sardar patel dissertation award

Yale MacMillan Center South Asian Studies

Sahana Ghosh wins 2019 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award

Sahana Ghosh GRD ‘18, a social anthropologist who examines borders, mobility, and militarization of borders and territory in South Asia, was announced on September 16th as the winner of the 2019 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Borderland orders: Gendered economies of mobility and security across the India-Bangladesh border.”

The Sardar Patel Dissertation Award was established in 1999 “to honor the best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India” by a doctoral student at a U.S. educational institution. The prestigious award honors Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister, and is awarded annually by the Center for India and South Asia (CISA) at UCLA. The award is accompanied by a cash prize endowed by the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association and is awarded at an in-person gala in Los Angeles. Yale, with three winners of the Prize (in 2019, 2016, and 2013), has the most of any institution.

In the announcement of the award, CISA emphasized the way in which “ Borderland orders shows how the life of regional geopolitics advances as nations are gendered and bodies on the move sexualized in particular expressions of threat and vulnerability within, at, and across their shared borders.” The dissertation was built on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in India and Bangladesh during which Ghosh studied border security, migrant flows, and the concept of “illegality” at the border.

Ghosh, who is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, told the SASC, “I’m so honored to receive the Sardar Patel Prize, which is really one-of-its kind in North America. Being a community-funded Award, the opportunity to speak to the South Asian diaspora about my research on cross-border mobilities, increasing militarization, and struggles over citizenship in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh is precious.

Ghosh’s forthcoming book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands , is forthcoming with the University of California Press. The book builds on her dissertation to chronicle “the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility.” Ghosh’s current research, she said, studies the “historical ethnography of soldiering in postcolonial India through a focus on the Indian Border Security Force. Approaching soldiering as a form of gendered labor is allowing me to trace the development of postcolonial security institutions as employers as well as explore what this kind of work means for families and communities of soldiers, often agrarian, in terms of the promises of citizenship.”

Ghosh received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and a certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale, an MPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, an MA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, and a BA in English Literature from Delhi University. Her dissertation advisers were Inderpal Grewal, Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and of American Studies, and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Dinakar Singh Professor of Anthropology.

Sardar Patel Assoc Awards Two Scholars, Honors Philanthropists Navin and Pratima Doshi

FSPA President Hark Vasa with award winners Ahona Panda and Sahana Ghosh and Anna Morcom, Director, UCLA Center for India and South Asia. 

India-West Staff Reporter

LOS ANGELES, CA – The Friends of Sardar Patel Association (FSPA), on October 1, held a glittering ceremony at the University of California, Los Angeles campus awarding two researchers the $10,000 annual prize.

Interrupted by the pandemic, the organization nevertheless, recognized Sahana Ghosh as the winner of the 2019 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for ‘Borderland orders: Gendered economies of mobility and security across the India-Bangladesh border,’ which she completed at Yale University in May 2018. She is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. 

The winner for 2020 was Ahona Panda for her dissertation entitled ‘Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955’, completed at the University of Chicago in August 2019.  She is now Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.

FSPA, at the event, also felicitated Navin and Pratima Doshi for their multi-million dollar donations to various educational institutions over the years.

As UCLA Sardar Patel Award endowment embarks on its 23rd year of existence, founding charter member and current President of FSPA Harkishan Vasa delved into its history. The endowment is unique, he said, in that FSPA is a private non-profit entity but the “active private right hand of the UCLA Sardar Patel Award endowment in assisting UCLA to ensure the continued success of the endowment.” The original intent of the award continues to draw the best minds to study India and its place and impact on the world.

Vasa also paid tribute and remembered the late FSPA supporters Anil Mehta, Uka Solanki, Shyamal Leonard, Prof Damodar SarDesai, Lalchand Gaglani and Naresh Patel.

The evening’s honorees, the Doshis, the 125 strong audience was informed, are also founding members and major donors of FSPA. A list of the plethora of donations they have made was announced which includes UCLA, Loyola Marymount University,and the Indian Institute of Technology, among others. Their most recent donation is a $5 million building to the Maharishi International University for the establishment of the Navin and Pratima Doshi Center for Integrative Medicine in West Los Angeles, CA.

