The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi

by Vicki Mackenzie

  Her situation was exacerbated by insomnia. The heat was not only preventing her from sleeping at night, she was unable to nap in the afternoon because of the pigeons clattering about on the roof above her head. “I could have broken all my vows of nonviolence on them,” she said. The heat also made the toilets almost unbearable to the dirt-loathing Freda. They were ancient, foul, open to the elements, with only a flapping curtain for privacy. She was faced with the alternative of carrying an umbrella to protect her from the elements, which meant either putting her head in the revolting cloth or pushing aside the curtain and risking being seen. She did her best to block out the smells and sights, but it didn’t work. “If I were to give way to what I truly feel, I would be sick every time I go near the place,” she said.

  News that the inmates of Deoli were threatening yet another hunger strike ratcheted up Freda’s tension even further. She confessed she was literally worried sick, and vomited frequently. Knowing there was a heat wave there didn’t help. “They have no fans at Deoli. I wish things could be settled without this wringing of the heart,” she said.

  In jail, Freda’s concerns and compassion stretched beyond her husband. In the garden she was mingling with an array of colorful, nonpolitical women prisoners, who were certainly not the peaceful satyagrahis with whom she shared a room. She got to know them all—drug smugglers, gypsies, embezzlers, and murderers. She listened to their stories of abduction and poverty, the latter often due simply to the awful financial calamity of having too many girl babies, and was filled with pity, understanding, and indignation.

  “These jail women wring my heart. They may be guilty, but what does that really mean here? Either that they loved another man and ran away with him—a thing that happens hundreds and thousands of times in the West—or that they were the helpless tool of some man’s guile. Many women have deliberately chosen jail as being preferable to life with a despotic, exploitative old man. It’s tragic that they can do nothing and must suffer like common felons.” she said.

  She tried to help by sharing with them the “beauties” of socialism and the horrors of fascism, and sometimes she even gave legal advice. “There is a sixteen-year-old girl here whose seventy-year-old husband sent her out onto the streets to beg and for prostitution. He also bit off her ear. When she ran away, he had a case framed against her. I recommended she demand a divorce through lawyers. Anything is better than living with that old satyr.”

  Her concern and compassion went far beyond the prison’s bars, however. She was all too well aware that World War II was escalating in Europe, and this increased her anguish for the suffering she knew was being unleashed. Those others, so far away, she could not help. “I sometimes feel the awful agony of the world like a dark cloud above my head. It is almost unbearable to think of the brutalities and stupidities of man committed upon man,” she said. Later this widespread, deep-felt empathy for the pain of others in general and the wish for it to cease would be regarded as a mark of a genuine bodhisattva—the heroic Buddhist practitioner fired with altruistic intention to relieve all beings of their sorrows and fundamental ignorance, which prevented them from seeing the true nature of reality and their indwelling magnificent buddha nature.

  She was particularly worried about her mother, left behind in England, knowing too well the trauma she’d gone through during World War I with the loss of her husband. A letter from Nellie finally reached her in jail. It contained a ten-shilling note (a belated and very welcome birthday present) and news that Freda’s and BPL’s imprisonment had made the British newspapers. Freda knew how shocking the reports would have read (along the lines of “British Woman Turns Traitor”) and was relieved that Nellie seemed to be not unduly horrified at her maverick daughter’s latest scandal:

  “It’s easier now that I know Mother has taken it so well,” she said before continuing on a more defiant note that underlined her unswerving dedication to her beliefs. “Not that I would have altered my course of action, but I hate to cause her pain. I know she is suffering, but there is no panic, and friends have rallied around her. I’m glad, for few must have understood what it was all about. Anti-Fascist though we are, and have been for years, it is hard for the average British citizen who isn’t very interested in politics to understand what resistance to imperialism means, what India is really feeling, how severely her self-respect has been wounded, how she is ready and willing to fight oppression and aggression to vindicate her denied nationhood.”

  By May, Freda began to hear whispers that legal moves were afoot to get her an early release. It was true. A certain Justice Bhide gave an enterprising judgment in the High Court that claimed that sending a letter to a magistrate announcing one’s intention to break the law (as Freda had done) did not constitute an offense in itself. In fact, he argued, it was a prevention of a crime! Over the next few days, the news became more certain. On May 23, Freda was informed that she was to be released the very next day, triggering a round of farewell parties from the other inmates, who were sad to see her go.

  When the jail doors opened just after noon on May 24, 1941, Freda walked into freedom and a rapturous welcome from a small group of Indian National Congress supporters. A large party had been organized in her honor, where food and speeches were to be offered, but Freda declined. She gave instructions, however, that she was prepared to do whatever Congress wanted of her. If they required her to go back to prison, she would happily agree. Going to prison for her beliefs had filled her with a deep sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and strength.

  She sent telegrams to BPL and her mother telling them of her release and then made her way back to Dera Baba Nanak, the Bedi ancestral home, where she had been arrested.

