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The year 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America, a year its current president has chosen to mark by launching a war on Iran. So this is a perfect moment to savour Satish Kumar’s latest book, Peace is Possible. The poignancy is made even greater because this new volume is a collection of three of his previous works: You Are, Therefore I Am (neatly subtitled ‘A Declaration of Dependence’), Pilgrimage for Peace and The Buddha and the Terrorist.
Satish is, of course, well known and loved by Resurgence & Ecologist readers. He edited this magazine of hope and activism, art and sustainability from 1973 until 2016, and he remains in all his inspirational best as editor emeritus. When I sat down to read this finely produced book with its hypnotising graphics by Olivia Fraser, I wondered what I would discover. I had already read two of the three works collected here, along with his superb autobiography from 1978, No Destination, as well as many of his other books, articles and editorials. What would I find that was new?
I quickly realised that this was the wrong question. From the opening page of his fresh introduction to the collection, it’s blindingly obvious that first and always, Satish is a peace activist. He is forever living out the prayer he learned from his mother back in 1930s India, calling for a threefold peace: Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. The first shanti focuses on the need for peace within ourselves, and the second seeks peace with the whole of humanity. “For me, all wars are unjustified,” he writes, “all wars are immoral, irrational, uncivilised and unnecessary,” adding, “there are no just wars.” And the third shanti is to deliver peace with Nature, “our greatest teacher” and, according to his beloved mother, Anchi Devi, “greater than the Buddha.”
Halfway through the book, a Jain monk reveals the secret that runs through Satish’s life and throughout these pages. “Nonviolence is the perennial teaching, nothing new, but we need to reinterpret and revive it again and again.” And this is what Satish does, reviving and redeploying the eternal imperative of nonviolence in a multitude of ways.
In the first part of Peace is Possible, he drinks in the Jain culture of nonviolence as a boy in Rajasthan in the dying days of the British Empire, a segment told with great sweetness. This is a volume full of world-famous figures. But the most important people are unknown women, the first of whom is Anchi Devi herself. From the beginning, spiritual practice is central to Satish’s simple life with his widowed mother, and at just nine years old he becomes a Jain monk. From this faith with one of the closest relationships with the more-than-human, Satish is clear that “animals have souls, they are our kith and kin.”
Being a monk meant renouncing the world, including the sorrow of renouncing his mother. Yet, after he spends over a decade wearing the monk’s white robe, we receive the first example of his special quest to “pursue the path of a free spirit which goes beyond geographical, religious and cultural boundaries”. On reading Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography in his late teens, Satish realised that renunciation could neither save his soul nor rescue society.
And so, aged 21, he fled life as a monk and sought out a post-religious spirituality with India’s leading Gandhian activist, Vinoba Bhave. After Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Bhave sought to fulfil his work by persuading the wealthy to give a sixth of their land to the poor through the Bhoodan movement. Bhave’s mechanism was a 20-year walk criss-crossing some 100,000 miles of India. Through this persistence, he had secured four million acres for land reform by the 1970s.
Yet long before then Satish had embarked on the next stage of his life as a free spirit: his own 8,000-mile walk with his friend E.P. Menon, from Delhi to Washington, US. The story of this great pilgrimage is told in the second part of the collection. Reading that the British philosopher Bertrand Russell had been imprisoned for protesting nuclear weapons, the two set out in 1962 to convince the leaders of the four nuclear nations – Britain, France, the US and the USSR – to give up their weapons of mass destruction. Blessed by Bhave, they crossed mountains and frontiers with no money and a commitment to eat only vegetarian food. It’s a delight to read this in such depth and detail for the first time.
The walk took Satish out of Indian culture and led to meetings with Russell as well as with Martin Luther King Jr., who was walking for civil rights and peace in the US. Yet the most memorable encounter was with the women tea workers they met in the Caucasus, who gave them four packets of Peace Tea to deliver on foot to the Kremlin, the Élysée Palace, Downing Street and the White House. The women also gave them the message that if the leaders should ever get close to using their nuclear weapons, they should pause and have a fresh cup of tea. Satish and his friend duly carried out their instructions, in the process being imprisoned in France. With their tea mission complete, the pair then undertook a 16,000-mile Greyhound bus peace tour across the US before flying to Japan and continuing on foot to Hiroshima.
The third part of Peace is Possible takes us up to date in the 21st century, with Satish seeking ways to overcome the violence of our own times. To do this, he reaches back some 2,500 years to the time of Gautama, the Buddha. Here he retells one of the Buddha’s most famous stories about A.ngulimāla, giving it the new title ‘The Buddha and the Terrorist’.
The story is set in the sacred town of Savatthi, where the Buddha established his monsoon retreat in the forest. Returning from his travels, Buddha finds the place terrorised by a young man of extreme violence, who has been told by a sorcerer that if he kills a hundred people and wears their dead fingers as a garland, he will win unlimited powers. He does so and gains a new name, ‘the wearer of a finger necklace’ or A.ngulimāla. In one of the most powerful sentences in the book, the Buddha then lays out the path to overcoming violence and terror: “All beings, human and other than human, are naturally equipped with this intrinsic power of love and it is released through the relationship of mutuality, reciprocity and friendship.” I will not spoil the ending, but the power of Satish’s retelling of this story feels fully fresh and ready to be applied to counter the conflicts we face today, whether out-and-out warfare or our struggles to achieve climate justice.
This is a rich read, a book that I will return to again and again because its message is for all times. Michael Murpurgo writes beautifully in a brand new foreword: “Satish believes, as we must believe with him, that war will be no more, that the peacemakers will inherit the Earth. And then all shall be well.” Peace is possible after all.
Peace is Possible by Satish Kumar. Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2026. ISBN: hardback 9781399424028; ebook: 9781399424035
