There is no doubt that Freda Bedi was a heroine. She was extraordinarily brave, wading into battle in the cause of equality and freedom on behalf of the entire Indian nation, the dispossessed, the poor, the sick, the forgotten, the refugees—and women, secular and ordained alike. She seemed to know no fear. She took on secret police, angry mobs, imprisonment, and bears with no thought of her own safety. She was a dauntless champion of women, a passionate feminist, who like the Suffragettes of her own era, believed that deeds, not words, were what mattered.
As Freda began to reveal herself, the woman behind the myriad roles she played took shape. She was full of curious contradictions.
She was an ace administrator, furnished with a steely will, a brilliant mind, a relentless drive, a woman who always knew where she was going. And she was dreamy, given to flights of lyric romanticism and hopeless idealism. Many attested to her imperious manner, dispensing orders and expecting them to be obeyed, and yet she was also universally acknowledged for her warmth and kindness. She was genuinely egalitarian, inviting servants to sit at her table with diplomats and insisting on herself traveling third class. Yet she mingled readily with the highest in the land and was prone to tedious name-dropping of the great and the good whom she knew. Maybe she had an eye toward being published. Freda was a high-ranking Buddhist nun, but she was never shy of fame or self-publicity. Never forgetting her socialist principles, she eschewed money and owning property. Yet she never balked at accepting invitations to stay at five-star hotels.
The most intriguing and arguably the most controversial contradiction in Freda’s makeup rested in her dual roles as Mother. She gave birth to four children, and yet from the time they were born, she frequently left them to fulfill her bigger calling as Mother to all the world. Everyone called her Mummy, for the love and caring she gave them. Yet one her babies died while she was away campaigning for the greater good, and she deposited her daughter at age five in boarding school so that she could follow her Buddhist vocation. She left Ranga without mother and father when she willingly went to jail, and she rendered the entire family homeless when she gave up her job to become a nun. Freda’s actions flew in the face of accepted mores that a “good” mother should be prepared to sacrifice everything for her children. In society’s eyes that selflessness is what gives a mother special status.
Throughout the book I had to ask myself, “Is it possible for a woman to be Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, and a physical mother at the same time? Was Freda really selfish and egotistical for leaving her children to follow a bigger path? Was I being judgmental, sexist? Fathers who pursue their dreams—climbing Everest, walking to the South Pole, crossing oceans in small boats, driving racing cars, or more commonly globe-trotting incessantly in the name of business are not similarly censured. I concluded that society holds strong judgments around mothers. Once again it was about gender.
Freda’s life choices around mothering also threw into focus other hot issues, normally not aired. Few dare speak the unmentionable—that not all women are fulfilled by motherhood. Many mothers cannot wait to get back to work, to escape the demands and tedium of small children. And newspapers often carry stories of mothers who have killed their children. Interestingly another great matriarch, Queen Victoria, mother of nine, revealed in her diaries that she hated being pregnant—“It was like being a cow or a dog”—viewed breast-feeding with disgust, and found her children “ugly and repulsive.” It was begetting her children with Prince Albert that she enjoyed.
It is not known whether Freda actively wanted children. She was born before the contraceptive pill—the great liberator—was invented, and became pregnant very quickly after her wedding in a day when marriage automatically meant motherhood. From childhood she had been driven by her strong spiritual and social ideals. She loved BPL, but married him as much for his political fervor for Indian independence as for her passion for him. She certainly had never been attracted to domesticity.
During my travels I met one of Freda’s friends, an American woman named Didi Contractor, who met Freda in Bombay in 1969. A film-set designer of mud brick houses, and later a leading ecologist, Didi threw an interesting light on many aspects of Freda’s personality.
“Because she valued the big picture, I am not sure how strongly she viewed motherhood,” said Didi, speaking in one of her own mud huts situated in a small village near Dharamsala. “I think Guli was rather shortchanged. I remember one occasion when she kept trying to tell her mother that she was engaged, but Freda was more interested in talking about Muktananda (my guru) and religion with me. She kept saying, ‘Not now, Guli.’
“Freda was unique, a big woman in every sense of the word, imposing and very, very warm. Her voice was strong, confident, and sometimes very dramatic, especially when she was saying prayers! And she could be endearingly pompous and rather sweeping, almost ludicrously so. Because she was so big, it was easy for her to be a big target for negativities. You could see her in either of two ways—comic absorption in her role or total commitment. I loved her, but I wasn’t blind to her foibles, as you aren’t when you truly love someone,” she continued.
“Everything was black-and-white with her—there were no shades of gray. That was exactly what was needed to accomplish what she did. She had a sense of humor but never about herself, and no sense of irony. Mummy always knew best. She would listen to you but not alter her opinion one jot. Whatever she believed in, she did it completely and instantly. She was immensely powerful because she believed in herself. At the same time she was extraordinarily naïve—naïve in the way every creative person is. You have to be naïve to complexities in order to embrace things as completely as she did.”
In the end I turned to her children, the only people truly qualified to speak on the subject of what kind of a mother she was. Today Ranga, Kabir, and Guli all regard their mother with a great deal of love and even a little reverence. None, however are blind to the difficulties she put them through.