  Her triumphant homecoming is etched vividly in Ranga’s memory. “Late one afternoon, a message came from Lahore that Mummy’s release was imminent, she would come straight to us in Dera. On a rainy afternoon we could hear sounds of slogans being shouted in the distance. I ran straight through the front gate and through the fields where a bullock cart was approaching. Mummy was crouched under a shawl surrounded by several others all crammed into the cart. A huge sirdar (Sikh) picked me up and put me next to her. She pulled me under her shawl and gave me an enormous, tight hug.

  “Mummy greeted Bhabooji with the traditional touching of the feet, and then the nightmare began. Within an hour dozens of relatives, accompanied by others, began to descend. The next morning it got worse—hundreds of bullock carts laden with families and villagers arrived for darshan (blessing). It was decided that another platform should be built outside the gate, where Mummy could sit and bless the people. For two days people filed past—and then on the fourth and final day Mummy was taken around the village on a bullock cart.”

  To the people, Freda had become more than a political activist, she had been virtually beatified. From then on, Freda became a national heroine, her fame, influence, and power growing stronger every day. This was to become invaluable in the work that lay ahead. Personally, however, she gained no pleasure from the fuss and the fanfare that greeted her when she emerged from jail. Instead she found it utterly exhausting after the confinement of her little world behind bars. She longed for nothing more than to be alone with Ranga, and to have a cold bath.

  Freda had served half of her six-month sentence. During that time she had put on two pounds (from sitting still too much), and had improved her spinning from 225 yards with number-14 yarn per hour to 387 yards with number-18 yarn. She also succeeded in having the name changed from the irksome, grammatically incorrect Lahore Female Jail to Lahore Women’s Jail. She had three rupees to her name.

  Prison, she concluded, had taught her much, especially about herself. “I discovered I do not mind being restricted to a small place. I used to imagine before I was released that I would long to be again in the wide world beyond the walls. But I don’t. Perhaps I am a bit of hermit and I live a good deal inside myself. Whatever the reason, I felt no more irked than if I had been in a small village and un
able to go to town (which I never liked much anyway).

  “The thing that troubled me most was not being alone. Being continuously surrounded by chattering, singing, laughing women was sheer emotional and mental torture. However nice they were, their presence permeated me too much and I began to lose myself.” Her words hinted at the path that was to be her final destiny—the path of a nun.

  Shortly after her release, Freda heard rumors that her husband was being moved from Deoli, because the detention camp was being prepared for prisoners of war. It was thought that BPL was going to be transferred to another prison, but much to the family’s amazement, he simply walked into Dera Baba Nanak one evening. The same victory parades that had regaled Freda’s return were now staged for BPL, but this time the couple stood on the bullock cart side by side.

  7

  Kashmir

  FAR FROM BEING bowed from her time in jail, over the next four years Freda increased her efforts to bring freedom to the Indian subcontinent. She continued giving speeches in towns and villages, championing the exploited, fighting injustice, and working around the clock to earn a living to support the family. Increasingly her attention was drawn to Kashmir, the exquisitely beautiful but politically volatile state in northwest India famed for its snowcapped peaks, verdant pastures, and Dal Lake with its charming houseboats.

  The lure was their close friend Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, president of Kashmir’s first political party, the National Muslim Conference, which he founded in 1932. In June 1939 he changed the name to the more secular sounding All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. The Bedis and Sheikh Abdullah had much in common. Both believed in equal rights for all sections of society regardless of caste, creed, or religion. Both were adamant about overthrowing imperialism, which in Sheikh Abdullah’s case took the form of the Raj-appointed maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh. Self-rule was the mutual goal.

  Sheikh Abdullah was a towering figure. He wore long regal robes and called himself “the Lion of Kashmir.” Like BPL, he was charismatic, forceful, and extremely determined. He was also a hunted man. The maharaja was after him, and so were the law enforcers of the British Raj. When he was banned from entering Kashmir, he rushed for sanctuary with Freda and BPL in The Huts. With enormous courage they took him in.

  Freda, however, went several steps further. In order to get Sheikh Abdullah’s messages to his many thousands of followers, she elected to carry them herself, disguised in a burka. Inevitably she was discovered and given forty-eight hours to get out of Kashmir. Freda announced, “I’m going to do nothing of the kind,” and surreptitiously continued carrying messages.

  During these years, fighting for Kashmir, Freda’s tenacity and courage became legendary. When the police discovered her staying in a hotel owned by a Sheikh Abdullah sympathizer in Srinagar, they stormed it, forcing her eviction. She found refuge with a houseboat owner on Dal Lake, who hid her in the kitchen. The police were hot on her heels; discovering her hiding place, they roughed up the houseboat owner and his family. Freda returned from her mission to find them in tears and beating their chests. Without a moment’s hesitation she sprang into action.

  “Mummy immediately got into a rowboat that took her to shore, where she climbed into a tonga (horse-drawn carriage) to look for the policemen,” reports Ranga. “She found them at a tea shop. After asking them why they had molested the family, she took off her shoe and began to hit them. They ran for their lives, nonplussed that a British woman was beating them.

  “Mummy was quite expecting to be arrested again, and was ready for it, but the maharaja thought better of it. He didn’t want the scandal of incarcerating her with its attendant publicity of what she had done—it made the police look too silly.”

