A Library That Still Stands

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 — the Gandhian system of education through labour, craft, and community rather than through books and examinations alone — he laid the foundation of the library as an act of institutional faith: a collection of documents and ideas that the village would need long after the generation that had created them was gone.

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. Where other students in the inaugural batch arrived at an unfamiliar institution in an unfamiliar village and spent their first months in the slow work of adaptation, Bhakti Dastane arrived home.

A Household Shaped by History

Her father’s story was woven into the larger story of the freedom movement in ways that most children learn only later, if at all. Dattoba Dastane was the son of the Marathi poet Annasaheb Dastane, and he had come to the Gandhian life not through accident but through deliberate choice — the choice to embrace simplicity, to live and teach according to the principles of Nai Taleem, to spin and farm and educate in the Gandhian manner rather than in the manner of institutions that separated learning from living.

Her mother, Malti Dharmadhikari, carried a different but equally serious history. Born in Kolhapur in 1924, she had lost her father early and moved to Wardha at the age of twelve, where she entered Mahila Ashram — the women’s institution that operated within the orbit of Gandhi’s ashram and offered its students an education that merged learning with spinning, weaving, farming, and meditation. 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 nonetheless 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, the reason for the choices her parents had made, the invisible architecture within which daily life was conducted. 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. Her mother had sat in the presence of the man whose ideas were now being translated, in a new medical college in the same village, into a particular vision of what doctors should be and how they should live.

The Student Sevagram Had Been Waiting For

When Dr. Sushila Nayar convened the selection committee for the inaugural batch of MGIMS in 1969, she and Dr. Jivraj Mehta were 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, in the dignity of village life, in the idea that medicine practised among the poor was medicine practised at its most essential?

By every one of these measures, Bhakti Dastane was the student the institution had been designed to find.

She had worn khadi since childhood, not as a political statement but as what clothing looked like in her household. She had heard satyagraha discussed not as a tactic from a history lesson but as a memory still fresh in the minds of the adults around her. She had grown up in Wardha, within walking distance of the campus where she would study medicine, in a family whose roots in the Gandhian project ran deeper than those of most students who would arrive in the inaugural batch.

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. She did not struggle with the charkha sessions, because the charkha had been present in her home as long as she could remember. The shramdan — the manual labour that other students accepted as an institutional imposition — was simply, for her, the way things were done.

Other students in the inaugural batch carried Gandhian values at one remove, absorbed from parents who had participated in the movement or from the institutional culture of a college that had been deliberately designed around those values. Bhakti Dastane carried them at the source. Shyam Babhulkar, born in Sevagram Hospital and raised in Wardha, shared something of this quality — as did Girish Mulkar, whose family had deep roots in the region. But even among students who arrived already shaped by the Gandhian world, Bhakti’s formation was unusually complete.

The Hostel Years

The early years of MGIMS were modest in the material sense and rich in almost every other. Hostels were still being built when the first batch arrived; electricity was unreliable; textbooks had to be shared. The girls’ hostel, a short walk from Dr. Sushila Nayar’s own modest home, gathered the fourteen women of the batch into the daily rhythms of pre-dawn prayers, cleaning duties, and the long evenings of study interrupted by the particular friendships that form when people live together in constrained circumstances and have no other option but to know each other well.

Bhakti moved through these years with the ease of someone who had been prepared for exactly this. The austerity was not new. The community was not strange. The expectation that a student would sweep her own floor, wash her own utensils, take her turn at the communal tasks of the campus — these were the same expectations her parents had lived by, and their parents before them.

What was new was the medicine itself: the anatomy hall, the Physiology lectures, the first encounters with patients in the wards of Kasturba Hospital, the gradual understanding that the knowledge in the textbooks was preparation for something that no textbook could fully contain. She learned it as her batchmates learned it — through the teaching of faculty who had chosen a village college over more comfortable postings and who brought to their work a conviction that had something personal in it. Through ward rounds where the patient before you was not a case number but a person from a village not unlike the village where you were living and studying. Through the slow accumulation of clinical experience that transforms a student into a doctor not at any single identifiable moment but through the gradual settling of responsibility.

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. It was not, perhaps, an accidental choice of specialty for a woman raised in a household where her mother had taught women to weave and spin and farm, where the dignity of women’s lives had been taken seriously before she was old enough to articulate why.

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. She brought to her patients the same quiet attentiveness that her parents had brought to their work: the teacher who built the library, the woman who had learned to spin in Mahila Ashram and had never stopped believing that the skills she learned there were connected to the skills she would later teach others.

What the Library Holds

The Gandhi Seva Sangh library in Sevagram still stands. It holds the documents and writings of a movement — the records of people who believed that India’s freedom was inseparable from the dignity of its villages and the health of its poor, and who organised their entire lives around that belief.

Bhakti Dastane did not write herself into those records. She did not seek monuments. She was her father’s daughter in this as in everything: a person who understood that the most important work is often invisible, that the doctor who delivers a child safely in a rural hospital at two in the morning leaves no permanent record of the act, that the teacher who builds a library in a village is remembered, if at all, by the library itself.

The library stands. The children she brought into the world are alive. The students she trained are practising medicine somewhere. The thread of the Gandhian project — from the Mahila Ashram where her mother learned to spin, to the Gandhi Seva Sangh where her father built his shelves, to the medical college that rose in the same village on the same principles — runs through her life and her work as continuously as it runs through the landscape of Wardha district itself.

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.