There is a library in Sevagram that Bhakti Dastane’s father built.
The Gandhi Seva Sangh library — its shelves holding the records and writings of a movement that had made the village famous — was established partly through the work of Shri Dattoba Dastane, a teacher and linguist who had come to Sevagram under Vinoba Bhave’s guidance and spent his working life in the service of Gandhian education. He taught in Sevagram, in Gopuri, in Wardha, and was later called to Varanasi to serve the Gandhi Seva Sangh’s publication division. A gifted linguist, a man who had absorbed the disciplines of Nai Taleem, he laid the foundation of the library as an act of institutional faith.
The library still stands.
When Bhakti Dastane arrived at MGIMS Sevagram in 1969 as a first-year MBBS student, she was arriving at a place her father had helped build. The red earth, the neem shade, the smell of the ashram in the early morning, the bhajans rising before sunrise — none of this was foreign to her. She had grown up with these things as the texture of daily life. She arrived home.
A Household Shaped by History
Her father, Dattoba Dastane, was the son of the Marathi poet Annasaheb Dastane, and he had come to the Gandhian life through deliberate choice — the choice to embrace simplicity, to live and teach according to the principles of Nai Taleem. Her mother, Malti Dharmadhikari, had lost her father early and moved to Wardha at the age of twelve, where she entered Mahila Ashram. She had been in the presence of Gandhi himself — which in the Wardha of the 1930s was not an extraordinary circumstance for someone living within the ashram’s community, but which left its mark. She later taught at Mahila Ashram and married Dattoba Dastane in Bhusawal in 1940.
Bhakti was born into this. The freedom struggle was not, in her household, history — it was the air the family breathed. Her relatives had gone to prison for the country. Her father went to work each morning to maintain a library that held the record of those struggles.
The Student Sevagram Had Been Waiting For
When Dr. Sushila Nayar convened the selection committee for the inaugural batch of MGIMS in 1969, she was looking for students who carried certain values — not as abstractions learned from books but as lived realities absorbed from family and community. Did their parents wear khadi? Had they worked with Bapu? Did they believe in Gram Swaraj?
By every one of these measures, Bhakti Dastane was the student the institution had been designed to find. She had worn khadi since childhood. She had heard satyagraha discussed as a memory still fresh in the minds of the adults around her. She did not flinch at the morning prayers at Bapu Kuti, because she had been attending morning prayers at Bapu Kuti since she was a child. The shramdan was simply the way things were done.
Other students in the inaugural batch — among them Shyam Babhulkar, born in Sevagram Hospital and raised in Wardha, and Girish Mulkar, whose family had deep roots in the region — carried Gandhian values at one remove. Bhakti Dastane carried them at the source.
A Career of Quiet Constancy
After her MBBS, Bhakti Dastane built a career in Obstetrics and Gynaecology — the branch of medicine most directly concerned with the lives of women, with the passages of birth and risk and survival that had been at the centre of Kasturba Hospital’s mission since Dr. Sushila Nayar had first brought her vision of rural medicine to Sevagram.
She practised without fanfare. She did not chase the appointments or the awards that mark certain careers as exceptional in the public sense. She served — which is, in the context of a life shaped so completely by the Gandhian tradition, precisely the right word.
The Gandhi Seva Sangh library in Sevagram still stands. It holds the documents and writings of a movement. Bhakti Dastane did not write herself into those records. She was her father’s daughter in this as in everything: a person who understood that the most important work is often invisible.
She came to Sevagram as the daughter of one of its builders. She left as one of its doctors. The two things were never, for her, very different.
Dr. Bhakti Dastane completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969, and went on to a career in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Her father, Shri Dattoba Dastane, was a Gandhian educator and linguist who helped establish the Gandhi Seva Sangh library in Sevagram. Her mother, Malti Dharmadhikari Dastane, taught at Mahila Ashram, Wardha, and had been in the presence of Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. Bhakti Dastane lives in Maharashtra.