A Letter to Gandhi

Abstract

"But I know that you have forbidden its use, that in a moment of spiritual protest you declared yourself to be no more than a “scavenger”. Nor do I dare call you “teacher”. I know of you since the days when Tolstoy addressed his famous “Letter to a Hindu” to you. I have followed your work since 1914; I carry sharply engraved in my memory each step of your martyr’s path - each arrest and trial, each vow, each fast, each triumph and each passing defeat which never shook your faith. I have read, in the languages familiar to me, all that you have written and there has been no social-religious thinker who has exerted so fruitful an influence on me. If, despite the fact that in various periods I have been stirred to the deeps of my soul by your teaching and your life, I am far from being your disciple or follower, the fault is not yours. You know how hard it is to follow you sincerely and completely in India itself, a land where both racial and cultural heritage have created conditions favourable to the growth of your teachings; still harder is it in the lands of the West, particularly for a man of my generation, who grew up in the heroic period of the Russian revolution - an epoch seething with moral conflicts. But it is easy for me to call you “brother”, if only because I belong to a people from whose prophets thousands of years ago there flashed the conception of God’s universal fatherhood, as well as of the brotherhood of all whom He created “in his image”. Therefore, permit me to use the name of “brother” together with the two names you heard in childhood - Mohandas Karamchand."(pg 1)