by Majid Sheikh
Dawn
November 04, 2018
Chapter 12: Buddha and Baba
Burma was Freda Bedi's gateway to Buddhism -- her assignment there changed her life utterly. She found a teacher, a faith, a form of meditation, and had a moment of awakening which marked a personal turning point. When she returned to India she not only regarded herself as a Buddhist but had decided that her life had a new purpose. Her encounter with Buddhism was more by chance than design. She had for some years been a spiritual seeker -- persisting with her regular meditation sessions and taking up yoga as well. But of the world's four major faiths, Buddhism was the one to which she had been least exposed. She had reviewed a children's storybook based on the Jataka -- an early Buddhist work about the birth tales of the Buddha -- and read from it to Ranga. It stayed with her. Several years later, she wrote about the Buddha's various incarnations, weaving this into her reflections on war, famine and death.1 She had read Buddhist texts along with other spiritual classicswhich she found so rewarding. But her visit to Burma was, in so many ways, a revelation. It was her first time immersed in a Buddhist culture and she felt instinctively 'that was my home. Then I knew that in some former life, I think in many former lives, I'd been in the Buddhist way. That's what I feel,' she told a California radio station, while adding 'of course it may be wrong.'2
It was money more than spiritual considerations that attracted Freda to Burma. Towards the close of the Bedis' time in Kashmir, she accepted a six months' United Nations posting to Burma, which had won its independence from Britain a year after India. She could probably sense that her husband wouldn't continue for much longer at Sheikh Abdullah's side, and the family needed an income. Her family also needed a home, and before taking up the post Freda had to ensure that her children were cared for. Freda had travelled a great deal but usually with one or other of her children in tow. This was the first time that she had made a long trip leaving all her family behind. Ranga was eighteen and at college in Delhi; Kabir and Guli were much younger, seven and three. She decided against leaving them in the care of her husband, and arranged for them to stay in Delhi with a Czechoslovak friend, Jana Obersal.
Freda's new role with the United Nations was to help in the planning of Burma's social services: 'A job after my own heart,' she told Olive Chandler, 'but it's hard not to be with the family. However, in their interest, I can't throw opportunities away + this opens new fields for us all.'3 She was restless by nature and relished the opportunity of working somewhere new. 'Burma is like India enough to be homely,' she wrote, 'unlike enough to be beguiling.' Without family responsibilities, she had more time to devote to her own interests, and above all to meditate. She met a Buddhist teacher in Rangoon, U Titthila, who had spent the war years in London where he had on occasions abandoned his monk's robes to serve as an air raid warden and, during the Blitz when London came under sustained German air attack, as a stretcher bearer. Freda found him 'very saintly'; she asked him to teach her Vipassana (insight) meditation techniques. 'And it was then ... I got my first flash of understanding -- can't call it more than that. But it changed my whole life. I felt that, really, this meditation had shown me what I was trying to find ... and I got great, great happiness-a feeling that I had found the path.'4
While Vipassana meditation dates back many centuries, the Vipassana movement -- which developed particularly in Burma in the mid-twentieth century -- was an adaptation of earlier teaching. It was innovative and linked broadly to rising anti-colonial sentiment. The meditation technique was intended mainly for lay people and offered quick results (some see it as shaping the more recent mindfulness movement) but because of its intensity, it could on occasions overwhelm new practitioners. For Freda, it brought an early moment of illumination -- one which was life-changing but also destabilising.
For two months, she had a weekly session with U Titthila. 'And I remember him saying when the eight weeks was coming to an end: if you get a realisation or a flash of realisation, it may not be sitting in your room in meditation, in pose in front of a picture of the Buddha or something, it will probably be somewhere where you don't expect it.' That's exactly what happened. 'I was actually walking with the [UN] commission through the streets of Akyab in the north of Burma -- [it was] as though some gates in my mind had just opened and suddenly I was seeing the flow of things, meaning, connections. And when I went back to Delhi, well, I told my husband I'd been searching all my life, it's the Buddhist monks who have been able to show me something I could not find and I'm a Buddhist from now on. Then I began to learn Buddhism after that.'5 Her family's recollection is that this 'flash' of spiritual awakening was accompanied by a breakdown. According to Ranga, his mother fainted and was taken to hospital. Bedi managed to get emergency travel documents, headed out to Burma and brought his wife home. When she came back, she didn't recognise B.P.L. or anybody. She didn't recognise her children. She would sit on her cot doing nothing -- completely blank. You couldn't make eye contact with her,' Ranga recalls. 'There was no speech, no recognition-though she could eat and bathe. That lasted for about two months when she gradually started reacting to things. All she recalled was that when walking down the street ... she saw a huge flash of light in the sky and she lost consciousness.'
