Meera Behn was born as Madeleine Slade in 1892 in England. Her father, Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, came of an aristocratic conventional family and was a typical English gentleman, affectionate but strict, reserved and always correct. Her mother was beautiful, artistic and came of aristocratic but unconventional parentage. In her family there was a strain of gypsy blood, which according to Meera Behn was responsible for her wander lust.

Madeleine was a solitary child who hated school and was educated at home by a governess. She learnt to read and write, could not master mathematics, but loved flowers, birds, trees and animals. She studied Botany and Anatomy and developed appreciation for the beautiful and the artistic. She was fond of riding and gardening and learnt French, German and later Egyptian.

She was six feet tall, with attractive features, a sharp hooked nose and beautiful eyes. She was much sought after by young men but she felt bored by the London society. She did not like to go dancing and instead enjoyed being with nature. She loved music. Beethoven roused in her a spiritual hunger. She made a pilgrimage to Bonn and Vienna, the places of Beethoven’s birth and death.She read ‘Jean Christophe’, a novel based partly on the life of Beethoven, written by Romain Rolland, and went to meet the French philosopher. In order to talk to him in French, she first went to live in France in order to master the language.

Romain Rolland introduced Madeleine to Mahatma Gandhi. She read his book ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ at one sitting and it changed her life. “Now I knew what that something was, the approach of which I had been feeling.” “It was to go to Mahatma Gandhi who served the cause of oppressed India through fearless truth and non-violence, a cause, which though focussed in India, was for the whole of humanity.” In order to prepare herself to come to Gandhiji, she gave up alcoholic drinks, became a vegetarian and studied the Bhagvad Gita.

She wrote to Gandhiji congratulating him at the end of his 21-day fast in 1924 and sent him L20 from her pocket money for the cause. She wanted to join him. He welcomed her and she landed at Bombay on 6 November 1925 and was at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, on 7 November. Life in the Ashram was hard but she made an adjustment, adopted Indian dress, learnt Hindi and mastered spinning and carding.

She never married though she fell in love twice, once in England with a married Pianist whom she was helping to get established, and once in India. She took a vow of Brahmacharya, shaved off her head and in later years adopted saffron robes. She wanted to become a Hindu. Gandhiji dissuaded her. All paths lead to the same God, he said, there was no need for anyone to change his or her religion.

Asked about her religion in London, she said, she followed Gandhiji’s religion, but was not a Hindu.
“There was a Christ and a Buddha. Now there is Gandhi,” she said. To a New York representative she said, “You have your Christ. To me Gandhi is Christ.” She studied the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Puranas. She writes, “As the days went by, I became more and more devoted to the Vedas. They entered into my innermost being through the medium of the very elements which

had drawn them out of the human heart thousands of years ago.”

Gandhiji gave her the name of Meera in view of her devotion to him and her dedication to the service of India. Soon after she came to India, she was sent to the Kanya Gurukul, Dehradun, where she had to choose between receiving visitors or letters from Bapu. She chose the latter. In the Gurukul she taught English, spinning and carding and studied Hindi and the Scriptures.

At first Gandhiji did not allow her to join the political struggle. She toured Bihar, Bengal and Madras to propagate Khadi and to teach improved methods of carding and spinning. The poverty in Bihar distressed her. She taught the villagers sanitation and nursed the sick when she was free from fever in between attacks of malaria.
She accompanied Gandhiji to the Second Round Table Conference in 1932 and acted as his interpreter on the Continent on his way back. She said India was her home and she felt like a foreigner in England.

She joined the Satyagraha movement later on and was in prison along with Kasturba once and twice by herself.
She tried to settle independently in several villages to serve them, but every time she fell ill and came back to Bapu. In 1934 she started work at Segaon, a village near Wardha. Bapu told her that if she left Segoan, he would have to go and settle there. She did leave it and Bapu had his last Ashram at Segoan which he named Sevagram.

During the Second World War, Bapu sent Meera to Orissa, Assam and Bengal and it was on the basis of her reports that he worked out a scheme of non-violent civil defence, non-violent resistance against possible Japanese invasion. She went to see the Viceroy, but he would not meet her. His Secretary, Mr. Laithwait, met her instead. She told him that the time had come for the British to end their rule in India. They should quit India.

Bapu sent her to the A. I. C. C. at Allahabad with a draft on Quit India Movement which was later accepted at the Bombay A. I. C. C. meeting in August 1942 as the Quit India Resolution. She was arrested along with Bapu on the morning of 9 August and was in the Aga Khan Palace Detention Camp from August 1942 to May 1944. She kept a little ivory statue of Balkrishna in her room and made beautiful floral decorations around it which all inmates of the detention camp loved to see. She played carrom, badminton and table tennis in the detention camp. She had many discussions with Gandhiji which she has narrated in her book ‘The Spirit’s Pilgrimage’.

After her release she started a centre for the services of the villagers and old cows and bullocks near Rishikesh, called Kisan Ashram. She later named it Pashulok. She worked as an Honorary Adviser to the U.P. Government in connection with the newly-launched. “Grow more food” campaign for some time. Later she did similar work in Kashmir for a short while.

After Bapu’s death, however, the pull for India was not the same. It was on 18 January 1959 that she left India for good and settled in a small village about 30 miles out of Vienna. Here she spent her time in listening to Beethoven’s music, fraternising with nature. She went for long walks and was called by the workers and farmers miles around as “The Indian Lady”.