Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue

24. Mohandas Gandhi: Fellowship of Power

173 Mohandas Gandhi Fellowship of Power Lee Wilkins Gandhi, as perhaps no other leader, epitomizes the concept that ethics is not something one has, ethics is something one does. For Gandhi, the two were one. “I am told that religion and politics are different spheres of life. But I would say without a moment’s hesitation and yet in all modesty that those who claim this do not know what religion is.”1 The ancient Greeks viewed politics as the highest ethical activity . Only in the exercise of politics did human beings flourish in a community with their fellows. What connected politics, religion, and ethics for Gandhi was power. But, it was power of a particular sort that Gandhi sought to understand, acquire, and redistribute in a way that redressed what he believed were the most essential problems of his home: the violence to human dignity that only abject poverty can produce and the deleterious impact of the rigid caste system on community. Power, for Gandhi, was what political theorist James C. Davies has labeled an instrumental need (Davies 1964): without power, it is impossible to exercise autonomy, to form relationships, and to nurture community. Through the exercise of power, one comes to know oneself. During his lifetime, Gandhi argued through his actions that journalists were powerful people, employed by powerful institutions whose actions must be informed by a duty to human kind. Gandhi sought the power of transformation: the ability through action to help himself and his followers reshape themselves and their world into a more just, more caring place. 24 1. E. H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence, 22. 174 . Lee Wilkins Mohandas K. Gandhi (the surname Gandhi literally means “grocer ”) was the youngest child of a “young mother (25) and an aging father (47)”.2 He spent the first decade of his life in the port city of Porbandar on the coast of the Arabian Sea. He shared a house with his father, his five brothers, and their families; six generations of Gandhis were home ministers or prime ministers. Gandhi’s mother, Putali Ba, has been described as the ideal housewife, but the somewhat communal living arrangements of this very large household meant that “Western” constructions of male and female roles were more fungible than the contemporary meaning of the word “housewife ” might suggest. Gandhi’s identification with his mother and his mother’s work foreshadows his campaigns to elevate women’s status in India and to redistribute both the daily work of women and men—and hence their power in the home and in the community —to a more equal plane. Some biographers have credited Putali Ba’s religious bent with Gandhi’s tactic of fasting at pivotal moments. While this interpretation of his mother’s influence is in some dispute, it is at least as important to understand that Putali Ba belonged to a small religious sect that prided itself on having unified the Qur’an with the Hindu scriptures and rejected any attempt of one to supersede the other. From his earliest religious training, Gandhi understood that the politics of religion—or at least the dogma of religion—was in itself a battle for supremacy. To resist such a struggle was both a political and a religious act. Putali Ba’s religion also prepared the young boy “for the refusal to take anybody’s word for what anything meant, either in the Hindu scriptures which he rediscovered only in his youth with the help of Western writings, or in the Christians gospels, the essence of which he tried to resurrect in Eastern and modern terms.”3 From his father the young boy learned the daily art of political statecraft. His father, whom Gandhi called Kaba, was the administrator of one of the Kathiawar princes (a sort of prime minister’s court) that was held daily in Gandhi’s home. Kaba held this post throughout Gandhi’s childhood. When the boy was about ten, his father took a more lucrative and powerful role as the prime minister in Rajkot, a change that jeopardized both Kaba’s career and his health. After what must have been a difficult two years, Kaba quit this new post, but not 2. Ibid., 103. 3. Ibid., 112. .   175 Mohandas Gandhi before his employer reminded Kaba that he could use the money he would have earned to send his intellectually gifted youngest son...