This was a moment of epiphany -- an incident which redefined her life and purpose. From then on, she regarded herself as a Buddhist. And this was much more than simply a religious allegiance. It quickly became the most important aspect of her life. On her return to Delhi, she set up an organisation that she called the Friends of Buddhism. She took a personal vow of brahmacharya, a commitment to virtuous living which implies a decision to become celibate. Her engagement with the faith radically refashioned her links with her family and set her on the course which defined the last quarter-of-a-century of her life. The household faced several concurrent crises. Freda's collapse not only raised concerns about her health; it also brought an end to any prospect of a longer-term UN role in Burma or indeed anywhere else. Bedi's hasty exit from Kashmir had closed the door on the only regular, decently paid job he ever secured, and plunged him into the much more uncertain arena of small-scale publishing and writing and translating on commission. 'That was a very traumatic move,' Kabir recalls, 'suddenly overnight we arrived in Delhi.' Their reduced circumstances were reflected in the family's accommodation in the Indian capital. From the relative grandeur of a house close to Dal Lake, they took a flat -- a 'grotty' apartment, in Kabir's words -- in the crowded Karol Bagh area of central Delhi. It was quite a comedown.
Once she was fully recovered, Freda again had to take on the responsibility of being the family's primary earner. She got a helping hand from a well-placed friend. Among her papers is a handwritten note from 'Indu', Indira Gandhi, on the headed paper of the Prime Minister's House: 'Durgabai Deshmukh wants to see you at 11 a.m. tomorrow ... in her office in the Planning Commission, Rashtrapati Bhawan. I shall send the car at 10.30.'6 Deshmukh was an influential figure in the Congress Party and had been a member of India's Constituent Assembly. She had just been appointed as the initial chairperson of the Planning Commission, which in Nehruvian India with its faith in the state to engineer social and economic progress was an important post. She was adamant on the need to champion the interests and promote the welfare of women, children and the disabled. Her meeting with Freda clearly went well. The following month, in January 1954, Freda began working for the government's Central Social Welfare Board establishing and editing a monthly journal, Social Welfare. Although she was not a natural civil servant, she embraced the social agenda and the opportunity to travel across India and throw a spotlight on women's concerns and on projects which successfully addressed them. She remained in the job for eight years.
Freda's government employment wasn't particularly well paid, but it allowed the family a measure of financial security. They moved from Karol Bagh and by the close of 1954 were living in the more comfortable locality of Nizamuddin East: 'a nice house (for Delhi) in the shadow of a Mogul wall, near the beautiful Humayun's Tomb,' she told her old friend Olive Chandler.7 It was only a temporary respite. For a while the family lived under canvas at a Buddhist centre at Mehrauli just outside Delhi but eventually Freda was allocated government accommodation in the middleclass district of Moti Bagh. She described it as 'one of those nicely tailored modern flats complete with fans and shower-baths. To be frank, it doesn't suit us at all even though it has got its points in terms of comfort. We are a nice sprawly joint family, equipped on the male side with booming Punjabi voices, and hardly fit into a flat at all.'8 Money was tight. Freda travelled to work by bus or -- for a while -- on a scooter. She was responsible not only for earning but also for managing the household's finances. She was provident, as you might expect of someone brought up in a non-conformist, north of England household. Bedi was the opposite -- earning infrequently, and splashing out when he did. He was a writer for hire, Kabir says, but his earnings were irregular. 'Papa's style was whenever he got money he would then splurge, buy baskets of mangos for everybody in the family and take us on big treats. That was his way of showing his caring.'
