“You shall be my daughter,” said Mahatma Gandhi to Madeleine Slade on the day she arrived at his ashram in India in 1925. Slade, whose father was a British admiral, was then 32 years old. She’d undertaken the journey from Britain so that she could—as she wrote to Gandhi in advance—“learn to live your ideals & principles in daily life.” Gandhi gave her an Indian name, Mira, and she made India her home for the next 34 years, joining Gandhi in his nonviolent campaign to win India’s independence.
Mira’s is one of seven stories of “Western fighters for India’s freedom,” narrated to us by Ramachandra Guha in “Rebels Against the Raj.” Mr. Guha tells us that by dint of her devotion to Gandhi, Mira became a part of his innermost circle, accompanying him even to London for contentious meetings with the British government in 1931. So intimate was their relationship, in fact, that she was given the task of observing the Mahatma’s bowel movements. “There have been motions at 5 a.m., 6.40 a.m., 2.40 p.m., and now there has just been one at 3.40,” she recorded on a particularly productive day.
