(Patel in her Mumbai office/Brianna Sacks, Neon Tommy)

The rickety elevator shuttered to a stop on the fourth floor of the Women’s College in Mumbai, India. I barely pulled open the metal gate before I heard her rich voice filling the stark, rundown hallway.

Professor Vibhuti Patel is head of the University Department of Economics and a known social justice and human rights activist and researcher. She’s participated in many different Indian social movements since the 1960s, after witnessing violent communal riots and working in refugee camps.

“Workers’ movement, women’s movement, railway movement, trade union movement,” she ticks them off on her round fingers. “When the first anti-caste riots took place we were the first ones to march in the affected area back in ’78.”

Patel was also active in India’s first feminist network, and has since published papers, articles and studies on gender mainstreaming, the emergence of Women’s Studies in India, as well as the dismal socio-economic status of Muslims.

What’s most interesting, however, is how the fight for equality and the mistreatment of minorities and women in India has framed her own story.

She is a Hindu, born to a very influential “Patel clan” in Baroda. Her father, once a socialist, took a central government job and became a “Hindu right.” At 19, she joined a burgeoning liberal group of Indians working against the Vietnam War. That’s where she met her husband, a young Muslim man.

“Our relationship caused a lot of scandal because my family was well known and right wing and you can imagine what falling in love with a Muslim was like back then,” she explained.

What’s more, her husband’s family sneered at the match, calling her too highly educated.  Her three degrees trumped his one, and in the eyes of a lower-class Muslim family of traders, such education was seen as a waste.

To them, it would never work.

After her marriage, Patel remembers returning her father’s countless checks and pleas to let him buy her a flat until he accepted her husband “like any other son-in-law in the family.”

And they did, begrudgingly, when the couple gave birth to a daughter.

This is where I stopped her—after hearing how hard both families tried to convert Patel and her husband to either Hinduism or Islam, I asked:

“How did you raise your daughter?”

She nonchalantly replied—Christian.

“We made the conscious decision to put her with missionaries because I was working with liberation theologians at the time on gender issues,” she said.

Patel decided to name her daughter, now a human rights lawyer, Laura.

“So there was no fight between naming her a Hindu or Islamic name,” she laughed. “And it’s just easy to pronounce.”