A video on the life of the Doshis was presented along with a poem ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ written by Navin Doshi and performed and presented by musician Vijay Bhatt. Several members of the community spoke and lauded the contributions made by the Doshi family. Doshi graciously acknowledged everyone for their words and support over the years.  

The audience was treated to a vegetarian dinner and entertained with Kathak performances by Rina Mehta’s team from the Leela Academy of Arts.

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Sardar Patel Award 2019 Call for Submissions

The UCLA Center for India and South Asia announces the Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation submitted at any American university on the subject of modern India in 2019. The amount of the award is $10,000 (Ten Thousand Dollars).

1. The dissertation must be on any topic on Modern India (the dates of Modern India are defined as 1800 to the present).

2. The topic must fall within the following fields of study: History, Social Sciences, Humanities, Education or the Fine Arts.

3. Dissertations submitted for consideration will have been completed during the 2018-2019 academic year (1 September 2018 through 31 August 2019). In some cases dissertations completed very close to these dates may also be considered.

4. The dissertation must have been written while enrolled at a U.S. accredited university in history, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, or one of the other disciplines in the humanities, the arts, or the social sciences.

Applicants must submit a PDF of the completed and filed dissertation. In addition, please send the following as PDF files: ONE copy of an abstract of 500-1000 words, ONE copy of your curriculum vitae, and the attached form filled by their dissertation supervisor or department chair attesting to the completion of the dissertation during the period stipulated in item #3. All components of the application must be uploaded online to the application portal on https://www.international.ucla.edu/cisa/patel.&nbsp ;

The deadline for submission of materials is Friday January 31, 2020. All submissions, as well as any inquiries regarding competition guidelines, should be sent to: Sumita Mitra at mitra [at] international.ucla.edu (mitra[at]international[dot]ucla[dot]edu) . 

Note: By submitting their dissertation for consideration, candidates also agree to have their dissertation abstract posted on the CISA and Sardar Patel Association websites. The winner will be expected to attend an award conferral ceremony in Los Angeles on April 25, 2020 and is also expected to acknowledge the Sardar Patel Association in any publications related to the subject matter of the dissertation.

• Sardar Patel Award

CISA Announces 2009 Sardar Patel Award Winner

Congratulations to Dr. Gayatri A. Menon, recipient of the 2009 Sardar Patel Award, for the best dissertation submitted at any American university on the subject of modern India.

Among the most impoverished and politically marginalized populations of Mumbai, pavement dwellers have long been an element of the citys, and the nations, politics of belonging.

The Sardar Patel Award was instituted in 1999 and first conferred in 2000. This annual award of $10,000, endowed by the Los Angeles-based organization known as the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association, is administered by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia. Dissertations are evaluated for their insights into the nature of modern Indian society, the grasp demonstrated by the writer over the scholarly literature, and the clarity of exposition and argument. The dissertation must have been completed at an American university in history, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, or one of the other disciplines in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences.

The Sardar Patel Award for 2009 is being awarded to Gayatri A. Menon for her Cornell University dissertation titled Living Conditions: Citizens, 'Squatters,' and the Politics of Accommodation in Mumbai. 

Gayatri Menon is currently a Post Doctoral Associate at the department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. She received her PhD from the same department in 2009, as well as her Masters degree in 2001. Prior to graduate school she worked in India for several years on issues related to the livelihoods challenges facing the rural poor in Maharashtra, and on biodiversity and agricultural practices in Garhwal. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1992, having designed her own major in Development Studies.

The following is an abstract of the 2009 award-winning dissertation: Living Conditions: Citizens, 'Squatters,' and the Politics of Accommodation in Mumbai.

“This dissertation provides a historically informed examination of the conditions under which pavement dwellers in contemporary Mumbai are compelled to live in order to survive. Among the most impoverished and politically marginalized populations of Mumbai, pavement dwellers have long been an element of the city’s, and the nation’s, politics of belonging. Their precipitously located dwellings on the city’s pavements, and the frequent evictions that they are subjected to, are indicative of the material and political alienation of pavement dwellers from the body politic. Investigating how these violent conditions of life are produced and legitimized is the task to which this dissertation attends.

