The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Read online

  “The third member of our triumvirate was Freda Houlston, a dark, strikingly attractive girl who came from a modest, middle-class family whose conventional values Mrs. Thatcher would have approved of,” wrote the dyed-in-the-wool socialist somewhat scathingly of her archrival, the deeply conservative Margaret Thatcher. “Freda was not as lighthearted as Olive and I were, alternating between bursts of gaiety and moods of deep and almost somber seriousness.”

  Freda threw herself into her new world with great energy. She reveled in the sheer beauty and historical grandeur of the place—Shakespeare on the lawn, fireflies on balmy summer evenings by the River Isis, romantic May balls. She joined just about every society, from the League of Nations to the Ornithological Club. And over cups of cocoa, she talked long into the night with her coterie of like-minded friends on the usual student subjects: literature, travel, politics, and sex—the latter instigated by Barbara Castle, who was fervent in her campaign to shed the shackles of Victorian prudery, repression, and ignorance. She organized a whip-round, where everyone puts in money, to buy Parenthood: Design or Accident?, Michael Fielding’s groundbreaking book, complete with explicit drawings, which became exceptionally well thumbed.

  It was not enough to divert Freda from her studies, however. She worked hard for “responsions,” the first-year exams, which consisted of a curious mix of topics ranging from Logic through Virgil’s Aeneid, aimed at preparing her for the following two years of French, old and new. Freda breezed through them, but her heart had gone out of her chosen subject. Her world had expanded too far.

  “Suddenly I couldn’t be bothered,” she said. “I wanted to learn other languages, and History, Modern Philosophy, and International and Colonial Politics. I wanted to understand the world! I had this flash of understanding that French, Ancient and Modern, could only lead to me being a teacher. I passionately did not want to go back into the world of childhood.”

  She began to set her sights on the infinitely tougher and more sophisticated world of journalism. She aimed for the top.

  “I wanted to interpret the incredible international adult world that poured out of magazines and newspapers. My idea was to work my way up from cub reporter on the Derby Telegraph to Fleet Street, home of Britain’s prestigious national press.” With Barbara Castle’s encouragement, Freda dropped French and took up Modern Greats (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics).

  Oxford may have been idyllic at that time, but outside its hallowed halls life was grim for most people. The year 1929 heralded the start of the Great Depression, the biggest economic downturn Great Britain had ever experienced. Unemployment, poverty, and hunger stalked the land. Sensitized to pain and suffering by her father’s death, Freda grew increasingly uneasy with the disparity of her privileged life in contrast to the hardships of others. Oxford, heartland of the Establishment, was where the class system reached its zenith.

  “There was an underlying sense of guilt in the face of the reality of the economic conditions. We cared that people hadn’t got enough food, we cared that there were hunger marches, we cared that children in slums were starving. It’s impossible for people now to understand, in these relatively prosperous times, the stark division that existed between Right and Left. The Right wanted nothing to change. They wanted life to go on the way it had before World War I. The idealism of the people I was mixing with was that of helping the underprivileged. But what can one do at university except talk?” she said.

  Inevitably, like many Oxbridge intellectuals of her day, she became increasingly left wing, joined the Labor Club along with Barbara Castle and Michael Foot (the future Labor prime minister), and began to class herself as one of the “Burning Socialists.” She meant it. Freda’s idealism about a fairer world never left her. From Oxford on, she fought a tireless campaign against social, legal, economic, gender, racial, class, and eventually religious inequality wherever she found it.

  She was inspired and fired up on her quest by the impressive lineup of exceptional, world-renowned thinkers of her day, all Oxford professors, whose eloquent arguments filled the lecture halls to overflowing: Harold Laski, professor of Political Science, who specialized in Karl Marx; Keir Hardie, the great constitutionalist and pacifist, who was one of the founders of the Labor Party; Ephraim Lipson, author of The Economic History of England; and Professor Sir Alfred Zimmern, whose name is associated with the founding of the League of Nations. He later became a close personal friend of Freda and her husband.

  “My belief in the charter of human rights was very strong, so that I saw Marxism not as a cheap political stunt, but in a deep, direct way.” Freda rapidly learned German in order to be able to read and study Hegel, Marx, and the German philosophers in the original.

  Her spiritual life was not forgotten, however, and was running smoothly along parallel lines. Every Sunday she went to church to take Communion and would pop into chapel if there was Bach concert. Any hint of Eastern thought drew her like a magnet. She devoured The Light of Asia, subtitled The Great Renunciation, by Sir Edwin Arnold—an epic poem describing the life of Prince Siddhartha, who became the Buddha. And she rushed to attend a lecture by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali Nobel Prize–winning poet, philosopher, songwriter, and educator, and was immediately entranced.

  “I first saw him at Oxford lecturing on the highest philosophy before some of the greatest savants and philosophers in the West. He sat on a low platform with the rare light of the late evening falling on his face and making a complete aureole around his white head. I was very moved by his understanding, his dignity, the way in which he seemed to distill the essence of India into the small hall and with it the essence of all that is highest and universal in man. At that time my knowledge of India was superficial and I did not know it was to be my home, but my response to Tagore and what he was saying was immediate. I believe that Tagore, more than any other Indian, has been able to interpret the East, and her aspirations, and make them understood in the West. He was often obtuse and above the mind of ordinary man, but something in the very radiance of his presence did more than the words of popular speakers. Tagore’s heart was one with both the old and the renascent India, and though not a politician he could not keep silent in the face of the great outrage of Fascism and war.”

  The other great Indian she encountered was Mahatma Gandhi, who gave two talks at Oxford on October 24, 1931. His avowed intent was “to realize the dream of my life—the freedom of my country.” His method was peaceful revolution. Freda listened hard.

  3

  Love

  LIFE AT OXFORD was not all socialism and study, however. Freda was not the flirty, flighty type, and she never escaped over the wall into town for dances without the required late pass, like her more rebellious friends, Barbara Castle and Olive Shapley. But she was not beyond love. One day she was unusually early for a lecture and found a young Indian man, also atypically early, leaning against a wall reading a paper. There were several Indian students at Oxford, but in the 1930s, racial discrimination was strong.

  “I thought I’d better say good morning or else he’ll think I was snubbing him. I made some remark about the day’s news, and the young man just muttered good morning in reply and went back to his reading,” recalled Freda. Later, the young Indian thought the beautiful tall woman who had spoken to him must have thought he was a complete boor, and to make amends for his rudeness, he invited her to tea.

  Freda was surprised, but accepted, having duly engaged a chaperone to accompany her, following college rules, which stipulated that young ladies should not visit the rooms of the opposite sex alone. That was the start of an immediate affinity and later a passionate love affair.

  His full name was Baba Phyare Lal Bedi, (shortened to BPL or plain Bedi by Freda), a Sikh from the Punjab. He was a giant of a man, the All India Hammer-Throwing Champion, with a round face, mustache, and wavy black hair. His background was infinitely more illustrious than Freda’s. He was the sixteenth direct descendant of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), f
ounder of the Sikh religion, whose family still lived on the ancestral lands owned by Guru Nanak himself. Within Indian circles this classified him virtually as “royal.” BPL came from a long line of lawyers and was at Oxford on a Half Blue scholarship (awarded to athletes of outstanding ability) studying Modern Greats.

  BPL had a booming voice, a larger-than-life personality, and loved nothing more than good company, good jokes, and especially good food.

