GANDHIAN ASHRAM

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TOLSTOY ASHRAM
 LEO TOLSTOY
• Leo Tolstoy [Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy], was born on August 28, 1828, at Tula province, Russia, died November 7,
1910, Ryazan province, he was a Russian author, considered as a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s
greatest novelists.
• Gandhi and Tolstoy have been the two greatest followers of non-violence as a way of life and means of resistance.
According to Gandhi, Tolstoy’s ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893)’ "left an abiding impression" on him and
the Tolstoy’s idea of “love as law of life” and care for entire mankind greatly moved him. Gandhi named his second
ashram in South Africa after Tolstoy where he experimented with methods of Satyagraha.
• Tolstoy exercised a greater influence on him. In Hind Swaraj, we can notice that of the twenty books listed
there as many as six were by Tolstoy.
• While being taken to the court in handcuffs following an agitation in Transvaal, he carried with him a copy of The
Kingdom of God is Within You. Tolstoy's concept of "Bread Labor" was included among Gandhi's "Ashram vows"
and resulted in the formation of the Gandhian principle that makes earning a livelihood by the sweat of the brow
mandatory for inmates. They had exchanged a few letters before the great writer passed away in 1910 at the age of
82.
• Gandhi considered three of these – Letter to a Hindoo, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and What is
Art –so important that either he himself translated them or he had others translate them into Gujarati.
• Gandhi was greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, through his book ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ and his essay on
‘Christianity and Patriotism’. His ideal of “simplicity of life and purity of purpose” influenced Gandhi deeply. The
“love as law of life” and principles of non-violence, that is based on love for the entire mankind, were deeply
embedded in the writings of Tolstoy.
 LESSONS FROM LEO-TOLSTOY’S WRITINGS
• Keep an Open Mind, One area in which Tolstoy excelled was the ability and willingness to change his mind
based on new experiences. It was a skill he began nurturing in the 1850s when he was an army officer.
• Practice Empathy, Tolstoy was one of the great empathic adventurers of the 19th century, displaying an
unusual desire to step into the shoes of people whose lives were vastly different from his own.
• Make a Difference, For an upper-class literary gent, Tolstoy made a notable effort to take practical action to
alleviate other people's suffering. His dedication to the peasantry was nowhere more evident than in his
famine relief work.
• Master the Art of Simple Living, One of Tolstoy's greatest gifts — and also a source of torment — was his
addiction to the question of the meaning of life. He never ceased asking himself why and how he should live,
and what was the point of all his money and fame.
• Beware Your Contradictions, Apart from the fact that he preached universal love yet was constantly fighting
with his wife, the apostle of equality was never able to fully abandon his wealth and privileged lifestyle, and
lived till old age in a grand house with servants.
• Expand Your Social Circle, The most essential lesson to take from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and recognize
that the best way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and develop new ways of looking at the
world, is to surround ourselves with people whose views and lifestyles differ from our own. That's why he
ceased socializing in Moscow and spent so much time with laborers on the land.
 WHY THAT NAME?
• In Johannesburg, Gandhi befriended a Lithuanian-born rich Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. When he donated a 1,100 acre-farm
to help house Gandhi’s satyagrahis in 1910, it was called Tolstoy Farm, inspired by the Russian great’s writings.
• “No writing has so deeply touched Mr. Kallenbach as yours; and as a spur to further effort in living up to the ideals held before the world
by you, he has taken the liberty, after consultation with me, of naming his farm after you.”
• The passive resistance campaign grew from here till Gandhi returned to India in 1914 to spearhead India’s struggle for Independence.
• In 1910, the provinces of Southern Africa joined and created the Union of South Africa with Louis Botha its prime Minister. In 1910,
Gandhi established another cooperative colony near Johannesburg, called Tolstoy Farm, having been inspired by Tolstoy’s ideas. Tolstoy
Farm became Gandhi’s cradle of the Satyagraha activities.
• Tolstoy Farm was the second experiment in community living undertaken by Gandhi, which was established near Johannesburg, as a
corollary to Phoenix Settlement during the second Satyagraha campaign against the Asiatic Registration Bill popularly known as Black Act.
• It was mainly to accommodate families of Satyagrahis and to lead a communitarian life which Gandhi described as “cooperative
commonwealth.” Gandhi wrote in Satyagraha in South Africa “There was only one solution for this difficulty, namely, that all the families
should be kept at one place and should become members of a sort of co-operative commonwealth. The families of Satyagrahis would be
trained to live a new and simple life in harmony with one another.
• The Tolstoy Farm offered him an opportunity to experiment with the implementation of his ideas. His challenge was the greater because
the settlement consisted of men, women, and children for short, long, and irregular intervals, who were Hindus, Muslims, Christians or
Parsees, white or Indians, people who spoke one or more from among Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, and English. Gandhi recalls that there were
70 to 80 residents - 40 "young men", 2 or 3 "old men", 5 women, and 20 to 30 children - although the number must have varied from
time to time in the course of the farm's existence. It was a heterogeneous microcosm in which his leadership would prepare him for his
role in the macrocosm of his battles in India later.
• In a letter dated May 8, 1910, Tolstoy said, “I just received your letter and your book Indian Home Rule. I read your book with great
interest because I think that the question you treat in it-the passive resistance-is a question of the greatest importance not only for India
but for the whole humanity.”
 Activities
• “Tolstoy Farm was a family in which I occupied the place of the father and that I should so far as possible shoulder the responsibility for
the training of the young”, wrote Gandhi.
• The routine of the children on the farm was divided between attending classes and contributing to the maintenance of the farm. As at
the Phoenix settlement manual work was combined with instruction on a daily basis, but Gandhi took this concept one step further at
Tolstoy by introducing vocational training to give "all-round development to the boys and girls".
• Gandhi enabled each child to become self-supporting by supplementing their education with vocational training. Their ages ranging from
six to sixteen, the children had on an average eight hours of manual training per day, and one or, at the most two hours of book learning“.
• An added dimension of the Tolstoy Farm was the decision to hold co-educational classes, and indeed to encourage the boys and girls to
do everything together. The activities which the young contributed their energies to at Tolstoy Farm included general laboring, cooking,
scavenging, sandal- making, simple carpentry and messenger work. In addition to productive crafts, manual work of a purely constructive
nature was also essential for the maintenance and development of community life.
• The contribution of work such as sweeping, scavenging and water fetching was seen to be invaluable to the psychological, social and
moral well-being of an integrated community. Gandhi's objective in this context was to inculcate the ideals of social service and
citizenship through all the activities of children from the earlier formative years.
• Farm is located at 22 miles from Johannesburg, one would have thought, was a disadvantage. And yet, Gandhi must have weighed this
against its many advantages: it was but a mile or two from the nearest railway station of Lawley; on its 1,100 acres of land there were
nearly 1,000 fruit-bearing trees; and water was supplied from two wells and a spring. True, there were at the time no more than a "shed
and a dilapidated house containing four rooms". But its open spaces - it was about two miles long and three-quarters of a mile broad -
provided the opportunity for leading a simple life, and its distance from Johannesburg freed it possibly from "the varied distractions of a
city".
• He explains the reasons for the selection of the particular site.“ To live in a city would have been like straining at a gnat and swallowing a
camel. The house rent alone would perhaps amount to the same sum as the food bill, and it would not be easy to live a simple life amidst
the varied distractions of a city. Again in a city it would be impossible to find a place where many families could prosecute useful industry
in their own homes. It was therefore clear that the place selected should be neither too far from nor too near a city”.
 Activities
• "It should be an essential of real education," he wrote in 1914, "that a child should learn that, in the struggle of life, it can easily conquer
hate by love, untruth by truth, violence by self-sacrifice." This is presumably what he had in mind when he stated later in his
autobiography that education should concern itself with the "culture of the heart or the building of character". His goals in the education
of the young minds were similar to his insistence upon what adults should strive towards in their lives. What was important to this
morally scrupulous man personally was also important in his educational programme.
• The fatherly teacher's programme included both "manual" and "mental" training. The ashramas children were expected to undertake for
three hours in the morning duties which involved gardening, farming, sandal-making, or cloth-sewing. Such work was counterbalanced
with a programme of lessons in geography, history, arithmetic, and writing; "bhajans" (hymns) and "interesting stories" were included in
the teaching. No doubt they were stories with a moral lesson. Gandhi did not consider textbooks necessary. "Of textbooks...", he said, "I
never felt the want." The "true textbook for the pupil was his teacher," which in this case was Gandhi. Given his emphasis in education,
Gandhi probably felt that instruction based on the teacher's experience and convictions would carry more weight than the lifeless pages
of a textbook.
• The training imparted in a modern-day revolutionary camp might mean acquiring skills in the use of firearms, and learning tactics in
attack and self-defense. On the other hand, the "soldiers" at the Tolstoy Farm trained in the use of a different kind of weapon, namely,
Satyagraha. It appealed to the residents. Gandhi prescribed for them a "mode of life" in which satyagraha might be assured of becoming
fully realized. He believed that each one of the residents was capable of realizing the perfection of satyagraha by a rigorous spiritual and
mental exercise. Gandhi had no doubt that the "mode of life" accepted by the farm's satyagrahis proved to be "an invaluable asset" in
the campaign, even though there were probably no more than 60 of them present at any given time. From among this number came the
core of satyagrahi workers who assisted in the successful operation of the last stages of the campaign.
• Such was the case of the eleven "sisters", who, having been "trained" in satyagraha at the Tolstoy Farm, persuaded the Indian coal
miners in Newcastle to come out on strike at the end of 1913 in support of the general satyagraha movement.
• Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) attributes the success of the final phase of the satyagraha campaign in South Africa between 1908 and
1914 to the "spiritual purification and penance" afforded by the Tolstoy Farm.
ALL THE BEST.