[3] Freda Marie Houlston was born in a flat above her father's jewellery and watch repair business in Monk Street in Derby.

[5] She succeeded in gaining admission to St Hugh's College, Oxford to study French, being awarded an Exhibition or minor scholarship.

[citation needed] Romance blossomed and they married at Oxford Registry Office in June 1933,[2] in spite of the reservations of her family and disciplinary action by her college.

[1] At St Hugh's her closest friends included Barbara Castle,[4] later a prominent Labour cabinet minister, and the broadcaster Olive Shapley.

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".

[9] "Baba" Bedi spent about fifteen months in an internment camp at Deoli in the early stages of World War Two because as a communist he was seeking to disrupt recruitment of Punjabis into the British Indian army.

Freda herself was jailed for three months in 1941 as a satyagrahi after deliberately defying the wartime regulations as part of a civil disobedience campaign spearheaded by Mohandas K. Gandhi[10] After independence in 1947, Bedi and her family moved to Kashmir,[4] where husband and wife were influential supporters of Sheikh Abdullah, the left-wing Kashmiri nationalist leader.

[1][2] Freda Bedi briefly served as a member of the United Nations Social Services Planning Commission to Burma, during which she was first exposed to Buddhism, which quickly became the defining aspect of her life.

[18][19] 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.

[24] A hand crafted wooden tribute to Freda Bedi, made by Kalwinder Singh Dhindsa, was placed in a community garden in her home city of Derby in June 2022.