"..Gandhi owed much of his vast knowledge of the religion to his mother. She belonged to a sect which was opposed to idolatry, one which sought a bridge between Hinduism and Islam, and she had sympathy for Jainism.."

In India, mothers are customarily the transmitters of traditional Hindu religion and it was just the same with Putlibai, Gandhi's mother. Gandhi owed much of his vast knowledge of religion to his mother. She belonged to a sect which was opposed to idolatry, one which sought a bridge between Hinduism and Islam, and she had sympathy for Jainism, especially its emphasis on the importance of vows (e.g. not to eat meat). The religious teachings of his mother essentially came to influence Gandhi's ideas right from his childhood. It is evident in his philosophy that the old moral and religious beliefs formed the basis for it. Psychologists both Western (e.g. Erikson) and Indian (e.g. Sudhir Kakar) emphasize the strongly feminine character of Hindu culture, and it must be a matter of speculation whether Gandhi's identification with the feminine was a consequence of a specific relationship with his mother or the more pervasive influence of Hinduism.

N. K. Bose has argued that 'Gandhi's desire to purify and civilize mankind lay within the depths of his personal relationship with his mother or to certain events of his boyhood days'. According to him, Gandhi identified with women because woman, with her capacity to endure suffering (especially in childbirth), seemed to him the incorporation of the ideal of non-violence or ahinsa (Refer to the section on Gandhi's philosophy on Ahinsa). Erikson's account of the dominance of the 'maternal' in Gandhi's make-up, with his quest for the service of the poor and untouchable, may likewise be open to criticism, but his suggestion that it was Gandhi's pathway to the Indian society, 'with a primitive mother religion' as 'probably the deepest, the most pervasive and the most unifying stratum of Indian religiosity' is more convincing. Gandhi's relationship with his father, certainly in the short term, seems to be more dynamic, though Western readers must not automatically assume this was purely Oedipal rivalry (in brief, Freud's theory of Oedipus complex is that sons, even as infants, are sexually attracted to their mothers and thus jealous of their fathers), nor indeed that there was any sibling rivalry with his elder brothers.