Penguin Random House India to publish ‘Truth and Love: The Gandhi-Tolstoy Letters’

Penguin Random House India is delighted to announce the publication of Truth and Love: The Gandhi-Tolstoy Letters, a compelling exploration of the correspondence between two of the most influential moral thinkers of the modern era: Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy.

Presented by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and Daniil Tolstoy, a descendant of Leo Tolstoy, Truth and Love brings a remarkable early twentieth-century exchange to a new generation of readers. More than a historical record, these letters capture an intellectual encounter between two men separated by geography, culture and circumstance, but united by their search for truth and their belief in the transformative power of non-violence, moral courage and love.

The correspondence between Gandhi and Tolstoy represents a significant meeting of ideas. Tolstoy's thinking on non-resistance to evil, spiritual freedom and the moral responsibilities of the individual deeply engaged Gandhi during a formative period in the development of his philosophy. Their exchange became part of a larger conversation about how conscience could confront injustice without reproducing the violence it sought to resist.

In Truth and Love, Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Daniil Tolstoy revisit this intellectual legacy through the unique perspectives of their respective families. Reintroducing the letters to contemporary audiences, they reflect on the influence Gandhi and Tolstoy had on one another and consider why their ideas continue to matter more than a century later.

At a moment marked by armed conflict, political polarization, rapid technological change and environmental crisis, the questions at the heart of the Gandhi-Tolstoy correspondence have acquired renewed urgency: How does one resist injustice without hatred? What does it mean to live truthfully? Can moral conviction become a practical force for political and social transformation? And what place can non-violence occupy in a world increasingly shaped by division and conflict?

Truth and Love approaches non-violence not simply as an ideal or a chapter in history, but as both a practical and spiritual instrument for social change. In doing so, the book invites readers to encounter Gandhi and Tolstoy not as distant historical icons but as thinkers whose arguments about truth, love, conscience, and resistance continue to challenge the present.

The volume is also an unusual intergenerational conversation: descendants of Gandhi and Tolstoy returning to the words their ancestors exchanged and considering the legacy those ideas have left behind. The result is at once historical, philosophical and strikingly contemporary, a book about an exchange from the past that asks urgent questions of the world today.