Part 2 of 2
The temper of Indian politics in the early 1930s, and the three unsuccessful Round Table conferences in London intended to shape India's constitutional future, kept news of and from India on the front pages. Gandhi attended one of these conferences to argue for responsible government, but the other two were boycotted by the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist party. Indian nationalism and the means of achieving that ambition was one of the burning issues of the day. Among those on the left, there was a great deal of sympathy for India's goal of self-rule and disquiet about the manner in which Britain governed and policed its Empire. Indian students -- Bedi among them -- often came to Britain with little more than vague sympathy with the independence movement, and while studying became determined nationalists and sometimes were also won over to a form of internationalism, communism. Those British students they mixed with often shared these political allegiances.
The Majlis, established in 1896, was the main forum for Indian students at Oxford. It was not overtly political, to the extent of being at times bewilderingly naive. In January 1934, the Oxford Mail ran an eye-catching headline: 'FASCISM NO SOLUTION TO INDIAN PROBLEM -- Oxford Majlis' Decision in Debate With Fascists'. [24] There were other complaints of a lack of nationalist resolve. A student at left-leaning Ruskin College, Terence McCarthy, attended the Majlis's annual dinner at the Randolph Hotel in 1932 and was surprised to discover that a former viceroy of India was the chief guest. He was even more shocked when the peer broke Majlis convention by proposing a toast to the King-Emperor. 'Communist and Nationalist Indians rose to pledge loyalty. Despite all their revolutionary talk, they lacked the guts to brave the eye of Imperial England's hireling. I, a British worker, alone remained seated.' [25]The Majlis had a chequered existence, with frequent complaints of lack of activity, paucity of membership and close-to-unmanageable debts. It staggered on from one crisis to another. What is the good of the Oxford Majlis?' one Indian student asked aloud in 1931. 'Most members are dissatisfied with it most of the time.' [26] Nevertheless, Dosoo Karaka, at one time president of the Majlis, insisted that it exercised considerable influence.The little rectory of St Aldate's in Pembroke Street where it meets every Sunday provides an opportunity for the sixty or seventy Indians who come from various parts of that great continent, and who are scattered all over the university, to keep in touch with each other and with the latest developments in India, which the daily newspapers do not fully or accurately report. It is primarily a social body ... Although its membership is restricted to Indians it does not close its doors to others. In fact, its meetings are always attended by outsiders, who come as guests of the members of the club to get something of the Indian environment. [27]
Among the well-wishers and the curious was a regular contingent from St Hugh's. Barbara Castle recounted that Freda 'used to come with us occasionally to meetings of the Majlis, the mock parliament where Indian undergraduates threw themselves into rowdy and often disorderly debates.' [28]
That's where bonds of affinity between Freda and her boyfriend developed. Freda's sense of social justice was outraged by the manner in which Indian nationalism was suppressed, and her sense of the spiritual was intrigued by the culture and philosophy of the East.
The majority of Indian students at the University felt compelled to be part of the organization and take part in these political debates, even if they were intending to take up positions sympathetic to the British in India such as in the Indian Civil Service.-- Oxford Majlis, by The Open University
Freda wasn't the only one of the group to fall in love with an Indian fellow student. Olive Shapley, in her remarkably candid memoirs, recounted that her 'first real lover was a Muslim':
He was about seven years older than me and had already taken a degree somewhere in India. He was a lovely gentle man and he knew a great deal about life and love and politics. Later on he spent some years in prison for his beliefs. The eastern people put a great value on love making. I thought I was very lucky to be initiated by somebody like that ... but I did not think of marrying him. [29]
Olive didn't name her lover -- but provided enough clues to allow for a confident identification.
Sajjad 'Banney' Zaheer was at that time a student at New College -- he graduated in 1931 with a third-class degree in history. He went on to become a renowned Urdu writer and a founder of India's Progressive Writers' Association; he was also a communist of long standing. They went their own ways after Oxford but kept in touch -- Olive's son recalls accompanying his mother to visit Zaheer and his family in Delhi. [30]
Zaheer and Bedi knew each other well, and Olive's adventurous romance may have emboldened Freda -- and indeed her boyfriend -- in turning a friendship into a more intimate relationship.
