Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu and His Letters to Gandhi

Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence and the Human Spirit

In December 1908 Leo Tolstoy, then the most famous writer alive, sent a long letter to a young Indian revolutionary arguing that India would never free itself through violence, only through love and a refusal to cooperate with injustice. That text, now known as A Letter to a Hindu, reached Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa, sparked a short but remarkable correspondence between the two men, and fed directly into the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi later carried back to India.

Here is how the letters came about, what Tolstoy actually argued, why Gandhi took it so seriously, and what the exchange still offers anyone thinking about why people hurt one another.

How a letter to an Indian student reached Gandhi

The story begins with Taraknath Das, an Indian activist living abroad who edited a newspaper called Free Hindustan. In 1908 he wrote to Tolstoy twice, hoping the author of War and Peace would lend his voice to the cause of Indian independence from British rule. Tolstoy replied on 14 December 1908.

It was no quick note. The finished letter runs to roughly 6,000 words, and Tolstoy reportedly worked through 29 drafts and more than 400 manuscript pages before he was satisfied. Das printed it in Free Hindustan, and copies began to circulate.

One of them found its way to Gandhi, then a lawyer in his late thirties leading the Indian community's campaign against discriminatory laws in the Transvaal. In 1909 he wrote to Tolstoy asking for advice and for permission to reprint the letter in his own paper, Indian Opinion. Gandhi translated it into Gujarati himself and added an introduction.

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”

What Tolstoy argued in A Letter to a Hindu

Tolstoy did not offer a military or political plan. His answer to Das was moral, and it rested on one idea he had been working on for decades: that love, understood as the natural pull of human beings toward unity with one another, is the deepest law of life, and that violence always betrays it.

He structured the letter in sections, opening several of them with lines attributed to Krishna, and he drew freely on Hindu, Christian and other traditions. He even referred to the Tamil classic Tirukkural, which he called the "Hindu Kural", and which Gandhi later studied closely. The point of this borrowing was to show that the same teaching about love appears again and again across very different cultures, which to Tolstoy was evidence that it belonged to human nature itself.

He boiled the argument down to what he called an old and simple truth: It is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another.

Why, then, do people hurt each other?

Tolstoy's explanation was historical. Every society that rested on coercion, he wrote, found the law of love inconvenient. Rulers and institutions kept the language of love for private and family life, but claimed that prisons, executions and wars were justified in public life as protection against wrongdoers. Over centuries this split became so normal that people who praised love as the highest virtue also accepted a social order built on force.

He blamed two kinds of "superstition" for keeping that contradiction alive. The first was religion bent to serve the powerful. The second, newer and in his view just as dangerous, was a blind trust in anything labelled scientific, which he thought had simply replaced the old unquestioned religious authority with a new one.

How a few thousand ruled millions

The most striking passages deal directly with British rule. Tolstoy pointed out that a trading business, the East India Company, had come to dominate a nation of around two hundred million people. Force alone could not explain that. The real reason, he argued, was that Indians themselves took part in the system that oppressed them: they served in its armies, worked in its administration, paid its taxes and accepted its courts.

From this he drew his central conclusion. If people stopped participating in violence of every kind, oppression would simply have nothing to stand on. In his words, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

He compared humanity's situation to a young person outgrowing childhood: the old guides no longer work, and until a new understanding is found, people fill the emptiness with distractions and excitement. He believed the world had reached such a turning point and that the coming choice would be between the outdated law of violence and the older law of love. Writing in 1908, he warned of self-inflicted calamities on a vast scale. The First World War began less than six years later.

Why Gandhi took the letter so seriously

Gandhi did not agree with every line. In his introduction he told readers they did not need to accept all of Tolstoy's views, including his sweeping dismissal of modern science, art and institutions, to see the force of the central argument. He also admitted that there was nothing new in the teaching itself. What impressed him was the clarity and the sincerity: His logic is unassailable. And above all he endeavors to practice what he preaches.

This was not a sudden conversion. Gandhi had already read Tolstoy's 1894 book The Kingdom of God Is Within You and later described its strong effect on him. The letter came at the moment he was developing satyagraha, his method of mass nonviolent resistance, and it gave him a powerful outside voice confirming that path.

Letters until the end of Tolstoy's life

The two men exchanged letters from 1909 until shortly before Tolstoy's death in November 1910. Gandhi sent him news of the struggle in South Africa, and in 1910 his friend Hermann Kallenbach offered land near Johannesburg for a cooperative settlement. Kallenbach suggested the name, and it became Tolstoy Farm, the base of the satyagraha campaign in the Transvaal.

In one of his final letters to Gandhi, written about two months before he died, Tolstoy returned to the same theme with new urgency. He wrote that the nearer he felt to death, the more strongly he wanted to say what mattered most to him: that refusing to meet evil with force is simply the law of love, uncorrupted by clever excuses, and that any use of force is incompatible with it. He added that children show this truth most plainly, before the reasoning of the adult world teaches them otherwise.

Gandhi would spend the next decades testing that idea on a national scale. India gained independence in 1947, by a path in which mass nonviolent resistance played a central part.

What the correspondence offers readers today

It is easy to treat Tolstoy's letter as an elderly prophet's idealism. Some of it does feel extreme; he rejected not only war but almost every form of state power. Yet the core insight remains useful for anyone trying to understand why ordinary people take part in harm.

Violence depends on cooperation. Systems that hurt people need many hands to keep running. Withdrawing those hands is a real form of power.
We split our morality. Many of us hold one standard for friends and family and another for strangers, enemies or groups we are told to fear. Tolstoy asks why love should stop at the front door.
Labels can replace thinking. Whether something is called sacred or scientific, he urged readers to examine it rather than accept it because of its label.
Ideas travel. A letter written in a Russian country estate to a student abroad shaped a lawyer in South Africa, who later influenced civil-rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.

The full text of A Letter to a Hindu is in the public domain and free to read on Project Gutenberg. It takes under an hour, and it is worth reading alongside Gandhi's own introduction to see two very different minds meeting on the same question.

Sources: Wikipedia: A Letter to a Hindu; Project Gutenberg: A Letter to a Hindu by Leo Tolstoy; Wikipedia: Tolstoy Farm. This topic was first explored in an essay by Maria Popova on Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian), August 2014.

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COMMENTS

BLOGGER: 1

UnknownApril 6, 2016 at 10:43 PM
Sir : "Mahatma Gandhi" is a product of "chance" or "accident" in the "history of the world".He gave "sustainability" to Indian national movement through "non-violence" or "ahimsa" during the period of history where "military action"or "show down" was not continuously "sustainable".Sir Leo Tolstoy is a product of "literary genius" Gandhi was a saint.