  “Unorthodox is one word to describe my father. He was a born rebel, one of the big Lefties of his time,” says Kabir Bedi, Freda’s second child and a Bollywood legend. “Apart from his enormous strength—at school he was always the anchor in the tug-of-war competitions—he was famous for eating. He loved food. He would demolish a whole basket of boiled eggs on the way to school as if they were almonds. Once, a family friend, a hunter, sent over a whole deer that he had shot and cooked. My father and his brother, then both in their teens, decided to tackle the meat. Their mother was furious and said they would be severely beaten if they didn’t eat it all. They ate and ate, and fearing the inevitable thrashing, threw great slabs of the venison into the neighbor’s garden to get rid of it. Even the young Bedi boys couldn’t finish an entire deer. Well, the neighbor was a Jain, totally vegetarian and furious. The ensuing argument was never forgotten.

  “With his own children, he was the most indulgent father you could find. He was a real softie. Mummy was the disciplinarian. My father more or less let us do what we liked. I hated school and I remember, when Mummy was away, he would say, ‘It’s OK, leave the house as though you’re going to school and just run away on the way there.’”

  Superficially, they seemed an unlikely couple. BPL was quixotic and loud. Freda was refined and contained. They became known as Beauty and the Beast, but they soon found common ground.

  “At tea, I found him to be a warm man with an interesting mind, and we quickly became friends,” Freda wrote, with typical reserve.

  Initially the glue was their shared admiration of communism and socialist ideals, so fashionable among the Oxbridge intellectuals of their day, who were eager to build a better, fresher world after the devastation of World War I. Cambridge, in particular, became a famous, well-documented breeding ground for communist gentlemen spies. Revolution was in the air, first in Russia then in China, overthrowing the old order, making way for the new. It was exhilarating. The Suffragettes were on the march too, chaining themselves to rails, throwing themselves under horses, and going on hunger strikes to obtain equal rights with men. The atmosphere was electric.

  Freda, reading Marx in the original, could not help but be moved by his arguments for championing the oppressed, the exploited, the downtrodden, and the poor. She had personally seen children in the slums in Derby running around with bare feet, undernourished babies in the hands of incompetent mothers, and of course knew of the hunger marches of the unemployed. To her caring nature, Marxism symbolized humanism, justice, and ultimately freedom. These were causes she could and would readily dedicate her life to.

  What they both recognized was the approaching menace of fascism, with its anti-Semitic agenda, which to them was anathema. Only communism, they believed, was strong and brave enough to oppose and defeat it. While their government, loath to take up arms again, was talking appeasement, only the communists and Christians seemed to understand the danger of what Hitler and Mussolini were wanting to bring about—and were willing to go to jail for saying it.

  Of course the young Oxford idealists did not know then of the gulags, the terrible persecutions, the appalling death toll, the insane economic policies that killed millions, and the sheer tyranny that communist rule evoked. Nor did they comprehend the utter lack of freedom of thought, speech, and belief—the very things that Freda and BPL held most dear—that ensued.

  In the heady days of the early 1930s, Freda and BPL were enthusiastically having tea in town, and meeting at lectures and the Bodleian Library to discuss their ideals. In time, Freda went openly to BPL’s rooms to talk and work without the chaperone. Deciding they had to do something to start bringing about the change they wanted, they sat down together and compiled a book on Marx’s letters. When that was done, they went on to edit three volumes of contemporary Indian economic, social, and international writings, entitled India Analysed, which was later published by Victor Gollancz. Freda was just twenty and BPL was twenty-two.

  Inevitably, Freda was increasingly drawn into Bedi’s Indian world—and she loved everything about it. He introduced her to his cuisine (unsurprisingly he was an excellent cook) and took her to the Matji, the very noisy mock Indian parliament, which staged disorderly debates. The students she met there became good friends and leading figures in the new India: Vidyar Shankar, the right-hand man of Sardar Patel; Humayun Kabir, an enlightened administrator; Lakshmanan, first Indian director of All India Radio; writer and poet Mahmud-u-Zaffar, also called Mahmud Saheb Zada Bane, among many others.

  “It was an interesting time, and somehow all this turmoil of the Indian independence movement, and the students who were ready to dedicate their lives to it, entered my own life in a very natural way. I began to feel for India and her people even while living in Oxford,” she said.

