rule and to preserve the wholeness and unity of the nation of India's family and the wholeness and unity of the family of man. To Gandhi, "self-rule" was not only political as in people of India leading themselves, but also much more. It also presented a relgious/spiritual, personal and societal means for the family, for the nation, to care for itself. The direction of Gandhi, of course, has to be viewed in a political perspective and in relationship to the desire of achieving a political agenda of self-rule. However, from a broader perspective, it needs to be recognized also as a means of continuing the Hindu social hierarchy. For Gandhi, the term human family could be taken quite literally. Yet he also saw the meaning of family as national family or the leader of the India independence movement, or patriotism.
             It is interesting to note how Gandhi used the different levels of family-from the basic nuclear family, to the India community, to global humankind-as a means of bringing about equality for his own people and encouraging the same for individuals throughout the world. His first actions concerned making the nuclear families more equal by supporting the wife's cause. As many men of his class in India, Gandhi had to marry while he was barely a teen and had difficulty establishing his role as a husband and father. He confessed in Experiment how horribly he treated his wife, Kasturbai, "Once I went the length of sending her away to her father's house, and consented to receive her back only after I had made her thoroughly miserable" "I saw later that all this was pure folly on my part" 3
             However, as he matured, and went through his intellectual and spiritual modifications, Gandhi encouraged women to be perceived in a different way through a changing pattern of family. In fact, Gandhi said he learned much from his wife "when I tried to bend her to my will." Gandhi wrote. "Her determi...