Who was Mira Behn and why did she want to import some of F. Newman Turner's Jersey cows to India?

Madeleine Slade (1892-1982)  was an enthusiast of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and in pursuit of this interest came across a biography of Mahatma Gandhi.  Inspired by his work, she wrote to ask if she might go to his Sahamarti Ashram.  Gandhi invited her and she set about training herself for the demands of the ascetic life in the Ashram that he had warned her would be necessary. The daughter of  Rear Admiral Sir Edmund Slade, she arrived in India in 1925 and remained there for almost 35 years during which she accompanied Gandhi (who had given her the name Mira Behn after a devotee of The Lord Krishna) to round table conferences in London in 1931 and other events leading to India's independence.

After independence and Gandhi's assassination in 1948, Mira Behn continued his campaign for rural and social reform and became active in dairying and farming in the foothills of the Himalayas.  She had a deep interest in organic husbandry and was a regular reader of he Farmer,  an organic periodical published in the 1940s and 'fifties by Frank Newman Turner. According to Dr Bidisha Mallik, who made a detailed study of Mira Behn's life and work: 'Impressed with the animal husbandry experiments of Newman Turner at his Goosegreen Farm in the Chilton Polden Hills of Somerset, Mira Behn desired to Mira Behn with Mohatma Gandhi integrated some of Newman Turner's cattle breeding ideas into her scheme for the mountain people' (Mallik, 2014, personal communication).

She had hoped to invite Frank out to her farm in Kashmir and to import some Jerseys from his herd.  Her plan to establish  smaller shorter-legged breeds which might be more suited to the mountain conditions, were thwarted by the Indian Government's refusal to fund such a scheme and their determination to rely on indigenous breeds.

Mira Behn returned to England in 1959 before moving to Austria in 1960 to pursue her interest in Beethoven where she wrote a  biography, The Spirit of Beethoven, which was published many years later as Beethoven's Mystical Vision (Khadi Friends Forum,1999). She died there in 1982.

You can read more about The Farmer, MiraBehn, and Frank Newman Turner at

 

Post Views : 3