Bedi faced his own moment of revelation which, uncannily, also involved a breakdown and a dramatic change in his life. It was as if husband and wife were mirroring each other at just the moment their marriage was unravelling. He started taking part in seances -- perhaps, Ranga believes, to try to contact his brother who had recently died. He started writing wildly, sometimes apparently in languages of which he had no knowledge. One day, Ranga returned home to find his father motionless and with his eyes closed. He eventually arose, came out on a terrace and held his hands outstretched 'like a Muslim prayer'. Ranga's recollection is that his father remained as if in a trance for days. He was motionless and without speech. A doctor repeatedly administered injections, which failed to have any obvious effect. 'About eleven o'clock on the third day, he came down the stairs, went into the 100, had a bath, put on his kurta and went to sleep. He woke up that evening and ate something. But for two months, he was exactly the same as mother had been -- no recognition, no eye contact. His eyes looked totally stoned, though he never took drugs,' Ranga says. 'It was so similar to mother's breakdown. And he also came out of it.'
As with Freda, Bedi's crisis had a lasting spiritual aspect. He developed a keen interest in the occult, establishing the Occult Circle of India; he became attracted to the mystical Sufi tradition within Islam and -- re-engaging with the religion he was born into -- in Sikh mysticism; he believed he had acquired special powers, and took to hands-on spiritual healing. He dressed in a smock and carried a staff; as his hair became increasingly unkempt, he looked like a latter-day Moses. He chose to be known as Baba, which carried with it an echo of a mystical or spiritual identity. It was a reinvention almost as complete as those that marked out the phases in Freda's life; he had gone from gilded youth, to communist and peasants' rights activist, to political apparatchik, to prophet and visionary. Bedi had largely broken links with the organised left and although he remained active in a Delhi-based Kashmir support group, he moved decisively away from active politics.9 'I had been under an impulsion to take to spiritual life,' he recalled a decade later. 'I resigned at once from all organisations .... It was like a realization that now [the] time had come to quit all this work and take to a new form of life.'lOBedi insisted, not altogether convincingly, that his embrace of a spiritual purpose did not involve any repudiation of his socialist beliefs. 'The statue of Lenin I loved still lies on my mantelpiece, and not a dent on [my] Marxist convictions exists.'11 But several of his old associates felt uncomfortable with Bedi's new look and message and kept their distance. Ranbir Vohra, who had known the Bedis in Lahore and Srinagar as well as Delhi, recalled that his old friend offered to help him communicate with anyone who had passed on: 'He suggested that 1 talk to Marx. 1 declined the generous offer.'12 Among the constants in his life were the heavy smoking and use of paan masala, and a more occasional appetite for alcohol.
The death of Bedi's brother also provoked another far-reaching change for the family. T.D. Bedi had a mistress, Raj Narindra. Before his death, he asked his younger brother to keep an eye out for her. Bedi saw through that obligation -- and helped Raj complete the building of a house in Jangpura in south Delhi. 'At first this posed only a financial problem,' Kabir commented, 'later it became emotional. As Freda moved closer to the spiritual path, through Buddhism and meditation, Baba's relationship with the mistress grew closer. It was a time of testing.'13 Bedi's increasingly intimate relationship with Raj was an open secret. 'It was clear to me, absolutely, that there was more than just friendship,' Guli recalls. 'He would tell me not to tell mother about my visits to ]angpura Extension with him.' And there were other women in his life. Guli describes her father -- in the demotic language of modern-day America -- as a chick magnet. 'My mother never spoke about it, but he did have a wandering eye.... He was very charming and charismatic and women came to him like moths to a flame,' Gull says. 'It wasn't exclusive; my father was a free spirit. It was his Achilles heel. He just enjoyed women. He loved my mother-but that was his Achilles heel. She must have suffered with that. She was a woman, after all.' Whether Freda's celibacy encouraged her husband to be less circumspect about his extra-marital liaisons, or whether his affairs made it easier for Freda to adopt this form of renunciation, it's difficult to say. Her husband's affairs certainly weren't the impetus behind Freda's turn to Buddhism, but it may have made her pursuit of a religious life easier. Her husband had disavowed his marriage through his infidelity. It perhaps allowed her to forsake sex without feeling she was being selfish.
