From its inception, mainstream second-wave American feminism was made in the image of other places. And significant among those places was India.
Betty Friedan (1921–2006) and Gloria Steinem (1934–), two of second-wave feminism’s most prominent and polarizing figures, made formative trips to India in the 1950s and 1960s before they became leaders of the movement. At the time, India had become a spiritual destination for young Americans seeking salvation amid the bloodshed of the Vietnam War. Simultaneously, India was a growing power in world politics, leading a campaign for solidarity among decolonizing nations outside the dominant Cold War blocs.
Steinem’s interest in India — she spent two years on a fellowship there between 1956 and 1958 — is perhaps better known. She worked as a freelance writer and did odd projects for Indian companies, including posing in a nylon sari for an Indian advertisement. The time Steinem spent with grassroots Gandhian activists in western India affected her deeply and shaped her thinking about race, gender, and inequality. When she published the first issue of Ms. in 1972, the cover featured the Hindu goddess Kali.
While Steinem visited India several times, Friedan made only one trip in 1966. I learned about this trip while leafing through Friedan’s personal papers, which are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. I found multiple drafts of an essay, an oral history recording, and scattered notes, receipts, and telegrams that tracked Friedan’s days in India. I decided to reconstruct her journey because it seemed to have catapulted her into a defining phase of her politics.
Having recently published The Feminine Mystique, Friedan traveled to India because she wanted to meet Indira Gandhi, India’s first — and only — woman prime minister. The brief trip shaped Friedan’s outlook toward female leadership and power. In the months that followed, Friedan threw herself into establishing the National Organization for Women (NOW) with a group of feminist lawyers, academics, and activists.
As NOW grew, Friedan continued to trot the globe. She toured communal housing in Czechoslovakia and ate caviar in Iran, appealing confidently for the collective liberation of women around the world. She called herself an “ambassador-without-portfolio for women,” although those women tore at what they saw as her imperial outlook and her ignorance of Third-World aspirations. When, in 1975, a man was elected president of the first International Women’s Year conference in Mexico, Friedan led a crusade against that decision, even though many women from outside the U.S. — and especially from Latin America — had supported it. One Nigerian-born magazine editor summarized, “Women in the Third World do not need any more champions. We are bored and tired of all Great White Hopes.”
Despite her contentious relationship with the Third World, Friedan always maintained a sense of reverence toward India, which represented for her a model of collective will and meteoric social progress, ideals that were constantly challenged in her own activism. In looking to postcolonial India for lessons in overcoming oppression, she simultaneously fetishized the country and its gender politics, and her attitude captured the paradox of Western feminism’s attempts to be international.
The Cape
Betty Friedan’s Indian Winter
Betty Friedan was having a wardrobe crisis. As she hurried down New York City’s Fifth Avenue — or perhaps it was Sixth — she didn’t know what exactly she would buy, but she knew it would need to suit the weather. It was January 1966 — not a particularly cold winter so far, and the snow had only teased when it had appeared at all. Her coat might have been serving her well, but it would have certainly been too warm for her travels. She needed something lighter — and more elegant.
Betty hadn’t been one for fancy wares, or at least, she hadn’t been able to afford them until recently. Still, she did have a charge account at Henri Bendel, one of the swankiest department stores in town. The dignified establishment, which sat along West 57th Street, happened to be owned by her family friends. With only a day left before her departure, it was perhaps the most convenient destination for a shopping run.
As a mother to three children, Betty had probably grown accustomed to shopping for convenience. But now, as she pushed past Henri Bendel’s heavy glass doors, she was confronted with choices in every texture and fragrance and hue. A “street of shops” unfurled along the store’s first floor like a long spine, its every segment a new brand, thrust between false wooden walls and mottled stone columns. As Betty rushed through this bazaar of lipsticks and stockings, her eyes fell upon something bolder. It was a Rudi Gernreich cape — black on one side, camel fur on the other, the edge of its front strikingly askew. To Betty, it seemed perfect for India. And, perhaps more perfectly, it was on sale. For a thrifty $100, it would become the first designer thing Betty ever owned.
