I was recently honoured to be asked to give a talk to Urdu Culture London and Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu UK about the spot where the Indian Progressive Writers' Association gathered for their first meeting. Noor Zaheer had seen an earlier post on this site which prompted her to extend the invitation. She was sitting alongside me as I spoke about her father, the distinguished Urdu writer and leftist Sajjad Zaheer - and happily she confirmed the details of his personal life which I shared in the talk. Here is the text of what I said:  The Nanking restaurant was in the basement, down those steep outside stairs In the course of a few minutes I am going to take you on a journey in search of the birthplace of the Indian Progressive Writers Association – we’ll take in Little Tokyo, Tin Pan Alley, the Rolling Stones and Revolution. And we’ll end up at a now deserted basement not more than a mile from here. The renowned Urdu writer, Sajjad Zaheer, in his reminiscences gave an account of the first meeting of the IPWA: 'A Chinese restaurant owner of London was very considerate towards us and used to offer the back room of his restaurant free of charge. This small, unventilated cellar could accommodate forty to fifty people with difficulty.’ The venue was the basement of the Nanking restaurant in Denmark Street - and the date, according to the scholar Carlo Coppola, was probably the evening of Saturday, 24 November, 1934. Mulk Raj Anand says that it was at a meeting at the Nanking restaurant in the following year, 1935, that the Association’s historic manifesto was agreed The first All-India Progressive Writers' Conference was held in Lucknow on 10 April 1936 under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer. But where was the long gone Nanking restaurant? Yes, Denmark Street – a short street off Charing Cross Road still associated with music and instruments - Tin Pan Alley as was, centre of the sheet music trade – before that Little Tokyo, hub of the small Japanese commuity in London – and earlier still a haunt of the radical O’Brienites, followers of the Chartist and socialist Bronterre O'Brien who met at the Eclectic Hall in Denmark Place and mustered alongside Karl Marx in the International Working Men's Association. I come at this from two perspective: a keen interest in fiction set in London which has a strong sense of place, and Sajjad Zaheer’s novella ‘London ki ek raat’ is exactly that, in large part a lightly fictionalised account of the lives of Indian students and recent graduates in Bloomsbury in the mid-1930s. The Lucknow-based scholar, Madhu Singh, has written about the title on a website I set up, London Fictions. My interest also arose because I was working on a biography of Freda Houlston – Freda Bedi – a woman from Derby from a non-privileged background who studied at Oxford in the early 1930s. There she met and married an Indian student and communist from Lahore, B.P.L. Bedi - and from that moment, long before she had set foot on Indian soil, decided that she was unequivocally Indian. She lived most of her adult life in India, died there, two of her sons live there today – one of them of course is the actor Kabir Bedi.  Oxford Mail, February 1933 At Oxford, Freda had two close friends: Barbara Betts, who became better known as Barbara Castle, and was really the first woman cabinet minister to make a big mark on British politics; and Olive Shapley, who became a broadcaster on the BBC notably as the host of Woman’s Hour on the radio. Freda was emboldened to have an Indian boyfriend by her friend, Olive. At Oxford, Olive Shapley was a fervent class-against-class Communist and Olive’s boyfriend was ... Sajjad Zaheer. They never married of course nor intended to marry. I suspect Olive is the model for Sheila Green in Zaheer’s novella, who is told by her Indian boyfriend that he is returning home because he loves his country and its national cause even more than he loves her. At Oxford, Zaheer was an evangelical communist. He took over the publication of the Oxford Indian students, Bharat, and turned it into a revolutionary publication. The only copy I’ve been able to trace is in the India Office Records. On the cover is the slogan: ‘Inquilab Zindabad’. It survives only because a British civil servant wanted to ban it and sent a copy to government lawyers for their view. They said it was, in effect, already illegal in India so no further action was needed.  Olive Shapley and Sajjad Zaheer remained on cordial terms. Indeed Olive’s son tells me that as a teenager he accompanied his mother to India, and they called on Sajjad Zaheer and his wife and daughters at their home in Delhi. So let’s get back to Denmark Street. What do we know of the Nanking restaurant where the IPWA held its early meetings? Rather wonderfully there’s an account of the street from a visitor in 1932: “….enter Denmark Street, which is now almost wholly given over to Chinese and Japanese restaurants and emporia. Undoubtedly the most amusing of these places is The Nanking, presided over by Mr. Fung Saw. Mr. Fung is some thing of a politician, and to his restaurant come many of the more youthful of the budding Parliamentarians. These, together with composers and song writers, their publishers and film artists, comprise the chief of Mr. Fung’s clientele. The hall of feasting is reached by long, steep steps, which lead to an exceptionally large, light, and lofty basement. ... Inside, the decorations are reminiscent of a Chinese junk, and the walls are decorated in vermilion and in greens and yellows, which only a Chinese artist is able to use to Oriental perfection.” And where exactly was the Nanking restaurant? Well, a 1940 street directory answers that. It was at no. 4 Denmark Street, sharing the elegant six-storey building with a bookseller, a music publishers, a film casting agent and a commercial artist. And no, the street hasn't since been renumbered. It was in the basement that Zaheer and his comrades met. So when I discovered that 4 Denmark Street was the spot, a decade back, I went round with my good friend Sam Miller. It was a bar, the Alley Cat, which promised live music nightly. When we navigated our way down the outside metal staircase and entered, there was no music and no other customers. The bartender told a story of tough times. The bar subsequently closed down. That basement space is derelict today. There must be a business opportunity there. And it really deserves a blue plaque asthe birthplace of the IPWA.. The floors above became Regent Sounds Studios. Back in the day, they all recorded here: Hendrix, Elton John, Black Sabbath, the Kinks. The ground floor is now a shop specialising in electric guitars but the studio signage survives.
There’s a sign in the window saying that the Stones’ recorded ‘Not Fade Away’ here in 1964. You know the song, I'm sure. It goes: 'Your love for me has got to be real, Love is real and not fade away’. Part of our common purpose today is to ensure that the progressive legacy of those who gathered in the basement of the Nanking restaurant all those decades ago does not fade away.
7 Comments
 This is Delia el-Hosayny, standing alongside the museum display that chronicles her achievement. Delia was Derby's first woman bouncer! And she's one of twenty or so Derbyshire women celebrated in an excellent 'History Makers' exhibition which has just opened at Derby Museum and will be on for almost five months.  The display includes newspaper cuttings about Delia's career as a bouncer - some dating back to her first job at the Saracen's Head:  And there's also the coat which was her work attire, making her look official - and formidable:   I went to the exhibition launch last night because Freda Bedi, whose biography I have written, is - rather splendidly - one of the Derby women given special attention!  Freda Bedi married a Punjabi fellow student and made her life in India where she was variously a pioneering leftist, a prominent nationalist and a path-breaking Tibetan Buddhist nun. What a life!
 Derby now has, at long last, a tribute to one of its most distinguished daughters. Freda Bedi - who became a prominent Indian nationalist and later the leading Tibetan Buddhist nun of her time - was born in the back streets of Derby 111 years ago. She was born Freda Marie Houlston and spent her childhood in Derby, and even after moving to India with her Punjabi husband, Freda kept in touch with her home city and visited when she could.  The memorial is the initiative of, and has been crafted by, Kalwinder Singh Dhindsa. He is a Derby man, a serious Derby County fan and a social and community activist. Kal's done a huge amount to burnish the memory of Freda Bedi in her home city - and of course he shares with Freda a sense of belonging to both Derby and Punjab. The photo shows Kal with the Freda Bedi tribute - on the left - and another piece which he has also hand crafted. Impressive!  Kal says: 'The tribute is made from a cutaway cross section of a large Derbyshire tree. The great thing about the Freda Bedi Tribute is that the pattern of the 'heartwood' in the centre around the pith does not conform to the usual circular ring pattern of most trees. The Freda Tribute suggests that the early stages of the tree's life might have been a difficult period. Very much like Freda's own life due to the devastating loss of her father during the First World War.' 'From the photo you can see the 'heartwood' looks almost like a leaf shape or even a tree. Definitely not concentric circles moving outward uniformly. As soon as I saw this piece of wood I knew it was perfect to represent the life of Freda Bedi. A non conformist rule breaker, forging her own path in life. The Freda Tribute has an image of a cedar tree within its pith. This is a nod to Freda's old School, Parkfields Cedars. 'I pass this spot regularly on my walks. So do many locals and school children. It's nice to see folk stop to read the plaque. Although initially many folk would not be too aware of who Freda was, when finding some time to research her name or ask further questions, they'll no doubt be amazed to discover what an amazing life this Derby born girl lived.'  If you want to find the tribute, it's in a community garden on Carlisle Avenue in Littleover. This is close to Freda's principal childhood home on Wade Avenue and to the parish church where Freda's father, Frank Houlston, is honoured on a war memorial as a local man who gave his life in the First World War.
Against the odds, Freda Houlston got to Oxford University where she met B.P.L. Bedi. They married at Oxford in 1933. The couple moved to Lahore where both became prominent leftists and nationalists and published at various times an impressive quarterly review and a much more activist-minded weekly paper. During the Second World War, B.P.L. Bedi was interned so that he couldn't disturb British military recruitment in Punjab. Freda took the huge step of offering herself up for arrest as part of a passive resistance campaign led by Mahatma Gandhi and spent several months in a Lahore jail.  The photograph below was taken in Mickleover in 1947 when Freda was visiting her mother. The baby in her arms is her third child, Kabir Bedi - who became a hugely successful star of film and small screen.  After India's independence, the Bedis lived for several years in Kashmir where they were influential figures in the new nationalist movement which came to power after the eclipse of the local maharajah. Later they moved to Delhi, and Freda's association with Tibetan Buddhism started when she worked to improve facilities in the camps set up in north-east India for Tibetan refugees who followed the Dalai Lama across the Himalayas to escape Chinese rule. She became probably the first ever woman in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to receive full ordination as a nun. I have written Freda Bedi's biography, The Lives of Freda.  Freda Bedi's birthplace on Monk Street is still standing. Last time I visited, it was a tanning and beauty salon.
What a marvellous spot this would be for a civic tribute to this inspiring Derby woman!  This wonderful little brooch, a little bigger than a 10p coin, dates from the First World War. It's a sweetheart brooch of the Machine Gun Corps, which was set up in October 1915 to ensure the more effective use of machine guns on the Western front and was disbanded in 1922. The corps' level of casualties was so high it was nicknamed the suicide club. The badges aren't particularly rare or valuable - this one has the corps badge mounted on mother of pearl and is slightly chipped. It cost me a very reasonable £8. Historian Penny Streeter has written about these brooches, which reached the peak of their popularity during the First World War. She says: 'These little brooches are miniature replicas of the badges of military regiments, naval units, the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF, generally known as sweetheart brooches because they were often given as romantic keepsakes by members of the armed forces to their wives and girlfriends before they left for the front.' I found this brooch last week at an antiques stall in Cromford near Derby, and the location is as important to me as its charm and historical resonance. I have written a biography of a Derby woman, Freda Bedi, who made her life in India, where she was an active nationalist and leftist and later a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Her father, Frank Houlston, was in the Machine Gun Corps and died in northern France in April 1918. In this photograph, he is wearing the corps emblem on his cap.
There is not the slightest evidence that the brooch I bought was given by Frank Houlston to his wife - but nor is that out of the question.
 I made a personal act of pilgrimage in Lahore this week - to the Bradlaugh Hall. This magnificent but sadly dilapidated building is where Freda Bedi - the English woman turned Indian nationalist whose biography I have written - first addressed a political meeting in her adopted home of Punjab. It was the mid-1930s, and Freda was convinced by her Punjabi communist husband, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi, to address a student rally at Bradlaugh Hall. 'B.P.L. said oh, you know, they want you to talk - it's nothing, you just talk as you talk at a debating society at Oxford. And when I got there I was petrified to find that there were 24,000 people waiting, and this crowd of 24,000 had a very definite opinion about what it should listen to and what it shouldn't. And if it didn't like the speaker it would start beating the ground with sticks and the soles of the feet and making a noise so the speaker would have to go down. 'Anyway, I decided that the reason they didn't like a number of speakers was that they couldn't hear them and the best thing would be to speak pretty loudly. ... So I stood on the platform like a martyr awaiting execution and I suddenly began speaking ... in a very loud voice, and I can still feel the shock that went through the whole 24,000 heads when this slight western-looking person suddenly bellowed into the microphone, must have been out of sheer fright. And that established me as a speaker. I found I could go on speaking and not be drummed out of existence by the sticks and the feet.' The 24,000 number is not to be taken too literally - but creeping inside the rotting hulk of the building, a rather perilous venture, you get a sense of the scale of the nationalist rallies so often held here. When Freda and other wartime political prisoners were released from jail in Lahore in 1941, Bradlaugh Hall was the venue for the Congress rally to mark their liberation. It was a stormy and overcast day when I visited the hall - you can get an idea of how it looks when the sun shines from this photo, one of a series, which accompanied an excellent article in the Dawn newspaper a few years ago:  Bradlaugh Hall, Lahore - courtesy of 'Dawn' The hall has a fascinating, if somewhat opaque, history. It is very central - just off Rattigan Road and a few minutes' stroll from Government College where B.P.L. Bedi was once a student. And it's named after an English politician, Charles Bradlaugh (I once made a radio documentary about him - you can hear it here). He was a republican and atheist MP on the ultra-radical wing of Victorian liberalism who was famously detained overnight in the Houses of Parliament as part of a tumultuous struggle he staged to be allowed to affirm - rather than take a religious oath - when taking his seat in the Commons. Bradlaugh took on the informal title when a Parliamentarian in the 1880s of the 'Member for India'. And he was one of the very few British MPs of his day to make the trip out to the biggest and most valued part of the Empire.
In December 1889, Bradlaugh sailed to Bombay to give the opening address at the annual gathering of the Indian National Congress. Yes, that's the same Congress - in institutional terms at least - as the political party which dominated politics once India gained independence, until the recent rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP that is. Bradlaugh was by then very unwell, in part because of his ceaseless campaigning. Part of the purpose of the trip to India was the supposedly restorative sea passage. He spent not more than two weeks in India and health concerns meant that he wasn't able to fulfil his ambition to travel around the country. And it's clear - in spite of what some local historical sources say - that Bradlaugh never made it to Lahore. Four years later, in 1893, the annual session of Congress was held in Lahore - and was presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, who was also a member of the House of Commons (the Liberal MP for Finsbury Central). That seems to be when fundraising started to construct a hall in Lahore not under the direct control of the colonial authorities and so able to be used for nationalist gatherings.  The inaugural stone was laid in 1900 - nine years after Bradlaugh's death - by a prominent nationalist Surendranath Banerjee. Once completed, it became associated with Lala Lajpat Rai, who established the National College in the hall buildings. Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary regarded as perhaps India's foremost martyr of the struggle for independence, attended this college and almost certainly spoke here. Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah are among many prominent political figures said to have addressed their followers at the Bradlaugh Hall. It was perhaps the foremost venue in Lahore for nationalist meetings during the first half of the twentieth century.  The hall is slightly hidden away and not fully visible from the main road. That perhaps explains its survival more-or-less in tact - though some extensions were added when the building was, apparently, used as a steel mill after independence. Although it's supposed to be sealed off, with the help of local historian Faizan Naqvi, I was able to get inside the cavernous hall, which was both awe-inspiring and, given the poor upkeep, deeply depressing. A detailed study of Bradlaugh Hall - posted below - describes it as 'a gem among all the colonial period building of Lahore' and points to the window design in particular as a remarkable amalgamation of western and local styles. The architecture is certainly, well, non-standard - but its importance lies in the use to which it was put rather than the integrity of its design. The building is certainly imposing, and given its centrality to the nationalist movement in what was then the capital of undivided Punjab, I do hope it has a secure future. At the moment, the structure seems broadly sound, but many of the remarkable wooden window fittings are crumbling and the roof is peppered with holes. It was a rainy day when I visited, and floor of the hall - happily constructed of brick - was an array of puddles. 
The building is under the control of a curious hangover from the Partition era, the Evacuee Trust Properties Board. After the steel mill closed, the building was apparently used as a school - and although it is said to have been empty for the past fifteen years, my ramble round the interior revealed educational posters of a fairly recent vintage and even a blackboard with some maths sums still clearly legible. There is now a Save Bradlaugh Hall campaign which deserves support - though there's work to be done to develop clear plans for any future use of the hall and the source of funds to repair and adapt the structure. But such a magnificent and historic meeting place - a location so redolent of the nationalist movement in Lahore - surely deserves a generous measure of tender loving care ... and cash.  LATER: a piece based on this blog was broadcast on the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent on 27 February 2020. Here's the audio:  It's taken four years of work - but at last my biography of Freda Bedi is out. The Lives of Freda: the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi was launched at the Oxford Bookstore in Calcutta over the weekend. Jawhar Sarcar, a former head of India's public broadcasting corporation, presided - and Ami Bedi, Freda's granddaughter, also spoke..
Who was Freda Bedi? An English woman who made her life in India - the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student, that was in 1933, and who was jailed in Lahore during the Second World War for championing India's national cause over that of her mother country. She later was an active Kashmiri nationalist, a Tibetan Buddhist - and towards the end of her life she became a Buddhist nun. You can find out more about Freda Bedi and my biography here and I've posted below a reading from the introduction to the book - There are lots of ways to get the book - which is also available on kindle ... and if you order direct from the publishers, Speaking Tiger, then if you are in India you get a discount and there's no delivery charge. What about that!
The contributors are a roll-call of the most distinguished British academics on India and on international relations and the most renowned of India's coming generation of professors and public intellectuals. The style of the articles is bookish and the volumes didn't generate a huge amount of interest - but this was a new, more assertive style of Indian nationalism assembling its intellectual armoury.  This set (there was supposed to be a fourth volume on constitutional issues, but it never appeared) were part of the publishers' archive. A pity that has been dispersed - but a joy to have these volumes, and in excellent condition. And the editors? They were both in their early twenties when these volumes appeared and Freda Bedi - whose biography I have written (out very soon!) - had not set foot on Indian soil, though she was to do so in the autumn of 1934 and it was her home for the remainder of her life. Once settled in Lahore, the Bedis embarked on another venture much in the style of India Analysed, a heavyweight nationalist quarterly, Contemporary India. What a precocious couple they were!
 For three years in the mid-1930s, B.P.L. Bedi and his English wife, Freda Bedi, published in Lahore a really excellent leftist and nationalist quarterly. It was called Contemporary India and ran for ten issues, the last a double issue - there's a complete set at the British Library (though the catalogue entry is none too great - it's at P.P.3779hc) and an almost complete run at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was a substantial publication - each issue ran to 160 or more pages. 'Netaji' Subhas Chandra Bose was among the contributors. The articles were mainly about Indian politics and economic themes but also extended to Indian folk song and theatre, the caste system, issues relating to gender and such topics as Hitler's rise in Germany, Stalin's grip on the Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Africa, the Bahai religion and much more. It was nationalist - and internationalist. And it is virtually unknown. At the end of this blog I've posted all the journal's covers to give an idea of the range of content, and also the complete text of Bose's article, which was entitled 'India Abroad'.  Sombart c1933 B.P.L. Bedi said that the idea for the quarterly came from Werner Sombart, his doctoral supervisor in Berlin and one of Germany's leading social scientists. Sombart lamented that India had no quarterly magazine of intellectual calibre. 'That very day I came back home', B.P.L. recalled, 'discussed the situation with Freda and decided that we must have a quarterly magazine immediately on our return'. Contemporary India published an extract from Sombart's deeply controversial 1934 volume, Deutscher Sozialismus, which some regarded as advocating a form of German 'national' socialism which offered some intellectual solace to the Nazis. The intellectual partnership between B.P.L. and Freda had begun earlier, when they were fellow students at Oxford University. They fell in love, and a fruit of their personal and political alliance was a series of three volumes they edited for Gollancz with the title India Analysed. They became engaged early in 1933 - below is their formal engagement photograph - and married at Oxford Registry Office a few months later, as soon as they had finished their final degree exams. Freda Houlston was from a middle -class family in the English Midlands. She lived a remarkable life, was jailed in Lahore by the British during the Second World War for opposing the war effort, and later became a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I'm writing her biography - it will be published soon .  The Bedis - after a sojourn in Berlin interrupted by the menace surrounding Hitler's increasing political authority - arrived in Lahore in the autumn of 1934. Contemporary India started publication within a matter of months. B.P.L. was listed as the editor and Freda as the managing editor, and they assembled an impressive list of Indian academics as contributing editors. 
In politics, the quarterly both championed Bose and the radical wing of Congress, and promoted the interests of the Congress Socialist Party, in which both communists (the CPI was banned at this time) and Congress leftists gathered. Contemporary India also published some poetry - including this piece by a youthful Balraj Sahni, later a key figure in Indian cinema:  And the journal also published a folk song translated by Nora Richards, the founder of Andretta and a champion of traditional Punjabi theatre and performance:  Freda Bedi told a friend at the close of 1936 that the quarterly was 'self-supporting. and growing every day'. But that was putting a very positive gloss on a precarious situation. The journal was short of revenue and also had to deal with official obstruction and disapproval. And the Bedis' attention moved to another venture, a much more populist political Lahore-based weekly Monday Morning, which achieved both sales and impact but has disappeared completely beneath the waves (if anyone has a copy of knows where there are any, please let me know).  A double issue published towards the close of 1937 was, it seems, Contemporary India's last. This was the only issue to contain plates - to accompany an article by Tandra Devi (aka Mrs Maud Foulds aka the violinist Maud MacCarthy) on puppet and traditional theatre. The quarterly was a brave and important initiative and deserves the attention of historians of Indian nationalism and leftism. UPDATED in October 2018 with the discovery in the British Library of the tenth and apparently final issue of Contemporary India.  Contemporary India: covers of all ten issues         
|
Andrew Whitehead's blogWelcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! Archives
April 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed