i was much affected by Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which he read in the context of acquaintance with Christians involved in obtaining social justice for Indians in South Africa. Gandhi was urged, without success, to convert to Christianity, but he wrote that the "defects" of Hinduism, notably its sectarianism and casteism, were also "depressingly visible to me" (as cited in Fischer, 1962, p. 41). What is relevant to this research is that, in 1928, Gandhi specifically and programmatically attributed to Tolstoy's text his decision to embrace nonviolence as the controlling ideology of his political activism:
I was at that time a believer in violence. Its reading cured me of my skepticism and made me a firm believer in [non-violence]. What has appealed to me most in Tolstoy's life is that he practiced what he preached and reckoned no cost too great in his pursuit of truth. . . .
No one in the West before him or since has written and spoken on non-violence so fully or insistently . . . Tolstoy's life with its oceanlike love should serve as a
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