Prisoner made craft out of envelopes

Indian symposium hears how prisoner Patel turned envelopes into a craft in 1930s

CONTRASTING the grandly funded Statue of Unity and the simple craft of envelope-making that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel undertook during a jail term while under British rule to save money, former West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi recalled the Mahatma’s Gujarati phrase “Vallabhbhai ni kala” to praise his co-prisoner’s skill.

Speaking at the opening panel of the international symposium, Creativity and Freedom, which was inaugurated at the India International Centre in Delhi, Indian on Tuesday, Gandhi cited the vast body of Indian prison literature, especially the widely read books written by the Mahatma, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhagat Singh when behind bars.

During a jail term from 1932 to 1933, Patel, on the other hand, busied himself with “not a phenomenally intellectual activity, but a craft activity”, making lifafas (envelopes). He focused diligently on the task using the material “thriftily and creatively”, the former civil servant said.

He recalled the letters his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, had sent to Devdas (the fourth and youngest son of the Mahatma) during the prison term. Many of the letters, preserved by Devdas, were sent in envelopes prepared by Vallabhbhai Patel.

In a letter dated May 11, 1932, the Mahatma had mentioned that the envelope containing the letter had been made by Patel. “We thus save money pai by pai,” he had written.

In another, Gandhi tells his son to observe the envelope for “Vallabhbhai ni kala” (Vallabhbhai’s artistry), and in yet another, lauded his determination and said they “may well set up a fairsized shop for envelopes” when they were free from jail.

But where did the paper envelopes come from?

“It was not bought. Remember they were saving ‘pai by pai’. They were for the made from incoming letters,” Gopal Gandhi said.

“One side of an incoming letter is blank, if one so wishes, that can be turned into an envelope. But not all letters with one blank page are turned into envelopes, only those, the contents of which, if read by another, will pose no problem. That is the uniqueness of this shop. Patel looked for incoming letters with an intentness in cat’s mind for a mouse,” he quoted from his grandfather’s writings.

“What the simple envelopes tell is that, the man for whom a 182m – the world’s tallest and perhaps, the costliest – statue has been built, made the smallest of the objects using one side of paper to save ‘pai by pai’,” Gandhi said.

The two-day symposium also opened with theatrist-film-maker Suman Mukhopadhyay’s account of encountering censorship in the performing arts, author Kunal Basu’s talk on orthodoxy hindering creativity, and journalist TN Ninan speaking on how creative ideas move business.