A Letter to a Hindu

In December 1908, a 78-year-old Russian novelist spent seven months and wrote 413 manuscript pages to produce a 6,000-word letter. The result would help birth the twentieth century's most powerful political force: nonviolent resistance. Tolstoy wrote this letter to a young Indian activist named Tarak Nath Das, who had asked the famous author to support India's struggle against British colonial rule. But Tolstoy's answer surprised everyone. Rather than endorsing revolutionary violence, he argued that only love, nonviolent protest, and a refusal to cooperate with evil could truly free India. The letter reached Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa, then a struggling young lawyer. Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy asking for permission to reprint it. The exchange that followed shaped Gandhi's philosophy of satyagraha and introduced him to the ancient Tamil text the Tirukkural. Tolstoy drew from Krishna, Jesus, and Swami Vivekananda to build his case: that the real prison of colonialism is the colonized's own belief in their powerlessness. The ideas in this letter would help end British rule in India forty years later. For anyone interested in the intellectual origins of nonviolent resistance, or the remarkable story of how one letter can change history, this is an essential document.