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THE LIVES OF FREDA: THE BLOG
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Here I am talking about Freda Bedi's journalism - and the possibility that she was the first Indian woman journalist writing a regular column about women's issues. That column 'From a Woman's Window' appeared in the Lahore daily the Tribune for a year or so in the early 1940s. I was talking to Krishna Prasad, former editor of Outlook magazine, and he's posted this on YouTube. This review has appeared on the books page of the Telegraph in Calcutta. I'm not sure what I think of being called a 'veteran' journalist - but I suppose I've been called worse. And at least the reviewer likes the book - and indeed has highlighted Freda's championing of 'the voices of women in the struggle for Kashmir'. The website The Print has carried a chunky piece from The Lives of Freda: https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/freda-bedi-the-english-girl-married-to-a-punjabi-who-joined-indias-freedom-struggle/214143/ And the Sunday Guardian has published an extract from the book's introduction: https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/culture/british-birth-indian-cultural-affinity
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It's so fitting that the Tribune, the paper that Freda Bedi used to write for, has done a big spread on her and the biography being published in the next few days. Freda had a path-breaking weekly column at one time entitled 'From a Woman's Window' - a very early journalistic endeavour by a woman for women and often addressing gender-specific issues. The Tribune also sent Freda to Bengal in December 1943 to report on the calamitous famine there. When Freda wrote for the paper, it was based in what was then her home city of Lahore - indeed it was the city's leading nationalist daily. It's now in Chandigarh. The paper's archives were recently digitised which meant that the task of retrieving Freda's journalism - and stories about her and her husband - was hugely easier than in the old days of leafing through mouldering volumes of bound copies of the paper. Here's the link to today's article: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/spectrum/fearless-freda/725486.
And if you want to see the article as laid out - it's the cover of the Sunday Tribune's Spectrum supplement - then here's the link: https://epaper.tribuneindia.com/2020078/Spectrum/SP-10-February-2019#dual/1/1 |
The Lives of Freda- a blog about my biography of Freda Bedi Archives
September 2021
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