The emotional bond between Freda and Bedi remained strong. They were loving and respectful to each other. They appear not to have given serious consideration to ending their marriage. But behind the facade of a happy and contented partnership, the distance between the couple widened. In 1957, Berinder Dewan -- by now an accomplished Urdu language journalist and short-story writer using the pseudonym Zafar Payami -- married Manorma Das, the daughter of veterans of the Independence movement who were good friends of the Bedis. Manorma, known within the family as Moma, spent the first few months of her married life living with the Bedis in Moti Bagh. She remembers it as a three-bedroom flat: Bedi had one bedroom; his mother Bhabooji was in another; and Moma and Binder took the third. Freda slept on the floor in the drawing room and kept her clothes there too. Moma was aware of, and uncomfortable about, Bedi's infidelities. When Freda was out of town for work, Bedi would occasionally bring women home. 'They were not educated but they were quite beautiful. They would cook for him and take care of him,' Morna remembers. 'When Freda came back, I told her -- such and such a woman was here ... She thought marriage was being comrades together, thinking together -- not all the time this sex business. I used to have a lot of fights with Berinder about Bedi sahib having other women.'14 She saw it as demonstrating an exploitative attitude to women. It didn't change Bedi's behaviour.
The heaviest burden of this fractured household was borne by the youngest child. Gulhima was packed off to an Anglican boarding school in the north Indian hills at the age of six. She spent eleven years there. Although Gull liked the school, she did wonder why she was sent as a boarder so young, and she never got a straight answer until she became a mother herself. 'When I had my first child, my mother said to me: "I never told you why I sent you to boarding school -- I did it to keep you safe." She was travelling a lot and didn't want me to be left with the servants because as a social worker she was aware of the danger of sexual abuse. Father was happy-go-lucky and not very responsible, though a wonderfully positive man. My mother couldn't trust him not to leave me with the servants.' Kabir too went to boarding school, though only at the age of thirteen when his progress at school was slipping.
In the years when Freda was becoming immersed in Buddhism, Kabir was the only child routinely living at home. He was close to his mother and intrigued by her spiritual journey. In the summer of 1955, she returned to Burma to study meditation. She found a new teacher -- the most prominent of those pioneering the Vipassana movement, Mahasi Sayadaw -- and when a few months later she next made the journey, Kabir travelled with her. Remarkable photographs taken on that visit depict Kabir in the dress of a novice monk. 'I ordained myself as a Buddhist monk at the age of ten: head shaved, robed,' Kabir recalls. 'I was living in the same Buddhist centre, Mahasi Sayadaw's centre, where Mummy was, so I'd get to see her once a day maybe. But the rest of the day, we'd rise early in the morning, have our bath, get our robes on, take our begging bowls and head in a crocodile down the streets of Rangoon, with people coming out early in the morning with portions of food. They put the food in the bowls of the monks, these wonderful black lacquer bowls. And being the youngest, I was always at the end of the line, so they would start filling up the bowls of the monks in front and when they had enough they would cover the bowl and the monks behind them would get the offerings. And by the time they came to me, if I had enough in my bowl, they had no one else to give it to. So they were very upset if I closed my bowl and I would always return with this overflowing bowl.'
'There's something in the atmosphere of Buddhism, Buddhist monks, the way of life based on meditation which attracted me,' Freda reflected twenty years later. 'When I saw the stupas and the monks with their begging bowls -- just simply going out in the morning, taking enough food and managing for the day-the golden robes, and my first gurus ... then I knew that in some former life, I think in many former lives, I'd been in the Buddhist way.'15 On a subsequent visit to Rangoon (now Yangon), she took Upasika vows from Mahasi Sayadaw, reflecting a devout lay commitment to a spiritual path. Her vows had eight precepts, activities from which to refrain: killing or injuring any living being; taking that which is not given; excessive sensuality; false and harmful speech; fault finding; harsh and abusive speech; meaningless conversation; and wrong means of livelihood.
