Mirabehn

1. 🎹 In 1921, Madeleine Slade, then a concert manager in London, arranged for a German conductor to lead the London Orchestra in Beethoven concerts, helping to end the British boycott of German musicians after WWI. 2. 📚 After reading Romain Rolland’s biography of Gandhi in the early 1920s, Slade decided to dedicate her life to him, adopting vegetarianism and learning spinning before writing to Gandhi in 1924 to express her desire to join him in India. 3. Upon arriving in India in 1925, Gandhi gave her the name Mirabehn, after the Hindu mystic Mira Bai, and she took vows of celibacy, wore a white sari, and immersed herself in spinning cotton and learning Hindi and Gujarati. 4. Between 1927 and 1933, Mirabehn courted imprisonment multiple times during civil disobedience movements, including stays in Arthur Road Jail and Sabarmati Jail, while serving as Gandhi’s personal emissary to Viceroys and British leaders. 5. 🌾 In 1946, she was appointed honorary special adviser to the Uttar Pradesh government to help increase agricultural production, and in 1947 she founded an ashram near Rishikesh to continue rural development work. 6. 🌲 After Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Mirabehn spent over a decade traveling throughout India, initiating environmental projects like flood control and anti-deforestation efforts in the Bhilangana valley, and experimenting with crossbreeding English Dexter cattle with yaks in Jammu and Kashmir. 7. ❓ Why did a British woman, born into a naval family in Surrey in 1892, abandon her privileged life to live as an Indian ascetic, spinning cotton in a remote ashram, and later dedicate decades to grassroots environmental and social projects across India?