Olive Shapley mentioned that her Indian lover 'pointed the way' for her in politics -- in the direction of communism. While Barbara became a stalwart of the Labour Club, which was itself not immune to Soviet sympathisers, Olive devoted herself energetically to Oxford's newly established, communist-aligned October Club -- indeed, a student newspaper passed comment on her zeal in selling the Daily Worker. [31]
Freda also came along to their weekly gatherings, though she was not as determined in her pursuit of communism as either Olive or indeed Bedi. All the same, when her relationship with Bedi became public, it was described as an October Club romance. 'We had meetings and other events,' Olive Shapley recalled of her days as a student communist,
'read a lot of Marx and Engels and discussed them endlessly.... [We] were anti-empire, which was a radical stance at that time.' Olive's involvement in student communism left what she called 'an enduring blot on the secret files.'
Decades later, she was still 'visited regularly by a gentleman from MI5 who quizzed me about my activities over a pot of tea. This did not really worry me and I always looked forward to his visits. It was one of the few occasions that I ever got news of my old friends.' [32]The vigilance, albeit belated, of
the British security service provides a window on the membership and activities of the October Club. Cambridge student communism in the 1930s spawned a celebrated cluster of Soviet agents at the heart of the British establishment. When this became apparent twenty years later with the defection to Moscow of two senior figures in British intelligence, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, MI5 became alarmed about how little they knew about Oxford communists at that time. They resolved to find out-and were assiduous in approaching one-time members of the October Club who might be happy to share information about their former comrades. They were fortunate that the club's founder -- an American, Frank Strauss Meyer -- had recanted of his student communism and was happy to cooperate. [33] And still more valuable for MI5, another onetime member of the October Club, Francois Lafitte, divulged the names of all the Oxford student communists he could recall. Freda and Bedi were both on the list -- 'Seemed to me both to be close fellow-travellers. They married and went to Lahore ... ' -- and so too was Sajjad Zaheer, a 'very capable Indian and close friend of Olive Shapley.' [34]
Meyer and others established the October Club at the close of 1931, as a left-wing breakaway from the Labour Club. 'We decided to organize the October Club quite on our own, with the idea of using it to attract those interested in Communism and forming a guiding group inside it,' Meyer told MI5. 'At the beginning we had considerable contempt for the official Communist Party' -- a suspicion which was reciprocated. The Communist Party of Great Britain was at the time a small, workerist and distinctly sectarian force of a few thousand members. [35] By the spring of 1932, the October Club's core of ten or twelve activists had joined the party, and after its first year of activity that number had doubled and the club's membership was in the hundreds. In its early months, the October Club achieved attention with a string of big name speakers, one of whom, H.G. Wells, was subject to barracking for being critical of Moscow. Escapades such as singing the communist anthem 'The Internationale' at an Armistice Day service to honour the war dead and street fights with fascist students earned the club a certain notoriety. The political atmosphere at the time was highly charged, and the Oxford Union's resounding endorsement in February 1933 of a motion 'that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country' caught global attention; the Daily Express lamented that 'the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success with the publicity that has followed this victory.' In the wake of that controversy, a book on Young Oxford and War was rushed out, edited by V.K. Krishna Menon and with contributions from students of various political loyalties. Dick Freeman, a founder of the October Club, wrote about the radicalisation of Oxford students, and the emotional and political impact of the reception and support given in October 1932 to unemployed hunger marchers from the north -- for many students the first direct experience of the poverty and misery of those without work. [36] The October Club made a political impact out of all proportion to its numbers. Michael Foot, an Oxford student (and a Liberal) at the time and later a leader of the Labour Party, commended it as 'the most lively and enthusiastic club in Oxford.' [37]
Freda, along with many October Club stalwarts, had started out as a member of the Labour Club and then gravitated towards the breakaway group. 'The idealism of our generation was the idealism of helping the underprivileged,' she recalled. 'If the Labour Club to which I belonged ... had any meaning, it was showing that we cared if people hadn't got enough food when they took the government dole, and we did care if the hunger marchers went all the way from Reading to London, we cared if there were children in the slums with no shoes and that children hadn't got enough food.' Her years in Oxford, she said, were 'radical years ... we used to attend all the clubs like the Labour Club and later on the more extreme October Club ... The whole atmosphere was electric with social demands and social change. We were, as it were, the Depression generation.' [38] Both Freda and Bedi attended the socialist G.D.H. Cole's lectures and Harold Laski's seminars on Marx and -- in a joint activity which served to demonstrate both their intellectual and personal compatibility -- they scoured the British Library to track down Marx's journalism about India.Many years later Sajjad Zaheer argued, with a touch of self-importance, that Indian students were the seed corn of the student communist movement at Oxford. 'I must record this,' he stated, 'that at Oxford, during this period, the first communists in the whole university were Indians -- one or two others and myself.' He and B.P.L. Bedi reflected a trend among privileged Indians who came to study in Britain and became so attracted to communism that it shaped their lives. For Bedi, the October Club was the induction to an involvement with communism which stretched over twenty years. Minoo Masani, another Indian from an elite background who was on the periphery of the communist movement when a student in England, declared that it was not an accident that the 'aristocracy' of the Indian Communist Party came in large part 'from the class of people whose parents could afford an expensive foreign education.' [39]