Although her faith loomed increasingly large in her life, she had a demanding job too. At the Central Social Welfare Board, Freda had a free hand in devising the new monthly publication. Social Welfare launched in April 1954 with Freda named as executive editor and promising to be 'the beginning of a new experience in co-ordinating social welfare in India.' It was conspicuously well produced and made effective use of black-and-white photos and on occasions bore striking modernist-style covers. The journal's purpose was to support the Board's endeavour to develop 'services for women, children, the delinquent and handicapped and the family as a unit'. Freda occasionally wrote under her own by-line, reporting on projects and initiatives she had visited in different parts of India. Both Binder and his wife Manorma were roped in as occasional contributors. She was able to reprise some of the themes she had introduced in Contemporary India twenty years earlier -- prevailing on Devendra Satyarthi to write on Indian cradle songs, traditional dance, and women's life as reflected in folk song. But the hallmark of the magazine was the focus which it placed on women's issues, including many which rarely appeared in the mainstream press.
In the first year of publication, Social Welfare's agenda was cautious. Once established, it became more adventurous, tackling such themes as deserted wives, family planning, unmarried mothers, trafficking of women and children, and prostitution. It also prompted discussion of the widening career opportunities for women, and published exercises for expectant mothers. Freda enjoyed the opportunity to see something of village life in different parts of India. She described herself as 'somebody who loves the village old and new, and finds happiness there'.16 Her conviction that the village was the essence of India, and village women the backbone of the nation, remained undimmed. The monthly had the advantage over commercial magazines that it was not vulnerable to dips in circulation or revenue, and the frustration that as a government publication its impact was limited. It was the job that Freda stuck to longer than any other. She saw herself as a social worker as much as an editor and journalist and welcomed the prospect of contributing to independent India's social development.
Some of the missions on behalf of the Social Welfare Board took her to corners of the country which were rarely seen by outsiders. In 1958 she accompanied Indira Gandhi to north-east India, visiting areas which are now in the Indian states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. 'Indu' remained a close friend, and perhaps a confidante -- her marriage had also hit problems. Freda's children remember going to eat at Auntie Indu's and attending the birthday parties of Indira's sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. 'Sometimes we would go privately and play with their remarkable collection of trains,' Kabir says. 'They had a wonderful room in the prime minister's house that had these trains around tracks, gifts of foreign dignitaries .... As we got older, we'd go out on the president's estate and ride horses and see movies there or go to the swimming pool or go on car rides together. So it was that kind of fairly close relationship with the Gandhi family.'
Freda's government role allowed plenty of opportunity for the networking at which she excelled. Among her new friends was Tara All Baig, a prominent social worker from a privileged background who became the president of the Indian Council of Child Welfare. Baig first met her at a United Nations Youth Conference at Simla, and was struck by both her appearance and personality:Instead of the learned academic I subconsciously expected, I was confronted with a tall motherly woman in Punjabi salwar kamiz, with merry blue eyes, hair pulled back in a tight, unfeminine bun, and a warm, slightly buck-toothed smile. Almost immediately we started talking about our children, a preoccupation that dominated both our lives. Immediately a bond of close friendship sparked into being. Freda was one of those radiant people who to the end of her days could believe ill of no one. This was no mushy sentimentality, but an almost saintly reverence for the individual and a total absence of the kind of judgement people instinctively make about each other. In some extraordinary way she could only see the good and never the evil in anyone .... What she constantly sought was an absolute faith.
All through her various metamorphoses, she remained consistently herself, conscientious, hard working and self-denying. Her husband who resembled Henry VIII, with his beard and regal robes, was more a thinker and philosopher than a wage earner. While he toyed with publishing and other esoteric activities, Freda reared her children with the help of their generous godparents...17
Freda's involvement with Buddhism introduced her to several rich and influential Punjabi women who shared her interest. Goodie Oberoi had married into the family that ran one of India's leading chains of luxury hotels. The Maharani of Patiala was part of a Sikh royal family which retained its political influence after the dissolution of the princely states. In 1957, Freda travelled to Britain at the maharani's request -- her first visit for a decade -- to accompany her two daughters to their new boarding school. She took the opportunity to visit her mother and brother in Derby and see old friends. Freda saw no inconsistency in championing the interests of poor village women and accepting the patronage of the moneyed elite.
