This paper will present three main theses. The meeting of these two minds is significant in that it represents the meeting of East and West in a unique way: Thoreau’s Transcendentalism, steeped in Brahman sources, repaying a seventy-year-old cultural “debt” to the Hinduism of a young, Western-educated Indian lawyer. This essay is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming by clarifying the nature of the political, social, and literary affinities between Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. Except for a few short essays that tend to focus narrowly on the influence of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi’s Satyagraha (Truth-Force) Movement, no comprehensive treatment of this topic has appeared in English. However, the references regarding this connection are brief, usually not more than one paragraph, rarely more than a few pages. Gandhi has been duly noted by most Gandhi and Thoreau biographers. The intellectual kinship between Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas K.
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