Bedi was prone to bragging and placed himself in retrospect more at the centre of events than he appeared to his contemporaries. He was not among the most high profile Oxford communists, and perhaps lacked the discipline and intellectual drive which marked out the most effective student political organisers. But he had one very valuable trait at a time of political turbulence, when rival groups often sought to disrupt each other's meetings -- his physique:
So then, as a University tough, my duty used to be to stand at the gate so that any persons coming to break up [the meeting] would know that I was standing at the gate. . .. This reputation had been spread. Thus my place became just at the gate, listening inside, and watching what was happening while somebody was addressing the meetings. [40]
When the playwright George Bernard Shaw came to address the October Club, Sajjad Zaheer recalled, there were fears of an attempt to stop him speaking. 'So we decided to defend that meeting and among the chief defenders of the meeting was my dear friend, B.P.L. Bedi, who was at that time physically the strongest man at Oxford.' [41]
The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth....
That may mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seat in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost of direct State experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achieve successful results.
It may mean a private society or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr. Graham Wallas has already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the Sterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administratively convenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding point of view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which the drift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies....
Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our present reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when an ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let them loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty....
It will have to be handled by statesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracy that statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applying their suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents. The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organization strong enough to impose respect upon the State....
Let those who think the whole conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselves why George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinker could marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did not matter a rap politically whom the tinker married, whereas it mattered very much whom the king married. The way in which all considerations of the king’s personal rights, of the claims of the heart, of the sanctity of the marriage oath, and of romantic morality crumpled up before this political need shews how negligible all these apparently irresistible prejudices are when they come into conflict with the demand for quality in our rulers. We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier, whose marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlled with a view solely to military efficiency....
On the other hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker’s marriage has been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife’s health in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds of his children out of his hands and put them into those of our State schoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishment independent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand the country over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years’ practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman. Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves and desires a pedigree....
A conference on the subject is the next step needed. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believing that they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work into which they can build the best of themselves before their refuse is thrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace.
-- Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw
Over time, Bedi's commitment to Marxism deepened to something more than simply muscular:
I became more and more drawn to it, not in just a vague leftist form, but Marxism as a way of life and a philosophy. . .. As I delved deeply into it, naturally I was drawn into friendships with people who had similar convictions ....
I almost became a Lenin idolator and I had no hesitation whatsoever in getting a very big picture of his and just plopping it in my room and hanging it up. [42]
Bedi became convinced that India would not become free without a more assertive and militant approach than Gandhi and the Congress leadership were willing to countenance. His repudiation of Gandhi's advocacy of civil disobedience and non-violence also brought an end to his vegetarianism.
