Reading room

A Letter to a Hindu

Leo Tolstoy

Letter dated 14 December 1908 to the Bengali nationalist Taraknath Das, editor of Free Hindustan, who had asked for his support in the struggle for independence. Tolstoy replies that India is subjugated not by the force of a few Englishmen but because millions of Indians cooperate with them; that violence will not free it, and that the only way out is the law of love and non-cooperation with evil, which he finds in the Vedas, in Krishna and in the Gospel. Gandhi translated it into Gujarati and published it with his own preface in 1909.