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 This was the journal in which Freda Bedi's (her maiden name was Houlston) first published writing about India appeared. United India was a curious, nationalist-minded, vaguely left-wing, journal published by an oddball in the Indian diaspora in the UK, G.S. Dara. Partly as a marketing ploy, I suspect, the issue for March 1932 was dubbed 'the Oxford number' and consisted of very short articles by more than twenty Oxford students. In June he followed up with a 'Cambridge number' of the journal. Along with Freda, one of her close friends, Olive Shapley contributed. Among Indian students, Freda's husband-to-be B.P.L. Bedi wrote for the special number, as did Sajjad Zaheer and Humayun Kabir. Michael Foot and Tony Greenwood later rose to prominence in Labour governments; Frank Meyer and Dick Freeman were at this time the leading student communists at Oxford.  Freda's own contribution was insubstantial - but shows a focus on women, an element of sympathy for Bina Das, a nationalist would-be assassin, and familiarity with the Tribune, the main nationalist daily in Lahore. Olive Shapley wrote a much more militant piece - let's remember this was still the Class-against-Class period of international communism which concludes: If the woman's movement in India is to be used to prop up the capitalist system for a few more years before its inevitable collapse, then purdah and child-marriage would be lesser evils. The women of Russia did not achieve their emancipation through the media of welfare centres, baby clinics, and women's institutes, and it is greatly to be hoped that the women of India will not be deceived by these sops to their awakening consciousness.
 Kalwinder Singh Dhindsa from Derby has written this poem about Kabir Bedi and his Derby-born mother, who married a Punjabi Sikh. When Freda was born in Derby, in 1911, it had no Punjabi population at all - quite by chance, it now has a large and prominent Sikh community.  Ahead of the publication next month of The Lives of Freda, the excellent Srinagar-based daily Rising Kashmir has published a piece by me about Freda Bedi's role in the Kashmiri resistance in the mid-1940s and then in support of the radical administration that took power locally at the close of 1947.  This photo comes from about 1948, when Freda Bedi was a member of a left-wing women's militia in Kashmir, the women's Self-Defence Corps. She is with her two sons - Kabir is in her arms while Ranga is astride Rufus, the family's Great Dane.  In 1963, Freda Bedi was the victim of a scurrilous and vindictive piece of journalism which deeply upset her. The article appeared on the front-page of a Bombay weekly, The Current, and was the work of its founder and editor, D.F. Karaka. He had been an Oxford contemporary of Freda and her husband - indeed thirty years earlier he had been the first Indian President of the Oxford Union debating society. By the 1960s, he had been reduced to tawdry, sensationalist journalism. Karaka's article accused Freda of just about everything: financial irregularities, abusing her role as a civil servant, innuendo about her friendship with Sheikh Abdullah, and a suggestion of involvement in political skulduggery in Kashmir. At its heart, though, was the suggestion that Freda Bedi was using her Buddhism, and her support for Tibetan refugees, as a cover for the promotion of Communism. This was twenty years after Freda had broken her links with the communist left and a decade after her husband had done so. Given that Communist China was the oppressor of the Tibetan people and the religion so central to their way of life, the suggestion that she was acting as a Communist agent was both deeply wounding and very damaging. What particularly upset Freda - in the recollection of colleagues and family - was the suggestion that a fellow British convert to Buddhism was behind some of the smears. That suspicion seems to have been well founded. There's more in my biography of Freda, out in India soon:  The Lives of Freda: the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi by Andrew Whitehead to be published by Speaking Tiger in February  This exceptional photograph shows Freda Bedi with no less than five future prime ministers. It was taken in the Kashmiri town of Sopore in August 1945, at the annual conference of the main political party there, the National Conference. It captures a remarkable constellation of political talent. The older man to the left of the tall, bearded man holding a child is Jawaharlal Nehru, who had just been released from jail and hurried to Kashmir where his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was staying. She is just to the right of the man carrying the child. And the youngster? Almost certainly Indira's son, Rajiv Gandhi, then just a few days short of his first birthday. All three became prime ministers, leading India for a total of thirty-eight years. The man holding Rajiv is Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the most prominent Pashtun nationalist of his era, also known as 'Badshah' Khan and as the Frontier Gandhi; on the other side of Nehru is another leading political figure from the North West Frontier, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai. On the left of the picture is Mridula Sarabhai, who later spearheaded efforts to retrieve the many thousands of women abducted at Partition. Behind Indira Gandhi is the imposing figure of Sheikh Abdullah, the commanding Kashmiri nationalist leader of his generation. Sheikh Abdullah's colleague and later rival, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, is standing behind Nehru. Both in turn became heads of government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir with the title of prime minister (these days it's chief minister). Freda Bedi is shown on the far right. She is clearly pregnant - her son, Kabir, was born in Lahore the following January. Her husband, B.P.L. Bedi, is behind her, largely hidden from the camera. The couple next to them haven't been identified. My thanks to Ramesh Tamiri for alerting me to this wonderful photo - if anyone has a high res copy, please do let me know.  The Lives of Freda:
the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi by Andrew Whitehead to be published by Speaking Tiger in February All three of Freda Bedi's childhood homes in Derby survive - which is remarkable for a city which has been knocked around more than a bit. But she's not well known in her home city - after all, she never returned to live there after her years as a student at Oxford - and there's no blue plaque or tribute to her. I do hope The Lives of Freda may help to redress that.  She was born on Monk Street, above the watch and jewellery shop run by her father. When last I was in Derby, the building was a tanning studio. Although the family moved from here when Freda was still a baby, this is the best option for a plaque. Let's hope it happens. The family moved to Wade Street in Littleover, a move up the social ladder. Freda had keen memories of the trees in the back garden and - unlikely as it seems now - rural walks with her brother over to Mickleover. Her home was called Wade House.
Freda's mother at some stage inherited money - or perhaps it came from her second husband's family - and the family designed and built a much grander house on Keats Avenue in Mickleover. This was close to the golf course, where Nellie was one of the most accomplished women members.  And what would the blue plaque say? Well, perhaps something like this -   The Lives of Freda has a cover - a nice one. Nothing quite convinces the author that his book is about to reach daylight as much as a cover design. This photograph of Freda Bedi was taken in Lahore in the early 1940s - at about the time she was locked up in a Lahore jail. It captures her idealism and of course her twin identities, English and Indian.
Warm thanks to the Bedi family for this and other photos. |
The Lives of Freda- a blog about my biography of Freda Bedi 
Andrew Whitehead
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