Day 40 | RAS Mains 2025 Answer Writing | 90 Days

Gandhi’s experience in South Africa was decisive: not only in his political, family and social life, but also for his culture and religion. Two of his most faithful collaborators there, Henry Polak and Hermann Kallenbach, were secular Jews. Gandhi had occasion to meet exponents of diverse religions and denominations, including Christian ones; he held long discussions with them, and some tried to convert him. It was a Jainist poet and thinker from Bombay, Raychandbhai, who confirmed Gandhi in the faith of his fathers. 

Gandhi met him on his return to India from England, and continued to correspond with him from South Africa, until the poet’s premature death. In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that only once in his life had he come close to choosing a personal guru: yes, Raychandbhai. He considered him ‘the best Indian of his time,” and freely acknowledged his debt to the Jain. If his Christian friends in London had awakened in him “the thirst for a religious quest,” Raychandbhai had taught him that religion was essentially the control of one’s own spirit, and liberation from any attachment or aversion to people or things. 

                    It was principally during his South African years that Gandhi became acquainted with writers whom he would consider masters for the rest of his life: Ruskin, Thoreau, Carpenter, Tolstoy. In 1904 he read Ruskin’s Unto this Last, a book identifying the individual good with the common good, and speaking of the importance of work as the cornerstone of life; for Ruskin, all types of work have equal dignity and value, whether they be intellectual or manual, noble or humble. In 1907, Gandhi read Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,”’ and was struck by its central theme: one’s duty to refuse to obey a country’s laws if one believes them to be unjust. Two years later, while in London, he read a volume written by the idealistic socialist, Enward Carpenter: 

Civilisation: Its cause and cure. He found it “enlightening’’, excellent in its analysis of civilisation. 

             An advocate of the return to a simple life in harmony with nature, Carpenter condemned modern civilisation as degrading and corrupting; like Ruskin, he exalted the joy of manual work, which industrialism had separated from the creative project. 

    However, the author that struck Gandhi more than any other was Tolstoy. All during the rest of his life, Gandhi would recognise his debt to the Russian writer. He probably read Tolstoy for the first time during the London years of his youth, when he greatly admired the author’s ideas and work.

But his first great encounter with Tolstoy dates back to 1894, in South Africa, when a friend gave him a copy of God’s Reign is Within You. Gandhi’s reading of it left an indelible impression on him. He felt for the book and its author the same admiration that he had held for the Sermon on the Mount. 

          He found in it an admonition against responding to evil with violence, an exhortation to love one‘s neighbour and practise pacifism, and a confirmation of the ancient Indian commandment (Jainist, in particular) of ahimsa. He also found a brief story of the forerunners of non-violence, and a catalogue of its advocates and “militants’’  at that time: from the Quakers to Tom Paine, from the American abolitionists to the Russian doukhobors. 

                   In other books by Tolstoy which he read in the years that followed, Gandhi was led to agree more and more adamantly with the Russian’s distillation of Christianity-and of every religious faith-to the commandment to love one’s neighbour; the aspiration toward a profound moral rebirth of man; a highly critical attitude toward progress, science, luxury and wealth, as well as toward the city, a place of alienation and destruction of man’s deepest values. 

Answers 

1. Gandhi’s experience in South Africa was decisive because two of his most faithful collaborators were there. He interacted with intellectual exponents of diverse religions and denominations. 

2. Raychandbhai was Gandhi’s personal guru. Gandhi chose him because it was him who taught Gandhi that religion was essentially the control of one’s own spirit and liberation from any attachment or aversion to people or things. 

3. Gandhi considered Ruskin, Thoreau, Carpenter and Tolstoy his masters. 

4, The masters influenced Gandhi in different ways. Ruskin taught Gandhi about identification of personal good in common good and to respect every kind of work. Thoreau and Carpenter fed him about civil duties, right, causes and cure. Tolstoy refined Gandhi as a nonviolent person as he inspired him to not respond to evil with violence. 

5. Tolstoy left an impeccable mark on Gandhi. He shook him internally through his advocacy of admonition against violence as a response. 

6.  (i)  enlightening

     (ii)  harmony

7. (i) religious,  spiritual

    (ii) unconscious, ignorant