The investigation is advanced through a relational formulation of the term ‘living conditions,’ a conceptualization that brings into focus social relations that extend far beyond the sidewalk, in order to apprehend the material and political circumstances under which pavement dwellers are compelled to encroach on the sidewalks of Mumbai in order to live. Through a historicization of the living conditions of pavement dwellers, the ragged encampments that line the streets of Byculla (a locality in Mumbai) are tied to the broader politics of sovereignty in postcolonial India, i.e. the political configuration of land and life, which have rendered pavement dwellers as a population that has run out of place to live.

The methodological exegesis of the figure of the pavement dweller utilizes the analytical tools of historical sociology and political economy in order to pry open the nation-building project of development and reveal the exclusions through which the space and subject of sovereignty is defined, and the poor become Other. I argue that the suppression of the historical relationships that have produced populations as pavement dwellers has been a crucial element in the construction of the squatting figure of the pavement dweller as the predatory Other against whose encroachments ‘the citizen’ must be secured. Further, in order to understand how the urban poor came to squat on the sidewalks of the city in order to live, I find that it was essential to locate this national theater of violence and sovereign power within a broader, geopolitical framework. For, it is in the crisis of sovereignty that the newly independent Indian state faced as it struggled with chronic food deficits, and the consequent embrace of agricultural modernization, that the narrative of transforming rural populations into pavement dwellers - alienated from the land-must be located. The argument thus is that the historicized figure of the pavement dweller – and the challenges that the poor face in having their claim for bodily security recognized within the extant social order – provides a critical vantage point from which to trace the particular modernist organization of life and land that is invested in categories of citizenship and sovereignty.

Published: Friday, May 21, 2010

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Sarath Pillai is the winner of the 2022 Sardar Patel Award

Pillai won the award for a dissertation entitled "Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution and World in Late Colonial India," completed at the University of Chicago.

CISA is delighted to announce Sarath Pillai as the winner of the 2022 Sardar Patel Award (we are still catching up after covid, hence the double bill). His dissertation is ‘Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution, and World in Late Colonial India’ and was completed at University of Chicago. Please join us in congratulating him for this fantastic work! He will also present his work at the award ceremony at UCLA on 8 October.

Abstract: This dissertation is a fine-grained study of the debates for and against federation in late colonial India. The history of federation in India is often assumed to have begun after Indian independence, so much so that even as federation is the most contested political idea in India today, little is known or said about the colonial past of the Indian federation. The dissertation addresses this lacuna by showing the worlds of alternative political imaginations around federation articulated by characters less popular in historical narratives—like the Indian princely states, Muslim minorities, liberals, vernacular politicians, and intellectuals—and placing them in opposition to the Indian nationalists who stood for a strong, unitary nation-state. Instead of viewing late colonial India as the gradual but inevitable triumph of democracy, nationalism, and the nation-state, this dissertation argues that non-national groups (groups that disputed the idea of a unitary nation-state) like the Indian princely states and Muslim minorities imagined postcolonial India as a collection of sovereign states and nationalities in opposition to liberal conceptions of state and citizenship. Thus, the dissertation maps the rise and dominance of federal ideas—which privileged state’s rights and provincial autonomy as opposed to individual rights—and their eventual fall when the princes, minorities, and liberals were sidelined at the time of independence. The federal ideas and their advocates fell so low that the Indian Constitution didn’t even mention the word federation once. Marshaling multi-lingual archives from three continents collected over 18 months, the dissertation situates late colonial India in the global context of sentiments against the nation-state and parliamentary democracy and recovers the deeply contested realm of state and worldmaking in late colonial India.

Bio: Sarath Pillai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD with distinction from the History Department at the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, Harry Truman Library, and Princeton University Library. His writings have appeared in Law and History Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The Diplomat, Himal Southasian, and Scroll.in, among others. He holds a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School and an MA in History from Delhi University.