The late 1950s were a period of transition for the Bedi family. Bhabooji, Baba's mother and a constant in Freda's life ever since she had arrived in India, died in August 1958. She was told just before her death that Ranga had got engaged. He had spent a year or two with friends farming on 600 acres of remote land near the border with Nepal -- and, for a second time in his life, living in huts without electricity or running water. That hadn't worked out, and he secured a job as an assistant manager on a tea estate in the far reaches of Assam, one of the first Indians to break into the hitherto 'ex pat' domain of tea planting. He and Urmila Paul, known universally as Umi, married in November. She was from a Christian family and they had a Christian wedding at her uncle's home in the Lodhi Estate in Delhi. Indira Gandhi attended and brought a note from her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, bestowing his blessings. Freda told friends approvingly that Ranga's bride 'comes from a Punjabi family like ours'. Amarantha, the first of Freda and Bedi's grandchildren, was born the following October. Ranga and his family lived at a vast distance from Delhi. Binder and Morna were closer to hand. Binder at times felt insecure about his place in the household. He was regarded as a member of the family but he was keenly aware that he wasn't a Bedi. Both he and Moma were writers and instinctively on the left and so had much in common with Freda and Baba -- Freda described them as 'our adopted children'. But they left Delhi to undertake a long trip through the Middle East. When Kabir went to boarding school at Nainital, the house emptied out. Bedi continued to put on weight, as Freda teasingly mentioned in her Christmas newsletters. Both enjoyed rich Punjabi food as well as the cakes and trifles which Freda made a point of making, a culinary legacy of her English upbringing.
Towards the close of 1956, Delhi hosted a major international Buddhist gathering that was Freda's introduction to the Tibetan schools of Buddhism, which are in the Mahayana tradition as distinct from the Theravada school which is predominant in Burma. This Buddha Jayanti was to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's life. The Indian government wanted Tibet's Buddhist leaders to attend, particularly the Dalai Lama, who was that rare combination of temporal ruler and spiritual leader of his people. The Chinese authorities initially said no but at the last minute relented. Jawaharlal Nehru was at Delhi airport to welcome the twenty-one year old Dalai Lama on his first visit to India; the young Tibetan leader had at this stage not made up his mind whether he would return to his Chinese-occupied homeland or lead a Tibetan independence movement in exile. Freda played a role in welcoming the Tibetan delegation to the Indian capital. 'The radiance and good humour of the Dalai Lama was something we shall never forget,' she told Olive Chandler. 'I also got a chance of shepherding the official tour of the International delegates to India's Buddhist shrines and made many new friends.'18 A snatch of newsreel footage shows Freda Bedi at the side of the Dalai Lama at Ashoka Vihar, the Buddhist centre outside Delhi where the Bedi family had camped out a few years earlier. Both Kabir and Guli were also there, the latter peering out nervously between a heavily garlanded Dalai Lama and her sari-clad mother.19 Freda also received the Dalai Lama's blessing.
In the following year, when she made a brief visit to Britain, Freda made a point of visiting the main Buddhist centres in London and meeting Christmas Humphreys, a judge who was the most prominent of the tiny band of converts to Buddhism in Britain. She was becoming well-known and well-connected as a practitioner of Buddhism. What prompted her to become not simply a devotee but an activist once more was the Dalai Lama's second visit to India -- in circumstances hugely different from his first. Nehru had dissuaded the Dalai Lama from staying in India after the Buddha Jayanti celebrations. Early in 1959, Tibet rose up against Chinese rule, an insurrection which provoked a steely response. The Dalai Lama and his retinue, fearing for their lives and for Tibet's Buddhist traditions and learning, fled across the Himalayas, crossing into India at the end of March and reaching the town of Tezpur in Assam on 18th April 1959. Tens of thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama, undergoing immense hardships as they traversed across the mountains and sought to evade the Chinese army. Freda felt impelled to get involved.
***
The move to Dalhousie [1963] obliged Freda finally to forsake the role of editor of Social Welfare which she had occupied since before the monthly started publication in 1954. The Central Social Welfare Board held a farewell party for her, recording that she had resigned 'to devote herself completely to the cause of the Young Lamas' Home School'. She was no longer a civil servant but alongside the greater freedom was the loss of her salary and her government accommodation. The ground-floor flat in Moti Bagh had been cramped but it was the focus of the family. Ranga was well established in the tea business and with a family of his own; Kabir was sixteen and on the cusp of admission to St Stephen's College in Delhi; Guli was just twelve and increasingly spent time in her holidays with her older brothers. 'My brothers and Ranga's wife Umi cushioned me from my insecurities,' she says. Kabir and Guli visited Dalhousie, and indeed Kabir taught there -- one renowned Buddhist lama insists with a broad smile that whatever the limitations of his spoken English, Kabir Bedi is to blame.
