Sarvodaya

Sarvōdaya (Hindi: सर्वोदय, from sarv-, 'all' and uday, 'rising') is a Sanskrit term which generally means "universal uplift" or "progress of all". The term was used by Mahatma Gandhi as the title of his 1908 translation of John Ruskin's critique of political economy, Unto This Last, and Gandhi came to use the term for the ideal of his own political philosophy. Later Gandhians, like the Indian nonviolence activist Vinoba Bhave, embraced the term as a name for the social movement in post-independence India which strove to ensure that self-determination and equality reached all strata of Indian society. Samantabhadra, an illustrious Digambara monk, as early as the 2nd century A.D., was called the tīrtha of Mahāvīra (24th Tirthankara) by the name sarvodaya.

Origins and Gandhi's political ideal

Gandhi received a copy of Ruskin's Unto This Last from a British friend, Henry Polak, while working as a lawyer in South Africa in 1904. In his Autobiography, Gandhi remembers the twenty-four-hour train ride to Durban (from when he first read the book), being so in the grip of Ruskin's ideas that he could not sleep at all: "I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book." As Gandhi construed it, Ruskin's outlook on political-economic life extended from three central tenets:

That

the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.

a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.

The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized.