Rejecting the Raj: Gandhi’s acolytes in the West

Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate in Surrey was followed by years of rejecting suitors and performing Beethoven on the piano. Occasionally she would sail across the world to visit her father, the commander-in-chief of the East Indies Squadron, who was responsible for Britain’s fleet in the Indian Ocean. But in 1923, a trip to Switzerland to visit the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland in the hills of Villeneuve would change the concert pianist’s life forever. Rolland had recently written about an Indian civil rights activist called Mahatma Gandhi. ‘You have not heard about him?’ he asked in amazement. ‘He is another Christ!’

Rolland’s book convinced Madeleine that she needed to meet the Mahatma. She moved to India, changed her name to Mira (to make it easier for Gandhi to pronounce), learned Hindi and within two years had become the Mahatma’s adopted daughter. Tasked with looking after his spinning wheel, peeling his fruit and even recording the minutiae of his bowel movements, Mira firmly established herself in Gandhi’s inner circle, along with the likes of India’s future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. By the end of the decade, Gandhi’s disciple had become a fully-fledged revolutionary, imprisoned in Bombay’s Arthur Road Jail for civil disobedience. On her release, Gandhi sent her to lobby the president of the United States and create pressure for Britain to grant India’s freedom. ‘The East and West have met before,’ she told a surprised young journalist in New York. ‘To say they have not met is to deny Christianity, for Christianity came from the East.’