Manilal Nabhubhai Dwivedi (; 26 September 1858 – 1 October 1898) was a Gujarati-language writer, philosopher, and social thinker from British India, commonly referred to as Manilal in literary circles. He was an influential figure in 19th-century Gujarati literature, and was one of several Gujarati writers and educators involved in the debate over social reforms, focusing on issues such as the status of women, child marriage, and the question of whether widows could remarry. He held Eastern civilisation in high esteem, and resisted the influence of Western civilisation, a position which drew him into conflicts with other social reformers of a less conservative outlook. He considered himself a "reformer along religious lines".
Manilal's writings belong to the Pandit Yuga, or "Scholar Era" – a time in which Gujarati writers explored their traditional literature, culture and religion in order to redefine contemporary Indian identity when it was subject to challenge from the influential Western model introduced under colonial rule. His works include Atmanimajjan, a collection of poems on the theme of love in the context of Advaita (non-duality) philosophy; Kanta, a play combining Sanskrit and English dramatic techniques; Nrusinhavatar, a play based on Sanskrit dramatic traditions; Pranavinimaya, a study of yoga and mysticism; and Siddhantasara, a historical critique of the world's religious philosophies. His faith in Shankara's Advaita philosophy provided the fundamental underpinning for his philosophical thought. He was invited to present a paper at the first Parliament of World Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, but financial considerations made his participation there impossible.
Manilal's beliefs led him to search for perfection and love in his friendships with men and women, though he was often disappointed by his experiences. He married at the age of thirteen and had two children, but his wife left him in 1890. He had multiple sexual relationships with women, and also visited brothels, where he contracted syphilis. He suffered from frequent bouts of serious illnesses throughout his life and died prematurely at 40. Narmad, the founder of modern Gujarati literature, considered Manilal his intellectual heir. Manilal elaborated upon Narmad's line of thinking through his writings in the monthlies Priyamvada and Sudarshan, which he edited from 1885 until his death.
Biography Manilal Nabhubhai Dwivedi was born on 26September 1858 at Nadiad, Gujarat, to a Sathodara Nagar family. His grandfather, Bhailal Dave, left eleven thousand rupees and a house to Manilal's father, Nabhubhai, who worked as a moneylender and sometimes as a temple priest. Nabhubhai had little education but desired that his son learn enough to work as a clerk, and therefore had him attend school from age four.
He showed good progress at secondary school; he was ranked first in the annual examination of the second standard and won a prize. His teacher promoted him to the fourth standard, but Manilal was unhappy with the promotion and requested to be returned to the third standard. He was not proficient in Sanskrit and geometry, and failed Sanskrit in his matriculation examination in 1875. However, he was ranked second in examinations at Bombay University the following year, winning the James Taylor Prize.
He joined Elphinstone College in 1877 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history and politics in 1880. Under pressure from his father to earn a wage, he left the college and completed his Master of Arts studies as an autodidact. He returned to Nadiad, and in July 1880, became an assistant teacher at the government high school. In 1881, he was transferred to Bombay as a deputy education inspector of girls' schools. He joined Samaldas College in Bhavnagar as a professor of Sanskrit in 1885 but retired in 1889 due to health problems. From November 1892 to July 1893, he stayed at Patan, Gujarat, preparing a catalogue of more than two thousand manuscripts from Jain libraries. This resulted in the establishment of the Baroda State Archaeology Department, which he headed from December 1893 to July 1895.
Manilal was a delegate from Nadiad to the Indian National Congress's Bombay convention in 1889. In 1890 he was elected as secretary of the Congress committee of Kheda district, and that year he was also hired by the Universities of both Bombay and Punjab to be a Sanskrit examiner for their BA and MA examinations. He retained both positions until 1892, and was chairman of the Nadiad Municipality school committee from 1891 to 1893.
Dhirubhai Thaker, a biographer of Manilal, noted that Manilal had an impressive personality and was tall and handsome in appearance. He habitually wore a long coat, a brahmin-style dhoti, a red turban and a long loose scarf hanging over his shoulders.
