A new disciple
November 7, 2023
On November 7, 1925, Gandhi’s ashram had a new arrival, one unlike all the others. Madelaine Slade was the daughter of an British admiral, and had come to India specifically to live and work with Gandhi. She was thirty-three, and would live there for the next thirty-four years before returning to Europe for the last decades of her life.
The source of her inspiration was a 1924 hagiography written by Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One With the Universal Being. After reading it, she felt a calling. To prepare herself for life in India, she took on various challenges: she gave up meat and alcohol, she learned to spin and studied the Indian language, she “taught herself squatting and sleeping on the floor.”1
After arriving in Bombay, she was met by Gandhi’s youngest son, Devadas, who brought her to Ahmedabad to the ashram. In her autobiography, she describes her first meeting with the man she would call Bapu (father) for the rest of his life:
As I entered [the room], a slight brown figure rose up and came toward me. I was conscious of nothing but a sense of light. I fell on my knees. Hands gently raised me up, and a voice said: ‘You shall be my daughter.’ My consciousness of the physical world began to return, and I saw a face smiling at me with eyes full of love, blended with a gentle twinkle of amusement. Yes, this was Mahatma Gandhi, and I had arrived.
For her new life in India, Gandhi gave her a new name: “Mira, after the medieval Rajput princess who renounced everything for God.”2 Commonly known as Mirabehn (the suffix -behn means sister), she was frequently found by his side, traveling with with him to London in 1931, for the second Round Table Conference.
Mirabehn also made a tour of the West to promote the cause of Indian independence, even meeting with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. When World War Two arrived, she went to western India to prepare nonviolent resistance to a Japanese invasion, and in 1942, when Gandhi and his wife were imprisoned in the Aga Kahn Palace, she was there as well.
What have you done to prepare yourself for challenges that you expected to face?
Short biography on mkgandhi.org
Gandhi: The Man, his People, and the Empire (Rajmohan Gandhi, 2007) p. 282