Manilal Nabhubhai Dwivedi (pronounced [məɲilal nəbʰubʰai dvivedi] ^ⓘ; 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".^[1]

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.

Manilal Nabhubhai Dwivedi was born on 26 September 1858 at Nadiad, Gujarat, to a Sathodara^{[upper-alpha 1]} 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.^[2]

He showed good progress at secondary school; he was ranked first in the annual examination of the second standard^{[upper-alpha 2]} 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.^{[3][upper-alpha 3]}

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.^[4][5] 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.^[4][6]

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 an 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.^[7]

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.^[8]

Manilal was an adherent of Advaitism,^[19] a Hindu philosophical school that considers only Brahman to be ultimately real.^[20][21] 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.^{[upper-alpha 5]} 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.^[19]

Manilal's beliefs were the basis of his ethics and of his approach to the social reform questions of the day.^[22][23] 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.^[24][25] 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.^[26] Manilal was associated with the orthodox reaction to this movement, known as revivalists, who believed in "reforms along national lines".^[25]

Manilal was often critical of old customs, but he argued that true reform should not begin with simply abandoning Indian culture;^[26] his message, in the words of K.M. Munshi, was "No surrender to the West".^[1] 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.^[26][1] 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.^[26] 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.^[27]

The difference between Manilal's approach and that of the modernists was apparent in the controversy over marriage customs in the 1880s.^[28] In 1885, Manilal published his essay Nari Pratishtha. In this essay, he opposed widow-marriage,^[29] which was traditionally forbidden even if the prospective husband died after betrothal but before the wedding,^[30] and argued that a woman who understood her moral duties would not wish to remarry should she become a widow.^[29][29] The reformer Behramji Malabari was attempting to move the government to legally establish an age of consent for women, and to legislate in favour of widow-remarriage.^[31][32][28] Manilal believed that marriage between Hindus was a religious, rather than worldly act,^[33] and hence the government had no standing to determine what was right.^[34] He and Malabari entered into a public disagreement on the issue which continued for six months in the pages of Advocate of India and The Indian Spectator. Malabari tried to persuade Manilal to give up his opposition to this; Manilal refused.^[31] A meeting of orthodox Hindus in the Madhav Baug^{[upper-alpha 6]} which discussed some of these issues concluded that the help of the Government was not welcome with regard to marriage customs; an attempt to amend this statement to acknowledge that some changes to marriage customs were necessary, though the government should not be involved, was unable to gain support. Manilal defended the Madhav Baug meeting, arguing that it would be wrong for the government to enforce changes.^[35] Instead, Manilal found support for changes in the rules of widow-marriage in his reading of scriptures: by a controversial interpretation of a sentence from the Parasharasmriti, a work on legal code and conduct, he asserted that a betrothed woman who has not yet married can marry another man if her intended husband dies.^[30]

In Manilal's view, child-marriage was harmful but it was rare for the woman in such a marriage to actually go to her husband's household before puberty, and he felt that the reformers were exaggerating the problem in order to gain support.^[28] It was during the controversy over the Madhav Baug meeting that the case of Rukmabai became public. Rukmabai had been married at thirteen years of age, but had refused to live with her husband for nine years. Her husband filed suit to force her to live with him, and the Bombay High Court found in his favour; Manilal wrote articles attacking the reformist position, which further estranged him from the modernists.^[36]

Reformers such as Ramanbhai Neelkanth spoke out against Manilal's conservatism.^[37] Manilal criticised the Prarthana Samaj^{[upper-alpha 7]} for importing the concept of God as a transcendental creator from Christianity, which, according to him, was "the fifth edition of Aryadharma (Indian religion)". On behalf of the Prarthana Samaj, Neelkanth entered into a seven-year dispute with Manilal on numerous topics related to religion, philosophy, social reform, education and literature. Their public debates, carried on in the pages of Manilal's Sudarashan and Neelkanth's Jnanasudha, are considered unparalleled in Gujarat's history of reflective literature.^[38][39]

Overall, Manilal was critical of both the modernists' approach and of cultural orthodoxy in isolation; he argued that "there is no antagonism between the Old and the New. Both are essential qualities – inherent in everyone. The world cannot go on if the two were not blended together".^[32] His unwillingness to support legislative reforms that did not address the underlying cultural and religious beliefs led him to be labelled as a conservative, despite his belief that the caste system, traditional marriage customs, and the inequality of men and women in Indian society were problems that needed to be resolved.^[40]

Manilal's writings belong to the Pandit Yuga – an era in which Gujarati writers explored the traditional literature, culture and religion to redefine contemporary Indian identity when it was challenged by the Western culture brought by the colonial rule.^[43] His writing career began in 1876 with the poem Shiksha Shatak and continued until his death.^[44] He contributed to almost all popular forms and published poems, plays, essays, an adaptation of an English novel, book reviews, literary criticism, research, edited works, translations, and compilations. His autobiography was not published until 1979. His prose writings have been collected in Sudarshan Gadyawali (1909). He was an exponent of Advaita philosophy; throughout his life, he interpreted all aspects of human life and civilisation in the context of Advaita Vedanta,^[4] writing several articles and books on the topic.^[45]

Manilal, along with his fellow Gujarati writer Govardhanram Tripathi, significantly contributed to Gujarati literature. The period of their activity (1885–1905) is recognised as the Mani-Govardhan Era rather than by a general terms such as Sakshar Yuga or Pandit Yuga.^[70] Anandshankar Dhruv publicly described Manilal as a Brahmanishtha (one who always keeps his mind fixed on the Supreme Brahman, the ultimate reality).^[69] Thaker wrote a biographical play, Uncho Parvat, Undi Khin (1993; 'Lofty Mountain, Cavernous Valley'), based on Manilal's life.^[71]

Manilal occupies a distinctive place in Gujarati literature. Throughout his life, he struggled at both a personal and public level to live up to the practical principles he elicited from his reading of the Advaita Vedanta tradition. His vision combined an ardent advocacy of Aryan philosophy with a Hindu worldview. He endeavoured to publicise his opinions to counteract what he saw as the blind enthusiasm of his fellow Indians for Western culture. Manilal thought that the non-dualistic philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, despite its complexity, contained important values which could inspire people to lead practical lives while remaining faithful to its ideals.^[72]

Mahatma Gandhi, during his first stint in gaol in South Africa in January 1908, read widely in the literature of Western writers such as Tolstoy, Thoreau and Emerson to enlarge his vision and, "among the masters of Indian philosophy", he turned to Manilal's book on Raja Yoga and his commentary on Bhagavad Gita.^[73]