Attached Women

Madeleine Slade, the daughter of Admiral Slade, born in 1892, grew up in India and in England in the conventional chrysalis of the upper middle class milieu to which she belonged. Some unmarried women in this situation may learn to paint, collect bric-a-brac, or take to drink or spiritualism. Madeleine Slade did something much more unpredictable. In 1925, after a conversation with Romain Rolland, she travelled to India and became Mira Behn, the trusted lieutenant and spiritual daughter of Mahatma Gandhi. This book is her autobiography. It is a true saga of the spirit. It contains an unsentimental account of her difficult adjustment to a life of poverty and Hindu asceticism. Her admiration and love for Gandhi is perhaps too unqualified – but saints do inspire absolute devotion in their followers. The most interesting feature of all is her description of the way Gandhi gradually weaned her from a personal love for him to an unattached charity towards her fellow men. There are many valuable insights and observations in this book for the Western student of Gandhi’s life and work.

The Marriage of Gor is sub-titled ‘the true account of a white girl’s life with a black man’ – not vice versa. Miss Lawrie, who tells the tale, unfortunately lacks the inter-racial consciousness of Mira Behn. As a voluntary do-gooder, she visits Koku Gor and his de facto wife Doris over a period of eighteen months, and finally persuades them to legalise their relationship. But though she learns to care for them, and they for her, there is little sign that she has learnt by the end of the book to modify her conditioned response to lackpage 451 of sanitation, financial improvidence, or emotional disorder. She is a little like the New Zealand schoolteacher who goes into a Maori district with a scrubbing brush and a book of rules. And this is simply not good enough. She learns too little.

1961 (240)