Gijubhai, mustachioed mother

Tushar Bhatt

    A child has its own individuality,personality.Respect it,foster it.Do not try to frighten a child into submission.These may sound commonplace guidelines in child education today, even though they still are not universally practised maxims of child raising.

    Nearly a century ago, when the name of Madame Montessori was only now gaining international fame, these were as novel as anything else in India, Gandhian way of fighting for the country's independence included.

    Yet,one man in Gujarat, hailed in his lifetime only during those years as an innovator in child education, had already earned the nick-name of being a mustachioed mother of tiny tots(balakoni muchhali maa).

    He was only 54 when he breathed his last in Bombay more than half a century ago, on July 23,1939,but what Gijubhai Badheka did in those years before the World War II has been so much path-breaking that it has remained unrivalled till today.

    His work on a scientific child education system attracted widespread attention and admiration, as also a following among teachers and parents alike in Gujarat,Maharashtra and Rajasthan.He is scarcely mentioned today in spite of the fact that what he said then is perhaps more pertinent now,and needed sorely.

    Ironically,there has hardly been any attempt,save a centenary celebration in 1985 to take further the invaluable work done by him; so many of the ideas he threw up ,especially in child and adult education, are so relevant even today and deserve whole-hearted implementation.A promise was made on behalf of the State government to help set up a child psychology laboratory in Bhavnagar university to commemorate Gijubhai's memory;but it has remained on paper only.Governments and ministers came and went;rhetorics on improving the quality of education flowed and ebbed and flowed again.

    Gijubhai was a visionary.He had given deep thought to the need for rationalising primary education,written prolifically for children and educationists in the field of child education,implemented successfully many of his ideas at the Dakshinamurti in Bhavnagar and had even pioneered a scheme for adult education among the illiterate.

    Said Mrs Vimuben Badheka,his daughter-in-law who looks after a kindergarten set up by Gijubhai in Bhavnagar:"He had written so much that no one has a complete record." Many were booklets of stories,folk tale,nursery rhymes,poems and songs for children.Others were his observations on child education,including a book on how to tell a story for the teachers who have to deal with kids.This was in addition to hundreds of articles,essays and notes he penned on child education.

    Many books were low prices so that all those who were interested could easily afford; some were available at just one-and-a-half anna or two annas.

    But,writing was only one part of the educationist's personality.Gijubhai,remembered his colleagues, students and followers, was essentially a home-spun ,scientific human being,who saw in every child a great potential to groom and believed that if the child did not develop properly,the fault more often lay with its teachers and parents.

    Born on November 15,1885 at Chital in Saurashtra,his father Bhagwanji Badheka was a pleader of extremely amiable nature,hailing from Vala,near Dhola junction.His mother,Kashiba, was a soft-spoken woman of few words and deeply religious person.The sweet nature and simplicity Gijubhai had all his life were as if his parental heritage.The child,Girjashankar,had also an innate sense of curiosity and a courageous soul.Vimuben recalled that once while still a young boy,Gijubhai had led a group of classmates to a bush of trees near Vala,widely believed to be the abode of ghosts.The trees had delicious fruits but no one dared to pluck them for fear of spirits.One day,Gijubhai and his friends went there and did not come for a long time.The elders,when they came to know that the children had gone to the haunted place were worried stiff.But Gijubhai was unafraid and brought the group back safe and sound,stomach full of fruits.Not only the qualities of leadership evident in the young boy,but he seemed a natural teacher.Gijubhai was a voracious reader and brilliant student,but unlike many of that genre,he was totally self-effacing,spending time in reading aloud difficult pages for his class mates,and stopping to help them tide over obstacles in understanding a lesson.

    Completing his primary schooling,Gijubhai came to Bhavnagar,staying at his maternal uncle,Hargovindbhai's house.Hargovindbhai was to wield a considerable influence on the shaping of Gijubhai's personality.A station master in the state railway, Hargovindbhai,who had earned the nick-name of Motabhai (big brother),was known as a saint because of his kindly and pious nature.Though kindly,he was a strict disciplinarian.Once when he found that Gijubhai and other children,being relatives of the station master,were frequently on the trains between Bhavnagar and Khodiyar or Bhavnagar and Sihor,without any ticket.He told them: "The railway does not belong to us and we cannot go anywhere we like without buying a ticket.So anytime you want to go,just tell me,I will purchase tickets for you." It taught the boy never to take anything that was not rightfully his own, a lesson he never forgot all his life.

