The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi

by Vicki Mackenzie

  “After a short while we were escorted to the commandant, a strapping British colonel whose discomfiture was even greater than that of his juniors. He said he could not allow the visit without confirmation from headquarters. Furthermore, he continued, providing accommodation for a difficult prisoner’s wife and child or acquiring transport to the nearest town was out of the question. He didn’t know what to do with us. We could see he was rattled, and confused! At sundown he relented and conceded that we could stay in the officers’ suite and would be able to meet Papa the next morning, at nine, for one hour. In the end we were given the VIP treatment, including an invitation to dine in the officers’ mess hall. Mummy politely declined.

  “Mummy was up at first light, and after breakfast (served in our rooms) we were escorted back to the commandant. The atmosphere was tense. The colonel told us there had been an ‘incident.’ The political prisoners had gone on hunger strike and had had to be force-fed—with the exception of Mr. Bedi, who had aggressively resisted. They had been protesting against prison conditions, alleging it was being run like a concentration camp, with the inmates being denied the rights of political detainees.

  “News of our visit had spread, and another attempt to force-feed BPL had been made at six o’clock that morning. Apparently eight people had gone to Papa’s room and found him to be calm and generally cooperative. They put together the feeding apparatus, with no protest from Papa. As the medical officer bent over him, Papa sprang into action. He kicked the attendant in the groin, carried him to the door, and threw him off the veranda, causing him to dislocate his shoulder. Two other guards were floored, and the others backed off.

  “Mummy remained very calm. ‘Didn’t you know he holds the All India hammer-throwing record?’ she asked. Knowing we were there, Papa said he would eat voluntarily, but only if he could see us.’ Of the incident BPL remarked, ‘The battle lasted only two minutes, my honor was sustained.’”

  The story became apocryphal among the Bedis.

  Freda and Ranga finally found BPL the sole occupant of a ten-foot-square room, the last one in a long row in a barrack-like building. There was a mattress on the floor, no furniture or curtain at the window. The books they had brought him were confiscated. The meeting was warm but abysmally short. When they emerged, one of the escorting officers commented, “Mrs. Bedi, your husband is a very strong man.” Freda, polite as always and willing to connect with everyone, struck up conversation and was amazed to discover he was from Derbyshire.

  After they left, BPL’s hunger strike continued for twenty-five days, during which time he received several beatings, which left permanent damage to his spine. He always walked with a cane after that.

  The visit marked a turning point in Freda’s life. Her marriage was founded on the vow to unite with BPL in his fight for Indian independence, whatever it took. She now decided to join him in jail. Having discussed the matter over with him in Deoli, she applied to become one of Gandhi’s handpicked satyagrahis, the select band of protestors who were willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives, to free India from colonial rule. It was the radical move, she told Olive, that was needed to get the job done and give the oppressed a voice. Freda was determined to live out her beliefs to the full, even if it meant leaving Ranga without both parents.

  Conceived when Gandhi was working as a lawyer in South Africa, the Satyagraha movement was defined as the Force Born of Truth, Love, and Nonviolence. As his independence movement gathered increasing support, Gandhi rightly judged that a handpicked band of highly committed, disciplined individuals, his satyagrahis, would have a greater impact on public and official opinion than would mob unrest. Furthermore he would run less risk of losing control of them in the heat of the action. Freda explained, “The idea was that only the few would go to jail to protest for the many.”

  It was a momentous decision, especially in light of the fact that they had already lost one child in the name of their political activities. Torn between compassion for the many and the care of her child, Freda chose the bigger picture. She reasoned that the many, suffering as they were under exploitation and poverty, had no one to champion them, whereas Ranga was surrounded by doting relatives, especially Bhabooji. In the end, as always, Freda followed the force of her convictions.

  “I didn’t want to make things worse on the domestic side, but on the other hand I felt I should back up the nationalist movement in whatever humble way I could, even if it meant suffering for some months in prison. I also wanted to support BPL and share what he was going through,” she reasoned.

