Mirabehn

• 1. Introduction

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  Mirabehn, born Madeleine Slade on the 22nd of November 1892, closed a book one day and decided her life was no longer her own. The book was Romain Rolland's biography of Mahatma Gandhi, and the effect it had on her was total. "I could not put it down," she later recalled. "From that moment I knew that my life was dedicated to Gandhi."

  She was a daughter of the British establishment. Her father, Rear-Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, commanded the East Indies Squadron and later ran Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty. She grew up on a country estate and spent her twenties immersed in Beethoven, managing concerts and helping mend the rift between British audiences and German musicians after the First World War.

  Then a chance conversation in Villeneuve changed everything. What drove an English admiral's daughter to leave that world behind, live in an Indian ashram, get arrested multiple times by her own government, and spend her final years in the Vienna Woods? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Beethoven to Gandhi

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  At fifteen, Madeleine Slade developed a passion for Ludwig van Beethoven's music that would shape the entire trajectory of her life. She taught herself the piano, attended concerts, and eventually became a concert manager. In 1921, she organised a series of London Orchestra concerts conducted by a German conductor, an act that helped break the British boycott of German musicians that had persisted since the First World War.

  Her devotion to Beethoven took her to Vienna and Germany, where she visited the places he had lived and worked. She read deeply, including the Beethoven books written by the French author Romain Rolland. It was this reading that led her to seek out Rolland himself at Villeneuve, where he was living at the time. During their meeting, Rolland mentioned his new book on Gandhi, which she had not yet read. He described Gandhi as another Christ and the greatest figure of the twentieth century.

  Back in England, she read Rolland's Gandhi biography and was transformed. But rather than sailing for India immediately, she spent a year preparing herself with deliberate care. She studied material on the Sabarmati Ashram, sat cross-legged to accustom her body, adopted a vegetarian diet, gave up wine, beer, and spirits, and learned to spin and weave wool. In 1924, she wrote to Gandhi directly, enclosing twenty pounds. Gandhi replied warmly, praising her patience, and suggested she take another year to decide. She used it to read the Bhagavad Gita and portions of the Rigveda in French, and subscribed to Gandhi's journal Young India. By November 1925, she was ready.

• 3. Arrival and Transformation

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  Mirabehn arrived in Bombay on the 6th of November 1925, met at the dock by Gandhi's followers and his son Devdas. She refused to spend the day sightseeing. Within hours she had set off for Ahmedabad, where Mahadev Desai, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Swami Anand received her on the 7th of November. It was the beginning of a stay in India that would last almost thirty-four years.

  Gandhi greeted her with the words "You will be my daughter," and gave her the name Mirabehn, drawn from the Hindu mystic Mirabai. The name took hold completely. In the spring of 1982, just months before her death, she said: "It is my name. If someone says 'Miss Slade' to me, I don't know who they are talking to."

  Her first year at Sabarmati was structured around the rhythms of ashram life. She spun and wove, cooked, and cleaned. When her Hindi and Gujarati remained shaky after a year, Gandhi sent her north to Gurukul Kanya and Gurukul Kangri to study the languages properly. She hoped Gandhi would take her along after the Jubilee Celebration at Gurukul Kangri, but he redirected her to Bhagwadbhakti Ashram in Rewari instead, believing a more immersive environment would serve her better.

  Gandhi also trusted her with editorial work. He asked her to correct the language and grammar of the English version of his autobiography, a task that placed her at the intersection of two worlds she now straddled. Back at Sabarmati, she made a formal commitment to celibacy, began wearing a white sari, and cut her hair short. In September 1928, Gandhi sent her on a solo journey through North, South, and East India, hoping she would gather enough experience to eventually establish a training centre for spinning and weaving.

• 4. Arrest, Resistance, and the World Stage

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  Mirabehn attended her first Indian National Congress annual meeting in December 1925, and the arc of that political struggle would come to define her decades in India. She accompanied Gandhi to the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, and on the return journey they stopped to visit Romain Rolland, who presented her with a book on Beethoven he had written in her absence. She began reading it and felt something shift. The book convinced her that she eventually wanted to spend her remaining years in Austria, in the country whose music had first altered her path. That wish would take thirty years to fulfil.

  Gandhi was arrested on orders of the new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, shortly after they returned to Bombay. Mirabehn immediately took on the work of compiling weekly reports detailing who had been arrested, where, and on what grounds. The activity drew official attention. She was jailed at Arthur Road Jail for three months, where she met Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Released briefly, she was arrested again in 1932 for entering Bombay without permission, this time serving a longer sentence. She was transferred to Sabarmati Jail in Ahmedabad, where her cellmate was Kasturba, Gandhi's wife.

  In the summer of 1934, Gandhi gave her permission to tour the West and make the case for Indian self-rule. She spoke in London, Wales, Lancashire, and Newcastle, met former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and corresponded with and eventually met the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She argued that Indians were fully capable of self-government and detailed the damage British colonial policy had done to India's rural industries and its taxpayers.

  Through her contact with Priest John Haynes Holmes, she then crossed to the United States. In a two-week tour she addressed twenty-two gatherings, appeared on five radio broadcasts, and met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In August 1942, she was arrested alongside Gandhi and other Congress leaders when the Quit India movement launched. They were held at Aga Khan Palace in Poona until May 1944. Both Mahadev Desai and Kasturba Gandhi died while imprisoned there.

• 5. Roots, Rivers, and the Himalaya

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  After her release from Aga Khan Palace, Mirabehn turned her energy toward the land itself. With Gandhi's permission, she established the Kisan Ashram near Haridwar on a plot given for the purpose. Local people built a house and a cattle shed. Cows and bullocks arrived, followed by a khadi shed and a small dispensary for basic medicines.

  In 1946, at the request of Govind Ballabh Pant, she moved to Pashulok to work on agriculture extension programs. She stayed in correspondence with Gandhi through 1947, and spent three months with him in Delhi after falling ill toward the year's end. She was a witness to many of the defining events of that period: the Simla Conference, the Cabinet Mission, the formation of the Interim Government, Partition, and Gandhi's assassination.

  After independence, she founded a settlement called Bapu Gram in Rishikesh and, in 1952, the Gopal Ashram in Bhilangna Valley. Dairying and farming experiments absorbed her. She also spent time in Kashmir. In the hills of Kumaon and Garhwal, she watched the forests being destroyed and traced the connection to flooding in the plains below. She wrote about it in an essay she titled Something Wrong in the Himalaya. The Forest Department ignored her. Decades later, in the 1980s, those same hills became the site of the Chipko Movement, a large Gandhian environmental campaign to save the forests, vindicating the concern she had raised years before.

• 6. The Vienna Woods

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  Mirabehn returned to England in 1959 and relocated to Austria the following year, making good on the feeling that had taken root when Romain Rolland handed her a Beethoven book on a journey home from London. She settled in small villages in the Vienna Woods, living in turn in Baden, Hinterbrühl, and Kracking over twenty-two years.

  India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whom Mirabehn had known since Gandhi was a child, ensured she was not forgotten. Gandhi instructed the Indian Embassy in Austria to provide Mirabehn with whatever she needed. Four friends visited her daily throughout those years.

  She still lived simply by choice. She ate only natural foods and refused to use labour-saving devices. In 1981, India recognised her with the Padma Vibhushan, its second-highest civilian honour. She died on the 20th of July 1982 in the Vienna Woods.

  She had left behind three books of her own: an autobiography titled The Spiritual Pilgrimage, a collection called Bapu's Letters to Mira, and New and Old Gleanings. A fourth book, Beethoven's Mystical Vision, was published posthumously in Madurai by Khadi Friends Forum in 1999, with a second digital edition issued in 2000 by MGM University. The circle between the two passions of her life, Beethoven and Gandhi, closed quietly in print, seventeen years after she died.