The-Polyester-Prince

Jayan Shah remembers Dhirubhai, who was about seven years younger than him,
coming to Anand Bhavan. Jayan Shah’s father took an interest in other people
children, lending them books to read and asking them to do odd jobs around the
house. Dhirubhai was welcomed with great affection, and returned it with respect.
Later, when he had gone away to work overseas, Shah remembers him dropping by
to pay his respects during a vacation back in Chorwad, arriving with great gusto and
a feeling of an old relationship.
The guild-like support of his merchant caste helped Dhirubhai continue his education
after finishing at his father’s old primary school. In 1945, he moved up to Junagadh
and enrolled at the Bahadur Kanji High School. This shared with a university college
a large yellow stucco edifice on the outskirts of the city that had been built in 1902
by the nawab of the time and named after him. Because of his family’s poverty,
Dhirubhai was admitted as a free student. He found accommodation in a boarding
house funded by the Modh Bania for children of their caste.
The Second World War had largely passed by Kathiawar, save for overfights by
military transports and the occasional visit of the new army jeeps. The movement for
Indian independence had not. On returning from South Africa, Gandhi had
established his ashram in Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat, and carried out
many of his agitations against British rule in the same region, including the famous
‘Salt March’s to the sea to protest against the government monopoly of salt in 1930.
His activities were financed by Indian industrialists from the Hindu trading castes,
fore-most among them the Calcutta-based Marwari jute-miller G. D. Birla. His
abstemious lifestyle was an extension of their own ideals, more familiar to them than
the Anglicized manners of the Nehru family. But a real self-interest was also
involved. The industrialists also saw in the Bania-born Gandhi a counterforce within
the Indian National Congress-the main secular vehicle of the independence
movement-to the socialist and communist ideas that had taken a strong grip on the
thinking of educated Indians. Gandhi’s ideas of industrial devolution to the villages
were intrinsically opposed to the proposals for state capitalism and central planning
of investment then being promoted by the Left in India as elsewhere in the world.
In Junagadh, the ideas of Gandhi and Sardar Patel, the Hindu nationalist lieutenant
of Nehru who was also a Gujarati, cast a strong influence. The Nawab, with his
Indian Political Service Resident Mr. Monteith at his side, was automatically put in
defence of the status quo. His police force and its detective branch kept a close
watch on the independence movement, and carried out many arrests of agitators
throughout the 1940s.
At the Bahadur Kanji School, Dhirubhai was quickly infected by the independence
mood. Krishnakant Vakharia, later a leading lawyer in Ahmedabad, was two years
ahead of Dhirubhai at the school and met him soon after his arrival in Junagadh. The
two took part in a gathering of students to discuss the freedom movement. Vakharia
recalls that all were inspired by the nationalist ideals of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and
most of all the socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, then still in the Congress Party.
The Modh boarding house where Dhirubhai was staying became the headquarters of
a new group to push these ideals, which they called the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh
(Junagadh Students’ League). The objective was to take part in the national
independence movement and Gandhi’s swadeshi (self-reliant) economic programme,