The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 8

  By 1943, the war was beginning to turn against Germany, and two years later, in May 1945, peace was finally declared, ending the global onslaught of terror, destruction, and death. Freda began to relax. She could sniff freedom in the air for India too, the goal that she had dedicated her life to since the moment she set foot in India. She and BPL had patiently waited for twelve years to increase their family and produce a sibling for Ranga. Now, she felt, her job was nearing completion and it would be safe for her to have another child. She would have the time and energy to devote to a new baby, unlike with Tilak. Freda promptly became pregnant.

  She had another prophetic dream in which she saw a Tibetan figure holding a boy in front of him. He said to her, “Take care of him.” However, at this point in her life, she knew no Tibetans—they had yet to pour out of their homeland into exile. The dream was a harbinger of things to come.

  On January 16, 1946, Freda gave birth to her second son, whom they named Kabir, after the sixteenth-century much-loved mystic poet and saint who preached peace between Hindus and Muslims, and the oneness of all religions. From the outset, Freda regarded Kabir as a special child and the closest to her of all her children. Sheikh Abdullah sent a congratulatory telegram from Riasi jail, where he was serving one of his many prison sentences. “He will grow up, I am sure, as a very handsome boy and his forehead depicts him to be a great thinker and revolutionary. May he live long and have a happy life.”

  Kabir fit happily into The Huts commune where he was guarded by Rufus, the Great Dane (his chowkidar, as BPL called him), given milk by Clarabelle the buffalo, and doted on by Ranga.

  In 1947, as Independence neared, Freda returned to England to attend a large socialist conference and to see her mother and show her the new child. On August 15, 1947, at the stroke of midnight while she was in England, Indian independence was declared. After all her work and sacrifice, ironically Freda had missed it. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s leading statesman and its first prime minister, made one of the most eloquent speeches in history. He said, “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny. And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

  She would have dearly loved to be there celebrating with her husband and all her friends, but BPL had warned her to stay away. Already the tension between Hindus and Muslims was mounting, and BPL knew the bloodshed that was about to occur. He had written her an urgent letter saying, “Don’t come back to Lahore at this time, whatever you do.”

  He was right. At the same time an independent, free India was born, a brand-new country, the Muslim state of Pakistan was also created, out of what had formerly been known as the Punjab.

  It should have been a moment of great joy and celebration. Instead India awoke to a bloodbath. Rather than being united under the banner of freedom, the subcontinent was abruptly split apart on the basis of religion. A massive cross-migration had begun, with thousands of Muslims fleeing India to get to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs going in the opposite direction to India. The Punjab bore the brunt of it. Lahore, the capital (and Freda’s and the Bedis’ home) found itself on the Pakistani side of the border, while Amritsar (the Sikhs’ holiest place) was a few miles into India.

  While Nehru was giving his speech, Lahore was ablaze, with riots in the streets as gangs of Sikhs and Muslims clashed. By August 15, Lahore was on fire. Over the following days it only got worse. Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus all engaged in sprees of slaughter, rape, and carnage. Trainloads of refugees that had been hijacked en route arrived at stations filled with dead bodies. Women were stripped naked, paraded through streets, raped, and tattooed with their rapists’ names. Corpses piled up on street corners. Villagers were hacked to pieces, babies were burned. Temples were razed to the ground. There was a total collapse of public order, as police stood by or joined in, according to their religious affiliations. The stench of death and burning filled the air. It was estimated that more than half a million people were killed and more than a million made homeless.

  For Freda it was physically, emotionally, ethically, and spiritually devastating. “I never felt there was any difference between Hindus and Muslims,” she said. “We lived in a society that respected people of all religions, castes, and creeds. But when the Punjab was broken up, we had the traumatic experience of seeing rifts and fissures, yawning like gulfs, between people suddenly divided against themselves. It was shocking and terrible for us—we who had lived in an atmosphere of harmony.”

