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reject British mill-made cloth. Gandhi spent hours spinning daily and urged his followers to do likewise.

In a dramatic gesture at this time, Maniben wrapped her gold jewelry - every Indian woman's treasured dowry - into a bundle and, with her father's knowledge and consent, donated it to Gandhi in the cause of Indian freedom. She gave away sentimental gifts - the bangles given by her late beloved aunt, the gold wristwatch her favorite uncle had brought her from England - along with several pieces she herself had picked out. At seventeen, had she already decided she would not marry?

Maniben's letters from those years reveal her loneliness. She mentions the keenly felt pain of being motherless, made harder by an emotionally distant father who despite his deep love for his young daughter, could not open up to her. His silences coupled with her constant fear that he might end up in a British jail leaving them alone again created a deep depression. His letters show that he suffered for her but did not know how to help. Unlike other Indian young women of the time, Maniben was self-reliant yet, like them, she was expected to get married. At twenty, it was already high time.

Luckily for her, this is when the Mahatma took charge. Through those difficult years, Maniben had found it easier to talk to Gandhi than to her father. Compassionate and empathetic, he reached out to the lonely young woman who bicycled regularly to his ashram in Ahmedabad. She grew close to Gandhi's kind wife Kasturba, traveled with them, and once lived at the ashram for several weeks. Soon, Gandhi wrote to her father, "Maniben has no intention to marry. We must support her to maintain this attitude. You please cease to worry about it and leave it to me."

The Mahatma had once urged Maniben "to serve Father with heart and soul," reminding her of "the heavy responsibilities Father is loaded with." She took that advice to heart: she became Sardar's constant companion, made his appointments, filed his letters, looked after his papers, cleaned and tidied his room, screened his visitors, nursed him when he was ill, and spun the yarn for everything he wore. She traveled with her father and, becoming a seasoned activist, went to prison repeatedly, often with Kasturba. When her father sent her to sustain the morale of a village in the thick of trouble, Gandhi wrote: "Mani has been showing her mettle. I have never seen another daughter like her." Sardar proudly told his friends of her "amazing deeds," but he never praised her directly.

She shadowed him always and sat beside him at every interview. In later years, her protectiveness of her father's time and energy made her brusque with visitors who found her crotchety. Her only concern was to mold her father's world to his convenience. In a rare note of appreciation, her father acknowledged that "forsaking all the pleasures and enjoyments of this world and wearing only white khadi, she has never even put on a colored dress! A woman as austere as she is rare." Towards the end of his life, he expressed his concern for her more directly: "The thought keeps coming to me that my time in this world is nearing its end. How long can you stay with me? Thinking of the future, shouldn't you settle down in a field of your choice so that you have no sudden difficulties when I am gone?"

On his deathbed, Sardar, unlike his unfortunate wife forty years earlier, was surrounded by all those closest to him. It was Maniben who, at the end, gave him his last sip of holy Ganges water. She was forty-six when he died. Honored with a seat in Parliament, she devoted herself to preserving her father's legacy. Later, she retired in Ahmedabad where she had spent so many years with her father and Gandhi. Visiting her two nephews in Bombay and Delhi regularly, she lived into her eighties.

When she died, I recalled her joy at my wedding, my surprise that she had brought a gift, and the kindliness with which she addressed my husband. The stern Maniben we knew had mellowed into a sweet old lady.

VIBHUTI PATEL

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 fancy yourself a Maniben?" She had entered our lexicon as synonymous with a unique state of freedom from matrimony.

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Photo courtesy of Bipin and Lui Patel
Maniben with her father, Vallabhbhai Patel, Deputy P.M. of India, at the entrance to the official residence.


HEDGEBROOK JOURNAL August 1999    31