The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Read online

  Many years later, in conversation with her children, she likened herself to Marie Curie, who had agreed to marry for much the same reason. Marie herself had said of her relationship with Pierre, “An extraordinary romance unfolded. He spoke to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research—and asked me to share that life.”

  The similarities did not stop there, however. Marie, like Freda, had been devoted to her cause, was obsessed by her work (at the expense of her children), and had a deep-seated urge to help. She single-handedly saved hundreds of soldiers during the World War I with her mobile X-ray units. She was also brilliant, brave, single-minded, and the ultimate high-achiever, having won two Nobel Prizes, the first for physics, which she shared with her husband, the second on her own terms, for chemistry in 1911, the year of Freda’s birth.

  If BPL thought that marriage would mollify the prudes and racists, he was terribly mistaken. News of their engagement unleashed a tsunami of outrage that went far beyond the Oxford establishment all the way to Parliament. Theirs was to be the first marriage of a white Oxford undergraduate to a nonwhite student. The Establishment—those bodies in power who protect the status quo—quaked in fear and anger, recalling that only the year before, Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the viceroy of India, had been forced to bring a libel suit against a publication for alleging she’d had an affair with a black man, generally thought to be American actor Paul Robeson.

  “The controversy went all the way to London, where a Round Table Conference was being held with Mahatma Gandhi and a great many of India’s senior statesmen,” said Freda. “We were told by friends that Rangaswami Iyengar, the Indian journalist, lawyer, and politician had staunchly supported us. ‘Why shouldn’t our boys marry the best English girls? Why should they have to marry girls who are not at university?’ he argued. Hearing that, we went up to London to thank him.”

  The next hurdle for Freda was breaking the news to her mother. It was, in her words, “traumatic.” Marrying BPL meant leaving England for good, and since sea voyages were the only means of travel, the chances of seeing her mother again were slim.

  She had taken BPL to meet her mother, and BPL had tried to endear himself by taking her a present of golf balls, since she was by now a champion. But although the encounter was pleasant, it wasn’t warm. Mrs. Swann was conservative, and BPL was the total opposite. BPL was never truly friendly with his mother-in-law.

  “I remember I had a terrible toothache on the day I decided to tell my mother. That morning I went to the dentist with what I was going to do all bottled up inside me. He gave me gas, but it wouldn’t work. ‘You must have something big on your mind, because you are fighting the anesthetic and it won’t work properly. I can’t take the tooth out,’ he said. I went home with the tooth still in and faced my mother. She was at the kitchen sink washing the dishes when I told her I was going to marry BPL. She went very quiet and then said, ‘I trust you and your judgment and I know you would not marry a bad man, but I am really sorry you are leaving.’”

  Barbara Castle, on the other hand, was delighted. “Thank heavens,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to become a dull little suburban housewife.”

  All went smoothly after that except for one incident that almost caused the wedding to be canceled. “Father came from a very male-dominated world,” Kabir told me, “and he asked Mummy to peel an orange for him. ‘Why don’t you peel your own orange?’ snapped my independent-minded mother. This was an insufferable affront to Baba’s male pride, and they had a huge argument. It escalated into a real issue, until finally they reached a compromise: Mummy would peel oranges for him, but he would not begin to eat until she had peeled her own.”

  Freda married BPL on June 12, 1933, at the Oxford Registrar’s Office. She was twenty-two and he was twenty-six.

  “It was a low-key affair. After finishing lectures we called my mother and stepfather, and BPL called his cousin, Kuldip Bedi, to act as witnesses. The ceremony was simple, in the drab registry office, and afterward we had a very ordinary wedding breakfast. Neither of us wanted a big party or any fuss,” said Freda.

  The local newspaper covered the event—after all, this was a “first.” It was just the beginning of many firsts Freda clocked up. The photograph in the paper shows a smiling groom gallantly holding an umbrella over his bride, who looks demurely beautiful in a long white dress with frilled short sleeves, a large bow at the back, white gloves, and a small corsage of flowers clipped to her bodice.

