Santbal A Saint with a Difference

Author(s): T U Mehta
Publisher: Navjivan Prakashan Mandir

Page 60

"Thereafter in Samvat 1993 (1937 A.D.), I observed solitary silence. During the period it became clear how I should behave as a Jain monk from the viewpoint of revolution on echical basis."
Selection of Bhal-Nalkantha :
He was from the very beginning, greatly influenced by the Gandhian ideology and was convinced that no social revolution could be brought about in India without touching her villages. He, therefore, began to move in the villages round about Vaghjipura. By this time at the village Ghodasar one social worker named Dahyabhai happened to see him and invited him to move in the nearby area known as Nalkantha. This area is situated round about the coast line of a shallow water reservoir called NalSarovar, and people residing there were in stark poverty. Vaghjibhai was at that time surveying this area for the purpose of primary schools and wells and was conversant with social and economic condition of the people residing there. The population of the area consisted mainly of Koli Patels who were subsisting on agriculture, which was controlled by feudal order. There were no primary schools for children, no provisions for health or medicines, no roads, no postal services and above all, a permanent shortage of drinking water. Most of the people were indebted to usurious money-lenders and oppressed by feudal lords. Kidnapping of married women was very common. As a measure of retaliation, the husband of the kidnapped woman would set fire to heaps of grass lying in open and belonging to the suspected kidnapper or his relatives. Every year 50 to 100 such heaps were burnt. People used to steal or loot sheep and goat for their meat.
Dahyabhai thought that these backward conditions could be improved only by the moral influence of a saintly person. He, therefore, requested Santbalji to move in this area. He and some
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