01Novels of Patan and Somnath
Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi was born at Bharuch and studied at Baroda College, where Sri Aurobindo was among his teachers. He built a large law practice in Bombay. In Gujarati he wrote the novels that gave his readers their own medieval history: the Patan trilogy (Patanni Prabhuta, Gujaratno Nath, Rajadhiraj) on the Chaulukya kings, Prithivivallabh, and Jay Somnath (1940) on Mahmud’s raid of 1026. In his last years he began the Krishnavatara series. In 1938 he founded the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Bombay to teach and publish Indian learning; its Bhavan’s Book University and the multi-volume History and Culture of the Indian People came out of it.
02Constitution, Somnath and Van Mahotsav
He was Home Minister of Bombay Province in 1937–39 and sat on the Drafting Committee of the Constitution. In 1948 he was India’s Agent-General in Hyderabad. When Sardar Patel pledged the rebuilding of Somnath in November 1947, Munshi took up the work and saw it through after Patel’s death; the jyotirlinga was installed on 11 May 1951, and his book Somnath: The Shrine Eternal appeared that year. As Union Minister for Food and Agriculture he started Van Mahotsav, the tree-planting week, in July 1950. He was Governor of Uttar Pradesh from 1952 to 1957, helped found the Swatantra Party in 1959, and in 1964 was among the founders of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. He died in Bombay on 8 February 1971.