That didn't stop Bedi and others venerating Gandhi when he visited Oxford while attending the Round Table Conference. 'Yes, we had him over at Oxford,' Bedi recalled many years later, probably speaking of Gandhi's address to the Oxford Majlis in October 1931. 'My heart was so overflowing with love and devotion that I just got out from the crowd and went low and touched his feet. Now, it was this demonstration ... done by an Indian student and that too a communist student which absolutely shocked the hall ... Though our paths differed our ideology did not stand in our way of adoring him.' [43]
Freda also heard Gandhi speak and admired his single-minded -- if idiosyncratic -- pursuit of India's independence. Together with Bedi, she set up the Gandhi Study Group, from which stemmed one of their most ambitious publishing ventures, though Bedi recalled that there was also a personal agenda. 'The first thing which Freda and myself decided ... was that we must do something which would draw us closer. So, we founded the Gandhi group in order to examine and expound the teachings of Gandhi.' The name was also chosen, he added, because it was safe and less likely to attract the attention of the university authorities. The speakers it attracted were not so safe, and included Shapurji Saklatvala, a Bombay-born Parsee who for much of the 1920s was the Communist MP for Battersea, as well as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, later the founding father of Pakistan. Along with the October Club, this Gandhi Group affiliated to the communist-led Federation of Student Societies -- though several of Gandhi's followers in Oxford resented this left-wing act of appropriation. 'They regretted we had called it the Gandhi group but it was founded only to criticise Gandhiji from the communist angle.' [44]Faction-fighting and name-calling was intense amid the loose network of groups which recruited among the Indian student community and equally tiny nationalist-inclined diaspora.
'The multiplicity of organisations in London devoted to propaganda for Indian freedom has been a source of endless confusion to the comparatively small colony of Indian residents and students,' one commentator complained. [45] The most substantial journal and the one that caused most concern to the British authorities was Bharat, the word increasingly used by nationalists for India. Initially published by the Oxford Majlis, by early 1931 Sajjad Zaheer had become the editor of the journal, which was viewed by the British authorities as 'definitely revolutionary and communistic and ... likely to have an unwholesome effect upon the minds of any Indian Students who may happen to get hold of it.' [46]
The other main nationalist publication in Britain was United India, published by an oddball figure, G.S. Dara. His tone was anti-communist but sympathetic to both the Indian National Congress and to Britain's Independent Labour Party, which was to the left of the Labour Party and had a greater focus on colonial issues. Bedi wrote a brief, and hot-blooded, article for United India to mark India's 'independence day' in 1932 (Congress had made a largely rhetorical declaration of independence on 26th January 1930). He thundered against 'the insolent alien Government' ruling India and offered homage to 'those men, women and children who fell under the British bullet, bayonet and baton; while fighting non violently for the freedom of our dear Motherland.' [47]The following issue of United India was described as 'the Oxford number' with brief pieces by twenty-six students, including prominent political figures such as Tony Greenwood and Michael Foot and at least ten Indian students.
Freda Houlston was also among the contributors. This appears to have been her first published article about India. It was very brief and insubstantial but confirmed her increasing identification with Indian nationalism. She praised the 'conviction and courage' of Indian women activists -- including a young Calcutta woman who had fired five shots at the British governor of Bengal -- and likened them to Mrs Pankhurst and the suffragettes. [48]
Olive Shapley was also among the contributors, with a distinctly more militant attitude towards women's activism -- reflecting the class-against-class outlook then dominant in the communist movement and its disdain for achieving piecemeal reforms: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. [49]
B.P.L. Bedi wrote about India's 'determined youth' -- 'the youth recognises no via media; it is either freedom or death.' Sajjad Zaheer also contributed, and
the two moving forces in the October Club, Frank Meyer and Dick Freeman, sent in a paragraph of revolutionary agitprop which while of little merit as political analysis offers a telling reflection of the political mood among student militants:Imperialism is as much of a curse for the British working class as for India. We further believe that the interests of the British workers and the Indian masses are identical -- and just as the British worker has to fight against treacherous leaders ... so the Indian worker has to fight its Ghandi [sic], its Jawaharlal [Nehru] and its Bose. It is just as essential for India's revolutionary youth to get rid of its worthless nationalist illusions, as it is for England to eradicate the 'Rule Britannia' mentality.