  According to Kabir, the ever-confident BPL faced the crisis head-on. “Father was in Lahore, right on the border. He helped people going both ways! He pretended to be whoever might be useful in the moment—he could speak all languages—and would talk his way out of every situation each time he was confronted.”

  One of the greatest tragedies of India’s independence was that the Sikhs lost their homeland, an irony not lost on the Bedis, who had put their hearts and souls into the battle. They could no longer stay in Lahore, which the Times of India now described as “a city of the dead.” Nehru had gone there himself to plead for peace, to no avail, and declared himself “sick with horror” at the sight of thousands, mostly Sikhs and Hindus, lying dead following the frenzy of killing.

  Packing their meager belongings, Freda, BPL, Ranga, and baby Kabir moved to Kashmir, the beautiful land north of the Punjab. The idealistic, romantic, basic, and communal life in The Huts was over. A new era was beginning.

  8

  Aftermath

  IN THE LAST few weeks of 1947, the Bedis moved into a fine gabled house on the edge of Dal Lake that was equipped with comforts and conveniences unheard of in The Huts. They had been drawn not by the landscape but by their great friend Sheikh Abdullah, who was now prime minister of the cojoined State of Jammu and Kashmir. He was promising everything they believed in—religious harmony between Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, and Harijans (the Untouchables); female emancipation; and land reform. They were delighted to support him. In Freda’s eyes, Sheik Abdullah was virtually a saint.

  “He is a Moses-like figure who has, along with his party, led the Kashmiris out of the virtual slavery of the maharaja’s kingly rule to responsible government, and given a new self-respect to these gifted people. To this country, whose beauty is tragically silhouetted against the great, unchanging poverty of its peasants and working classes, he and his government have brought fresh faith and a new approach,” she said.

  Freda’s secret ambitions went even higher, however. With her soft guiding hand, she hoped that Kashmir and its co-state, Jammu, would become the blueprint for the rest of the new India to emulate. It was political ideology of the highest order, an audacious, possibly arrogant dream, driven not by the greed for political power but by an altruistic ideal to create that better, fairer, happier world that she had been chasing since Oxford.

  Right now, her hero and his state were in deep trouble. Tens of thousands of tribal warriors were pouring over the northwestern frontier from Pakistan, hell-bent on taking Srinagar, with its airport, and making it their own. These were the Pathans, the famous fiercest Islamic fighting force in the world, who were raping, pillaging, and hacking to death every infidel they could find in revenge for the massacres carried out on their Muslim brothers in the border areas. They were stopped at Baramulla, a town a few miles upstream from Srinagar, but not before the town had been reduced to ashes, and its inhabitants—including the Irish nuns at the Baramulla Convent and a priest and nurses in the Baramulla Hospital—had been butchered.

  Freda and BPL nobly rushed to the rescue. “We decided we could be most useful in Kashmir and that where our friends were in danger, we should add our might to the struggle, which we had in effect been a part of for so many years,” Freda said. “It had never been our fate since our marriage in 1934, to live a particularly safe life in the political conditions then obtaining in India, and we had hoped that
with the dawn of Independence we should have a chance to settle down to solid, constructive work to build up a free India, with so many millions of our fellow countrymen and women. But there was a stretch of danger and difficulty still to be crossed.”

  The air was thick with tension. Kashmir balanced precariously on the brink as it struggled to decide where it was going to place itself—whether it would join with the Muslims in the newly formed Pakistan or accede to union with India. The tug-of-war was fraught, passionate, and vicious.

  Freda admitted in a letter to Olive how grim it was. “It has been a new world, both harrowing and inspiring. As you can imagine, it was an electric situation. The tribal raiders (helped by copious drafts of Pakistani petrol, modern firearms, and a hard core of Pakistani officers and men) had been stopped within a few hundred yards of Srinagar by the first Indian troops, who’d been flown in in the nick of time. We more or less camped out in our new house in Srinagar along with the family Great Dane, who has the color and appearance of a young lion.”

