This letter is somewhat self-promoting. Yet it speaks of an extraordinary self-confidence. The struggle in the Transvaal involved a few thousand Indians in a single colony of a single country, and yet Gandhi was already seeing it in world-historic terms – as, indeed, ‘the greatest of modern times’.29 Even as Gandhi asked Tolstoy to publicize his struggle, he used Tolstoy’s name to legitimize the movement in South Africa itself.
