Wrestling the Serpent: Gandhi,Amritsar and the British Empire

Throughout the period of the non‐co‐operation movement in India in the early 1920s, Gandhi surprised and sometimes bewildered the British in India with his incessant labelling of the Government as ‘satanic’. It is argued in this paper that Gandhi deliberately employed the word ‘satanic’ with a keen awareness of its power on both his opponents and supporters. He used it to give religious justification to the non‐co‐operation movement. He used it to apportion guilt and spread disaffection with the British Government. He used it to exhort his followers to greater self‐purification, especially against the ‘weaknesses’ of violence and untouchability.