  Freda jumped right in to start helping restore order to the chaotic, dangerous situation

  “The first thing Mummy did when we got to Kashmir was to get a group together and go to the church to clean it up. I was with her. Statues had been defaced and were lying smashed. She got down on her hands and knees to clean the blood off the floor and walls. The marauders had used machetes—blood was everywhere. The horror of it only urged her on,” recalled Ranga, who was fourteen years old at the time.

  The second thing Freda did was to rush to the aid of the multitude of refugees arriving daily from the occupied territories in a constant stream of misery. “Refugees were pouring into Srinagar from all the enemy-occupied areas and battle fronts, a few with some meager possessions, the majority with nothing more than what they stood up in, and these mostly cotton summer clothes utterly inadequate in face of the approaching winter. Their number in Srinagar city alone reached seventeen thousand, no small number to house, feed, and clothe throughout that long, bleak winter, the worst, as luck would have it, for forty years. It snowed for three solid months—we were completely cut off by snow on the one remaining pass, and no plane could land.”

  Freda focused on the women and children, setting up twenty-three milk-and-relief centers and recruiting a band of Kashmiri girls to help her. “We all acted as older sisters to the thousands of children and women suffering not only physical hardships in the desperate cold but often mental torture when relations and children had been killed, abducted, or lost in the miserable trek to safety,” she said. “It was exhausting work—there wasn’t time to breathe.”

  Ranga witnessed what his mother went through. “It was a nightmare. Utter chaos. Everything had shut down, including the schools. Mummy worked around the clock, leaving at seven a.m. and coming home around ten p.m. She was organizing it all—the camps, the food, the medical supplies, the tents. Selfless volunteers were coming in from everywhere, and Mummy organized them too. She was absolutely hands-on.”

  Freda wasn’t the only eminent Englishwoman helping the refugees. Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last viceroy of India, tirelessly worked with the displaced and wounded after Independence, and she, too, appeared by Freda’s side. She declared herself deeply shocked by what she saw in Srinagar but was full of admiration at the sight of the women engaged in the relief effort. “It is always true that good comes out of evil and that there is no doubt that this crisis has brought out women to play their full part in their country’s affairs, which would otherwise have taken years of evolution to achieve,” she wrote in a letter to Sheikh Abdullah.

  Edwina Mountbatten and Freda Bedi were clearly united in their outlook and mission. Edwina’s next move bore all the hallmarks of Freda’s persuasive powers. On returning to Delhi she persuaded Nehru (with whom she was particularly close) to send more government help to the Kashmiri refugees, which he duly did. Freda was never bashful about pulling the most powerful strings she could to achieve her goals—a trait that continued throughout the rest of her life.

  Srinagar may have stopped the marauding hordes of warrior tribesmen from entering its gates, but they were never far away, threatening the most savage killing and maiming imaginable. Freda was particularly vulnerable. BPL was far away in Delhi, working to reopen the trade lifeline, shut since the war, which was essential to Kashmir’s economy. So she was alone with Ranga and Kabir, with only Rufus the Great Dane to guard them.

  To protect herself and her family, Freda did the unthinkable. She took up arms by joining a women’s militia—the Women’s Self-Defence Corps—started by some feisty members of the Communist Party affiliated with Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference Party. They demanded to be trained and given arms in the face of the countless women being raped, abducted, and killed all around them. For Freda, a follower of Gandhi, it was a radical but necessary step. She spent hours drilling on a parade ground, learning to shoot a gun and lob a grenade alongside seventy other women, all volunteers gleaned from all classes, who had pledged to protect not only themselves but the citizens of Srinagar itself. This Band of Sisters broke all cultural, social, and historical traditions in the subcontinent, where women conventionally took submissive roles (in public at least). It was a big story, and was reported with pride in The People’s Age, a newspaper to which BPL contributed.

