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HEDGEBROOK AUTHORS

Vibhuti Patel
Vibhuti Patel (Oak, 1999) is working on a memoir of growing up in India and of her family's involvement with Mahatma Gandhi and the fight for Indian Independence. She has two daughters and lives and writes in New York City.
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MANIBEN VALLABHBHAI PATEL
My subject is a brave woman, born at the beginning of this century, in a small village in India. She overcame the seemingly insurmountable vicissitudes of her sad early life and found a way to make a meaningful contribution in her country's struggle for freedom from the British. She won Mahatma Gandhi's friendship and admiration and offered quiet support to her father, the "Chief" who became India's first, and only, deputy premier. She fought the demons of silence that threatened to stifle her and vanquished them by effacing herself. Her voice has never been heard: no biography was ever written; no memorial to her service exists. My tribute aims to correct that conspiracy of silence.

...
EVEN AS A CHILD, I KNEW Maniben was different from other women. Certainly, she was nothing like my fashionable mother or my vain aunt Bhanumati, my father's sister, who was married to Maniben's brother Dahyabhai. Bhanumati and my mother, ten years younger than Maniben, wore brilliantly colored silk saris, or fine machine-woven English cottons, precious jewelry, sexy sandals. My mother even dared to wear a little lipstick. But Maniben, a tiny woman, with smooth brown skin, large dark eyes that conveyed seriousness at all times, a full mouth, and salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a tight little bun, wore nothing but rough white khadi, the handspun, handwoven cloth that became the uniform of Gandhians. A regular spinner, the yarn that she spun was woven into fabrics for her spotless saris and the unfashionable long and loose blouses which neither bared her midriff nor hugged her bosom. The border of her sari covered her head in the old-fashioned gesture of modesty that was tossed aside by younger women at Independence. Shunning traditional jewelry, she wore only a stainless steel man's watch, not on her wrist, but on her upper arm.

Growing up, I observed all three women at close quarters, for my aunt and uncle lived in a seafront apartment just one floor above ours. Maniben stayed with them whenever she was in Bombay. We saw much of her then, since the doors to the two apartments of our extended family were rarely shut. Thus I noticed that Maniben was never involved in the preparation or serving of meals. When afternoon tea was brought in by the servants, it was my mother and aunt who took turns pouring tea and serving snacks. Maniben neither volunteered nor was expected to do so. Not surprisingly, my cousins and I grew up thinking her eccentric and hearing her described as "unfeminine." In the India of the 1940s and 1950s, it was unthought of to choose not to be married. Years later when, as a teenage rebel, I announced my aversion to marriage, I was challenged by my aunts: "Do you fance yourself a Maniben?" She had entered our lexicon as synonymous with a unique state of freedom from marriage.

Yet Maniben was respected. She was not the failed "spinster" to be pitied and relegated to a subservient role of shameful degradation. She had exercised choice and opted for a life of independence that put her on an equal footing with men. And men respected her. My irreverent father with his irrepressible sense of humor and his longtime buddy, my fun-loving uncle Dahyabhai, were both in awe of her. My mother feared that Maniben was the standard against which my father measured all women. Bhanumati simply resented her. Maniben's chosen vocation was to look after "Father," to be his assistant in all things, at all times.

Her father, as everyone knew, was the redoubtable Vallabhbhai Patel, affectionately nicknamed "Sardar (the Chief)," by grateful compatriots in recognition of his fearless and pragmatic leadership in the freedom fight. Gandhi's tough right-hand man and loyal troubleshooter for thirty years, he was the one the Mahatma chose to be deputy prime minister of independent India in 1947 when the British finally left. He consolidated modern India, and shared power with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru until his death in 1950. Maniben worked beside him for all those years.

Maniben was born in 1904, the first child of Vallabhbhai and his young wife Jhaverba whose marriage had been arranged by their peasant families, twelve years earlier, when he was seventeen, she thirteen. As was the custom then, the child-bride continued to live with her parents in their village until the boy-husband finished school. Eight years later, they started their married life together in a small town where Vallabhbhai became an advocate. Unfortunately, Vallabhbhai's natural reserve - part of the trademark stoicism that awed so many throughout his life - prevented him from reporting anything of his married life. There are no records of his wife's physical appearance, her temperament, his feelings for her, or of their life together.

Then, in 1909, Jhaverba died - totally alone and quite unexpectedly - in a Bombay hospital where she was awaiting surgery, while her husband was pleading a case in an out-of-town court. He had promised to return for her surgery but her end came suddenly. Mani, five, and Dahyabhai, three, were at their uncle's home in Bombay when they heard the news of their


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