He has left us all with a great responsibility – to feel the crisis that is on hand and face it with all our best efforts
Kishore Bhai. Photo: Swaraj University, Udaipur Kishore Bhai passed away on the morning of August 15, 2022, at his home in Udaipur. He is survived by his wife Sudesh and two children, Tarun and Amita, son-in-law Roopen Arya and grandson Karan Arya.
He was 90 years old. He came to Udaipur at the behest of Mohan Sinha Mehta to head the Vidya Bhawan Rural Institute in 1972.
He then went on to be the chief executive of Seva Mandir, a voluntary organisation in Udaipur, for many years. He left Seva Mandir in 1983 to create a tribal-led institution called Ubeshwar Vikas Mandal.
Kishore Bhai was a nationally and internationally known Gandhian thinker and practitioner. He was friends with people like Aseem Shrivastav, a leading thinker in the field of planet conservation and Ashok Chatterji, a pioneer in the field of design and development communication.
He was a close member of the Lokayan / Centrefor the Study of Developing Societies group that consisted of public intellectuals like Rajni Kothari, DL Sheth, Ashis Nandy, Smitu Kothari and Vijay Pratap.
He brought Kamla Chowdary, head of the National Wasteland Development Board, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sundarlal Bahuguna and Anil Agarwal to visit Udaipur to support a people’s movement to afforest degraded lands.
He spent his life implementing Gandhian ideas, advocating for local self-governing institutions of tribals and local people. He was a patron of local culture and spiritual practices.
He deeply respected their ethical outlook to nature. He would host the performance of Gavri, a 40-day tribal dance ritual in praise of Shiva-Parvati, in Udaipur city to make urban people aware of the richness of tribal culture.
Despite many odds and disappointments in his life, Kishore Bhai never gave up his faith in the wisdom and integrity of local communities and Gandhian thought. He bore no bitterness towards those who had wronged him.
He was a man of great refinement and compassion. He wrote his memoirs towards the end of his life.
He was born in undivided India, in a village in West Punjab that is now in Pakistan, lived through the Partition almost losing his brother, grew up in Kenya, studied in England and taught at Friends World College, a Quaker college in New York City.
In 1972, he came to India to keep alive the traditions of constructive work and Gandhian thought. He was fluent in Urdu, Hindi, English and Punjabi.
He was deeply interested in Urdu and would often quote couplets according to occasion. In his last years, he taught countless students about Gandhian thought.
People gravitated towards Kishore ji for good reason. True to his name, he displayed a child-like curiosity towards life and this showed clearly in the way he always showed a genuine interest in every person he met.
He had an infinite capacity to give and share with everyone alike. Each person would know and feel that they were important to him and that he valued them.
He belongs in the league of Sarla Behn, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sundarlal Bahuguna as pioneers in protecting the environment and believing that grassroots work is the key to making our society decent, self-governing and democratic.
His legacy in Seva Mandir, of seeing development in ecological terms and self-governing communities, endures.
In the last few years, he increasingly turned his energies to the urgent problem of climate change at the global and local level, a theme that embodies his lifetime concerns regarding nature and communities.
Well into his old age, he engaged and challenged as many youth as he could to think with full attention and engage the world, to understand and act.
He was a person ahead of his time. A tragic hero in some ways. He has left us all with a great responsibility – to feel the crisis that is on hand and face it with all our best efforts.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth
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