  “For the first time on the soil of India there is being built an army of women trained to use the rifle and other modern weapons of war. The women of Kashmir are the first in India to build an army of women trained to use the rifle. By their example they have made Indian history, filled our chests with pride, and raised our country’s banner higher among the great nations of the world.”

  The writing bears all the hallmarks of BPL’s communist rhetoric and with it the pledge to achieve female emancipation.

  Nehru came to inspect the Women’s Self-Defence Corps, and press photographs reveal Freda standing boldly upright, rifle in hand, the only white face among a sea of brown ones. The training took up hours of her precious time, but in the end she never had to shoot anyone.

  By the beginning of 1949, things were quieting down a little. On January 1, a cease-fire had been established following the condemnation of the Kashmir crisis by the United Nations. The maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, had fled, and much to Freda’s approval Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Harijans, and Christians began living peacefully side by side, in the capital at least. For the next few years, Freda and BPL got down to building up a new “enlightened” society. “Kashmir with its socialist government and its young leaders can lead India and rebuild this miserable country. I have great faith in it and love it, too. It’s beautiful, rich in talent and natural resources,” she claimed.

  For the first (and last) time, BPL was bringing in a regular salary—employed in various capacities by Sheik Abdullah’s government. Freda’s portfolio was massive. Not only did she continue her work with the refugees, she also established a Houseboatmen’s and Domestic Workers Unemployment Relief School, giving technical training to the children of classes hard hit by the stoppage of the lucrative tourist trade. She was delighted that the training carried with it a monthly cash payment for each child, thus enabling hard-hit families to buy food.

  She and BPL also rewrote more than ninety school and college textbooks. “Kashmir was the first part of India to reorganize its teaching materials so that the books fitted in with the new world and the new free India that our children now live in,” she boasted.

  In a brief respite from her heavy workload, Freda managed to become pregnant again. The decision to have another child was not prompted by maternal longing, however, but the consideration that Kabir might be lonely. She wrote to Olive, “The latest family news is that we are expecting a sister (finally, a sister) for the boys in early September. It’s really a lot to take on—a new baby in the midst of present-day Kashmir, but Kabir needs someone his own age—and there’s a lovely garden to relax in and forget, sometimes, the quarrels and miseries of the world.
So I carry on and make baby clothes. Ranga, who is slender with brown eyes and black hair, is now head boy at Hadow School and takes his matriculation examination next year. Kabir is in kindergarten.” (How Freda knew that her unborn baby would be female is unknown.)

  On September 15, 1949, Freda gave birth to a girl. They called her Gulhima (shortened to Guli), meaning “Rose of the Snows,” a fitting name, Freda thought, for a child born in the valley of the Himalayas, famed for its snow, flowers, and gardens. “She’s a happy, independent little being, with golden hair and black eyes,” she said.

  Never one to forsake her calling for motherhood, the very next year, Freda was back at work, this time as a member of the Board of English and Philosophic Studies at the newly founded Jammu and Kashmir University. By the autumn of 1950, she had taken on the additional role of visiting professor in the pioneering college, newly established in Srinagar especially for Kashmiri girls wanting to get their BA or BS degrees. She worked late into the night, diligently marking all the papers.

  “We hope to produce our first graduates by the summer of 1952. There are 160 girls studying at the college, which is quite a good number for a part of the world where in the old days everything was done to discourage rather than encourage higher education for women,” she said.

  More work was in store. In 1950, all of North India suffered the most dreadful floods. Freda became Secretary of the Government Flood Relief Committee for Srinagar and Suburbs. In the same year, both Kabir and Guli contracted whooping cough. Despite all this, she could still see the bright side. “The mountains and lakes are full of mysterious mists and colors. Living on the edge of one of the world’s volcanoes has its compensations,” she told Olive.

  There was time for a social life. Freda was very highly regarded throughout Kashmir, and with their connections the Bedis became a celebrated couple, frequenting many high-society cocktail parties.