Sarvodaya Movement

The term for the social movement called Sarvodaya is a compound, formed from two Sanskrit words, meaning the uplift (udaya) of all (sarva). The term was first used by Mahatma Gandhi and later taken up by reform movements in India and Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan movement, Sarvodaya Shramadana, has developed a broad international reputation in recent years.

The term Sarvodaya was coined and popularized by Mahatma Gandhi in his 1908 translation of John Ruskin's critique of the Industrial Revolution, Unto This Last of 1860. Gandhi translated the work using the title Sarvodaya, a term that he felt Indian readers would associate with the spirit of the text: a call for political, moral, and economic development from the ground up, focusing especially on the uplift of rural populations. Gandhi further developed the ideas he laid out in Sarvodaya in Hind Swaraj of 1909, where he further specified uplift as cultivating political independence (swaraj) and moral power (satyagraha) through creating an independent, local, village-based industry (swadeshi) not reliant on British consumer goods or modern, industrial techniques.

The Sarvodaya movement refers to those organizations worldwide that have taken up Gandhi's call for “the uplift of all” by means of rural development. In India, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan sought to carry out Gandhi's program through land reform and social and political change. In Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya gained even greater prominence through the work of a Buddhist rural development organization started by a Sinhalese college teacher from Colombo, A. T. Ariyaratne, called Sarvodaya Shramadana. Ariyaratne's movement began in 1958 as a program that sent college students to rural work camps to help with various development projects, such as constructing roads, digging latrines, and building homes. These camps were originally called Shramadanas, meaning “gifts of work.” The group adopted the name Sarvodaya in 1961 to highlight their connection to the Gandhian legacy. Yet Sarvodaya Shramadana inflects the term with a slightly different meaning to Gandhi's, translating it as “the awakening of all,” a phrase meant to foreground the moral and spiritual aspect of their development projects. Ariyaratne's group understands rural development in terms of Buddhist principles and seeks to foster moral rectitude (sīla) and spiritual awareness (samādhi, pañña) as well as economic self-sufficiency.

Although not without critics, since the 1980s, Sarvodaya Shramadana has been regarded by many as a model grassroots nongovernmental organization. Ariyaratne has received several international awards for his work, and the group has received a steady stream of financial assistance from donors overseas. In addition, Sarvodaya Shramadana has opened offices throughout Sri Lanka and has established an international presence in the United States, where it currently runs an office in Madison, Wisconsin.