The paragraph concluded, predictably, with the slogan: Workers of the World Unite' -- which jarred with Bedi's style of signing off with the words 'Bande Mataram', the tide of the hymn to the motherland which had become the anthem of Indian nationalism.
In the summer of 1932, perhaps while recuperating from her ill health, Freda travelled in northern Germany. She wrote articles for the Derby Evening Telegraph about German family life and about the merits of German men, their cheerfulness, domesticity and love of order. [50] If this was also an interlude to allow both Freda and Bedi to consider whether they were certain about marrying, it didn't disturb their intentions.
I remember him saying to me at that time: 'I've nothing to offer you because I'm only just a member of the Indian national movement, a follower of Gandhi, and for all I know you might have to wait for me outside jail walls. I've really nothing to offer you -- except my love and this companionship that I feel we have.' And to me it seemed the only thing -- I never thought about it twice. I just said: 'Yes, well whatever it is, let's share it together.' And that's how we became engaged.
She now had the 'traumatic' task of telling her mother. That day, she recalled, she had to go to the dentist but was so tense that the tooth couldn't be taken out. 'So I went back home with the tooth still in -- and the thought now I must tell my mother. And at that time I remember she was washing the dishes -- in Derbyshire we call it washing the pots -- at the sink in the kitchen, and I told her that I had decided to marry B.P.L. She was very quiet and then she said: Well, I trust you and your judgement and I know you wouldn't marry a bad man, and you do as you wish, but I'm only sorry that you'll leave England.' [51]
Freda is being less than candid about her family's response to the relationship. She would not have been so anxious about breaking the news if she expected her mother to receive it tolerably well. She was losing a daughter. Freda never had any doubt that marrying Bedi meant making a life in India. In middle-class Derby, the idea of a daughter marrying out of her race, religion and nationality was at that time almost unthinkable and vanishingly rare. Freda's eldest child believes there was a threat to disinherit Freda -- and indeed she didn't inherit her mother's house (though as a Buddhist nun she had little need of it). But however great the anguish, a lasting breach was avoided and in the Easter holidays, Bedi came up to Derby and met his wife-to-be's brother and mother -- and judging by photographic evidence, succeeded in allaying their fears.
_______________
Notes:
2. The Gates of the World1. 'Oxford' audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, Bedi Family Archive (BFA)
2. Tim Richardson, Oxford College Gardens, London, 2015, p 236.
3. Laura Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour: Gender, Education and Community at St Hugh's, 1886-2011, London, 2011, pp 147-153
4. Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour, p 156
5. Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way, London, 1992, p 48
6. Olive Shapley, Broadcasting a Life: the Autobiography of Olive Shapley, London, 1996, p 25
7. Castle, Fighting All the Way, pp 46-7
8. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p 23
9. Castle, Fighting All the Way, p 49. There were twenty shillings to the Pound, so six shillings would be the equivalent of £0.30. Olive Shapley also recounts this episode and recalls that Barbara tested her friends on the book 'which was delightfully typical of her' -- Broadcasting a Life, pp 26-7
10. Anne Perkins, Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle, London, 2003, pp 21-2
11. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p 24
12. The Imp, March 1930, St Hugh's College archive
13. 'Oxford' audio recording, BFA
14. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, pp 29, 25
15. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, pp 25-6
16. Freda Bedi handwritten notes apparently in preparation for making audio recordings about her life story, BFA
17. I am particularly grateful to Amanda Ingram, the archivist at St Hugh's College, for sending me copies of Freda's tutors' reports. In later life, Freda herself blamed her disappointing degree on an interruption in her studies occasioned by ill health, though she took some comfort that Nehru also got a third class honours degree. She wrote to her son Kabir, who faced a similar break in his college career: 'It isn't easy to get a good Division when you drop a year -- rather like the kettle going off the boil. It happened in my case too: only I got a Royal Third as Panditji put it. (He also got the same!!)'
18. Freda Houlston, 'The Reality of Oxford', Calcutta Review, 1933, pp 95- 99. Established in 1844, the Calcutta Review was one of India's most venerated periodicals and between the wars it was an influential platform for Indian nationalism.