Baba Bedi moved from the government flat into Raj Narindra's house in Jangpura Extension in south Delhi where he had been a regular, if surreptitious, visitor for some years. He continued to write, if irregularly and without conspicuous success, and to embrace the occult and forms of mysticism. In June 1963, he sent Margaret Bourke-White an inscribed copy of his latest pamphlet -- 'Unity of Man & World Peace, by BABA, Grand Master of the Celestial Order of the White Lion, Master of the Occult Circle of India, Director, Institute for Inquiry into the Unknown'.
-- The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead
As schoolchildren we heard a lot about Rajinder Singh Bedi from our father. They were school friends, attended Lahore’s literary gatherings and joined the All-India Radio together. When WW-II started my father was posted with Indian soldiers in Europe. Rajinder Singh Bedi at the end of the war was posted to Jammu.
When my father died he wrote a short note to my mother in chaste Urdu: “Chupp ho gaya mera yaar”. Unlike modern day letters of condolences, it seems our elders believed in very short versions. My father’s BBC cricket commentary partner John Arlott sent a short note to my mother: “They don’t make ‘em like him any more”. Both were brief, betraying the happy times spent together. Over the years as my research on Lahore and the Punjab goes on, it seems I have grown fond of the Bedi clan, who once lived in sufficient numbers in the city. It is probably because they are considered the ‘royalty’ clan among Punjabis.
The mother of Baba Guru Nanak was a Bedi, and because the seer was born in the house of his maternal family, as is Punjabi tradition, he was named ‘Nanak’, based on the term ‘nanakay’ – of the maternal family. The Bedi clan henceforth has been known as the ‘first family’ of the Sikh religion. This piece is about two exceptional Bedi men who graced Lahore in the pre-Partition era.
The first Bedi, naturally, was Rajinder Singh Bedi, the outstanding Urdu writer, playwright, dialogue writer, screenwriter and in his last years a film director. Born in September 1915 at Dalley Ki village in Tehsil Daska in Sialkot District, as a baby his mother moved to Lahore as his father, Hera Singh Bedi, was a senior official in the General Post Office of Lahore and they lived in the small ‘postal colony’ behind the main GPO on The Mall. His father, Hera Singh Bedi, naturally, was a Khatri as all Bedi are, while his mother was a Brahman named Sewa Dei.
Rajinder was fond of Urdu literature and soon started writing short stories under the pen name ‘Mohsin Lahori’. In the literary circles of Lahore, which in those days met mostly inside the old walled city at the various ‘baithaks’, he started making a name for himself and his first short story ‘Maharani ka Tohfa’ appeared under his real name Rajinder Singh Bedi. The Urdu monthly magazine of Lahore ‘Adabi Dunya’ declared his story as the best story of the year. From this point onwards he was a sought-after writer.
After completing his schooling in 1933 he joined the Lahore Post Office as a junior clerk. For the next eight years he spent his spare time reading books, attending the literary sessions of various colleges and organisations. His contributions invariably made their mark and by 1941 he joined the Urdu Section of All-India Radio in Lahore. After 1947 this station naturally became Radio Pakistan. He wrote dramas, which in those days of broadcasting was the most sought-after media. Among his earlier dramas were ‘Khawaja Sarra’ and ‘Nakl Makani’. He took time out for two years in 1943 to join a Lahore film studio called Maheshwari Films, whose studio was at the Montgomery-Davis Road crossing. Here his ability to write dialogues was further honed.
When the war ended in 1945 he was posted to Jammu. Soon he rose to become the director of the Jammu and Kashmir Service. But the experience of the Partition of his homeland moved this sensitive writer to such a degree that he resigned and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) to work as a dialogue writer for films. Among his numerous films were ‘Dev Das’ (1955) and ‘Madhumati’ (1958). He turned to film direction and among his many films were ‘Dastak’ (1970) and ‘Phagun’ (1973).