  They were the last Western clothes she ever wore. From her marriage onward she happily wore Indian dress, in which she stated she felt perfectly at home. “From my wedding day onward I thought of myself as Indian,” she stated. The metamorphosis from provincial Derbyshire girl to cosmopolitan, politically-aware Indian bride was complete. Their honeymoon was also unorthodox—a camping tour of Europe with a Ugandan Indian friend, who owned the car. “Touring and tents! What could be better?” she enthused.

  Their creative, radical Oxford days were over. Both Freda and BPL received their degrees and a whole new life beckoned. It was not what Freda had imagined. She had successfully lined up a job as a cub reporter on the Derby Telegraph, her first stepping-stone to Fleet Street (as she had intended). Instead she went to Germany with her new husband, who had won a Humboldt scholarship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, to research a PhD in Political Science.

  “Bedi was concerned about the rise of Hitler, but he thought that as long as he didn’t get a chance to rant in Parliament, it would be all right. He was going to keep a very keen eye on the situation,” she said. She was not to see her homeland again for fourteen years.

  4

  Transitions

  BY THE TIME Freda reached Berlin, she was pregnant, and delighted with the prospect of motherhood. BPL somewhat protectively decided that she should not work, but instead live quietly in the charming little cottage they had found on the bank of Lake Wannsee. “It was really a lovely place, with a beautiful garden, and we had some very happy months there preparing for the child,” she said. She busied herself with making baby clothes, but could not resist going to Berlin University to study Hindi with a Punjabi professor—a necessary preparation, she thought, for a life on the subcontinent, and to counteract the full-on domesticity she found herself in.

  As a new bride with a baby coming and living in a foreign land, Freda missed her mother enormously, but was comforted by the presents she received from BPL’s mother, Bhabooji, whom she grew to love dearly.

  “She was a widow who, after her husband’s death, had gone to live with her own very enlightened family in the state of Pusla. Naturally the idea that her son had married a foreigner must have been rather a shock. With typical diplomacy, however, she accepted the situation and sent very beautiful clothes for the baby and also for me—saris and blouses—as well as delicacies that she thought her son must have missed while abroad. He always had a great time getting these food packages through customs. He once made the customs officer sample one of the really dry dal cakes to prove that it couldn’t be sold in Germany. Bhabooji was an extraordinary woman. I used to think of her as a great patriot.”

  BPL refrained from any political activity in Germany, although he was keeping up-to-date with the Free India movement in India. A frequent visitor to their lakeside cottage was Subhas Chandra Bose, who went on to become one of the most prominent and controversial leaders of the independence movement. Bose was educated at Cambridge and also had a European wife—Emilie Schenkl, an Austrian. He made it a point to visit sympathetic Indian students living in Europe, and the couple had much in common with Freda and BPL Bedi.

  “We came to know Bose intimately, and a deep friendship grew,” said BPL. Bose was a hard-core communist, a great admirer of the Soviet Union, who maintained that only an authoritarian state, not democracy, would be able to reshape India. (Later he was forced to resign as president of the Indian National Congress because his platform of violent resist
ance clashed with Gandhi’s peaceful pathway.)

  In Germany, however, Bose, won the young BPL over completely. “Freda and I were both fired up with the patriotic zeal of liberating the motherland from British imperialism,” BPL said. “While we were in Berlin, an eminent journalist asked me what was my agenda for India. ‘Live dangerously,’ I replied. ‘Live dangerously for every form of exploitation of man by man. Live dangerously for every form of injustice. Live dangerously for any violation of human dignity.’”

  On May 13, 1934, Freda gave birth to a son after just a four-hour labor. The baby weighed eight pounds and was perfectly healthy; Freda and BPL were besotted. “He seemed to me the most beautiful baby in the whole world—that goes without saying! He had rosy cheeks, a little cap of dark hair, and the most astoundingly beautiful eyelashes,” wrote Freda. They named him Ranga after the Indian statesman who had defeated the political opposition to their marriage, ten months previously.

  Nazism was all around, but Freda, wrapped up in motherhood, seemed blissfully unaware. “I was coming back from the market one day with some beautiful Jaffa oranges, which I presented to my landlady. She turned up her nose and said, ‘I don’t eat Jewish fruit.’ That’s when I found out she was a Nazi. I’d had no idea.” BPL had not joined any political club at Berlin University, nor was he taking part in any political activities, but he sensed that tension was mounting. He was friendly with many of the Indian students living in the International Houses, which were being increasingly dominated by Nazi representatives.

  In August 1934, Hitler was made führer. The morning the news broke, BPL put down his paper and announced, “Tomorrow we get on the train and go to Geneva. It’s not safe here anymore.”

  “He knew that Hitler could swoop down on the Indian students, which was precisely what happened,” said Freda. The life of drama and danger that she pledged to share with Bedi had begun. “You can imagine the state I was in, having to pack up everything in one day, and with BPL having to get the visas for Switzerland. But the next morning we were on the train!” she said.

  After their hasty exit, they spent a few pleasant weeks staying in accommodations that had been arranged by their old Oxford professor, Alfred Zimmern, who ran a school there. In October 1934, they finally made the decision to go to India and make it their permanent home. They sailed on the SS Conte Verde from northern Italy to Bombay, a journey of three weeks. Freda found the experience horrifying: She had to negotiate thousands of cockroaches on her way to the ship’s kitchen to get the milk she needed to nourish herself while she was breast-feeding Ranga. Her aversion to dirt and grime never left her. For the rest of her life in India she carried a wash-bag whenever she traveled, and refused to eat at roadside stalls. Her entry into India itself was not more welcoming. News of their political activities and pro-Independence stance in London had reached the authorities, and they were subjected to body searches. “Even little Ranga’s diaper was taken off and searched. Really, it was just too much,” she declared.

  An indignant, bedraggled Freda arrived in the Punjab, homeland of the Sikhs, after an exhausting two-day train journey wearing a dirty white cotton sari and carrying baby Ranga in a little French sailor suit, which to Freda “looked quite adorable.” She was met by Bhabooji, who was wearing the classic dress of the widow—white veil and kurta with black trousers—and BPL taught her how to touch his mother’s feet in the traditional way of respect. Because it was BPL’s mother, Freda was happy to oblige.

  There followed an exceptionally warm and affectionate welcome as the Bedi family followed the age-old rituals of bringing the bride into the groom’s house. The grandfather gave Freda the traditional Rs 11, Bhabooji placed a traditional red dupatta (a scarf-like cloth) around her shoulders, and the whole family poured gifts onto a red veil that had been placed on the ground. The state band was brought in, and played extremely loud music, and endless family delicacies were served. It was a stark contrast to the drab wedding ceremony they’d had in Oxford. Freda was presented with clean, beautiful saris, and Bhabooji tactfully persuaded Freda to get Ranga out of his sailor suit by giving him kurtas, the collarless muslin shirts, on the grounds they would offer more protection from the sun. “The whole event was very beautiful. Most importantly, there was no trace of racial antagonism,” said Freda.

  It could well have been so very different. Freda was a daughter of the British Empire, the greatest empire the world had ever known, four times larger than that of ancient Rome, governing one-fifth of humanity. It also was a commercial superpower, boasting the mightiest naval and military force ever seen. India was the jewel in their glittering crown. If you were born English, you were on the top rung of life, and Freda had gone one better. She was a graduate of the oldest, most prestigious English university, a woman of stature, fresh off the boat. In the society of “them and us,” Indians were all too used to the haughty, superior ways of the memsahibs bossing them around—and they were beginning to resent them.

  To their delight, Freda was nothing like that. She wore a sari, and she tried to speak to them in their own language. “That really knocked them out. Learning Hindi was her biggest coup de grâce,” said Kabir. “From the moment they met Mummy, she was warmly embraced as a daughter of the family.”

