દલપતરામ ડાહ્યાભાઈ ત્રવાડી

Dalpatram Dahyabhai Travadi was one of the founding figures of modern Gujarati literature, a Sanskrit-trained poet who chose to write for ordinary readers in plain, musical Gujarati rather than for a scholarly elite. Befriended and encouraged by the British administrator Alexander Kinloch Forbes, he helped establish the Gujarat Vernacular Society and edited the journal Buddhiprakash for nearly three decades, using both to campaign against child marriage, caste rigidity, and superstition. He wrote Laxmi Natak (1850), the first modern Gujarati play, and composed a treatise on Gujarati prosody that scholars relied on for generations. But he is best remembered for verse like ઊંટ કહે: આ સભામાં, where sharp comic instinct did the work of a reform pamphlet — teaching a lesson through laughter rather than argument. He was the father of poet Nanalal, who would take Gujarati verse in a very different, more Romantic direction a generation later.