But his first major novella ‘Eik Chaddar Maeli Se’ was why he is best known. It was initially made into a film in Lahore before 1947, as well as in India in 1986. Being an Urdu language writer his works were published both in Pakistan and India.
But then his fame will rest on his beautiful novels and short stories, which like Sadaat Hasan Manto, centred on the events of Partition. It was an experience, as he was to himself write “the pain of which just cannot go away”. In a speech in Mumbai he was to say: “My heart and soul remain in Lahore. My body you will cremate in Mumbai”. That was where he died at the age of 70 on the 11th of November 1984.
So we move on to the other great Bedi of Lahore. It is not that famous Indian actor called Kabir Bedi, but his amazing father Baba Pyare Lal Bedi, who was born on the 9th of April 1909 at Dera Baba Nanak, a town founded by the Bedi ancestors of the first Sikh Guru. Though Guru Nanak lived and died and his last rites performed at Kartarpur in Pakistan, his ancestors founded this town nearby and lived there. So it was that the 16th generation Bedi was born to be named Baba Pyare Lal Bedi, or BPL Bedi.
Like his ancestors BPL Bedi was a mystic of sorts making a name for himself for spreading what he called the Aquarian Philosophy. Ultimately he was to set up a research institute that researched ‘The Not-Known’. His interest in all the religions, the occult and mysticism remained his abiding interest. Given that he was the 16th descendant of the founder of Sikhism, this was not surprising.
Baba Pyare Lal Bedi grew up in Lahore and lived in a house just behind Dyal Singh College near Lakshmi Chowk. After schooling and college, he left for Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics. Among his college mates was Freda Marie Houlston, an activist student he was to marry and bring back to Lahore. At Oxford both were exceptional students and moved to Heidelburg’s Ruprecht Karl University and finally to the University of Geneva. He was a passionate researcher and got a job at the University of Berlin. There the couple in 1933 had their first child named Ranga. The couple returned to Lahore in 1934 and set up house in Model Town.
Very soon the couple joined the revolutionary politics after the hanging of Bhagat Singh in Lahore. They were seen as a dangerous couple and BPL was arrested and sent to a remote detention camp in the Thar Desert. On release he was to head the North Indian delegation to the First Congress of the Communist Party of India.
By this time his wife Freda had started taking a greater interest in the Buddhist faith and headed to Nepal, where she became the first-ever female Buddhist priest. The couple’s house in Model Town became the place to be seen if you were interested in Communism, as well as spectacularly different, if you were interested in mysticism and ‘The Unknown’. The authorities were confused on how to label the Bedi couple.
When Partition came - with which BPL Bedi disagreed calling it an “unnatural act” which will ‘fatally divide the people along sectarian lines’ - he decided to dedicate his life to assisting Partition refugees in India. The stories of the hate generated convinced him that only by following a spiritual life, completely detached from all forms of beliefs, could humans live in peace with themselves.
BPL Bedi was probably the first Indian to rebel against the growing Hindutva pockets in the new country and in 1961 he declared that he was Baba Bedi the XVI (the sixteenth) and founded in New Delhi the Institute of Research on the Not-Known. He did not find much success and in 1972 he moved to Italy to preach ‘Aquarian Philosophy’using vibrational therapies.
In his lifetime BPL Bedi was to write a number of books, the best known being ‘Karl Marx – Letters on India’, a well-known book on Sir Ganga Ram titled ‘Harvest from the Desert’, ‘Sheikh Abdullah: His life and ideals’, ‘Mystic India’, ‘The Holy Commandments of Nizamuddin Aulia’, and several books on Guru Nanak as well as on the occult and mysticism. He passed away in Italy in 1993.
So it was that the two famous Bedi intellectuals of Lahore lived their lives trying to understand the pain of Partition. It would be interesting if the 17th generation Nanak Bedi, namely the actor Kabir Bedi, proves to be the first Indian to be invited to walk from his ancestral village Dera Baba Nanak in India towards Kartarpur in Pakistan to lay the foundation of a peace the Bedi clan have always represented.