Nadiad

01Patel and the Kheda satyagraha

Vallabhbhai Patel was born on 31 October 1875 at his mother’s family home in Nadiad; his father’s village was Karamsad, some twenty kilometres away. In 1918, when the crops of Kheda district failed and the government still demanded the full land revenue, Gandhiji called on the farmers to refuse payment, and Nadiad was the centre of the campaign. Patel, then a successful pleader at Ahmedabad, gave up his practice to tour the villages with Gandhiji; Kheda made him a leader of Gujarat’s peasants ten years before Bardoli made him Sardar.

02The town of letters

Govardhanram Tripathi, born in Nadiad in 1855, came home to Nadiad to finish Saraswatichandra, the great Gujarati novel of the old order meeting the new; the philosopher Manilal Nabhubhai Dwivedi was born here too, and a line of Gujarati poets after them. The town’s best-known shrine is the Santram Mandir, the samadhi of the saint Santram Maharaj, which draws devotees from across central Gujarat.

The life of this place