Published: Tuesday, September 5, 2023

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Sardar Patel Awards 2020 from the UCLA Center for India and South Asia, USA

Publish Date: Dec 09, 2019

Deadline: Jan 31, 2020

The UCLA Center for India and South Asia announces the Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation submitted at any American university on the subject of modern India in 2019. The amount of the award is $10,000 (Ten Thousand Dollars).

1. The dissertation must be on any topic on Modern India (the dates of Modern India are defined as 1800 to the present).

2. The topic must fall within the following fields of study: History, Social Sciences, Humanities, Education or the Fine Arts.

3. Dissertations submitted for consideration will have been completed during the 2018-2019 academic year (1 September 2018 through 31 August 2019). In some cases dissertations completed very close to these dates may also be considered.

4. The dissertation must have been written while enrolled at a U.S. accredited university in history, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, or one of the other disciplines in the humanities, the arts, or the social sciences.

Applicants must submit a PDF of the completed and filed dissertation. In addition, please send the following as PDF files: ONE copy of an abstract of 500-1000 words, ONE copy of your curriculum vitae, and the attached form filled by their dissertation supervisor or department chair attesting to the completion of the dissertation during the period stipulated in item #3. 

The deadline for submission of materials is Friday January 31, 2020. All submissions, as well as any inquiries regarding competition guidelines, should be sent to: Sumita Mitra at [email protected]. 

Note: By submitting their dissertation for consideration, candidates also agree to have their dissertation abstract posted on the CISA and Sardar Patel Association websites. The winner will be expected to attend an award conferral ceremony in Los Angeles on April 25, 2020 and is also expected to acknowledge the Sardar Patel Association in any publications related to the subject matter of the dissertation.

For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.

This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:

https://southasia.stanford.edu/news/sardar-patel-award-2019-call-submissions

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Vulgar Acts: Circus Performances and the Production of India's Circus Golden Age

Eléonore Rimbault

12:00 PM - 2:00 PM (Pacific Time) Bunche Hall 10383 and online

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

This talk interrogates the rift between nostalgic and flattering accounts of what the circus used to be and comments provided by circus professionals and audience members about the alleged vulgarity of the present-day show. Reflecting on the transmission, reproduction and transformation of circus performances between the 1920s and today, the talk discusses the affordances of an imagination in which the past of the circus is constituted as a golden age and the present as a moment of fading and loss. It also studies the implications of this disappearance for the current form of circus performance, whose liveliness and performative dimensions are interpreted as a “vulgar” or undignified afterimage. I contend that this tension contributes to the retrospective foregrounding of the egalitarianism, physical culture, and the cosmopolitanism associated with the circus in the past as grounds for nation-building in a bygone mid-20th century golden age. This talk thus offers reflections on the perennial disappearing of the circus and on historical accounts about the disappearance of aesthetic objects in South Asia more generally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Eléonore Rimbault is a sociocultural anthropologist working on labor, publicity, human-nonhuman relations, and memory in South India. Her research attends to the ethical questions raised by the categorization and marginalization of individuals and social groups, both human and nonhuman, and the aesthetic regimes through which social differentiation materializes in South Asia. Her current book project, The Thrill of Disappearance: Labor, Publicity, and Recollection in India’s Circus Industry , is a visual ethnography of the circus profession in India, which examines the enduring idea that the circus is disappearing in postcolonial India. Through ethnographic work with circus stakeholders, complemented by visual methodologies, she follows these transformations with an emphasis on the development of media technologies, animal rights, the social status of children, and labor conditions. In 2023, she received the Daniel F. Nugent Prize for best dissertation in historical anthropology at the University of Chicago for her dissertation, titled “ Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circus ”. Her ethnographic research has been funded by the American National Science Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies and the US Department of Education. Aside from her research, Eléonore contributes to the circulation of research and theory in the social sciences through her translation work between English and French. She is currently working on a translation of B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste into French which will be published in the coming year by the Indian publisher Other Books . Eléonore’s work has been featured in Public Culture , Asian Ethnology , and Anthropology Now , and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory .

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Georgetown India Initiative

Uday Chandra

Georgetown University in Qatar

Uday Chandra is an assistant professor of government in the School of Foreign Service. He is based at Georgetown University in Qatar.

International activities include:

• Recipient of the 2013 Sardar Patel Award for writing the best dissertation in a U.S. university on any aspect of modern South Asia.
• Held a prestigious research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany.
• Published articles in the Law & Society Review , Critical Sociology , Social Movement Studies , New Political Science , Journal of Contemporary Asia , Contemporary South Asia , and the Indian Economic & Social History Review.

Learn More About Uday Chandra

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Ahona Panda receives the 2020 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award

Sharing tools, upcoming events, responding to geopolitical threats: the eu expands its role, careers in a globalizing world: an international career panel, cultural resistance on robben island, making sense of consensus: social desirability bias and hawkish attitudes among u.s. foreign policy elites, recent news, ucla joins multilateral association of university leaders, committed to serving the underserved, q&a: cindy fan on the importance of global studies and perspectives, austrian archives for exile studies: preserving literary and cultural history.

CISA is delighted to announce Ahona Panda as the winner of the 2020 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for a dissertation entitled ‘Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955’, completed at the University of Chicago in August 2019. This prestigious prize is awarded in an in-person celebratory event with the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association who are the benefactors of this dissertation prize. 

Ahona Panda is Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. She received her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2019, and a BA and MA in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research and teaching interests span modern South Asia and decolonization; the British empire; religious and linguistic nationalism; caste and race; print and book history; the history of political movements and the organised left; gender and sexuality studies; and critical theory. She is currently working on a book manuscript Bengal Undivided: Language and the Limits of Nationalism in Modern South Asia , in which she aims to provide a new account of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in South Asia through a renewed attention to the politics of language. Traditional accounts of this relationship frame it in terms of enmity and competing religious nationalisms culminating in the Partition of 1947. By focusing on Bengali as a shared language on which a shared sense of community could be forged, she uncovers a hidden history of friendship and collaboration that helped to generate new possibilities across three nation-states (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) over the course of the twentieth century.

Dissertation abstract: Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955 begins and ends with two academies of language; the first is the Bengal Academy of Literature or the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad established in colonial Calcutta in 1893 and the second, the Bangla Academy established in Dhaka in 1955. Between these two academies, this dissertation explores the role of philology—the structures of linguistic and literary understanding of the world—in the unfolding of the political relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal in this period of political history that witnessed a number of major events and ruptures. It examines how Hindu Bengali scholars and patrons dominated the modernization of the Bengali language and the canonization and archiving of Bengali literature at the turn of the century. Thereafter, in the first few decades of the 20th century, the agenda of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad came to be gradually resisted by a number of literary societies and publishing houses established by Bengali Muslims who felt excluded from the cultural sphere of Calcutta. The 1920s and 30s thus witnessed both the restoration of the pre-modern archives of Bengali Muslims and the birth of increasingly more politicized literary periodicals addressed to new Bengali Muslim reading publics. The language question was reinvented in the 1940s with the Pakistan movement, and ultimately found fruition in the language movement of 1948 and 1952 in East Pakistan. By studying a diverse range of literary and linguistic archives belonging to publishing houses, literary societies, legislative assemblies, small press periodicals, private papers, organized political parties, and music and radio archives, the dissertation argues that language politics operated parallel to the normative politics of nation-state making in twentieth-century South Asia. This project thus aims to displace the centrality of Partition in the modern history of Bengal/South Asia. First, by foregrounding a community of language, it establishes a history of friendship and intimacy between Hindus and Muslims that extends beyond 1947. Second, it argues for a form of linguistic identity that transcends the political limits of the modern nation-state.

Published: Monday, September 19, 2022

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Know Your City: In Ahmedabad, this house is a rare memorial to Sardar Patel’s daughter Maniben Patel

Now known as sardar vallabhbhai patel smarak bhavan, the family of sardar patel lived in the house in the bhadra area of ahmedabad from 1913..

