 What a powerful book this is! Published in May 1944, Ela Sen's short stories - 'all culled from real life' - represent the profound tragedy and misery of the famine which ravaged Bengal in 1943 and claimed up to three million lives. The text is overshadowed, however, by the deeply shocking and emotive images of Zainul Abedin. 'Drawings from life', the book asserted. He used Chinese ink and paper made from rags to capture these desperate depictions of the human impact of famine. They are both the starkest images of the famine, and the defining work of one of Bangladesh's most highly regarded artists. Zainul Abedin was still in his twenties when he made these drawings - some of the originals are in the British Museum, whose website records that Ela Sen's book was banned by the British authorities, presumably because of its impact on wartime morale. There is no doubt that British alarm about the prospect of a Japanese invasion of Bengal from Burma - and so their determination to ensure that stocks of grain and boats for river transport couldn't fall into the enemy's hands - contributed to the scale of the tragedy.  There are about a dozen Zainul Abedin drawings in the book, most of them spread over a double page. This image of a young child seeking sustenance from an emaciated and dying mother bring to mind the similar - and similarly unsettling - artwork of Sobha Singh.  This image - which I have blogged about before - was also published to accompany a first-hand account of the famine ... in this case the journalism of Freda Bedi for 'The Tribune', which was published as Bengal Lamenting. And in this book too, the image is more haunting than the words. In the 1940s, both Zainul Abedin and Sobha Singh had links to the progressive writers' movement, and were clearly on the left. Abedin has come to be regarded as the founding father of modern art in Bangladesh. He died in May 1976. I've been able to find out much less about Ela Sen - if you can help, do get in touch. 
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 This is Ranga Bedi, at work in his study at his wonderful home in Bangalore. He and his wife Umi - who began their married life as tea planters in Upper Assam - were my very generous hosts earlier in the month. I am writing a biography of Ranga's mother, Freda Bedi - and here you can see Ranga looking through the rich cache of letters, documents and photos relating to his mother which he very kindly allowed me to go through. On the wall behind Ranga is Umi's painting of Kabir Bedi as a novice monk. Kabir (yes, that Kabir Bedi) is Ranga's younger brother, and in the 1950s, when Freda became absorbed by Buddhism during trips to Burma, he accompanied her and for a while was a novice in a Buddhist order. I also visited Kabir and his wife Parveen during my trip to India this month, and they too were enormously welcoming and generous with access to documents - and were happy to share personal memories. I am very grateful to them. Ranga's life in some ways maps Freda's own (if you want to find out more about Freda, I've recently written online pieces about her for an English newspaper and for an Indian website). His parents, Freda Houlston and B.P.L. Bedi, married in Oxford in June 1933. They moved to Berlin where B.P.L. had a research scholarship. By the time they arrived there - after a motor tour across Europe as a honeymoon - Freda was pregnant. Ranga was born in the German capital - brought up in the huts his parents built at Model Town in Lahore - educated at Tyndale Biscoe school in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar - and by the time his mother became an ordained Tibetan Buddhist nun, Ranga was working on the tea estates. Both Ranga and Kabir - and indeed their sister, Guli, who lives in the US - are immensely proud of their parents. And here's perhaps my favourite portrait photo of her - probably taken in Lahore in the early 1940s, when she would have been 30 or a little over..  Copyright: Bedi family archive
Freda's pioneering role as a Buddhist has been much written about - her earlier political involvement has not been as fully honoured. It's time to make amends!
 A fascinating book in so many ways - which I was lucky to find, though at quite a price, in a London bookshop. It's a graphic first-hand account of the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, written by the remarkable Freda Bedi, with unsettling photographs and an arresting dust jacket designed by Sobha Singh. Freda Bedi was an English woman (she was born Freda Houlston) who at Oxford met and married a Punjabi Sikh, B.P.L. 'Baba' Bedi. She moved with him to Lahore, became an active Indian nationalist and was, like her husband, a communist. I've written about Freda Bedi before, and there are photographs of her elsewhere on this site. Both Baba and Freda Bedi were keenly involved in Kashmiri politics in the 1940s, supporters of Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference - indeed Baba Bedi is said to have drafted the party's distinctly radical 'New Kashmir' manifesto. Later Freda Bedi embraced Tibetan Buddhism and became a renowned woman religious. In the first half of the 1940s, Freda Bedi wrote for 'The Tribune' and other titles , and two books of her journalism were published, both now very hard to find - the first was Behind the Mud Walls, followed in 1944 by Bengal Lamenting. The wartime famine in Bengal was one of the great calamities of modern India. Millions died. 'This small book', Freda Bedi wrote in the foreword to Bengal Lamenting, 'is the record of the month of January, 1944, which I spent touring the most afflicted districts of famine-stricken Bengal.' By then the famine had brought in its wake epidemic and disease, and Freda Bedi drew a sharp political lesson from the agony and wretchedness she encountered: The book is more than a cry of pain, a call to pity, a picture of another tidal wave of tears that has wrenched itself up from the ocean of human misery. It is a demand for reconsideration on a national scale of a problem that cannot be localised, a plea for unity in the face of chaos, one more thrust of the pen for the right of every Bengali and every Indian to see his destiny guided by patriots in a National Government of the People.  The cover is a powerful work by Sobha Singh, then active in the progressive artists' movement and later well known for his paintings of the Sikh gurus. Five mounted photographs are pinned into the book - harrowing scenes of the suffering caused by famine.  Quite the most macabre and shocking is the image on the right, which I have deliberately kept small so that it doesn't upset casual browsers.
The caption reads: 'Memento Mori - death benefits the starving dog'.  Published by Random House, India Freda Bedi was a Derbyshire woman who at Oxford married B.P.L. Bedi, and later moved with him to Lahore. She was an Indian nationalist - and was jailed by the British - and a communist, and later a prominent Tibetan Buddhist. She was active in Kashmiri politics, and is still remembered warmly in Srinagar. And, we now discover, she wrote rhymes for children. More particularly, Freda wrote poems for her elder son, Ranga, who is now in his late seventies. These are charming, whimsical verses - sometimes mystical, or about animanlsm, sometimes with a feel for the Punjabi countryside and a sense of the momentous events then emboiling india. These rhymes have now been published by Random House India, graced by charming illustrations by Anna Bhushan. The cover - designed to accompany a rhyme entitled 'The Kite Song' - gives a sense of her style.  Freda and Baba Bedi Freda's life merits a full biography. She was a striking figure - noted for her beauty and her courage. Margaret Bourke-White met her in Kashmir in 1947-8, and heard from her stories about Kashmiris' struggle against their maharajah. She later worked with Tibetan refugees in Kashmir, and that was what led to her conversion to Buddhism and then her role as a senior woman religious within Tibetan Buddhism. She wrote a couple of books about India in the 1940s, in essence compilations of her journalism. These are now very difficult to come by. Rhymes for Ranga has great charm. It works as a book of nursery rhymes, but the occasional insight into Freda's politics - and the evident warmth of her relationship with her son - are what stand out for me. The rhyme below is about Gandhi, and Anna Bhushan's illustration represents Freda and Ranga on the streets of Lahore.  |
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