Two years before Tolstoy passed away at the age of 82, he wrote a letter, “A Letter to a Hindu”, dated 14 December 1908, in response to a letter from Tarak Nath Das, a Canadian immigrant from Bengal who ran the newspaper, Free Hindustan. The letter gained historical significance when Gandhi republished it with a short introduction a year later, on 19 November 1909, in his newspaper Indian Opinion published from South Africa. The letter is remarkable in many ways, but most of all due to a few conceptual terms and phrases used by Tolstoy, decades before such words gained universal meaning and circulation. I will concentrate on how Gandhi understood and used Tolstoy’s letter to understand the political predicament of his time, and more broadly seek to understand Tolstoy’s language by relating it to our contemporary understanding of the modern condition. 

The ‘enslaved’ Indians

I

In the letter, Tolstoy reversed the problem of colonisation by making Indians responsible: “What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?” 

Gandhi took this indictment seriously and in his seminal text, Hind Swaraj, also written in 1909, he elaborated on Tolstoy’s idea to argue that it was particularly two modern institutions established in colonial India by the British—education and law—that “enslaved” Indians. He put the larger blame on modern, Western civilisation. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi echoed Tolstoy: “The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them.” 

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Tolstoy explained what he thought was the exact problem with Indians: “If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.”

Gandhi connected Satyagraha or its imperfect English translation “passive resistance” to the “spirit of love or of truth” to argue that once love replaces hatred there can be no room for violence and enmity against anyone, including the oppressor. Tolstoy in his letter made a distinction between “the law of love” propagated by all religions, but its constant disregard by people who forcibly united the “incompatibles”: the idea of love as a virtue accepted alongside “the restraining of evil by violence”.

Gandhi took up the question of love in a generic manner in Hind Swaraj and argued the necessity for an ethic of trust rather than the divisive, third-party interference of the law when it came to the Hindu-Muslim question. However, in the context of the lack of love and use of violence in Indian society, Hind Swaraj is conspicuously silent on caste (that includes the exclusionary idea of the outcaste). It prompted historian Aishwary Kumar in his book Radical Equality to note “Gandhi’s absolute silence on caste inequality and the peculiar absence of the “untouchable”” in Hind Swaraj (though Gandhi consistently wrote and campaigned against these ills of Hindu society later). Tolstoy identified the source of British hegemony in the failure by Indians to recognise the problem of “force as the fundamental principle of the social order”. This principle is most clearly visible in the caste structure.   

II

Tolstoy’s use of the term “pseudo-religious” is ahead of his time. He explained the word as a phenomenon that has stayed on from the premodern era to become part of “the ills of nations”. Tolstoy identified pseudo-religion, or pseudo-divine power, in “the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority” (from kings to priests) that justified the use of violence. It was too early in history for Tolstoy to embark on a critique of the nation as a structure of violence, but it is possible for us to do so. Not too long after Tolstoy’s letter, Rabindranath Tagore in his 1916 series of lectures on nationalism in Japan called the nation “a great menace”. The nation introduces elements of territory and population into religion and turns it into a corrupt political form where universal principles are replaced by national ones. Tagore, in his nationalism lectures, called it “organised selfishness”. Both territory and population become sources of collective paranoia. This paranoia is used to justify territorial violence. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s “two nation theory”, for instance, turned the minority question away from the language of democracy that involves political rights and constitutional safeguards towards a claim for territory based on religious identity. Nations have boxed in the meaning of religion. 

In contrast, Gandhi’s use of religion was not nationalistic like Jinnah’s or like that of the religious nationalists among Hindus. For Gandhi, religion in politics was meant to reconcile fraternal differences. Even though it was in the service of an internally-friendly nation, Gandhi did not define nation in religious terms. 

Tolstoy’s conflict with pseudo-religion and pseudo-science

III

The other term Tolstoy used which is ahead of its time is “pseudo-scientific”. In Tolstoy’s understanding, the scientific idea of modern power embodied in the will of the people and a constitutional government justify “the principle of coercion”. The justificatory use of violence merely shifted across time from “divine power” to governmental power. In a striking phrase, Tolstoy called it “scientific superstition”. Science is the new religion of superstitions. 

In a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, the writer tells a woman he meets briefly that the world is “ruled by cast-iron laws [and] insufferably boring”. He says he found the Middle Ages with their churches interesting, and then blurts out: “Because if god is also a triangle, then I don’t know what to think”. There is humour and concern in that statement. It connects to Octavio Paz’s 1981 essay on Fyodor Dostoevsky where he connected the problem of “ideologue” with the crisis of modern pedagogy: “The tyranny of the ideologue is the soliloquy of a sadistic and pedantic professor, intent on making society a square and each man a triangle.” Holding scientific rationality as the only authentic and admissible form of knowledge, Enlightenment thinkers introduced a schizophrenic understanding of human societies as well as human beings, where we are conflicted between ideas and feelings, theory and reality. E.M. Cioran put it presciently in The Short History of Decay (1975): “[Man] no longer lives in existence, but in the theory of existence.”

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The problem of pseudo-scientificity has also ravaged life worlds. The Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 was followed by the Chernobyl disaster two years later. In the last section of Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (1997), we learn of a 17-year-old boy Andrei who hanged himself with his belt in an empty classroom after being operated upon twice for illnesses caused by radiation. His last words to his friend were: “We will die and become part of science. We will die and everyone will forget us.” The scientific understanding of the world, its fetish of technology, experiments, and solutions, devastated the 20th century. We need science, but not at the cost of life and its memories being erased by scientific projects. Gandhi’s warnings against machinery in Hind Swaraj and in later writings make a qualitative distinction between machinery as a fetish (or the cult of technology) and machinery as such. Many thinkers and writers have voiced their concerns about the divine power granted to scientific thinking. The critiques of Nazi distortions of science to promote racist theories in the 1930s and 1940s do not dwell on the political problem of science being granted an unquestionable status that lends itself to the deliberate promotion of fake theories. Scientific theories of human life must be questioned.

IV

Tolstoy had a remedial prescription against pseudo-religion and pseudo-science. He identified it with “the spiritual element” in individuals. Tolstoy did not define the spiritual in religious terms, but in the universal spirit of love. The idea resonates in Gandhi’s idea of love-force as the primary impulse of Satyagraha. Any collective, national or ideological, cannot ignore or coerce the individual source of the spiritual element in the world. The broadening of the scientific idea of human society has ensured that nations behave like machines. Tagore had the insight to describe modern power as “a scientific product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the dissolution of personal humanity”. The spiritual component in us is neither religious nor scientific. It is an unnameable element of resistance. Writing in 1933 in Harijan, Gandhi called it “the inner voice,” the voice of “conscience”. A voice that resists the bureaucratic and rationalist designs of power. 

Elaborated from a presentation on Gandhi and Tolstoy made by this author at a conference on Gandhi’s 155 birth anniversary in Russian House, New Delhi, on 3 October.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.