“Looking back I can honestly say I feel truly blessed. As a mother she was really something. For a daughter, she was fantastic because she really believed in empowering women,” said Guli, the child who saw the least of her mother, and yet the one who grew up to be most like her. Guli inherited Freda’s strong independent streak, her brain, and, with her job of teaching disadvantaged children, her commitment to caring for others.
“I was raised to have a voice, make something of my life, and be financially independent. She told me many women were unhappy because they couldn’t leave their marriages. She wasn’t pleased that I was going to marry an artist, because she knew how hard life could be without money, but she wasn’t going to stop me, because she believed in freedom of choice. She had a premonition it wouldn’t last—as usual she was right.
“Although I never knew from one month to the next where I was going to be living, I have to admit I never felt neglected or unloved by either of my parents. Mummy was very cuddly.
“Her one great fault was that she saw life through rose-colored glasses. She had a romantic view of life and people. She would only see the good. Kabir and I used to joke about it. If we encountered a mean or unpleasant person, we would turn to each other and say ‘They must have inner beauty.’ Mummy did not, or would not, see the dark side of people’s nature. It could be utterly exasperating. Sometimes she got hurt because of it too.” Guli also found great difficulty in accepting her mother’s absolute obeisance to the Karmapa. “I had a raging argument with her just before she died. ‘I can’t understand how you, a radical, smart, decisive, strong woman, an Oxford graduate, who has always been outspoken and taken responsibility for your actions, now have to check with your guru before you do anything! Why are you now handing over everything to him?’ She replied, ‘Guli, you don’t understand. It’s about going into another life—one that is far more fulfilling.’’’
Kabir handled Freda’s constant commitment to her work and her causes very well.
“Of course Mummy was away a l
ot—which honestly didn’t bother me,” he said. “She was driven by her large social conscience. When she was home, she held you and made you feel special and wanted. The main problem was that she left us homeless when she took up Buddhism. I worried about Guli, especially as Mummy was the main breadwinner. There was always the stress of having no money—my parents just didn’t care about it. What was important to them was their principles. They were idealistic to the point of folly. We children inherited nothing from them except their values.”
Ranga, who saw the most of Freda when he was a child, shares Kabir’s feelings.
“Mummy gave me a wonderful life. But because my parents lived constantly on a knife-edge, I have always felt the need for security. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but my childhood was very insecure. Throughout my adulthood I had to be secure in my job, and my family always comes first. I’m highly protective,” he said.
Freda may have been physically absent from her children, but she attempted to manage their upbringing, down to the smallest details of their lives, through her letters.
Here’s Freda answering Kabir’s championing of his sister’s need for pickles at boarding school:
Guli’s pickle problem is as follows: Please tell her to be reasonable and not complain. You have given her pickle. I am sending her a birthday parcel containing jam and pickle. It’s quite absurd anyway that one should not be able to live without jam and pickle rolling in.
And this intimate, though somewhat cryptic letter to Kabir:
Think hard about smoking and the other thing. These all have karmas. It’s a law as impersonal as a scientific law that H2O = water. Smoking affects the mind (leading to attachment) and the body, filling its pure cavities with smoke. There’s a tarry deposit from tobacco that causes cancer. Always use filter tips if you must smoke. When I went to college, the girls persuaded me to smoke, and I smoked for three months. Then one day I woke up to the uselessness of it and stopped. I never smoked again.
Kabir didn’t heed his mother’s advice. Instead he followed in his father’s footsteps and is rarely seen without a cigarette.
When letters would not do, Freda became more hands-on. She officiated at Kabir’s first marriage to Protima, conducting the ceremony herself. And she’d rush to her children’s side when she felt they were in danger.
I concluded that Freda was a woman who had managed to have it all—husband, children, a stellar career, political activism, and a religious vocation. Freda did not give up anything. It was no mean feat.
As to Freda being an emanation of Tara, the female Buddha of Compassion in Action, I am in no position to judge. For all her very human shortcomings, she had exceptional compassion, which played out in all the myriad roles she undertook. Like Tara she was indisputably a doer, not content to sit back and bewail the problems of society or merely legislate about them. She jumped right in. Her heart was as wide as the world. Furthermore Freda, like Tara, was highly effective in accomplishing what she set out to do.
Whoever she was, by the end of my journey into her life I understood why Lama Yeshe, in that meditation tent in Kathmandu back in 1976, had prostrated three times before her. I wondered why Freda’s remarkable story had never been told. I concluded that her fate was that of most powerful women in history; she was simply overlooked. It was time to set the record straight. Freda’s song deserved to be sung.
ALSO BY VICKI MACKENZIE
Cave in the Snow: A Western Woman’s Quest for Enlightenment
Child of Tibet: The Story of Soname’s Flight to Freedom, with Soname Yangchen
Reborn in the West: The Reincarnation Masters
Reincarnation: The Boy Lama
Why Buddhism?: Westerners in Search of Wisdom
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The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 20