  On another occasion it was Freda herself who was hurt—and this time she had taken Ranga with her. They were in Srinagar for a riverboat procession down the Jhelum River to celebrate the fact that Sheikh Abdullah had changed the name of his party from Muslim Conference to National Conference, indicating its nonsectarian basis. Sheikh Abdullah was willing to embrace all faiths in his cause. As the boats, with Freda, Ranga, BPL, and all of Sheikh Abdullah’s top guns, sailed down the river, they saw the maharaja’s people gathering on the banks to protest.

  “As the boats passed under the bridges, they hurled stones down on us, including Mummy, who lay on top of me to protect me. Many people got injured, but I was OK. As for Mummy, she just carried on. She was utterly fearless,” said Ranga.

  This oblivion to danger was exemplified in one vivid event, when Freda took Ranga camping high into the mountains to escape the Punjab’s searing summer heat. They reached Pahalgam, a beautiful and remote spot situated at an altitude of 8,990 feet, and pitched their tents.

  “It was stunning, and utterly isolated. We were completely alone up there—the nearest habitation was a small store about three miles away. Papa was not with us, and I was really enjoying having Mummy to myself for once. One morning we woke up to find the upper flap of one of the tents had been torn. A bear had come during the night. Rather than pack up and leave immediately, Mummy lit a bonfire every night between the tents, saying that would do the trick. I wasn’t scared. Mummy was always calm and unshakable, and that infused me with a sense of stability in spite of the constant dramas going on in her life,” said Ranga.

  During her treks in the Kashmiri hills, Freda met the renowned British writer Rumer Godden (author of Black Narcissus and The Greengage Summer, among other highly esteemed literary works), who lived in a charming pink-and-gray cottage called Dove House halfway up the slopes to the orchard where Freda had pitched her tent. With her uncanny knack for drawing the famous, talented, and unconventional into her orbit, the two women became close friends. Freda was delighted.

  They had a lot in common. Both women were literary, loved the arts, had children, and were broke. Rumer’s husband had abandoned her, leaving her with a mountain of debt that she paid off from the proceeds of her books. Like Freda, she lived in a romantic dwelling built by a poet, with no running water, no electricity or any form of heating—a serious disadvantage in the snowbound Kashmiri winters. Like Freda, she attracted the bizarre and the dangerous. She discovered her cook was a homicidal maniac when her Pekingese puppy died and she and her family suffered horrifying hallucinations: He had been mixing powdered glass, marijuana, and belladonna into the midday meal of rice and dal.

  Another illustrious figure who came into Freda’s life at this time was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister. He had met Freda in the early thirties at a Congress convention and admired her greatly, especially after her imprisonment. In addition to Indian self-rule, he too was keenly interested in socialism and women’s emancipation. Nehru passionately loved Kashmir, his ancestral home, and took every opportunity to go there. At such times Freda would often drop in, and she became close friends with his daughter, Indira, who was just six years younger, and also Oxford educated. The relationship was sealed when Freda and BPL were invited to Indira’s wedding to Feroze Gandhi (no relation), in 1942.

  Ranga was at the celebration. “I remember it was held in a large house—and Mummy was the only British face there. Afterward we went to have breakfast with Nehru. We all stayed friends for years. Indira’s sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, and became our playmates. Many years later Indira attended my wedding to Umi.”

  For all her political work, her teaching, her family, her marriage, and her writing, it would be wrong to think that Freda had forsaken her spiritual quest. Far from it. If anything, living in India had only heightened her deep yearning for spiritual nourishment and education. She did yoga (even in jail) and read as much spiritual literature as she could, including the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible, searching for the eternal verities that lay beyond dogma. “I am going through the Old Testament again, leaving out the Rules and the begats. The Gita says that all paths lead to Me. That I believe,” she said. What she was looking for was a path that she could devote all h
er attention and energy to. It was still a way off.

  She meditated on her own, compelled to find a space of inner stillness, which she claimed was essential to her very sanity. Meditation, in fact became the fuel that drove all her many endeavors. Just as she had as a young girl, she still somehow knew intuitively that the answers she was seeking were ultimately not to be found between the pages of any religious book but through direct personal experience.

  “Bringing up my children, carrying on my life as a teacher, writer, and speaker, I would find that without this time of quietness I could not reach into the deepest reaches of my mind, and the full potentiality of the mind could not be released. The questions kept haunting me: What is the meaning of life? Why is it like this? How can we understand? Who is to tell us? We can’t get it from books. We can only get it from within. That’s what sustained me,” she said.

  An interesting side effect of Freda’s daily meditation practices, she said, was an increase in her clairvoyance: “I got many internal revelations, even visions,” she said later in a radio interview in New York. She discovered she could receive messages via dreams, for example. On one occasion Freda was able to reassure an old college friend living in Malaysia during the outbreak of the war that her missing husband was not dead, as she feared, because she had dreamed of her, her two children, and her husband escaping from the Japanese. Sure enough, four years later the husband emerged from the jungle where he had been hiding and was reunited with his family.