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The British woman who fought for India’s freedom
Freda Bedi lived an unusual life. Born in a small town in England, she moved to India for love and ended up joining the independence movement. Her biographer, Andrew Whitehead, writes about her remarkable story.
"There are things deeper than labels and colour and prejudice, and love is one of them."
These were the words of Freda Bedi, an English woman who overcame prejudice to marry an Indian Sikh and went on to challenge Indian notions about the role of a woman and a wife.
Freda and her boyfriend, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi (his friends called him BPL), met at Oxford where both were students.
This was the early 1930s and romances across the racial divide were rare - almost as rare as a girl from Freda’s background securing a spot at a top university. She was born, quite literally, above the shop in the city of Derby in England’s East Midlands, where her father ran a jewellery and watch repair business.
Freda could barely remember her father. He enlisted during the First World War and served in the Machine Gun Corps, where casualties were so high it was known as the "suicide club". He died in northern France when his daughter was just seven years old. "This death shadowed my whole childhood," she recalled - it shaped her political loyalties and prompted her lifelong spiritual quest.
Her years at Oxford were "the opening of the gates of the world", as Freda once put it. She was part of "the Depression generation" - those who were students at a time of global crisis, mass unemployment and the rise of fascism.
She made firm friends at her college with young women who were rebellious by nature, and went with them to meetings of the Labour Club and the communist October Club.
image caption: Freda and BPL met as students at Oxford University
The engagement photo of Freda and BPL taken at Oxford in 1933
Driven by curiosity and by sympathy with those struggling against the Empire, she also went along to the weekly meetings of the Oxford Majlis, where radicals among the university’s small number of Indian students asserted their country’s case for nationhood. BPL Bedi, a handsome and cheerful Punjabi, was a regular there. A friendship developed into intellectual collaboration and, within months, Freda and BPL were a couple.
In the early 1930s, women’s colleges at Oxford were obsessed with sex or rather with preventing it. If a male student came to have tea in a female student’s room, a chaperone had to be present, the door left wide open and the bed had to be taken into the corridor. Freda’s college did its best to derail her relationship - she was disciplined for visiting BPL without a chaperone in what she was convinced was a case of racial discrimination.
But she was fortunate in her student friends. Barbara Castle, who later became a commanding British woman politician of her era, was thrilled when Freda confided that she intended to marry her boyfriend. "Well, thank goodness", Barbara exclaimed. "Now at least you won’t become a suburban housewife!" Freda’s mother didn’t see things that way though. Her family were sternly disapproving, until BPL made a visit to Derby and managed to charm them.
Freda commented that the engagement caused "a minor sensation" in Oxford. That was an understatement. She believed she was the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student. Some didn’t hide their disapproval. The registrar who conducted the marriage ceremony pointedly refused to shake hands with the couple.
From the moment she married, Freda regarded herself as Indian and often wore Indian-style clothes. A year later, husband and wife and their four-month old baby, Ranga, set off by boat from Trieste, Italy, on the two-week journey to the western Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). "The nightmare was to get milk for myself to drink because I was feeding the baby", Freda recalled. "And I remember the millions of cockroaches that used to come out at night in the ship’s kitchens - I used to go in and attempt to get milk."
The couple had already been marked out by the British authorities as revolutionaries and potential trouble makers because of their student activism. When they disembarked in Bombay, their bags and cases were inspected for seven hours to check for left-wing propaganda. "Even Ranga’s little napkin was taken off and searched," recalled Freda, "because they thought I might be carrying messages in it".
The key test of Freda’s marriage was still to come - the first meeting with her Indian mother-in-law, a widow and matriarch known in the family as Bhabooji. From Bombay, the Bedis travelled non-stop for a couple of days to reach the small Punjabi city of Kapurthala, arriving at the family home close to midnight. Freda was wearing a white cotton sari - "not the ideal travelling dress, and nursing Ranga had not improved it".
BPL bowed to touch his mother’s feet in the traditional expression of respect. "I copied him, feeling a little awkward," Freda said, "but all my shyness disappeared when she smiled at us both with tears in her eyes, and embraced us and the child as if she could not hold us close enough."
Although Freda was determined to fit in with her Indian extended family, her lifestyle was anything but conventional. BPL’s political stand extended to rejecting any share in his family’s wealth. They made their home in Lahore, one of the largest cities in Punjab, in a cluster of thatched huts without power or running water, keeping hens and a buffalo. It can’t have been the sort of life Freda had expected - nor would she have been used to the idea of sharing the household with her mother-in-law.