  Most of all, however, BPL talked to Freda about his one overriding mission and intent—to free India from British rule. Imperialism was part of the repugnant old order that had to be overthrown, and he was determined to help bring it about. Under the Bedi family motto, “Honesty and Justice,” he was convinced he would succeed. Freda was more than sympathetic. She loved her country, she said, but she loathed imperialism.

  It was not only politics over which they bonded; they also found affinity in their spiritual orientation. Oxford, with its intellectual liberalism and vast library, provided Freda with a wider scope of religious inquiry. Hearing Gandhi and Tagore and listening to BPL opened her up to Eastern beliefs. Her spiritual horizons were broadening considerably.

  “I decided completely that my search for Truth was beyond the Church, beyond Christianity even. By now I had become conscious of all the religions in the world. At Oxford, I realized I wanted to follow the path of the seeker, and the path of the meditator,” she said.

  BPL understood that. Although he belonged to the Sikh Guru family, he himself was not orthodox. “He did not attach himself to any particular religion, but to all gurus and those who believe in deeper truths. This of course included his devotion to his ancestor, Guru Nanak, which was very great.”

  At one point, Freda showed him a drawing she had done when she was seven. “You’ve drawn the Lord Buddha,” BPL told her. He later added, “It explained why she was drawn to India, and why she fit in so well, and her great attachment to Buddhism in the latter part of her life. Everything that happened to her was the inheritance of a past life. Her karma was there from the very start.”

  Her love affair with the hammer-throwing champion and his country had begun. For Freda this was both thrilling and terrifying. In 1920, falling in love with an Indian was a bold and risky move. Racial prejudice was ubiquitous; notices outside boarding houses announced, “No Dogs, Jews, or Coloreds”; blacks were regularly spat at, shunned, and beaten up. The prejudice wasn’t all one way, either; to many upper-class Indians their greatest fear in sending their precious sons overseas to be educated was that they would end up “marrying the landlady’s daughter.”

  For whatever reasons, Freda was unusually free from such prejudice. She openly began to be seen with Bedi, and the young mixed-race couple paid a heavy price. BPL was targeted by fellow students more than once—though the assailants came off worse. Freda was shunned by her peers, although her closest friends rallied round and tried to protect her from the barbs. Finally an officious school doorman porter, traditionally in charge of the comings and goings of the students, reported Freda to the authorities for going to BPL’s room unaccompanied. The result was that Freda was suspended for the rest of the academic year.

  “It was nonsense,” snorted
Freda. “Everyone was going into each other’s rooms and no one else was reported. Because I was white and BPL was Indian, I had to suffer the indignity of being suspended. It really brought me up against the question of racial discrimination. The suffering we both underwent—BPL because he thought he was the cause of it—only brought us closer together,” she added defiantly.

  But underneath the sensitivity, Freda was a stoic young woman with a strong spirit. Her friend Barbara Castle said that on Freda’s return to school, “she resumed her visits to Bedi, in the digs outside college where he had moved, only this time she decided to give the disciplinarians their money’s worth and started an affair with him.”

  Still, the trauma and tension of sticking to her principles took its toll. Freda suffered a nervous breakdown, which meant she had to leave school for another term. But her love for Bedi grew stronger and endured. When she recovered, Freda returned to Oxford to finish her degree. BPL in turn decided enough was enough and proposed.

  “I have nothing to offer you but love and this companionship that I think we both feel,” he said. “I am a member of the Indian National Movement and a follower of Gandhi. For all I know, you might have to spend the years of our marriage waiting outside jail walls.” He did not know how prophetic his words would turn out to be.

  Freda remembered, “I never thought about it twice. I said, ‘Yes, whatever the future brings, we will share it together.”’ In saying yes to BPL, Freda was in effect agreeing to become an outlaw to her own country, to go against its rule. She had joined the revolution.