LANGUAGE IN INDIA

VOICES OF THE MARGINALISED –
THE VOICE OF GOD IN THE LIVES OF PEOPLE
A Study of Leo Tolstoy’s Language

Olive Thambi, M.A., M. Phil.

Simple Pleasures of Life

INDIAN FASCINATION FOR LEO TOLSTOY

Indian fascination for Leo Tolstoy began in great strength with the arrival of Gandhi from South Africa in 1915. He settled down in India finally and began his experiments withTruth through Satyagraha. While in South Africa, his ideas and methods had already been firmed up (Thirumalai 2005). In South Africa, Gandhi established the Phoenix Settlement in 1904 inspired by the reading of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and then afterwards he founded Tolstoy Farm to practice simple living in a community context. Since then, generations of young Indians have read Tolstoy’s works with great admiration, longing for a simple way of life, based on Gandhian and Tolstoyan teaching. His works have been translated (and re-translated in some languages) in many Indian languages. His stories apart, his ideas of simple living continue to attract young people to him.

SOUL OF THE MODERN WORLD?

Chesterton, et al. wrote that Leo Tolstoy might be viewed “as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world” (Chesterton, Parris, and Garnett 1903:36).

While Chesterton specifically wrote, “Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the simplification of life” (page 5), he was also critical of Tolstoy: “The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic” (Chesterton, Parris, and Garnett 1903:6).

Chesterton, in particular, was not happy with the kind of (Christian) anarchism that Tolstoy’s ideas and writings could bring about. Without specifically mentioning Tolstoy, Chesterton wrote, “A sect of men start with no theology at all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform, and endsby maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it will always be (Chesterton, Parris, and Garnett 1903:6).

RELAXED TOGETHERNESS AND MORAL OVERTONES

Leo Tolstoy has used language to appeal to human emotions. He uses it to connect people and bring them together in an atmosphere of relaxed togetherness. It is in this context that he intersperses his language with moral overtones.

Simple Prayers

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