Written by Aachal Vayeda 

A double-storey structure opposite the old Congress Bhavan in the Bhadra area of Ahmedabad ’s walled city is the house where Maniben Patel, the daughter of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, lived.

The Patel family lived at the house, now known as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Smarak Bhavan, from 1913, when Sardar Patel, the country’s first deputy prime minister and home minister, began to practice in the Ahmedabad courts as a barrister. April 3 marks the 121st birth anniversary of Maniben Patel, and this house is a rare memorial to her.

The white walls of Maniben’s house, which is now managed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Trust, are filled with family photographs, an informative timeline of Sardar’s life on the ground floor, and the room on the first floor where Maniben would write in her diary.

“Sardar’s daughter Maniben has done us a great favour by writing her diary regularly from 1936 to 1950. Rarely has a strong father found such a hardworking daughter and yes, rarely has a hardworking daughter found such a great father. In many books, we get an introduction to ‘who’ Sardar was. But Manibehan’s diary is to give us a glimpse of ‘what’ Sardar was,” writes Gunvant Shah in his book Sardar etle Sardar (Sardar was Sardar).

‘Checkpoint’

Sukhdev Dave, 85, who served the late Maniben as her personal assistant in the last 10 years of her life, told The Indian Express that she was “the finest example of work and life balance”. “She used to be a checkpoint of their home for whoever wanted to meet her father for political purposes. After 7 pm, she would not allow anybody to enter their home to meet Sardar,” said Dave.

Born in Karamsad, Maniben studied in a convent school. After her father came in contact with Mahatma Gandhi as a barrister, Maniben enrolled in the Gujarat Vidyapith. “She was transferred from Ahmedabad Girls Science School into Gujarat Vidyapith by her father. I found out during my research on Sardar Patel,” Dr Rizwan Kadri, the Ahmedabad-based historian and author of Sardar Patel: Ek Sinhpurush, told The Indian Express.

Mentored by Gandhi and Kakasaheb Kalelakar, who used to teach at Gujarat Vidyapith, she graduated in 1925. It is said Maniben announced her desire to be her father’s secretary at the Congress Bhavan, a job she took charge of, in 1928. She is said to have imbibed much of her father’s genes — integrity, speaking her mind, and an iron-like personality.

She was arrested in Ahmedabad on November 8, 1932, for 15 months for participating in Salt Satyagraha, her father’s letters show. On March 16, 1934, when Sardar was in Central Prison at Nasik, he only communicated to Maniben through a letter about the mental condition of Govardhanlal, a freedom fighter who was admitted to Sarabhai Hospital, Ahmedabad, after being jailed.

‘Grassroots leader’

In 1940, Maniben participated in the Satyagraha for freedom of speech and anti-war in Ahmedabad along with her father. Dr Shirin Mehta, a 90-year-old historian, interviewed Maniben Patel at Navjivan Press, Ahmedabad in 1983, while she was pursuing her PhD on her role in the Bardoli, Kheda, and Borsad Satyagrahas.

Dr Mehta said Maniben would then go on to edit Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s letters, which were published by Navjivan Press, Ahmedabad, in five volumes. “She was made the editor of Navjivan Press because Morarji Desai wanted her to earn money for publicising her father’s letters. After Sardar’s death, late Maniben had close ties with Moraraji Desai,” Dr Mehta added.

In 1951, she became a trustee of Navjivan Trust, Kasturba Gandhi Smarak Trust, and Mahadev Desai Smarak Trust. In 1953, she also became Sardar Patel Smarak’s trustee.

In his autobiography, Indulal Yagnik, who led the Mahagujarat Movement for the creation of a state of Gujarat for Gujarati-speaking people in the then Bombay State, describes Maniben “as a grassroots leader of the Mahagujarat Movement”.

“She was actively involved in advocating for the formation of Gujarat as a separate state. Her leadership and efforts contributed to the eventual realisation of demand when Gujarat was formed on May 1, 1960, after the bifurcation of Bombay State. During the MahaGujarat movement and Navnirman Andolan, meetings were conducted daily by Maniben at Congress Bhavan at 4 pm. In 1970, she was a significant figure in the Navnirman Andolan. The movement primarily took place in Ahmedabad where Maniben addressed issues of unemployment and inflation to the government,” Dr Shirin Mehta told The Indian Express.

