Person · Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy
The novelist spent his last thirty years on a Christian anarchist ethics of nonresistance, and read widely in Indian material to find it confirmed. In December 1908 he answered a letter from Tarak Nath Das, an Indian revolutionary seeking support for armed independence, with a six-thousand-word refusal — it took him twenty-nine drafts and four hundred and thirteen manuscript pages — arguing that only the law of love could free India. It was published in Free Hindustan as “A Letter to a Hindu”.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
He wove verses from the Tirukkuṛaḷ through the letter as epigraphs, and it was from Tolstoy that Gandhi first came to the Tamil text — an ancient Tamil work reaching a Gujarati in South Africa by way of a Russian in Tula.
Connections (2)
- TransmissionTirukkuṛaḷ
Tolstoy read the Tirukkuṛaḷ in translation and used its couplets as epigraphs in “A Letter to a Hindu”, the six-thousand-word answer he wrote in December 1908 to Tarak Nath Das, who had asked him to endorse armed Indian independence. Tolstoy refused, and argued that only the law of love could free India. The Kural suited that argument exactly: an ancient text on virtue that names no god, no nation and no king, which a Christian anarchist in Tula could quote without qualification.
- Teaching lineageMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi read “A Letter to a Hindu” in 1909, wrote to Tolstoy for permission to reprint it in Indian Opinion, translated it into Gujarati himself, and corresponded with him until Tolstoy's death the following year. He later named his South African settlement Tolstoy Farm. The transmission ran both ways in a sense: Tolstoy's nonresistance was built partly out of Indian material, and it came back to an Indian in South Africa as a Russian argument, which is where satyagraha was being worked out.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Leo Tolstoy” and “A Letter to a Hindu”. Tolstoy, “A Letter to a Hindu” (1908); Tolstoy–Gandhi correspondence, 1909–10; Anthony J. Parel, “Gandhi and Tolstoy” (2002).
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