Gijubhai Badheka

Girijashankar Bhagwanji Badheka, known throughout his life simply as Gijubhai, was born on 15 November 1885 in Chittal, a small town in the Amreli region of Saurashtra in present-day Gujarat, India ^[1]. His family belonged to the modest professional class of the peninsula, and much of his childhood was spent in Bhavnagar, the princely state town that would later become the site of his life's work ^[2].

He completed his schooling in Bhavnagar and enrolled at Samaldas College there, though he left before finishing his degree. Like many young men of Saurashtra in that era, he looked abroad for opportunity and spent time in East Africa around 1907, working to support his family before returning to India ^[1]. Back home he turned to law, qualified as a district pleader, and by the early 1910s had built a practice in the courts of Saurashtra ^[2].

Anyone tracing who was Gijubhai Badheka before his fame finds an unremarkable provincial lawyer. Nothing in these years hinted at the reformer to come, except perhaps a restlessness that friends later recalled, a sense that the routine of pleadings and fees did not satisfy him ^[2].

The turning point in any Gijubhai Badheka biography is the birth of his son Narendra in 1913. Confronted with the question of how the boy should be raised and schooled, Gijubhai began reading about education and grew dissatisfied with the rote learning, fear, and physical punishment that defined Indian classrooms of the period ^[3]. His reading led him to the work of Maria Montessori, the Italian physician whose child-centred method was then spreading across Europe, and her ideas struck him with the force of a conversion ^[1].

In 1916 he abandoned his legal practice entirely. He joined the Dakshinamurti Vidyarthi Bhavan in Bhavnagar, an educational institution founded by the reformer Nanabhai Bhatt, and threw himself into teaching and experiment ^[3]. The decision cost him a secure income and puzzled his contemporaries, since walking away from the bar to sit among small children was not a recognised career in colonial India.

On 1 August 1920 he founded the Bal Mandir, a preschool attached to Dakshinamurti, which is widely regarded as one of the earliest institutions in India built on Montessori principles ^[1]. There he worked out in practice what he had absorbed from books: classrooms without canes, learning through the senses and through play, and an atmosphere in which the child, not the syllabus, set the pace ^[3].

Among the most cited Gijubhai Badheka achievements is the sheer volume and originality of his writing for and about children. He produced well over a hundred publications in Gujarati: folk tales retold in a child's idiom, rhymes and songs, plays, and practical manuals for parents and teachers ^[2]. His retellings of Saurashtra folk stories gave Gujarati children a literature of their own at a time when almost nothing was written with young readers in mind ^[4].

His best known single work is Divaswapna (Daydreams), published in 1932. Cast as the story of a fictional teacher named Lakshmiram who persuades an education officer to let him run a class his own way for a year, the book dramatises everything Gijubhai believed: that fear teaches nothing, that stories and games carry more learning than textbooks, and that examinations measure the wrong things ^[5]. The book was later translated into English and other Indian languages, and the educationist Krishna Kumar has described it as a small classic of educational literature that remains startlingly relevant ^[5].

Alongside Divaswapna stand his theoretical and practical works, including Vaarta nu Shastra (The Science of Storytelling) and Mata-Pita Thi (addressed to parents), which together form an early Indian pedagogy of childhood ^[2]. In 1929 his contribution was recognised with the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak, the highest literary honour in Gujarati letters ^[1]. He also helped organise teacher training at Dakshinamurti and convened gatherings on primary education, spreading the new methods well beyond Bhavnagar through the journal Shikshan Patrika and through the Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh, an association for the new education that he helped establish ^[3].

Gijubhai married young, in keeping with the customs of his community. After the death of his first wife he married Jadiben, and it was the arrival of his son Narendra from this marriage that redirected his life toward education ^[2]. The household in Bhavnagar was, by all accounts, an extension of his school: children of neighbours and colleagues drifted in and out, and he tested his stories and songs on any small audience he could find.

His appearance became part of his legend. A heavyset man with a large moustache, he seemed an unlikely companion for toddlers, yet children adored him, and the affectionate title Moochhali Maa, meaning the mother with a moustache, attached itself to him permanently ^[1]. Colleagues remembered his patience with children and his impatience with adults who dismissed early childhood as unworthy of serious attention ^[3].

He worked closely for two decades with Nanabhai Bhatt and with the educator Harbhai Trivedi, and the three men made Dakshinamurti a national reference point for progressive schooling. Gijubhai's temperament was practical rather than political; although the nationalist movement swirled around Gujarat in these years, his energy went into classrooms, teacher camps, and the printing press ^[4].

Through the 1930s Gijubhai continued to write, train teachers, and campaign for what he called nutan shikshan, the new education. He travelled across Gujarat and beyond to speak at conferences on primary and pre-primary schooling, and his Montessari-inspired materials and songbooks circulated far outside Bhavnagar ^[3]. Divaswapna, appearing in 1932, distilled two decades of classroom experience into a form ordinary readers could enjoy, and it quickly found an audience among teachers frustrated with the official system ^[5].

The pace of work told on his health. In his final years he suffered from illness that steadily reduced his activity, though he continued to dictate and revise material for children almost to the end ^[2]. He left Dakshinamurti in 1936 after long service there and spent his remaining time consolidating his writing.

Gijubhai Badheka died on 23 June 1939 in Bombay (now Mumbai), aged 53 ^[1]. His death was mourned across Gujarat as the loss of a man who had, in barely twenty years, invented a public role that had not existed before: the champion of the small child.

Few basic Gijubhai Badheka facts are disputed: the founding of Bal Mandir in 1920, the flood of children's books, the Ranjitram medal, and Divaswapna's enduring life in teacher education. What has grown since his death is the recognition of how far ahead of his time he was. Ideas he pressed in the 1920s, learning through activity, the abolition of corporal punishment, respect for the child's own pace, entered mainstream Indian policy debates only decades later ^[5].

His books remain in print in Gujarati, and Divaswapna has been published in English by the National Book Trust with an introduction by Krishna Kumar, former director of India's National Council of Educational Research and Training, who urged that every teacher trainee read it ^[5]. Educational institutions in Gujarat carry his name, and the Dakshinamurti institutions in Bhavnagar continue to work in his tradition ^[3].

On 15 November 2016, Google marked his 131st birth anniversary with a doodle in India, introducing the mother with a moustache to a generation raised on screens rather than slates ^[6]. For historians of Indian education he occupies a place beside Tagore and Gandhi's basic education experiments: a provincial lawyer who decided that childhood deserved better, and then spent his life proving it could be done ^[4].