Indira Gandhi was reading the paper. Perhaps she was stuck on the headline just below the masthead — yet another one about her. Her colleagues wanted her to travel to the United States as soon as possible to meet with the American president, Lyndon Johnson. She knew this, of course, and had even agreed to go, but now, it was as though the entire country was waiting to see if she’d keep her word.
As she folded the paper and leaned back in her metal-framed lounge chair, Indira gazed out the window. The grass was still wet, shimmering under the slowly warming sun.
It was January 1966, the harshest month of winter in New Delhi. For Indira, it was a season of hurtling change. Days earlier, she had been designated prime minister of the Republic of India — a country that was at once a rising international power and a mess of religious violence, illiteracy, and starvation. Indira’s predecessor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had died unexpectedly in the Soviet Union, only one day after signing a treaty to bring the latest war between India and Pakistan to an end. The party election that followed had been thorny. The Congress Party, to which Indira belonged, had picked her over the older guard to lead them. Some cried conspiracy. Others cried nepotism. Others thought they could control a woman from behind the scenes.
Although she secretly wanted it, Indira had not chosen either the job or its timing. She had not chosen how the papers had announced her every move since, nor the many unwritten demands that were being made of her beyond the job. For starters, it was expected that she find quarters befitting her new status. But she didn’t want to leave her house. As she continued to stare at her garden, observing how the light jittered through the leaves of the tamarind trees, she knew this would remain her home. It was not that she owned it or had chosen it, but it had somehow, through the everyday experience of being in it, become hers.
The house itself was a square and squat building that stood amid a vast, green lawn, in proportions similar to other official residences in Delhi’s parliamentary neighborhood. But the building’s ubiquitous limewash exterior hid spaces that Indira had labored to personalize herself. For the living room, where she hosted parliamentarians and diplomats, she had picked a veneer of propriety — dark wooden furniture, upholstered in dull grays, browns, and blues. Away from this court of statesmanship, however, Indira’s choices grew wilder. Ceiling-high bookshelves lined the bedroom, their stacks studded unevenly with ceramic curios. The rug was a bright red. The chairs were noticeably soft. And even the wreckage of papers on the desk in the attached study betrayed their formality. Above them hung a cheeky black-ink cartoon — an incarnation of Indira’s late husband, Feroze, sleeping in past 10 a.m. In one corner, by a window overlooking the shaded garden, there was a lone lounge chair on which Indira read her paper.
Within the executive scaffoldings of the house, it seemed that Indira had crafted a home of her own. And it would be this setting, between power and privacy, that would captivate another woman — an American visitor — only a few weeks later.
The era of Betty Friedan’s stardom had not yet arrived. In early 1966, nobody thought her to be the leader of a global movement for women’s liberation. Such a movement, if it even existed within the United States, would gain its tidal moniker — “second wave” — only two years later. For now, Betty saw herself as an up-and-coming writer, one in whom New York publications were finally interested.
Three years earlier, in 1963, Betty had published The Feminine Mystique, a staggering bestseller on the plight of middle-class, white American housewives. According to her, American women had been robbed of their identities and aspirations; they had been systematically led to believe that their fulfillment as women lay in their roles as wives and mothers. Betty had dubbed this all-encompassing deception the “feminine mystique,” a phenomenon “so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids.” Now, she argued for women to have an equal shot at life outside the home — in the public and inevitably male-dominated world.
For someone so vocal about women expanding their horizons, Betty herself hadn’t ventured far, at least not geographically. Although she had worked as a labor journalist in New York City, she had been compelled to move to suburban Rockwell County after conceiving her third child. She had first glimpsed foreign waters only in her forties, when she used some of the royalties from her book to take her husband, Carl, to Antigua. But perhaps because that trip had been swift, years later, she would barely count it as having traveled abroad.
