A Letter to a Hindu

• 1. Introduction

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  "A Letter to a Hindu" arrived in India through a Russian author's desk, drafted and redrafted across seven months, twenty-nine attempts, and four hundred and thirteen manuscript pages. Leo Tolstoy wrote it on the 14th of December 1908, and the finished document ran to six thousand words. What drove that extraordinary effort? And why did the letter, addressed to a young Bengali-American activist named Tarak Nath Das, end up reshaping the thinking of the man who would eventually lead India to independence? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Request from Das

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  Tarak Nath Das sent two letters to Tolstoy asking the Russian thinker to lend his voice to India's cause. Das was seeking support for India's independence from colonial rule, and he turned to one of the most prominent moral authorities of the era. The letter Tolstoy wrote back was published in Free Hindustan, an Indian newspaper. That publication brought the letter into wider circulation and placed it before a readership actively engaged in debates about how, and whether, colonial rule could be overthrown.

• 3. The Argument Within

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  Tolstoy built his letter around a single organising principle: love. He argued that only through the law of love could the Indian people gain independence. He did not mean passive sentiment. He saw love as an active force expressed through protests, strikes, and other forms of peaceful resistance. Violent revolution, in his view, was not the alternative but the trap. Tolstoy found the law of love in all the world's religions, and he drew on two of them directly in the letter itself, quoting the teachings of Krishna and Jesus side by side. He also mentioned the works of Swami Vivekananda, weaving together voices from East and West to make his case.

• 4. Gandhi Reads the Letter

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  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was living in South Africa when the letter reached him, just beginning what would become a long activist career. He wrote to Tolstoy asking for two things: advice, and permission to reprint the letter in his South African newspaper, Indian Opinion, in 1909. That permission granted, Gandhi then translated the letter himself, working from the original English copy sent to India and rendering it into his native Gujarati. The act of translation was also an act of study: Gandhi was absorbing Tolstoy's argument word by word. The letter, together with Tolstoy's 1894 book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, helped form Gandhi's views on nonviolent resistance.

• 5. The Tirukkural Discovery

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  Tucked inside Tolstoy's letter was a reference to a body of ancient Tamil moral literature he called the 'Hindu Kural', known more precisely as the Tirukkuṟaḷ. For Gandhi, this was an introduction. He went on to study the Kural while in prison. The text Tolstoy drew Gandhi toward predates colonial India by many centuries; its moral framework had endured long before the independence movement and would outlast the debates of 1908. The fact that a Russian writer's letter became the path by which Gandhi encountered one of Tamil literature's foundational works sits as one of the quieter consequences of the correspondence between Tolstoy and Das.

• 6. Lasting Consequences

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  The ideas Tolstoy set out in the letter proved consequential. The principle of individual, nonviolent resistance that he articulated found its most visible expression in the culmination of the Indian independence movement in 1947. The letter's chain of influence ran from Das's original request, through Tolstoy's months of drafting, through Gandhi's translation work and his study of the Kural, and out into decades of political struggle. The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi did not end with the reprint request; Gandhi's letter to ask permission was itself the beginning of a direct exchange between the two men.