"Nowhere had I seen a white woman trying to be a typical Indian daughter-in-law", commented Som Anand, a frequent visitor to the Bedis’ huts. "It surprised me to see Mrs Bedi coming to Bhabooji’s hut in the morning to touch her feet. In household matters she respected the old mother’s inhibitions. Her mother-in-law was an equally large hearted person; despite all her conservatism she had accepted a Christian into the family without a murmur."
image captionFreda and BPL moved to Kashmir after 1947 and remained politically active
Freda with a rifle when she was living in Kashmir, probably 1948 - she is holding her son, Kabir, while her older son, Ranga, is sitting on the family’s pet dog.
When World War Two broke out, both BPL and Freda were outraged that India was being dragged into supporting the British war effort. BPL was detained in a desert prison camp to stop him sabotaging military recruitment in Punjab. Freda decided to make her own stand against her motherland.
She volunteered as a satyagrahi, a seeker of truth, and was among those chosen by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to defy emergency wartime powers. She travelled to her husband’s home village of Dera Baba Nanak and announced that she would "break the law by asking the people not to support the military effort until India became democratic". The authorities didn’t know how to respond to a white woman staging such a protest - they hurriedly sent an English police inspector to the village, deeming it inappropriate for an Indian policeman to arrest an Englishwoman.
Freda was brought before a visiting magistrate that same morning - she has left her own account of the trial:
It was finished in 15 minutes. The man on the other side of the table was quite young still, and looked as though he had been to Oxford. His face was red.
"I find this as unpleasant as you do," he murmured.
"Don’t worry. I don’t find it unpleasant at all."
"Do you want the privileges granted to an Englishwoman?"
"Treat me as an Indian woman and I shall be quite content."
She was sentenced to six months in jail, which was fairly standard, and also to hard labour, which she regarded as vindictive.
That turned out to be no more onerous than supervising the prison gardens, where women imprisoned for criminal rather than political offences - many were locked up for killing their abusive husbands - did most of the work.
"It was my destiny to go to India," Freda asserted. It was her destiny too to make history as an English woman who went willingly to jail in support of India’s demand for freedom.
The Bedis’ political prominence persisted after independence, when they moved to Kashmir - Freda joined a left-wing women’s militia and worked with the radical nationalists who gained power there. In the 1950s, her life changed utterly when, during a UN assignment in Burma, she encountered Buddhism for the first time and became an enthusiastic convert.
Freda became a Buddhist nun in the 1950s
Freda as a nun, when she took the name Sister Palmo
When thousands of Tibetans fled across the Himalayas in 1959 to escape Chinese oppression, Freda devoted herself to helping these "brave and wonderful" refugees. She became steeped in Tibetan spirituality. And once she felt that she had fulfilled her role as a mother (the film star Kabir Bedi is one of her three surviving children), she broke convention again by taking vows as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. In her sixties, she travelled relentlessly to spread the word about Buddhist teachings but never returned to live in the West.
"India is my womanhood and my wife-hood," she once declared. "I too am ’dust that England bore, shaped and made aware’. Yet I am living in an Indian way, with Indian clothes, with an Indian husband and child on Indian soil, and I cannot feel even the least barrier or difference in essentials between myself and the new country I have adopted."
Throughout her life, Freda was determined not to be constrained by barriers of race, religion, nation or gender. She delighted in challenging convention and confounding expectations - that is what makes her story so beguiling.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent. The Lives of Freda: the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi is published by Speaking Tiger.
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Publisher †: ‎ Speaking Tiger Publishing Pvt Ltd (10 February 2019)
Language †: ‎ English
Paperback †: ‎ 376 pages
ISBN-10 †: ‎ 9388070755
- The Hindu: United Colours of Freda (17 February 2019)
A review of Andrew Whitehead’s biography of Freda Bedi
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Freda, Baba and my roots
by Kabir Bedi
June 6, 2021
You can take a Punjabi out of Punjab, but you can’t take Punjab out of a Punjabi. I have lived outside Punjab for most of my life, but I never severed its precious umbilical cord. The ancestral village of my father, Baba Bedi, is Dera Baba Nanak. It’s where my mother, Freda Bedi, spearheaded her historic protest against the British as a “hand-picked satyagrahi†of Mahatma Gandhi in 1942. I was born in Lahore, then capital of undivided Punjab, a year before Independence. Even today, as part of Pakistan, Lahore remains quintessentially Punjabi.
“The Huts†, our rustic home on the outskirts of Lahore, was not just a symbolic name. Three kutcha thatched-roof village huts, with mud-plastered walls, no electricity or running water, sheltered my eclectic family. My parents Baba and Freda; my elder brother Ranga; my beloved grandmother Bhaboji and her adopted son Binder; two shepherd dogs, Pug and Snug; and a friendly buffalo, Miss Chambeli Clarabelle Cutty, tethered nearby for milk. I was, in my mother’s words, “welcomed home with garlands and a tikka on his forehead†at the door of a hut.
