Opinion In Elaben and her work, Gandhi lived on

“She’s a Gandhian,” replied my mother.

“So?” I countered, with my just-turning-eighteen brashness.

“Go, find out for yourself,” replied my mother.

Elaben, as she was known to all, was short-statured, soft-spoken, dressed in a white khadi sari with a green border. She took all of us — it was a conference — in a bus to Sabarmati ashram. As the bus halted, she was talking of the police that had stopped some women from selling their wares and how they had picketed and the women had won. I noticed her eyes were shining with pride.

“What about the traffic?” I asked in my naivete; she went at length to explain that the poor, particularly women, too have rights which are being consistently violated. As I listened to her, I missed walking to Hrday Kunj — Bapu’s room. She told me, “Get a glimpse of it, at least”. I ran; but seeing the delegates returning, I turned back. Observing my downcast face, she said, “You will get there.” I did not know her words would be prophetic.

Elaben was thrown out of her job at the Textile Labour Association in a patriarchal manner. As she cried, her husband, Ramesh Bhatt, who had a deep influence on her remarked, “Chalo, acchha hua”. “I was so surprised,” she recalled, but she then set up SEWA – Self Employed Women’s Association, the first all-women’s trade union of vegetable vendors, rag-pickers, head-loaders, cart-pushers, to whom she gave the dignified term, “self-employed”. It has now crossed the million mark and has worked consistently towards enabling the poor in the informal sector for minimum wages, dignity, health and insurance. Elaben worked tirelessly, informing society that 86 per cent of the workforce was in the informal sector, working with no social security and in appalling conditions. All the benefits were going to the formal or organised sector.

However, at the SEWA conference I was attending, there was an innovative discussion: An American producer, Martha Stewart, was talking about bringing in video equipment and there was a discussion about training the head-loaders, cart-pushers and vegetable vendors to make videos. In the late 1970s, the idea itself was revolutionary and it formed the genesis of Video SEWA.

I went on to do my Masters in Social Work, later going to Washington State University to do another Masters in Communications, but I heard a call — was it Bapu or Elaben — and on returning to India, I went straight to Hrday Kunj and on to Elaben’s home. Her home was simple; it was small, with a Gujarati swing in the verandah, a blue khadi-covered sofa and small peedis or stools. Her husband Ramesh Bhatt — who tragically died young — and she had named it, “Toy House”, making the small-is-beautiful idea a concrete reality. She seated me on the sofa, but herself sat on a low stool, then she served me with her own hands; perhaps she was obliquely teaching me about sewa — service and humility.

It was to her and to this home that I returned, again and again, at various turning points in my life. In 1995, I began making recordings of freedom fighters and reached Ahmedabad where I reached out to Video Sewa for assistance. Elaben was supportive and, indeed, applauded the archive with enthusiasm. I met and recorded Veerbalaben Nagarwadia who was present when Bapu and the others commenced the Dandi March from Sabarmati Ashram on March 12, 1930. I also recorded Nimuben Desai, who was jailed for harbouring in her house a man wanted by the British, and Sarlaben Shah who was present at the procession at Gujarat College where Vinod Kinariwala was shot and killed by the police. She had lifted the body along with the others.

Elaben was a mentor for the “Hamaara Itihaas” freedom fighters’ archive but always so unfailingly modest that it was only later that I learnt that her maternal grandfather, Manidhar Prasad Vyas, had been a freedom fighter and had worked with Bapu. She shared his diary, written in Gujarati, with me. Her grandfather had been a doctor, she told me: “He showed Bapu around Gujarat, and was forced to resign by the British for openly displaying his closeness to him”. She went on to share that he had organised the satyagraha at the Dharasana Salt works where there had been violence against the satyagrahis, as reported by Webb Miller of the United Press International. Since Manidhar Prasad Vyas was a doctor, he had considered it his duty to treat the injured satyagrahis, as well. All this and much more, I finally managed to record, after a lifetime of knowing her, at Elaben’s residence only in 2019.

At a critical point in my life, I reached her doorstep again. This time it was personal. Elaben generously shared her personal life with me, telling me that when she wanted to marry Ramesh, her parents had opposed it saying, “Do you even know what poverty is?” Ramesh Bhatt, while well-educated, was not from a wealthy family. She told me, she worked “as a manual worker breaking stones for a few days” to understand poverty. I knew she was gently guiding me. On the arrival of my beloved, daughter — whom I adopted and named Sachi for Bapu’s love for sach, truth — I took her to Ahmedabad. We visited Hrday Kunj and then on to Elaben’s home where she hugged my daughter and me with deep love, over a simple and memorable Gujarati meal with her son Mihir and daughter in-law, Reema and grandson, Som.

In the last few years of her life, Elaben wrote prolifically. Her book, We Are Poor, Yet So Many, proved the power of women organising and demanding their work be counted as productive. The women always said, “There is no work but the work is killing me” because their work was not accounted for or paid. I was present at the launch of her book, Anubandh, where she stated that the “six basic needs of life: food, clothing, housing, health, education and banking can be met locally, within a hundred-mile radius”. She believed — and her work through SEWA exemplified this — that people would themselves find innovative solutions to poverty, exploitation and environmental degradation, if given a few resources. She asked, “If we are inviting the world to do business with us, why are the policeman’s hands still on the shoulder of the vegetable vendor, who feels compelled to give hafta to do her daily work?”

Over the years we exchanged numerous messages with deep love and affection. I sadly did not get a response from her when I wrote to her on Diwali and on November 2, when I learnt that the soul who had kept the diya of ahimsa and satyagraha burning bright by lighting the lives of millions of women was no more, I wept. I had lost my spiritual mother, role model and heroine.

Elaben has left behind a powerful legacy of values. She showed that Gandhi lives on when we embrace a life of simplicity and stand by the poor. This is even more pertinent as we confront climate change. In her work with poor women and in SEWA’s work, Gandhi lives.

The writer is an author and filmmaker. She is the director of the ‘Hamaara Itihaas’ archives.