Galearie Edison
Mr. Bryant
English III
17 December 2014
Mohandas Gandhi, Henry Thoreau, Civil Disobedience. OH MY! Gandhi is known as Mahatma which means ‘the holy one’. His journey of civil disobedience and non-violence began after he came back to his homeland of India from South Africa in July of the year 1914, when he supported the Home Rule Movement. Gandhi originally went to Africa on business with his job as a lawyer, but instead Gandhi had found his calling both spiritually and politically. This led to many acts of non-violence and civil disobedience and ultimately India’s Independence Movement in 1947. Gandhi implementation of civil disobedience was heavily influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Civil Disobedience which depicts Thoreau’s resistance towards the government. Gandhi’s system of non-violence and peace was called the Satyagraha, which translates in English to the “truth force”. Gandhi thought of this as “living a life of love and compassion”. Gandhi practiced two types of Satyagraha; the first one was civil disobedience. Gandhi focused more on the civil and polite part than he did the actual disobedience. However one of the main rules of the Satyagraha is that only unjust laws of the government were broken, not all of them. The second was non-cooperation. With this form he decided not to cooperate with the government when it was unjust. This meant he would protest, go on strikes, and refuse to pay taxes, just as Henry Thoreau did.
In 1908 Gandhi had