One evening, in the third week of January 1966, Betty and Carl were entertaining guests at home when Carl mentioned the news. A woman named Indira Gandhi was going to be sworn in as the prime minister of India, and Betty, he declared, should go meet her. Betty loved the idea. A woman was going to lead a “major democracy,” and she wanted to see that happen from up close. She promptly called her agent and asked if the Ladies’ Home Journal would hire her to do a story. The journal agreed immediately and offered her approximately $3,000. If she bagged an interview with Indira, they said they would pay her double. If she could make that interview an exclusive, they would pay her triple.
Three days later, on the night of Sunday, January 23, Betty boarded a plane to India. This journey, she would later say, was her first real trip away from home.
A woman was going to lead a “major democracy,” and Betty wanted to see that happen from up close. She called her agent.
Betty arrived in New Delhi armed with a new cape and only a semblance of a plan. She wanted to “be in India and do as the Indians did,” so she dodged the American embassy and its stifling rules for cultural navigation. Instead, she checked into an Indian hotel called The Ashoka, the grandest one in the Indian capital.
In a stately hotel room — to her mind, it might as well have been a ballroom — Betty sat down to work. She had no friends in this country, and yet, she had to find its prime minister. She made calls to diplomats, to acquaintances of acquaintances, and made lists of every reference they gave her. Then she called for a car — or maybe it was a rickshaw — and went to the Congress Party’s headquarters to try her luck. She asked the staff there for the prime minister’s schedule. They told her to come to a memorial service early the next morning; the prime minister would be there, they said. At last, a plan. Back at the hotel, then, Betty finally gave in to her jetlag under a whirring ceiling fan.
The next morning, when the sky was still dark, Betty put on a dress, stockings, and a pair of high heels. She packed a copy of The Feminine Mystique in her bag and set out to a memorial site by the Yamuna River (though she would always remember it as the Ganges). Indira was standing at a distance, her head bowed in respect, as a throng of journalists, both Indian and foreign, captured the moment. The event was probably the 13th-day ceremony — a Hindu funeral rite — for the late prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, but Betty was not concerned with such details. She was distracted by the people around her. They were staring at her, pointing. She looked toward Indira, who was poised in a white sari, its end pulled like a tent over her head. Betty must have noticed the flash of silver peeking out from beneath the fabric when it dawned on her — people were staring at her because she looked like Indira Gandhi! “We were cutting our hair the same way,” she later said.
For the rest of the morning, Betty trailed Indira around the city with a brigade of foreign journalists. On the lawn outside Indira’s house, ordinary Indians arrived in sequence to see her for daily darshan (to Betty’s ear, “dharjan”). Betty watched attentively. As each worker and schoolgirl relayed their miseries and received their medals, she marveled at the ritual. Perhaps it was the scarcity of women or the obvious contrast of genders that made Indira notice her, too. In a sea of men — assistants, bodyguards, servers, journalists — Betty and Indira both seemed incongruous. At their third stop for the day, an aide came up to Betty and said, “Betty Friedan, the Prime Minister would like to see you.”
The 1960s saw the dawn of a new kind of tourism in India. Young, largely white “Westerners” flocked to the country in greater numbers, aching to find meaning in their lives — or perhaps simply to escape the fomenting years of the Vietnam War. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, terrorized by his newfound notoriety, sailed for Bombay in 1961, searching for God and a lost love. The year Betty Friedan set foot in New Delhi, the Beatles also made a brief visit. They would return two years later to meditate on the purpose of fame before carrying home a trove of exotically tinny songs that would become the White Album (1968).
Unlike younger generations of American and British seekers, however, middle-aged Betty didn’t go to India on a soul-searching mission. It wasn’t divinity that she wanted to witness per se but a vision of a political future with a woman at its helm. As it happened, Indira Gandhi was not the modern world’s first female head of state. In 1961, Sirimavo Bandaranaike had claimed that title when she took office as prime minister of Sri Lanka, but that milestone event had evidently failed to capture Betty’s imagination. India’s size and its growing presence in international politics had made Indira’s election seem more historic. Or perhaps it was India’s widespread reputation as a land of wonders that had impressed itself on Betty’s mind. Whatever combination of fact-finding and mythology had led Betty to recognize Indira’s election as revolutionary, it had been persuasive. “For the first time, a woman [is] moving into history,” Betty wrote, “not as hereditary queen, not as wife, mother, mistress, hostess…in a time of crises and dangers that the strongest men might shudder to take on.” The more time Betty spent in India, the more her fascination with Indira transformed into a fascination with Indira’s country. She began eating foods she couldn’t identify with little regard for their hygiene and chided herself as an “Ugly American” who had too many arrogant questions for this enlightened land.