Personal life In 1871 or 1872 Manilal married Mahalaxmi; he was then thirteen years old and she was four. She gave birth to two sons, one in 1882 and the other in 1887; but the marriage was unhappy and she frequently returned to her parents' house, leaving Manilal permanently in 1890. Manilal was obsessed with the idea of a perfect loving relationship, and was demanding of his friends, expecting them to treat the friendship as more important than their other relationships. The resulting strain cost him several friendships. He was equally demanding of his women friends; in some cases the relationship included sex, though again he was often disappointed by the outcomes. While he was in Bombay, he fell in love with the wife of an acquaintance, and spent hours each day with her. He composed poetry for her, but gave up the relationship and left for Bhavnagar when he discovered he was not her only lover. Another affair was with Diwalibai, a teacher in a Bombay girls' school; Manilal initially rejected her but she persisted, sending him a series of love letters, and he finally wrote back, agreeing to a written correspondence. He refused to see her in person, however, and she died of tuberculosis in January 1886. Manilal's obituary for her in his magazine Priyamvada was unemotional, but his journal records his regret that he did not respond to her: "Fool that you were, you did not respond nor could you enjoy!". Diwalibai's letters were first published by Ambalal Purani in the November 1936 issue of Kaumudi, a Gujarati monthly. They were reproduced in Manilal's autobiography Atmavrittanta as an appendix.
In 1891, Manilal began an affair with Ramlakshmi, the wife of his pupil Chhotu, which lasted two-and-a-half years. He also had a brief affair with Chhotu's mistress, Ladi. In his autobiography, he admitted to having had sexual relationships with a close friend's wife, his wife's aunt, a woman seeking a job, a local woman, several prostitutes, servants, and the daughter of a close friend.
Long term health problems and death In his autobiography, Atmavrittanta, Manilal says that he visited brothels during his college years, and contracted syphilis as a result. As early as his first term there in 1877, he became aware he had genital chancres, but, unfamiliar with syphilis and its long-term effects, he failed to seek treatment as they healed on their own. Later, he suffered from a severe bout of rheumatism.
Four years later, he again began to suffer from penile ulcers, and by the following year, 1882, a rash of secondary syphilitic lesions erupted all over his body, with cysts forming on both his hands and feet. He put up with this painful condition for well over a year, and eventually gained a measure of relief. When the symptoms resurfaced in 1886, he consulted doctors who diagnosed him as suffering from tertiary syphilis. The advance of the disease caused an ulceration of his nostrils and sinuses, and further damage to his respiratory tract. Due to the corrosive effects of the infection on his tonsils and soft palate, he lost his ability to articulate and found it difficult to swallow food. He was treated over the following two years in Bombay and then Nadiad, and experienced a slight alleviation of his symptoms by 1888, after a successful operation for a plate implant. The operation enabled him to recover his speech and resume his job at Bhavnagar, though his painful nasal and throat ulcerations persisted and required follow-up treatment in Bombay. Manilal's confidence returned to the point that by January 1889, he felt sure a complete cure was possible, and indeed, by June, he experienced a notable improvement in both his general health and his speaking ability.
In September 1898, he developed jaundice and pleurisy. He died on the morning of 1October 1898 while writing at his home in Nadiad.
Philosophy and social reform Manilal was an adherent of Advaitism, a Hindu philosophical school that considers only Brahman to be ultimately real. He believed that the self and God are not different in any way, and he argued that the Bhagavad Gita teaches this point of view rather than being a philosophical precursor of Advaitism. He believed that withdrawal from the world, as a religious practice, was wrong, and that instead one should fulfil one's duties, and sacrifice oneself for love of the world. Without a dualism between the self and the world, self-sacrifice becomes its own reward, and there is no expectation of a worldly reward: instead the soul receives "the joy of self-realization" in discovering that it and the world are not different.
Manilal's beliefs were the basis of his ethics and of his approach to the social reform questions of the day. By the late nineteenth century, a social reform movement was well established in Bombay and Gujarat, including early Gujarati writers such as Narmad, Dalpatram, Karsandas Mulji, and Navalram Pandya. Many reformers – the "modernists" – wanted to abandon traditional customs and adopt Western practices, these were "outer reforms", in Thaker's words, directed at such things as equal rights for women and the elimination of caste restrictions. Manilal was associated with the orthodox reaction to this movement, known as revivalists, who believed in "reforms along national lines".
Manilal was often critical of old customs, but he argued that true reform should not begin with simply abandoning Indian culture; his message, in the words of K.M. Munshi, was "No surrender to the West". Despite his vehement opposition to much of the social reformers' agenda, he considered himself to be a reformer – "a reformer along religious lines", since he believed that reforming religious ideas would lead to appropriate social reform. For example, he agreed with those arguing against caste-restrictions on social behavior, but did not approve of achieving this goal by concealing or lying about someone's caste. He argued that although the caste system was harmful, abolishing it without changing the underlying social attitudes would fail, as social discrimination would continue in a different form.