“In Bombay State, poor people had to travel to Surat to meet the mayor. Maniben was against it. When the Gujarat and Maharashtra partition was about to happen on May 1, 1960, at that time, Maniben’s stance was very clear that poor people from remote areas would not go to the Surat mayor for their issues from now onwards. She said ‘What is happening is happening for the betterment of the Gujarati people’,” her former personal assistant Dave told The Indian Express.

Maniben Patel served as the Lok Sabha member for 4 terms (1952-56, 1958-62, 1973-75, 1977). In 1964, she was elected as a Rajya Sabha member.

She died on March 26, 1990, at the house opposite Congress Bhavan, Ahmedabad.

(Aachal Vayeda is an intern with The Indian Express)

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Environmental Factor

Your online source for niehs news, fellows challenged to enhance science communication skills.

Three NIEHS fellows win awards for effectively communicating environmental health research to a general audience in just three minutes.

By Caroline Stetler

The NIEHS Office of Fellows’ Career Development (OFCD) hosted its annual Three-Minute Communication Challenge March 15 with a dozen predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees across the institute vying for top honors. Participants honed their communication skills in advance of the competition, which is designed to help trainees close the knowledge gap between the scientific community and the general public.

“Communicating science to a broad audience is an absolutely essential skill to have, so we are excited to continue this challenge,” said Mercy Arana, Ph.D., who leads OFDC.

Fellows were challenged to explain in three minutes what their research entails, the broader impact of that research on science and society, and what they have personally gained from their experiences at NIEHS.

The top three presenters — Yu-Ying Chen, Ph.D., of the Reproductive & Developmental Biology Laboratory , Ginna Doss, of the Epidemiology Branch , and Uchechukwu Chimeh, of the Biostatistics & Computational Biology Branch — each won professional development awards of $1,500.

All fellows who participated in the event, their respective research branch or lab, and talk topics follow.

• Joseph Breeyear , Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, discussed research to prevent diabetes-related blindness.
• Yu-Ying Chen, Ph.D. , Reproductive and Developmental Biology Laboratory, explained her use of single-cell RNA sequencing to identify different cell types within ovaries.
• Uchechukwu Chimeh , Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, explained work to uncover gene-by-environment interactions among North Carolinians.
• Luiz Paulo de Aguiar Marciano , Division of Translational Toxicology (NICEATM), provided an overview of a risk assessment study capturing pesticide use in Brazil.
• Ginna Doss , Epidemiology Branch, explained her goal to develop new tools for public health researchers to correctly identify preterm birth.
• Martin Estermann, Ph.D. , Reproductive and Developmental Biology Laboratory, discussed the role of cell nutrients and metabolism in determining sex.
• Erin McNell , Epidemiology Branch, shared her dissertation research focused on prenatal exposure to phthalates, which are endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics.
• Masahiro Nishimura, Ph.D. , Epigenetics and Stem Cell Biology Laboratory, explained research to understand how cells are reorganized in response to environmental stimuli.
• Opal Patel , Epidemiology Branch, discussed research to understand health outcomes associated with exposure to chemicals following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
• Siddharth Rawat, Ph.D. , Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, shared research to understand how climate change and temperature affect risk of preterm birth.
• Preston Siegler , Neurobiology Laboratory, discussed her project to understand how stress during prenatal development affects the brain and related social behaviors.
• Puja Sohal, Ph.D. , Immunity, Inflammation & Disease Laboratory, shared research to uncover that a gene called GLIS3 regulates inflammation and scarring in kidney disease.

The Postbac Communication Challenge will be held April 10 at 2 p.m. For more information, about career development opportunities offered by OFCD, visit Fellows' Career Development .

(Caroline Stetler is Editor-in-Chief of the Environmental Factor, produced monthly by the NIEHS Office of Communications and Public Liaison.)

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