  Freda might have had her own reasons to be nervous about what she was walking into. It was well known that in India, brides, including Western ones, are given an extremely hard time, especially by the mother-in-law, who frequently relegates them to the status of servant. Beatings, and worse, are not uncommon. The Bedis, however, were not typical. They were broad-minded, cultured, individualistic, and unconventional to an unusual degree.

  Freda slipped into her new Indian life with consummate ease. “The village where BPL’s father’s home is located is a lovely place on the wide Punjabi plains surrounded by grain fields, and the Himalayas, covered with snow, stretch in an unbroken line only fifty miles away. To see them in the melting heat of a summer day, suspended as it were in a haze of hot air, is unforgettable,” she wrote to her friend Olive. “Strangely, I am happier here, despite all the hardness of life from the point of view of Western amenities. The more I see of India, the more I realize I was not built to live in the West. The kind of happiness I feel in an Indian bazaar I never felt in an English street. I am picking up Urdu and Punjabi by degrees and will be thrilled when I am fluent in them.”

  Initially they moved into a grand house in the Solon Hills belonging to BPL’s brother, Trilochan Das (TD Bedi), a session judge, and his modern, English-educated Indian wife. “It’s far too anglicized,” complained Freda. Almost immediately they joined both the Socialist and Communist parties. Freda took on the extra work of organizing the All India Civil Liberties Union of the Punjab. BPL happily set to work organizing demonstrations, using his brother’s car to go from meeting to meeting. TD, as a member of the elite Indian Civil Service, was theoretically on the opposite side of the fence from his brother, but like BPL, he was an independent-minded character.

  “Secretly, he was a sympathizer. He refused to welcome the governor general at the airport on the legal grounds that the judiciary was separate from the executive and therefore he was not obliged to turn up. Like my father, he was a rebel—he was suspended several times for wearing Indian clothes into court,” said Kabir.

  Once Ranga was acclimatized, they swiftly moved to a beautiful bungalow in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab. However, the strength of their principles was challenged in one particularly stark incident, recorded by BPL toward the end of his life.

  “We were living a salubrious existence with servants and all the luxuries life could offer. One day some comrades from the country came to visit. It was a very hot summer day, and because they were rough-looking, simple folk, the servants told them, ‘Sahib and Memsahib are sleeping. You must stay outside in the garden.’ They would not let them enter our house. When we woke, we were shocked at what happened and unanimously decided that very day to give up that way of living. W
e turned our back on the bungalow, gave away our furniture, and donated many thousands of books that we had brought over from our Oxford days to the Lahore Library.”

  It was a radical, some would say heroic, stance, but as Freda pointed out, it was underscored by the very practical reality that rent on the bungalow was high and their incomes were abysmally low. Poverty was to stalk them all their married life, as they put principles above financial security.

  Through his brother’s connections, BPL was offered a job as a professor of Economics at Khalsa College in Amritsar, place of the Golden Temple, and the spiritual home of the Sikhs, but he turned it down on the grounds that the college depended on government funds. To take it would mean giving up his fight for independence. He was becoming increasingly known for stirring up the people to revolution. Nobody dared give him work for fear of retribution from the authorities.

  “Life is one long work with rather less than reward in the way of money, but that is inevitable if you are living in an imperialist country and have the temerity to fight the government. The vast majority of all paying jobs are in government, or involve toadying to the government, which neither of us are prepared to do,” said Freda. “Spiritually one lives on a precipice here. Both BPL and I are determined that our fight for Indian independence will be the one and only aim of our lives. There is no good or satisfaction in amassing money and possessions, even if I wanted to, when people with any independent political opinions are liable at any minute to be either imprisoned or have their goods confiscated. So we live in a happy-go-lucky fashion and thoroughly enjoy ourselves.”

  BPL turned to freelance journalism, editing a sports magazine and then founding Monday Morning, an outspoken newspaper carrying articles on injustice wherever he and Freda found it. Together they launched a national quarterly journal, Contemporary India, which ran articles on current ideas in politics, economics, and philosophy as well as short stories by interesting new writers. Their income was sparse and sporadic.