Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 35

Fragment ID: 8229

The Swadeshi Movement (1905 – 1910) and Later Developments [1]

When I read the speeches you delivered before 1910, it seems to me as if Gandhi had almost copied everything from that – Swaraj, Samiti, Non-cooperation, and so on. If not outwardly he must have received these things from you in an occult way.

The whole of Gandhi’s affair is simply our passive resistance movement given an ethical instead of a political form, applied with a rigid thoroughness which human nature except in a minority cannot bear for long and given too a twist which seems to me to make it harmful to the sane balance and many-sided plasticity necessary for national life. What with Gandhi, Hitler and the rest (very different people but all furiously one-sided and one-ideaed) a large part of humanity seems to have gone off its balance in these times.

21 September 1934