In India, Betty learned to dwell in an alien feeling. She was unmoored, uneasy, and inexplicably excited, though she would never call it culture shock. The first time she felt it was in a large state ground, dotted with tarpaulin tents that had been erected for dancers visiting from around the country. They had probably performed the previous day in India’s Republic Day Parade — a stoic display of expressionless soldiers, drawling speeches, and pious dance routines. Betty had witnessed the whole affair from a privileged seat in Box P, just behind the president’s head. Now, however, she found herself in the thick of the action. The prime minister had decided to pay the dancers an impromptu visit, and Betty was chasing after her.
As Betty scrambled behind quick-footed Indira, she noticed the heat and dust. She noticed the flies and the children running among donkeys, cows, and goats. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the dancing began. To Betty, it was warlike. It frightened her, even. The dancers were “shouting and jumping, waving spears inches away from the Prime Minister’s head.” Then, before Betty knew it, the prime minister had tossed away her sandals, walked into the storm, and was bobbing to the beat, barefoot.
Betty prayed for security agents to break up the dance. In her mind, she invoked the FBI. But in that same moment of horror, she also began working through a puzzle: How could a head of state lead a people and also dance with them?
“It was my first experience of another culture,” Betty later said, describing how the sights of India had overwhelmed her. Back when she was writing The Feminine Mystique, India had been a mere statistic: an unrestrained birthrate with a bleak warning for American boomers. But now, India was all color and sound and moral lesson wrapped into one. While traveling together for a few days that January, Betty confided in the French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, who was also covering Indira’s inaugural days. He scoffed at Betty’s wonderment. “Well, you should see China,” he told her. “This is nothing.”
Betty and Indira were sitting in the afternoon sun, likely sipping cups of milky tea. It was their first conversation, and in a way, each was checking the other out. “I am not a feminist,” Indira declared, “I don’t agree with Simone de Beauvoir.” Perhaps there was a moment of tension, maybe an uneasy silence. Then Betty confessed, “Nor do I, not completely.” Together, the two women wondered if, like them, the French philosopher was struggling to define the terms of her womanhood. Having rejected the old world of men, maybe she was just trying to become a new kind of woman.
Indira didn’t like talking about her femininity, Betty observed. When other American journalists had pressed her about what it was like to be a woman prime minister, she had shot back, “I am a Prime Minister and I happen to be a human being.” Yet here was Betty, a woman with exactly those questions, and Indira was listening.
In the United States, the thought of a woman president was “inconceivable” to Betty. “How is it possible,” she wanted to know, “for a woman to be elected Prime Minister of India, where enforced seclusion of women in purdah, child marriage, and burning of widows alive on their husbands’ pyres [had] outraged Christian missionaries less than a century ago?” But while Indira’s ascent seemed momentous, Betty was cautious of her own excitement at first. She knew that many in India believed Indira had come to power only because she was the daughter of the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Still, Betty couldn’t shake off her hunch that there was something unique in Indira. “Could a female Kennedy, Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, or Adenauer even be imagined in such a situation?” More than understanding how Indira had come to power, though, Betty was bent on knowing how she would handle it. Would she have to lead like a man and hide her femininity to become “one of the boys”? Indira didn’t give her an answer. Instead, she invited Betty to find out for herself.
Over the next two weeks, Betty traveled with Indira to riverine villages in the East and desert towns in the West. She wandered the depths of Indira’s home and interviewed her closest friends and most resentful rivals. The two women spoke about elections, freedom, and M.K. Gandhi. About mothering and marriage. About love, and grief, and duty. In a journey taken by plane, helicopter, jeep, and foot, Betty was to be the only other woman — and the only American — in Indira’s group.
The morning after their first tea, before they began their journey together, Betty sent Indira a back issue of Ladies’ Home Journal and a copy of The Feminine Mystique. On the flyleaf, she wrote that she hoped Indira would be “an existential image” for women all around the world. Betty had come to Delhi on a journalistic mission, but in many ways, she was Indira’s fan even before she landed.
There had been a stampede the previous day. Twelve people had died in the crush. Betty was learning the harsh realities of political life. She had followed Indira to Assam, a hilly region carpeted with colonial tea estates that was tucked within India’s distal reach to the east. Betty was crabby about the “spartan” shower she had been forced to take that morning — tossing mugs of frigid water from a bucket over her shoulders.
The Assamese days were short, the sun dropping behind the overgrown hills before teatime, and Betty’s had passed with almost martial speed. In the span of 48 hours, Indira had inaugurated bridges, walked diplomatic tightropes with local leaders, and delivered stirring speeches at every pitstop. Citizens had gathered in the hundreds of thousands to see her, and each time, she had charged them to make India great. Every moment on this eastward journey was a grand display of hope for the future, and Betty, though she didn’t know Hindi, felt she understood Indira’s every word. She marveled at how a woman could stand before a flood of captive listeners, not shouting or booming but addressing the masses in soft and clipped sentences. Indira spoke of education and development — but never womanhood — and yet, Betty felt exhilarated. At one sunset speech, she noticed the warmth of Indira’s face, how its fragility disappeared against the doves and eagles circling her head.
Betty then found herself in a straw hut that was hoisted above the mud on bamboo stilts. In one tract of the large enclosure, behind a wall of thick woolen shawls — white, black, and red — local women leaders were helping Indira get dressed. They were putting her in what Betty understood as “tribal dress” — probably two pieces of woven fabric, one to be wrapped over the torso, the other around the waist. Perhaps not wanting to leave Betty out, one of the women took a shawl that was hanging on the fabric partition and placed it over Betty’s shoulders. Indira looked at Betty and frowned. “Are you comfortable?” she asked.
Betty gazed down at herself. Underneath the shawl, she was wearing a knitted black dress with ill-matched beach sandals (probably the white-soled, blue-strapped phenomenon that all of India paraded and knew as hawai chappal). The heels and stockings and girdle with which Betty had come to Assam had not been cut out for climbing into jeeps and plodding through the slush. She began to apologize to Indira for her unbecoming appearance, but Indira interrupted, lifting the pleats of her skirt above her ankles. Faraway from the paved roads of Delhi, she too was wearing bedroom slippers.
It was in such spaces of privacy, with no man in their midst, that Betty began to sense in the prime minister a “womanly” tenderness. She adored Indira’s ability to dwell on small details — like the color of a sari or the size of a village woman’s nose ring — and she relished how the leader offered lozenges to a sniffly colleague in the middle of an official meeting. Most of all, though, Betty was struck by Indira’s ability to make time. It seemed incredible to her that a head of state would invite conversations with ordinary citizens, even while the country had an endless to-do list. As Betty watched Indira compartmentalize and multitask in her every activity, she began to see a version of her own life reflected.
When Betty wrote The Feminine Mystique, she asserted that women should be able to leave the home, take up traditionally male jobs, and have their success be judged on the same terms as men. She devoted a chapter of her book to a critique of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, whom she believed was reinforcing theories of biological difference among women. “Even though it would seem that Margaret Mead is now trying to get women out of the home…,” Betty wrote, “she is translating the new possibilities open to women and the new problems facing them…into sexual terms.” Until her trip to India, Betty had believed that true gender parity could emerge only when women shed their “feminine” personas in the professional world. But in Indira, Betty found another possibility for women’s leadership. “It was from her that I came to realize that women did not have to become like men.”
On the flight back to the capital, Betty might have observed the aircraft wing slicing the clouds outside. Below, she could see gray-white peaks opening toward her like canine jaws; she convinced herself she was passing Mt. Everest. Suspended above earthly duties for a few hours, Betty wondered if she might speak with Indira. She walked up to the front of the cabin and, with a breath of hesitation, pushed the door open a few inches. Indira was sitting on a lone, plush seat with the copy of Ladies’ Home Journal that Betty had gifted her. “If you’re not too tired…” Betty began. Indira laughed. “This is not the sort of thing that tires me,” she said, inviting Betty to another audience. Betty later decided Indira was the only woman she knew who had more energy than herself.
Betty, however, might have been tired. Her departure from New York had been riddled with anguish. Although her husband had suggested she meet Indira, he had also given her hell when she actually went. One day in Delhi, amid a flurry of memos from various Indian government ministries, Betty had received a message from the U.S. It was Carl, cussing at her in the span of a telegram, telling her she might as well not return. Decades later, Betty would admit that it had been a turbulent marriage. She would also allege that, after she became a regular television personality, Carl had assaulted her on more than one occasion.
“To hurt the male ego is, of course, the biggest sin in marriage.”
Betty asked Indira about her own happiness and if she had had to sacrifice her marriage when she entered politics. Indira said she hadn’t, though she confessed it had been hard. “When I went into politics and became successful, he liked it and he didn’t like it…To hurt the male ego is, of course, the biggest sin in marriage.”
As Indira explained that she had learned to live with — and love — her husband’s displeasure, Betty remarked that it was perhaps impossible for Indira to be “a little housewife” again. “Actually, that has always been my ambition,” Indira said, surprising her guest. “The good Indian would say it was just not in my stars to be that little housewife.”
As the plane thudded down into Delhi, back into the capital’s machinations, Betty might have begun to formulate a theory: Maybe “when commitment to some larger idea becomes a very part of your personality…‘happiness,’ as previously defined for women, is not relevant.” It was a message that stuck.
The slackened grip around Betty’s waist pleased her. The top of her drawstring churidar was so spacious that Betty was having little trouble hopping in and out of bulky vehicles. But it wasn’t just the ease that appealed to Betty. She was in love with the shapes and colors that enveloped her body now — the blue flowers of her A-line kameez and the wrinkled descent of her churidar toward her ankles. Sitting inside a jolting mobile health clinic, she felt self-consciously beautiful.
Betty had passed the morning traveling with a young lady doctor, whose name she had asked but just couldn’t remember. They were somewhere in the western desert state of Rajasthan, probably within a few hours’ reach of Jaipur, making official rounds from village to village. The doctor was in charge of a family planning drive, a cornerstone of Indira’s development policy. She was promoting the “loop” — a cruder ancestor of today’s IUDs — to small-town women.
At each stop they made that morning, Betty approved of the messaging. On billboards, public advertisements were trying to sell Indians on the glories of small nuclear families, and here on the ground, women were seeing that vision through. Village women who had already gotten the loop were bringing their friends to see the doctor. The doctor, in turn, had sacrificed her lunch hour to reassure the women and, she hoped, to race beyond her target numbers. When Betty asked some women who had come to the clinic what they wanted for their daughters, they told her, “an education.”
Maybe the feminine mystique didn’t exist in India, Betty considered. When she had interviewed Morarji Desai, Indira’s staunchest adversary, even he had refused to deride her capacities on the basis of her gender. From a sweeper to a top editor, men across classes had told Betty that Indira’s womanhood had nothing to do with how she might fare; unlike Americans, they insisted, Indians were perhaps more progressive on this matter.
Betty believed them. She believed the man who told her gender oppression was not a part of true Indian culture, that India had been led astray by foreign impositions. She believed the woman who told her that Indians live by Shakti, the Hindu goddess of power. And she believed Indira’s claim that the erotic sculptures in the ancient temples of Khajuraho revealed the country’s deep-rooted sexual liberalism. While Betty continued to believe the collage of so-called facts that were put to her by various Indians, she never reflected upon how she had met the people who provided them. Nearly every one of her sources had come from high-ranking recommenders — academics, diplomats, welfare leaders, and parliamentarians. Whatever their distance from power might have been, most of these people were followers of Gandhi and Nehru’s vision: that Indians were one people united by a common, glorious past. Even the sweeper Betty interviewed had been arranged for by a Congress Party official.
But it was this glib version of India’s nationalist ideology that also gave Betty her first lessons in postcolonial discontent. Empire had reduced Indians to voiceless shadows, she learned, and she felt their anguish. “As a woman, I can understand very well why Indians resent the idea of the United States or Britain or anyone else telling them what they should do,” she wrote, “…it infuriates them even more than it infuriates a woman to be told by her husband: ‘You just keep the house clean, and don’t worry about the world.’”
As they chatted between villages, the nameless lady doctor confessed to Betty that her husband was not always supportive of her medical practice, but she did it anyway. To Betty, there was an air of pragmatism in the doctor’s account — she had a problem but was trudging through it to serve other people. Even when women were denied their aspirations in India, Betty sensed, it wasn’t women’s liberation that they desired but the country’s uplift. In the winter of 1966, India’s freedom struggle still seemed to be blazing; Betty wished American women would find similar purpose.
The day she was to leave India — or maybe it was the day before — Betty went shopping. She would return to America with saris that she’d turn into table covers and also a magenta-colored shalwar-kameez for her daughter. She had gotten her exclusive interview and could finally return home. She might have stayed longer, but there were the children. And there was Carl, seething at her absence from across two oceans.
When Betty arrived back at the hotel, bags in hand, a frantic series of calls awaited her. It was the prime minister’s office, desperate to locate her about a matter of grave importance.
“Your cape. The Prime Minister so admires that cape,” the person on the phone said. “Do you have another winter coat?” Betty quickly understood the diplomacy at play. Even for the money they were willing to pay her, she would not part with her new cape. It was the beau ideal of sophistication, and she loved it.
“I am sorry, I can’t give you that cape,” Betty answered, firmly. But, not wanting to upset her hosts, she agreed to a deal: The prime minister could borrow the cape for a few hours to have it copied. Soon enough, a messenger arrived at the hotel and scurried away with the disputed garment. Hours passed, and Betty left for the airport. It might have looked like the prime minister had reneged on her word. Then, the messenger reappeared. Betty was boarding the plane to New York when he handed her a large brown-paper parcel. Her cape was inside it.
Barely a month after Betty returned from India, Indira arrived in the U.S. for an official visit with President Lyndon Johnson. The White House had planned a spectacular welcome, complete with endless rose bouquets and military drills. Men and women gathered outside the presidential mansion to greet the lady prime minister from India — and Betty was among them.
A helicopter descended upon the grass, and through the gusts around it, Indira emerged. The hem of her sari fluttered around her ankles, but it was weighted down by a long, black cape, buttoned at her neck. As Indira walked past the neatly arranged crowd, she noticed Betty in line, standing in a long, black cape of her own. One woman smiled, the other winked, almost, perhaps, to an image of herself.
A couple of months later, Betty published her article. Indira read it and, but for two factual errors, appreciated the testimonial. “For the first time,” she wrote to Betty, “someone has tried to portray a person and not a freak.” In her second book, Betty would return to her portrait of Indira as the ideal of femininity — a leader of “sari grace.”
Over the years, the two women would correspond occasionally, with Betty always expressing a kind of fondness. In 1971, she would congratulate Indira on her reelection, and Indira, in reply, would say she regretted having missed Betty when she was last in New York.
Four years later, Indira would spin her country, headfirst, into some of its darkest years. In 1975, in the face of mounting labor strikes and student protests, she would suspend elections for 21 months and throw her critics into jail en masse. Her visions for national family planning, meanwhile, would turn into a nightmare of forced sterilizations. In the handful of letters they exchanged, Betty would stick to pleasantries. And years later, she would remain skeptical of the truth of Indira’s authoritarianism, chalking much of it up to “bad press in America.”
After the two essays based on her 1966 trip, Betty would never return to writing about Indira’s politics. But she would always wish to return to India, and Indira would leave the invitation open. Then in 1984, months before Betty was to visit her, Indira would be shot dead by her bodyguards in the tamarind tree-lined garden of her beloved home. Betty would never write a word against her.
Poorna Swami is a writer from Bangalore, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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