Contemporary Indian Philosophy II: Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Deendayal Upadhyaya, M. N. Roy and Maulana Azad

• Truth: Gandhi's autobiography is titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He moved from "God is Truth" to "Truth is God", saying the second allowed even atheists to share his ultimate commitment. Truth is both the reality (sat) and the fidelity of thought, word and deed to it; human beings know only relative truth and must act on it while remaining open to correction.
• Non-violence: ahiṃsā is the means and truth the end, and the two are inseparable: "the means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree". Ahiṃsā is not only refraining from harm but active love, and it requires courage; Gandhi held that non-violence is the law of the human species as violence is the law of the brute.
• Satyagraha ("holding firmly to truth", truth-force): the method first worked out in South Africa from 1906, of resisting injustice by non-violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience, accepting suffering oneself rather than inflicting it, in order to convert rather than coerce the opponent. Gandhi distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as a weapon of the weak that could use violence.
• Swaraj: in Hind Swaraj (1909), written as a dialogue between an Editor and a Reader, swaraj means self-rule in the moral sense, rule over oneself, before it means political independence; "English rule without the Englishman" would not be swaraj. It is realised through village self-sufficiency, swadeshi and decentralisation.
• Critique of modern civilisation: Hind Swaraj calls modern Western civilisation a civilisation "only in name", because it makes bodily welfare the object of life. Railways, lawyers and doctors are criticised as multiplying wants and dependence; machinery displaces labour and concentrates wealth. True civilisation is the mode of conduct that points out the path of duty and self-control.

• Annihilation of Caste (1936) was written as the presidential address for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore, which cancelled the conference when it read the text; Ambedkar published it himself. Its arguments: caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, graded one above another and fixed by birth; it has destroyed public spirit and made a Hindu society impossible; reform of particular customs is insufficient, because caste rests on the authority of the śāstras, and that authority must be rejected. His positive ideal is a society based on liberty, equality and fraternity, which, as he said in a 1954 broadcast, he took not from the French Revolution but from the teaching of the Buddha.
• Philosophy of Hinduism (written in the 1940s, published posthumously): Ambedkar examines a religion by asking whether it serves justice (liberty, equality, fraternity) and utility, and argues that the social philosophy of the Manusmṛti, with its graded inequality, fails both tests.
• Neo-Buddhism (Navayāna): on 14 October 1956 at Nagpur Ambedkar and several hundred thousand followers embraced Buddhism, taking twenty-two vows. His The Buddha and His Dhamma (published 1957) reinterprets Buddhism as a rational, ethical and social teaching centred on morality (the dhamma as right relations between people) rather than on ritual, rebirth doctrines understood literally or other-worldly salvation.

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) presented Integral Humanism (Ekātma Mānavavāda) in four lectures in Bombay in April 1965. He argued that both capitalism and communism are products of Western thought that treat the human being partially, as an economic unit, and proposed an integral view of the person as a unity of body, mind, intellect and soul, whose four puruṣārthas, dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa, must be pursued in balance with dharma as the regulating principle. The individual, family, society, nation and humanity are not in conflict but form concentric, integrated circles. He drew this on the Advaita idea of the unity underlying diversity, and spoke of a nation's innate nature (citi) and of antyodaya, the uplift of the last person.

Manabendra Nath Roy (1887–1954), once a founder of the Communist Party of Mexico and a leader in the Communist International, broke with orthodox Marxism and developed Radical (New) Humanism, stated in the twenty-two theses of 1946 and his Reason, Romanticism and Revolution. He kept a scientific materialism, the world is a physical system governed by law, but rejected economic determinism and the dictatorship of any class or party. Man is the measure of all things; his basic urge is the quest for freedom and the search for truth; he is moral because he is rational, not because of any supernatural sanction; and a just society must be built by free individuals through decentralised, participatory democracy. In 1948 he dissolved his Radical Democratic Party into a Radical Humanist Movement.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958) grounded his humanism in his Qur'an commentary, Tarjumān al-Qur'ān. He argued for the unity of religion (waḥdat-i-dīn): the essential message of all prophets is one, belief in one God and righteous action, and differences of law and ritual are secondary. God is Rabb al-ʿālamīn, the sustainer of all worlds and all peoples, not of one community, so divine providence (rubūbiyya) and mercy extend to everyone. From this universalism followed his defence of Hindu-Muslim unity and a composite Indian nationhood, stated in his presidential address to the Congress at Ramgarh in 1940.