    After matriculation,Gijubhai joined Shamaldas college and got married to Hariben,but she died suddenly.In 1906,he got married the second time; the bride was Jadiben,the daughter of a friend of Hargovind.Poor financial conditions in the family did not allow Gijubhai to continue higher education and he had to seek a job. He opted in 1907 to go to East Africa,where a lot of Gujaratis used to travel to in search of a livelihood.The two years he spent there were very educative; he kept on doing different jobs,including that with a British solicitor,P.G.Stevenson.He got a lesson of his life while working with the white-skinned.Gijubhai,being new to his assignment, was in the habit of asking Mr Stevenson for guidance in every little thing.The solicitor was a quaint person;instead of providing guidance,he would tersely tell Gijubhai: "Use your brain."Gijubhai decided to do just that in tackling his life's problems.

    He could have easily settled down in East Africa,and probably earned pots of money.But he was not that sort of a man; he enjoyed his stay in Africa, observed the life around him minutely and these observations helped him write two books on the country. But his heart was not where his body was.The lean and wiry Gijubhai had a very strong mind and once his inner voice started telling him ,he returned home without hestiation,even thought what he would do here was an open question.After a lot of consultations with Hargovindbhai,Gijubhai went in 1910 for studying law in Bombay, doing a teaching job in a school there to provide for the expenses.In one year he got the enrolment certificate to practise as a pleader.In 1911,he started law practice in Wadhwan town in Saurashtra.He was a hard working man and slowly built up a prestige as a lawyer,but basically he was not a man cut out for the endless arguments and confrontation that the career involved.He was feeling uneasy.

    In 1913,a son was born in his house, adding to the turmoil in Gijubhai's mind. He had been keenly aware of the neglect of child education in India.Having grown up in an atmosphere of mental torture in primitive schools,Gijubhai had already been looking around if some innovative ways of educating tiny tots could not be adopted. He had heard of experiments in Italy by Madame Montessori in educating children between three and six years of age;of approaches which held that it was not necessary to use a cane to make a child learn.Affection could be more effective. A friend,Darbar Gopaldas Desai, suggested to Gijubhai to go and see the experiments being tried out by Motibhai Amin at Vaso in central Gujarat.He went to Vaso,got interested in Montessori method of child education,read a lot.A chapter had opened in Gijubhai's life; he went on reading and trying newer methods on his young son,fully satisfied that this was the real way of educating a child. Even as this process was on,he began to feel increasingly ill at home in law practice.What was he doing in this,what use was all the earning were the questions that kept bothering his conscience.

    Some propitious developments were under way on their own around this time.In 1910,Prof.Nrusinhprasad Bhatt,who later came to be known as Nanabhai and wrote extensively for children, used to teach in a college,set up a hostel for students and gave up his job to look after the hostel full time.Gijubhai helped him frame the constitution of the institution.Gijubhai's maternal uncle,who knew of discomfiture of his nephew in legal profession,suggested to him to come over to Bhavnagar and join Nanabhai.He did so in November,1916,becoming an assistant to the hostel rector at Dakshinamurti educational institution.He stayed on in the organisation for two decades,during which the dormant child educationist in Gijubhai came into full blossom.It was during the hostel work that Gijubhai realised that if students stayed only there and studied somewhere else,the hostel would not be much more than a boarding house.For definitive work in education, there should be a school too.In 1918,the organisers of the institution started a kumar mandir (a school),with Gijubhai as head master.But even this middle school did not make the born teacher any more happy; he kept wondering if ten to 15 years old students would be amenable to new experiments in education.What was needed was a kindergarten.The idea took a concrete shape one day when Gijubhai was an onlooker to a scene of what he thought cruelty; a trader was beating his young child who was being carried by others on to a school.The child cried all the way like a cornered deer.Gijubhai decided to start a school for tiny tots where they would willingly and happily come to learn and play,play and learn.On August 1,1920,such a school was started in a bungalow owned by Ratilal Modi.