19. 'Oxford' audio recording, BFA
20. Castle, Fighting All the Way, p 47
21. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p 26. Her account is echoed -- though without the reference to a mental hospital -- in Castle, Fighting All the Way, p 47
22. Sumita Mukherjee, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England -- returned, Abingdon, 2010, pp 22-26. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p 26. Olive Shapley could have added that the Indian students at Oxford were overwhelmingly men -- Freda appears not to have had any Indian student contemporaries at St Hugh's.
23. D.F. Karaka, All My Yesterdays, Bombay, 1944, pp 8-9. The article appeared in the left-wing Daily Herald in 1934.
24. Oxford Mail, 22 January 1934
25. United India, June 1932
26. Bharat, January 1931
27. D.F. Karaka, The Pulse of Oxford, London, 1933, pp 35-36
28. Castle, Fighting All the Way, p 47
29. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p 26
30. It is likely that Olive Shapley was in some measure a model for one of the characters in Zaheer's fiction. A Night in London is a novella, first published in Urdu in 1938 though written some years earlier, about Indian student life in London (where Zaheer studied law after his Oxford years). One of the most intriguing characters is Sheila Green, an intelligent and cultured Englishwoman with a fascination for India who falls in love with an Indian student to be forsaken by him for India and its national cause. Sajjad Zaheer, A Night in London, translated by Bilal Hashmi, Noida, 2011. This volume also includes a note by Carlo Coppola about Zaheer, and a translation of part of Zaheer's memoirs.
31. Isis, 1 June 1932
32. Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, pp 28-9
33.
Geoff Andrews, The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, London, 2015, pp 36-41. Security service papers relating to Frank Strauss Meyer, KV2/3501, National Archive.
34. Francois Lafitte papers, US72: box 37, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
Lafitte's remarkable list of more than eighty names of fellow Oxford student communists and other documents and subsequent correspondence with MI5 are not available in the National Archive but are included in his personal papers. I am very grateful to Nicholas Deakin for permission to consult this normally 'closed' part of the Lafitte papers.
Lafitte muddled many of the names of his former comrades. Freda Houlston is recorded as 'Freda Corbett' -- the name of a right-wing Labour politician of the time -- but there's no doubt which Freda he meant. Similarly, Zaheer's first name is given as 'Mumtaz' rather than Sajjad. The other Indian communist mentioned is Gopal Kumaramangalam.
35. The Communist Party did, however, set up a student network, and from the mid-1930s -- when international communism moved into its Popular Front period and abandoned sectarianism -- was conspicuously successful in attracting student adherents, particularly at Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and University College, London.
36. V.K. Krishna Menon (ed.), Young Oxford and War, London, [1934], pp 82-3.
37 Michael Foot, 'Oxford and Politics', Cherwell, 14 October 1933.
38. 'Oxford' audio recording, BFA
39. M.R. Masani, The Communist Party of India: A Short History, New York, 1954, p 47.
40. B.P.L. Bedi interview transcript, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), f31
41. A.G. Noorani, 'A Versatile Communist', Frontline (Chennai), 10 August 2012 -- an article consisting of extracts from an oral history interview with Sajjad Zaheer held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
42. B.P.L. Bedi interview transcript, NMML, f52
43. B.P.L. Bedi interview transcript, NMML, f39
44. B.P.L. Bedi interview transcript, NMML, f285
45. Ganga Das, 'Indian Politics in London', Hindustan, December 1933.
46. India Office Records L/PJ/12/252, ff5-6. This file includes the only copy of Bharat located, for January 1931. It was subtitled 'A Journal of Indian students abroad', and consisted of 48 well produced pages with a striking graphic on the cover. This was superseded in 1932 by New Bharat: Voice of India's Revolt! which the authorities considered banning from India because of its determinedly rebellious language. It later changed name once more to Indian Front -- several copies of which survive -- while remaining explicitly communist in outlook.
47. B.P.L. Bedi, 'The Nation's Response', United India, January-February 1932
48. Freda Houlston, Women in the Limelight', United India, March 1932
49. Olive Shapley, Women in India', United India, March 1932.
50 Derby Evening Telegraph, 24 August 1932, 19 July 1932.
51. 'Berlin to Punjab 1934-39' audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, BFA