  Freda began to prepare. She arranged for BPL’s brother, the judge, to support her family financially while she was behind bars, and she also carefully explained to Ranga what she was going to do and why.

  “Mummy swore me to secrecy. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone! I was really scared. I had this persistent raw feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember one incident when Mummy took us to have our anti–cholera-and-typhoid injections and the doctor said, ‘Freda, it’s very wise to have these shots before offering Satyagraha,’ and the raw feeling intensified,” Ranga recalled.

  Over the next few months she took her son back for extended visits to the family land at Dera Baba Nanak, where his paternal grandmother and her extended family were living, to acclimatize him to the impending separation. It was a clever move.

  “I loved it at Bhabooji’s. I was given an endless supply of sweets, was allowed to stay up and sleep in late, and was given a pair of quails, and a parrot, and was made the sole egg collector. On my return to Fateh Chand College I could hardly wait for Mummy to go through with her plans.”

  Freda waited some time to be chosen, but she was finally accepted by Gandhi as his fifty-seventh satyagrahi—the first British woman to be admitted to his elite band. Instructions came: On no account was she to retaliate or resist if she were arrested or beaten. The main thrust of her protest, like that of all satyagrahis, was to speak out against “the crime” of involving India in Britain’s participation in World War II without first consulting the legislative assembly. Gandhi argued that to fight another nation’s war without personal choice was unacceptable. (Ironically, Freda seemed not to notice that Britain’s war was against fascism, the very thing that she, too, declared she loathed.)

  She duly wrote to the district magistrate informing him that she intended to break the law by holding a mass rally during which she would urge the people not to support the military effort until India became a democracy and they could choose for themselves. But for all her outer composure, when the day came, Freda admitted she was scared.

  “Suddenly I felt alone, agonizingly alone. I could have wept for my sheer aloneness. I wanted to talk to BPL, to have his cheery voice near me,” she said. “I suppose in all crises of our life we get that feeling of isolation as though we are treading a path into the future all alone, for all the love that surrounds us—when we first leave home, when we marry, when we have a choice to make at some crossroads of our life. Perhaps we feel like that when we are on the brink of death. And on the borders of that aloneness, there comes another feeling, of being given the strength to carry on, of not being alone anymore.”

  Freda was buoyed up by the breadth of her vision, and the revolution she hoped she would ignite: “That spark will go on burning until it ignites a greater fire than the one from which it sprang. And you are the spark of a greater fire, although you barely know it,” she said.

  February 21, 1941, was the day Freda chose to make her biggest protest yet. However, in the hours beforehand, a comic cat-and-mouse game with the police was played out.

  “First a local inspector arrived to inquire about her plans and to inform her she was being put under twenty-four-hour surveillance,” says Ranga. “Then several police surrounded the house and compound. Mummy’s response was to send tea and snacks out to them every few hours. In the meantime huge crowds were gathering, and the villagers, undeterred by the police presence, erected a small st
age from which she could address the rally. The police tried to pull it down, but they could not get close enough. Their plan was to arrest her before she reached the stage.

  “At four a.m., when it was still dark, the police burst into the house, but Mummy was nowhere to be found. They searched the surrounding farmhouses, but to no avail, so they started a rumor that she had already been arrested in the hope that the multitude would disperse. By now some forty thousand people had arrived by train, bullock cart, or on foot to witness an Englishwoman offering Satyagraha, and there was something of a carnival atmosphere.

  “Mummy suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere. She had been hiding under the stage. It was the most dramatic event of my early life. Mummy was utterly calm, but I was shaking. She told the crowd that any form of violence or resistance to her arrest would defeat the cause and would deeply disappoint her, leading her to regard it as a failure of her mission. She went on to say she had chosen Dera because it was the home of Baba Nanak and the Bedi clan. Mummy then came over to me and gave me a big hug.”