    These were the days when the teacher too learnt a lot. One day he gave the children a lot of toys,assuming it would make them happy. The kids kept staring at the toys.Then,Gijubhai himself started playing with the toys,and his young pupils joined in.Then,he started telling them stories.He was enthused on finding the children enthused by what he was doing in making them learn things about life.The Montessori method of child education was basically good,but what Gijubhai did was to adapt it to Indian conditions.He wrote a lot of literature for children as well as their teachers himself,based on his own experience in these years.He started looking for like-minded colleagues and found a host of them-- Harihar Bhatt,Taraben Modak and a large number of other.By 1925, a Montessori education association came into being and its first convention was held in Bhavnagar.The association had Mrs Sarladevi Sarabhai as its chairperson and it started a monthly magazine,Shikshan Patrika.Gijubhai was its editor all his life.

    But,Gijubhai was basically a restless soul in the cause of child educationn.Not being fully satisfied with setting up an ideal kindergarten,he started dreaming of spreading the message for such an education all throuigh Gujarat and elsewhere.In 1925 only, they started an institution for training of the teachers to implement the ideas cropping up at Dakshinamurti.

    Gijubhai,although prolific in writing, was not a bookish person.He thought life's real education lay in observation of life around,in observing nature,plants and trees, flowers and birds,all living organisms around us.It was not just lecturing the young ones that shaped their life.It was a holistic attitude towards life encompassing everything including music and drawing that gave a meaning to the joys of life.he also was a staunch believer in dignity of labour; once he gave the task of cleaning the class room to two graduates from the Gujarat Vidyapeeth.When one of them objected to such an assignment,Gijubhai shot back: "If you do not want to do this work too,you can leave my institution."

    Gijubhai was keenly interested in adult education too, and wrote valuable guidelines which are valid even now. He would first observe,then think about the problems in more effective education, devise strategies to cope with them,and then implement them as experiments.Only when these succeeded in giving results, he would put them on paper.

    His activities did not remain confined to Bhavnagar or Gujarat only,but began to attract attention from neighbouring areas in Maharashtra and Rajasthan too.

    He had no other other abiding interest than child education.Usually,Gijubhai, would be found wearing round spectacles on a face that also sported long moustache,donning on the head a Kathiawadi turban,and a long coat,and dhotie,almost like a uniform. He had no interests in attire and would often have to be forced into giving up darned clothes only when no more repair was possible.Similarly,he also had no special taste in eating.Kaka Kalelkar once described Gijubhai as Bala sahitya na Brahma (Creator of literature for children).His vast contribution would testify that this was no exaggeration.In 1930,he was given the Ranjitram gold medal for 1929 for his work.

    Ceaseless endevouring of twenty years had a telling impact on Gijubhai's health.In the late thirties,he was afflicted by heavy fever and asthma,compelling him to remain in bed.In 1936,he relinquished his job in Dakshinamurti.He had accepted to set up another institution for training of teachers in child education in Rajkot,but his dream was to set up a university for children.Another was to get an encyclopaedia for children published.Gijubhai also wanted to go to the Himalaya for introspection.All these remained dreams only.In the middle of 1939,he was persuaded by friends to go to Devalali for rest and recuperation. On way, he took ill in Bombay and passed away.

    Gujarat celebrated his birth centenary in 1985 with some fanfare.But there has been no statewide attempt to carry forward the work he had pioneered.Gijubhai's main contribution was that in an era when child education received scant attention, he had done a lot of innovations,had refined the Montessori method to suit Indian conditions,and had shown a way to his fellow teachers to keep up the work he had undertaken.He stressed the need for original observations on child behaviour in our environment and then develop teaching material. The road is open today but there are few willing to travel on it.This is in spite of the fact that society recognises the worth of a proper child education system.

(Ends)