Akru is a small village in the Dhandhuka region of Gujarat, on the dry, flat country that runs down towards the Bhal and the Gulf of Khambhat. Joravarsinh Jadav was born there on 10 January 1940, and the folk songs, ballads, seasonal dances and oral genealogies he grew up hearing became the subject of a working life that lasted more than sixty years. By the time he died he had written or edited something in the order of a hundred and ten books, almost all of them about a culture that nobody else was systematically writing down.

Village School to Gujarat Vidyapith

He began at the village school in Akru and continued at Sheth Hasanali High School in Dholka. In 1956 and 1957 he studied at Gujarat Vidyapith, the institution founded by Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad, an experience that shaped both his politics and his sense of what scholarship was for. He took a bachelor's degree in Gujarati language and history at St Xavier's College, Ahmedabad, in 1961, and followed it with a master's in ancient Indian culture at the B. J. Institute of Learning and Research in 1963.

He began publishing articles in 1958, while still a student, in journals and newspapers including Buddhiprakash, Sandesh and Gujarat Samachar. He never really stopped; the column and the field note were his natural forms, and much of his book-length work grew out of decades of accumulated periodical writing.

A Working Life in Two Halves

Jadav's employment history reads like that of a man who took whatever job would leave him time to do the real work. He taught Gujarati at Panchsheel High School in Saraspur, Ahmedabad, and lectured part-time at St Xavier's College. In 1964 he joined the weekly Sahkar as publication officer, and much later, between 1994 and 1998, served as its chief executive. He also edited the monthlies Gramswaraj and Jinmangal.

The other half of his life was fieldwork. He travelled the districts of Gujarat and Saurashtra recording what he found: the songs of particular castes and occupations, the ras and garba traditions of specific regions, the ballads of local heroes, the vocabularies of pastoralists and artisans, the folklore attached to animals, wells, festivals and marriage rites. He was interested in the whole texture of rural life rather than in a curated selection of it, which is why his bibliography includes titles on the pearls of folk life, on animals in folk culture, and on the traditional craftsmen of Gujarat.

The Gujarat Lok Kala Foundation

In 1978 he founded the Gujarat Lok Kala Foundation, an organisation devoted to documenting, teaching and staging the state's folk arts. Its importance lay in institutionalising something that had until then depended entirely on individual enthusiasm. The foundation trained performers, organised festivals, published material and gave folk artists from villages a route to audiences and to a modest livelihood at a time when their traditional patronage networks were collapsing.

This was the practical core of his argument. He did not treat folk culture as a museum object. He argued that a tradition survives only if the people who carry it can eat, and much of his organisational work was aimed at that unglamorous problem. He also served as vice-chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the national academy for music, dance and drama, which extended his reach beyond Gujarat.

Recognition

His awards accumulated steadily over four decades. In 1978 he received the Meghani Suvarna Chandrak, named for Jhaverchand Meghani, the great earlier collector of Saurashtra's folk literature, for his book Lokjivanna Moti. The Gujarat Sahitya Akademi honoured his work on animals in folk culture, Loksanskritima Pashuo. The NCERT gave first prize to the opening volume of his study of Gujarat's traditional craftsmen, Aapna Kasabio, and the Gujarat government awarded another of his titles. In 2019 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him for his contribution to art.

His personal life carried its share of grief. He married Sajjankunwar in 1963; she died in an accident in 1968, leaving him with two daughters. He married Hemkunwar in 1969, and they had two daughters and a son.

He is often placed alongside Jhaverchand Meghani and Dulerai Karani in the line of Gujarati folk scholarship, and he accepted the comparison as an obligation rather than a compliment. Where Meghani had worked chiefly in Saurashtra and chiefly with ballads, Jadav extended the enterprise across the whole state and across the whole range of expressive life, including material that earlier collectors had regarded as too ordinary to record: work songs, children's rhymes, wedding abuse-songs, the professional vocabularies of potters and blacksmiths, and the folklore attached to livestock. He also insisted on recording the names of the people he collected from, treating village singers as sources with authority rather than as anonymous informants.

Joravarsinh Jadav died in Ahmedabad on 7 November 2025, at the age of eighty-five. The scale of what he left behind is easy to state and hard to grasp: a written record of an oral culture, assembled over sixty years by one man travelling between villages with a notebook, at precisely the moment when the last generation who held that culture in memory was passing. Much of what he wrote down would otherwise simply have gone.