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HEDGEBROOK AUTHORS

I was preparing to leave for Hedgebrook when I received a letter from Linda Bowers and Sue Ellen White asking for a historical piece related to what I would be writing at Hedgebrook. Since the suggested deadline was just a few days after my arrival at Hedgebrook, I decided to decline and asked if I could take a raincheck. But, Linda was curious, was I related to Vallabhbhai Patel, the freedom fighter? Since most Americans-even those who know of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru-have never heard of "Sardar" Patel, I was stunned by Linda's reference to him. As it happens, I am related to Sardar. Besides, he and I had had a meaningful personal relationship in the mid-1940s: he requested my company on afternoons when be wished to relax and I, the family's precocious toddler, was made available to entertain him. He had been my surrogate grandfather in my earliest years when my own grandfathers were far away; I had been his "grandchild" when his grandson, Bipin, was a young adult. So, Linda's innocent question came to me loaded as an omen about whom my first piece at Hedgebrook, a chapter for the memoir I am working on, should highlight. And if the theme was "untold histories," I reasoned, Sardar would fit right in because, rumor has it, there has long been an official conspiracy in India to obliterate his contribution to the nation. 

Even as I decided to write on Sardar, I remembered that Bipin and his American wife Lui had sent me "a factually, well-researched" biography of his grandfather. I read it now to refresh my recollection of dates and places. That is when, once again, my "subject" trounced me: Sardar was pushed aside as his daughter Maniben elbowed her way into my attention with the little-known but heart-breaking details of her life. Recalling this issue's theme of "untold histories and hidden stories: Stories of women, people of color, the poor, and the disenfranchised; those who have been left out of history, but whose live have nevertheless shaped the world we live in," I realized that it was tailor-made for Maniben. That same night I met Nancy Nordhoff for the first time. She said Hedgebrook was started to give voice to women because they had been silenced so long. I recognized then that Maniben, who struggled against her father's silences until she chose to silence herself, was crying to be heard at Hedgebrook.

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mother's death. Years later, Maniben said, "After being told that my mother had died, I was taken to a tap...and bathed [in a Hindu, after-death, purification ritual]. That's all I can recall."

Vallabhbhai, described by a colleague, as a "volcano in ice" never shared his grief with his children or with anyone else. Dutiful as he was, the failure to be with his twenty-nine-year-old wife at her death, doubtless caused him great anguish. But it was a private agony that no one was privileged to witness. Sardar's later letters record his grief over the deaths of his colleagues with more openness than he permitted himself in Jhaverba's case. He did not lack feeling but his reticence, a product of the times, of his culture, and his temperament, was to cause heartache in his family life. 

In 1987, one of Sardar's biographers asked Maniben, "Was your mother pretty?" Maniben, eighty-three then, replied, "I have no idea." He continued, "What can you say about her?" "Nothing," she recalled, drawing a blank. "Did your father ever talk about her?" asked the writer. "My father didn't talk to me about anything. In the morning, he would ask me how I was, that's all," was Maniben's shocking response. The silent strong man, so loved by the Mahatma, so admired by Indians and so long and devotedly served by his daughter, had never opened up emotionally with his children. Be it unspoken love for his dead wife, or his protectiveness towards his young children, he vowed, at thirty-three, never to remarry. And he kept his word. One cannot help wondering if he affected Maniben's emotional make-up: she shared his austerity in her way of life as much as in her temperament. 

The year after Jhaverba's death, Sardar sailed to England to fulfill his ambition to qualify as a barrister. In a highly unconventional move, he left his children, ages six and four, not with his family in the village but with a Miss Wilson (probably an Englishwoman) of Queen Mary's School in Bombay so that they could learn to speak English and qualify themselves for an education in England. Referring to this period in his life, Sardar the nationalist later said, "I used to think that the summum bonum of life lay in imitating the foreigner-in speech, in dress, in all things that mattered."

After two years as Miss Wilson's boarders, the children moved to the home of their uncle, Sardar's older brother, also a widower and a brilliant barrister, in suburban Bombay. They continued in Queen Mary's as day scholars, and spent vacations in the village with their father's only sister. An uneducated woman, she doted on them but, unfortunately, she, too died shortly. After an absence of three years, the new barrister Patel returned to India to establish his law practice in Ahmedabad, three hundred miles from Bombay. His children stayed on in Bombay with their uncle, spoke to each other in English, studied French in school and lost Gujarati, their mother tongue.  

Today, one shudders to imagine their sad, confused childhoods: left motherless first, then fatherless, shunted from small village to big city, boarding with a "foreign" headmistress with no prior preparation, losing an adored aunt, living with an Anglicized uncle who was widowed and childless, and speaking in two foreign tongues. Their visits to their father were as rare as his to Bombay. 

On one visit, Maniben recalled decades later: "We went with him in an old-style horse carriage to buy clothes. He was wearing a suit and peaked cap. I remember he got me a silk frock, a silk skirt and blouse." From Whiteway and Laidlaw, the fanciest English store in Bombay, he bought her boots, ribbons, and handkerchiefs, a far cry from what she was to wear the rest of her life. Or, he, for that matter: the "suit and peaked cap" were long gone when our dashing, Americanized cousin, the glamorous Bipin, was stunned at being told that his "fashionable" grandfather used to wear "foppish" clothes. The Mahatma was to change all that in many Indians' lives-Sardar's, Maniben's, and Dehyabhai's, as also my father's. A few years later, Sardar and my father were to immolate their prized English clothes in public bonfires of imported goods called for by Gandhi. 

In 1918, however, when Gandhi started to woo her father, Maniben had just moved to Ahmedabad's Government Girls' High School. Sardar cautiously weighed the temptation. He knew that joining Gandhi meant giving up, among other things, his dream of an English education for his children. But the persuasiveness of the Mahatma was legendary. Sardar capitulated. In 1938, he recalled, "When I joined Gandhiji, I collected some firewood, lit a few and put all considerations of my family, my career, my reputation, and everything into the fire."

Two years later, at sixteen, Maniben joined the movement and left the Government Girls' High School for one that had severed its British affiliation. On graduation, she and Dahyabhai enrolled at Gujarat Vidyapith, a nationalist college started in response to the boycott of British colleges urged by Gandhi to protest foreign control of Indian education. Turning away from her English-French schooling, Maniben studied Gujarati literature and Bengali in college. She started wearing khadi even before her father did and, from 1921 on, Maniben's spinning provided the yarn for her father's clothes. Spinning was a central tenet in Gandhi's platform. It demonstrated solidarity with India's poor, offered an income-producing skill, and helped 

30 HEDGEBROOK JOURNAL August 1999