a system, was seen as the outcome of his compromising association with conservative Hindus/Jains, 107 Gandhi's firm belief in anti-untouchability never swayed throughout his life. 108 What, then, about his attitude towards Muslims? I think the most controvertible aspect when considering Gandhi's terminological/conceptual shift was that there was, compared to the terms of "compassion" (dayā) and "love" ( prem), no shared common or fixed phraseologies for ahim  sā among Urdu Muslims, despite the fact that there had been a rich and long tradition of Muslim-Hindu-Jain synthesis during the early Mughal dynasty. 109 Gandhi was well aware of this purported untranslatability, as I will discuss below.
Indeed, Gandhi was invariably very careful when he needed to choose a new key term for his political struggle. For instance, during his South African years, Gandhi gave both of his communitarian settlements English names, i.e. the Phoenix Settlement and the Tolstoy Farm respectively. While writing Hind Svarāj on the Kildonan Castle, Gandhi wrote a Gujarati letter to Maganlal on 24 November 1909, explaining the reason for utilizing English names as follows: "And even when giving a name, we will have to search for a common word [madhyasth śabd] in which a question of [the distinction between] Hindus [and] Muslims should not arise. Mat h or āśram is perceived as particularly a Hindu word; therefore, they are not [to be] used, [but the name of] Phoenix is easily attainable, [and] a nice word. Since … it is neutral [tat asth]." word," 120 created the new English term "non-violent non-co-operation" for his campaign. 121 The Congress Constitution adopted at the Nagpur Session in December 1920, then, declared that "[t]he object of the Indian National Congress is the attainment of swaraj by the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means." Here, his religious terminology, that of satya and ahim  sā, was obviously secularized. 122 Despite consistently insisting upon the importance of national religion and language, Gandhi, when faced with the questions surrounding the communal alliance between Hindus and Muslims, could not entirely avoid depending upon the English framework of the colonial master. In the end, such English renderings hardly conveyed the ethico-spiritual connotation of satyāgraha, which should have been starkly distinguished from the mere materialistic method of "passive resistance." 123

Conclusion
In this article, I have chronologically examined Gandhi's writings in three languages and explored the genealogy of Gandhi's concept of ahim  sā/non-violence, a cardinal precept of satyāgraha. By so doing, I have demonstrated four points. (1) The principle of Gandhi's satyāgraha campaign in South Africa was never associated with the "Hindu" notion of ahim  sā. The idea of ahim  sā was then considered to entail communal questions.
(2) Gandhi's first satyāgraha campaign was chiefly promoted by the trans-religious, non-elitist, and egalitarian concepts of dayā/compassion and prem/love, as inherited from Tolstoy and the late medieval nirgun  bhaktas. (3) The major reasons for Gandhi's deployment of the term ahim  sā to explain "the foundation of satyāgraha" and "the religion of this country" or "the Hindu religion" after his return to India were intimately related to his awareness of the rising spirit of the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement and his tactical concerns for securing moral-financial support from local well-to-do vān  īyās in Ahmedabad.
(4) Gandhi first coined the term "non-violence" as a religiously "neutral" English rendering of ahim  sā immediately after the suspension of the first nationwide satyāgraha campaign in 1919, due to his hasty recognition of the difficulty of using ahim  sā alone.
The processes and reasons behind Gandhi's deployment of ahim  sā/non-violence strongly indicate that Gandhi's emphasis on his childhood influences in the Princely States located in the western and central regions of Kāt iyāvād  peninsula was a later retrospective interpretation. The extant historical documents 120 demonstrate that he did not regard the positive value of the term ahim  sā and by no means promoted it as a nationalist slogan before 1915. On the contrary, the cardinal principle of satyāgraha before India, which might be tentatively termed "proto-non-violence," expressed with the terms dayā or prem, was invented while Gandhi was deftly cooperating with people from multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic backgrounds in order to fight against racial discrimination in South Africa. In this respect, Gandhi was, in Judith Brown's terms, undeniably a "critical outsider" of the subcontinent who primarily cherished his ideas as quite distinct from his nationalist contemporaries. 124 Finally, I believe that the historical findings in this article, which show the cosmopolitan genealogy behind Gandhi's nationalist self-narrative, allow us to gain an essential insight into David Hardiman's fundamental question proposed in his book Gandhi in His Time and Ours (2003): "why [do] Gandhi's ideas continue to resonate in the world today?" 125 Despite the lament that Gandhian thought has been largely obliterated in his home country, 126 it has left an indelible mark beyond the subcontinent, in Anglo-Saxon Protestant countries, South Africa, and Myanmar particularly. 127 Once the lesser-known global, though invariably peripheral or dissenting, genealogy of Gandhi's ahim  sā/non-violence is unfolded, it comes as no surprise that the deep moral reverberations of his thought have reached people all across the world. 128