  Freda recounted, “A local policeman with a beard came forward politely. ‘Regretting it is my duty, but I must arrest you,’ he said. To his right was the English police inspector from Amritsar, who was there because they did not know how an Englishwoman might react when she was arrested. He was surprisingly small, in an unwieldy toupee and had a walrus mustache. He looked like Old Bill. I wanted to laugh, and the corners of my mouth twitched. ‘I am quite ready. Take me along with you,’ I said.”

  It took Freda and the policemen at least thirty minutes to get through the throng, who were all shouting, “Freedom for India! Long live Gandhiji! Long live Comrade Bedi! Release the Detainees!” and were throwing garlands over the awaiting car. “Garlands are not allowed,” said Old Bill. The villagers peered wonderingly into the car as it sped Freda away.

  At the police station the comedy continued. Following procedure, Old Bill asked her nationality. “English.” Where was she born? “Derby.” What color would she say her eyes were? “You might call them blue-gray.” She was taken swiftly on to the courtroom. The trial took fifteen minutes, with an embarrassed, red-faced young judge, fresh out of England, admitting to her, “I find this as embarrassing as you do.”

  Freda looked directly into his eyes and replied, “Don’t worry, I don’t find it unpleasant at all. Treat me as an Indian woman and I will be quite content.”

  After fumbling in his Defense of India rules book the judge handed her the sentence: six months’ rigorous imprisonment in Lahore female jail.

  “Surely you mean Lahore Women’s Jail,” Freda replied archly, offended by his grammar.

  The sentence was exceptionally harsh—no other satyagrahi was given as much. Freda reacted with customary composure, and with no anger or malice. There was even kindness. ‘Maybe it was because they wanted to make an example out of me, because I was English and the first Western woman to offer Satyagraha. Or maybe it was the ignorance of the young civil servant presiding at the trial. He gave the sentence regretfully and with many apologies. He was a decent sort of man,” she said.

  Freda was just thirty years old when she went to jail. She had come a long way from the little watchmaker’s shop in Derby. In those years she had become a trailblazer, defying expectations and convention by marrying a Sikh, living in a left-wing commune, and raising literally thousands of people to insurrection by the power of her oratory—all in the name of humanity and justice.

  6

  Prisoner

  CONVICT NO. 3613 started her prison sentence on a suitably rebellious note by refusing to hand over her wedding ring, which was classified as jewelry. It had not left her finger since the day she married BPL, and she was not prepared to part with it now. Drawing herself up to her full height and putting on her most English accent, she quoted her rights as a Class A political prisoner, which did not state that “jewelry” had to be relinquished. She won.

  Next step was getting what was called her “history ticket”: weight, 132 pounds; height, five feet six and a half inches; occupation, professor of English; crime, political; sentence, six months’ “rigorous imprisonment.” She was then marched through a barred outer gate and inner iron door that reminded her of entering a safe, and began her incarceration.

  It was not the dank, rat-infested hellhole one might imagine. Her cell was a room, which she shared with other satyagrahis—all self-sacrificing Indian women, who warmly welcomed the infamous white woman into their midst. Her time as a prisoner was recorded in a diary—later published in a book she wrote, Behind Mud Walls.

  “My cell mates are quiet, determined souls, not noisy rebels, the stuff of which Gandhi’s little army is made. They are not professional politicians, but widows and married women who have left behind their children, husbands, and households to offer themselves up (for arrest) in the service of their country.”

  Freda laid out her bedroll on the floor and began her life behind bars. She adapted relatively easily to the regime, which by Western standards was remarkably relaxed. Together the women cooked their own meals on firewood fires with basic rations issued by the prison: cooking fat, sugar, flour, bread, vegetables, milk, tea, and spices. Occasionally their diet was brightened by provisions sent in from family and friends, which they shared. Freda received baskets of fruit and, most incongruously, flowers from admirers and well-wishers. A particular bouquet of nasturtiums, sweet peas, and cornflowers elicited an ecstatic diary entry: “Flowers in jail! What they mean only a prisoner can know.”

