The blue-eyed blonde who fought for Indian freedom

While researching his first book, A Mission in Kashmir (2007), British journalist and historian Andrew Whitehead stumbled across photos of a blue-eyed blonde holding a rifle in Kashmir.


Intrigued, he decided to find out more about her, soon learning that Freda Bedi (nee Houlston) was the first English student to marry an Indian student at Oxford in 1933, their inter-racial marriage creating quite a stir at the time. The couple had three children and one of them, Kabir, went on to become a well-known actor. But Freda wasn’t just mom and daughter, she embraced the cause of Indian freedom and was even jailed in Lahore for her beliefs.

In 1966, Freda became one of the first Western women to become fully ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. She shaved her head, donned maroon robes, took the name Sister Palmo and moved to Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim where she helped spread Tibetan Buddhism to the West.

After spending years researching her life, Whitehead has written a book about her, The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, which was published earlier this month.

The book traces the story of how Freda Houlston, the daughter of a jeweller-watchmaker in Derby, fell in love with Baba Pyare Lal Bedi, a Sikh from a privileged family in Lahore, while studying PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford. They met at a lecture, joined the Oxford Majlis, an Indian debating society, the communist October Club, and the Labour Club. “She got sent down (suspended) early one term after the porter reported her for going into Bedi’s room unaccompanied. She regarded this as racism, as did he, and it strengthened the romance,” Whitehead tells TOI.

Their inter-racial marriages made it to the front page of the Oxford Mail. “Although quite a lot of elite Indian students in the UK married English women, they did not usually marry fellow Oxford students — they tended to marry socially beneath them,” Whitehead says. “There were articles in the British press warning young English women to avoid these suave handsome Indian men. Often they were already married.”

Left-wing students at Oxford in the mid-1930s didn’t just fight against unemployment and fascism but also British imperialism. “Where was the empire seen as its most grievous? In India,” says Whitehead. “She thought the way Britain suppressed the nationalist movement in India, policed the empire, and restrained people’s natural desire for self-determination, was wrong.”

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After marriage, they moved to Lahore where Freda sided with Indian nationalists and became an activist. She became the first European woman to be jailed as a satyagrahi after she gave a speech campaigning for India not to fight alongside the Allies in WWII and spent three months in a Lahore women’s jail. Her son Kabir Bedi, born in 1946, says he was “one of midnight’s children”. “We were freedom fighters in Lahore living in huts,” he recounts.

After Partition, the couple moved to Kashmir where they spent five years working for then prime minister Sheikh Abdullah and the Kashmir nationalist movement. Freda briefly joined a left-wing women’s militia intended to protect Kashmir from attack by pro-Pakistan forces. Bedi says, “She was very much a supporter of Sheikh Abdullah. Kashmir was being invaded by the Pakistanis and women were encouraged to learn how to use firearms for self-defence, even though it was totally against her nature. However, she never fired a gun. There were thousands of refugees who my mother looked after.”

To Bedi, his mother was more Indian than English. “Of course she was English to look at — blue-eyed — but she identified closely with India. (This showed) in the way she felt about the country, the cause she fought for and the way she dressed — in salwar kameez or sari. I was very close to her and she had an enormous influence on me,” he tells TOI. “She spoke Hindi and Punjabi and gave some speeches in Punjabi about the freedom struggle.”

Freda, or Sister Palmo, died in Delhi in 1977 at age 66, having lived two-thirds of her life in India. “She chose the interests of her adopted country over her native one,” Whitehead says. “When Indira Gandhi gave Freda a special award for foreign women who had served India, Freda was both proud and upset that after 40 years of living in India she was still regarded as a foreigner, and in some ways an outsider.”