Our rural home was a landmark in Lahore. It reflected my parents’ lack of money, but equally, their solidarity with India’s poor. It was a gathering spot, an adda, where freedom fighters, leftists and communists made their plans. They were watched, harassed, and sometimes beaten up by the police. After Independence, many of them became famous politicians: President of India Giani Zail Singh; Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral; “Lion of Kashmir†Sheikh Abdullah; Communist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet. Writer and historian Khushwant Singh wasn’t an agitator but a sympathiser. Some were creative people who became famous: artist Satish Gujral, actor Balraj Sahni, Poet Laureate of Pakistan Hafeez Jalandhari. All loved the Punjabi atmosphere of Lahore.
The Tribune, Punjab’s biggest newspaper, was also based in Lahore. My parents had sharply divided opinions about it. The paper put my mother’s historic satyagraha on its front page: “Mrs Freda Bedi left for Dera Baba Nanak where she will offer satyagraha on 21st February.†It reported her being jailed by the British as a big story too. In 1943, The Tribune sent her to cover the horrors of the Bengal famine, where over 20 lakh people were starving to death. After that, it commissioned her to write a regular column on women’s issues, ‘From a Woman’s Window’, the first of its kind in India. So my mother was fond of the paper.
My father viewed The Tribune rather differently. The newspaper was nationalist in spirit, but he felt it was not outspoken enough. He spotted a chink in the paper’s armour. It didn’t print on Mondays, as Sundays were holidays. So, in a small room on a small hand press, Baba started a radically nationalistic newspaper called Monday Morning. But taking on the Goliath of Punjab was gruelling work for idealists with no money. My mother pitched in dutifully. Journalist Jag Pravesh Chander, later the head of Delhi’s government, came to help out. Actor Balraj Sahni tried to join in too, but my father dissuaded him. “My dear Balraj, look here,†he admonished him, “if this were a literary magazine, I would say gladly come. Running a political weekly without funds is a dog’s job, and we are dogs. We are out to be whipped by our own choice. You are an artist.†Balraj left after a few months, but he was among the first to welcome me when I began my career in Bollywood. In the end, Monday Morning had to close down for lack of money. “Journalism in India,†my mother lamented in a letter to a friend, “is a tragic struggle against advertisers and news agents who sit on bills and never pay up†.
My family members were forced to abandon their beloved huts in Lahore during the horrors of Partition in 1947. But it led to a new life for my parents in Kashmir. Freda looked after the refugees of the war that raged between India and Pakistan. Baba, as an adviser to Sheikh Abdullah, helped write a “revolutionary†new Kashmir Constitution that gave land to the tillers. After moving to Delhi in 1953, my parents’ lives moved on from revolutions to religions. I’ve chronicled their amazing transformations in my autobiography. My mother became the top Buddhist nun in the world. As a 16th generation descendant of Guru Baba Nanak, my father revered him, even wrote books on him. But he went on to become a new-age philosopher in Italy. Throughout all those tumultuous years, he never lost his Punjabi sense of humour. “Dekhi jaoo†was his impish response to every problem.
We wore the badge of being Punjabi with great pride in our family. I learnt my Punjabi through my dadi Bhaboji, Mata Phool Kaur. She was an eternal presence in my life until she passed away in Delhi when I was 13. She made me tell her the world news every day in Punjabi as she was partially blind and bedridden. It was her way of teaching me the language, and reminding me of my roots. Those roots remained deep inside me even when I moved to America in the late 1970s.
I was living in Hollywood when the barbaric killings of Sikhs took place in Delhi in 1984. I was outraged and horrified. What also distressed me was the breakdown of goodwill between Sikhs and Hindus in California. The bitterness was being stoked by separatists and had to be reversed. The killings couldn’t be allowed to become a Hindu-Sikh conflict. Both communities had lived in harmony for more than 500 years. I started the S.H.A.R.E (Sikh Hindu Allied Relief Exchange) Peace initiative and sent contributions for the relief of victims to the Punjab Chief Minister’s Relief Fund. Thankfully, both communities are at peace again around the world.
Over the years, I’ve seen that whatever our religions, whatever our political beliefs, our roots are an enduring bond between all Punjabis. I’ll always be one at heart. I’m even married to a Punjabi sherni. And, like my mother, I’m finally writing for The Tribune.
(With extracts from the writer’s autobiography Stories I Must Tell: The Emotional Life of an Actor)
