By Satya Narayan Misra in Bhubaneswar, October 3, 3025: Gandhi was an obsessive letter writer, penning thousands of epistles, telegrams and cables. 31000 of them have been published in 100 volumes of Collected Work of Mahatma Gandhi. Yet he did not subscribe to any ideology of his times. Asked as to what ideology he follows he replied: “I have not read Smith, Mill or Karl Marx. When in doubt, a little voice tells me that when in doubt, turn neither left nor right but always follows the narrow straight path.”

On the face of it is a surprising statement as Smith was the father of classical capitalism, and magnum opus Wealth of Nations (1776) was the predominant economic driver of Western & imperial capitalism. Karl Marx, on the other hand, saw seeds of destruction contained in capitalism as it was exploitative of labor. In his Communist Manifesto (1847) he gave a clarion to the workers to revolt and usher in a classless society.

Though Gandhi was witness to the Russian Revolution (1917), he was more attracted by the work the British philosopher John Ruskin and his book Unto This Last and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy & his book The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Both these books went against the tide of those times & were proscribed. A third book “Civil Disobedience” by David Thoreau reinforced his belief in resisting unjust laws peacefully.

Gandhi was more impacted by ideas than dogmatic ideology books that influenced Gandhi. Ruskin was deeply critical of the market economics and wealth creation dictum of Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations and pleasure principle of John Stuart Mill. He was deeply concerned about the plight of working class after the industrial revolution and strongly pitched for equitable sharing of riches, where men are treated and paid justly. He strongly believed that an economy must be based on the consideration of humanity and economics must have its roots in ethics.

This philosophy sowed the seeds of Tolstoy’s farm which was founded by Gandhiji near Johannesburg in South Africa in 1910, where the residents lived self-sufficiently, devoting their bodies to hard manual labour, their minds to the ideals of truth, and nonviolence, and children exposed to the beauty of vocational education. Nonviolence and passive resistance were the lessons Gandhi learnt from Tolstoy’s book. Kingdom of God was a philosophical treatise where Tolstoy wrote that all those who waged war are an affront to teaching of Christ.

He was anguished that the Russian Orthodox Church supported states policy for war. In 1908 Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi only by using love as a weapon through passive resistance, the native Indian people can overthrow the colonial British Empire. Gandhi wrote: ‘Before the independent thinking, profound morality and truthfulness of this book, all the books seemed to pale in to insignificance’. Tolstoy Farm Hermann Kallenbach , a German architect who used to eat vegetarian lunch at Hotel Victoria with Gandhi provided a 1100 acres near Johannesburg to house the families of those participating in the nonviolent Satyagraha movement.

It was Kallenbach who suggested the farm be named “Tolstoy Farm’ in honour of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, whom both admired greatly. When Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy as to whether he can name the firm after his name, Tolstoy he wrote back: “I have known about your work in leading the Satyagraha movement in South Africa and your quest for equality. Nothing will give me greater pleasure than my name being associated with the community firm and high idealism that you propose to build.”

The major ideas in these two books, viz dignified living for all, community living, manual labour, shared responsibility and nonviolence as a non-negotiable article of faith remained lynchpins of Gandhian philosophy throughout his movement in South Africa & struggle for independence of India thereafter. Tolstoy Farm is also emblematic of the philosophy of globalization where the contribution of a German architect, ideals of a Russian novelist and peaceful crusade of an Indian barrister found fruition in South Africa, riven by the curse of apartheid.

No wonder, Nelson Mandela, who freed his country from the quagmire of racism, is an avid Gandhian admirer & practitioner. The Book That Upset Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi returned to India and was in the zenith of his political career in the 20s, when he read Katherine Mayo book Mother India in 1927. This book was a scathing attack on India’s religion, retrograde customs, pernicious practice of early child marriage, and lack of medical care for pregnant women. While many of the practice described by Ms. Mayo undoubtedly existed in India, she did not give credit to the effort of Indian reformers to end these evils and completely exonerated the British authority from any responsibility.

The Britishers were delighted with the book and free copy was presented to every Member of Parliament. Gandhi described a book as the report of a drainpipe inspector endowed with one purpose of opening the drains of the country. Gandhi charged Ms. Mayo with a selective representation of facts. At the same time, he insisted that we must not overlook the dark side of the picture where it existed like child marriage and ill treatment of women. Relevance of Gandhian Ideas The faith in the market forces that Adam Smith advocated and USA as a leading mascot of market fundamentalism got a severe jolt when the US financial crisis, happened in 2007-2009, with cascading impact on many countries who had close financial ties with the USA.

The world realized the fault lines of unregulated markets, toxic effects of greed and conflict of interests. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate wrote that market economics benefited only an unscrupulous few as against Smithsonian prognostication that it will bring welfare to all. This is when the ideals of Ruskin and Gandhian firm conviction that there is enough for everybody’s need and not for everybody’s greed found resonance in nurturing small and cottage industry, eschewing conspicuous consumption and flagged the importance of sustainable development.

His commitment to social justice, concern for villages where majority of Indians live, eschewing greed and mindless pursuit of wealth has made Gandhian ideals extremely relevant to the present times. The Nobel laureate Albert Einstein wrote ‘Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth’. Indeed, he is not merely an insignia of our national currency or a totem to remembered twice a year, but India’s contribution to alternative ideas that the quest for mindless wealth must give way to simple living that respects community life and labour , harmony and brotherhood and abdicates violence as an article of faith.

*The author is a Trustee in Sarvodaya Foundation E.mail-misra.sn54@gmail.com, Ph-91-7381109899