He earned a Bachelor's degree in Sanskrit, Hindi and Indian culture from Banaras Hindu University in 1957.

From 1974, he started working on his PhD thesis on Sachchidananda Vatsyayan 'Agyeya', a modernist Hindi writer, and completed it in 1977.

[4] Patel obtained a fellowship from the Visva-Bharati University where he did a comparative study of Indian literature.

Later he taught and headed the Hindi Department of the School of Languages at Gujarat University from 1969 until his retirement in 1994.

Patel served as a fellow of comparative literature at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan in 1983-84 and at the Institute of Humanities, Vidya Bhavan.

He was a polyglot who spoke Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, German, French, Marathi, Puria and Sanskrit fluently.

Patel was an expert on the works of the ancient poet Kalidas and the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

His other travelogues are Radhe Tara Dungariya Par (1987), Devoni Ghati (1989), Devatma Himalaya (1990) and Europe-Anubhav (2004).

[8] Other translations from Bengali include works by Rabindranath Tagore, such as Char Adhyay (1988), Jibanananda Das's poetry collection Vanlata Sen (1976), Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel Swargani Niche Manushya (1977), Buddhadeb Bosu's play Tapaswi ane Tarangini (1982).

He translated Hindi writer Shrikant Verma's Bijana Pag (1990) with Bindu Bhatt.

He also translated Syed Abdul Malik's novel as Soorajmukhina Swapna and Vasudev Sharan Agrawal's studies as Harshacharit: Ek Sanskritik Adhyayan.