  It was an extraordinarily social environment. Women had their babies with them in jail, and friends sometimes volunteered to be inside simply to keep their loved ones company. When they weren’t working, they sang and danced, especially on feast days, beating drums and swirling their skirts. Freda noted that the laxity of rules was excellent for keeping tension at bay and making imprisonment bearable. (It helped that the deputy superintendent had been one of Freda’s students.) The guards even turned a blind eye, or ear to the revolutionary songs with their theme of independence.

  “It was the go-ahead to revolt—to resist autocracy with every fiber of our being—and fight for the ultimate human values, the freedom of the human spirit,” Freda said.

  Her “hard labor” was not hauling bricks or smashing rocks but working in the prison garden from 8:00 a.m. until noon, and again from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Of all punishments, nothing could have suited nature-loving Freda better. It was a godsend. She set to work tilling the soil, tending the fruit trees and vegetables: marrows, cucumbers, onions, okra, lemons, mangoes, and mulberries. Surrounded by plants and birds, the mystical Freda was often “transported” beyond the prison walls. Her diary records how entranced she was by the early hooting of an owl, the tenderness of a pair of parrots making love, the crows flying purposefully home. And when the garden bloomed, she became positively ecstatic.

  “The garden in the early morning is delirious with young leaves, the scent of orange blossom and the crimson roses smelling like heaven. I’ve never seen so many roses in my life as I have this past fortnight. I put them in earthenware pots and brass bowls and then haven’t anything to eat off or cook in.” Freda was always good at putting a positive spin on even the most difficult of situations (and people), however, and a later diary entry when the summer was upon her reveals how much her survival in jail depended on the healing power she found in nature. “Out into the garden when the moon and evening star were together in the sky. It was a soft dark green everywhere after the thunder and rain last night—and it consoled me as it has always done. I can’t live without green things. If I hadn’t had even this bit of dryish jungle here, I would have dried up myself and become ill,” she confessed.

  When she wasn’t outside, Freda kept busy. She taught English, gave lectures on Marx, and as Gandhi exhorted, she spun cloth. Initially Freda found it soothing, but she spun so enthusiastically that she developed eczema on her hands.

  Life behind bars was not all song,
dance, and learning. The harsh reality of incarceration soon hit. She missed Ranga terribly and applied for permission to have him to visit. After a long wait, it was granted. The experience was difficult. “Ranga stayed overnight, sleeping with his little arms thrown drowsily around me, creating a night of bitter-sweet intensity, before he was off again, leaving me alone,” she said.

  From the beginning, Freda was perpetually wracked with anxiety and longing for BPL, who was locked away in his own jail cell, miles away. She missed him deeply and wrote him copious letters and telegrams asking how he was. At first all she received was silence. Every day her diary tells how she pined for him, especially on April 5, his birthday.

  “Being physically and mentally cut off from him, I am thrown even more into myself. His jailers and mine can’t cut me off from thinking about him; my thoughts burn like a flame so that sometimes we are no longer apart. I try to project my love toward him, to strengthen and protect him,” she wrote.

  Eventually a telegram arrived: “Happy Beloved, letter following million tons love.” It was so sudden she was utterly taken aback. Four days later the letter arrived. Holding it in her hands, Freda felt turned over inside. In true BPL style it blithely informed her that he had acquired a ten-day-old orphaned deer and a goat foster mother! Freda relaxed. With baby animals to care for, she knew her husband was happy.

  As the weeks wore on and the heat grew fiercer, life for Freda grew tougher in all respects. In the garden her “hard labor” began to earn its name. With temperatures reaching 115 degrees, the searing heat made her exhausted and demoralized. The water supply for the plants she worked so diligently on dried up, ruining her garden. She saw the earth turn to dust and wizened little lemons drop to the ground. Her nerves, always fragile, were stretched to the breaking point. When her pleas for more water fell on deaf ears, for once, self-contained, polite Freda lost her temper and shouted at the guards. Afterward, she felt ashamed.