Freda Bedi

Freda Bedi, a British woman who was jailed in India as a supporter of Indian nationalism and was the first Western woman to take full ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. Freda Bedi was studying it Oxford University where she met Baba Pyare Lal Bedi and where their first child, Ranga, was born. Freda,her husband and baby son sailed to India in 1934. She worked as a journalist and taught English at a women's college in Lahore, and with her husband published a high quality quarterly review "Contemporary India". In Delhi, she became a prominent Buddhist and in 1956, when the 14th Dalai Lama made his first visit to India, she showed him around Buddhist shrines in Delhi. She joined a women's militia for a while and taught English at a newly established women's college in Srinagar in Kashmir. She was one of the first Western women to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. While running the Young Lamas Home School at Dalhousie in north India, Bedi also spent time at Rumtek in Sikkim, the seat of the Karmapa in exile.

Freda Bedi's son Kabir Bedi is a popular movie actor.