Launch of In The Shadow of Freedom

Laxmi Dhaul’s new book “In The Shadow Of Freedom’’ published by Zubaan, is to be launched at the Jaipur Literary Festival today at 1.30 during the lunch session at the Char Bagh in Diggi Palace.
The book is about Ayi Tendulkar, a young Maharashtrian man who started life as Vallabhai Patel’s secretary in Sabarmati Ashram and was sent to study in the UK with a scholarship.Eventually, he travelled to Germany to study. Within a short time, he married Eva Schubring, his professor’s daughter. Soon after the short-lived marriage broke up, Tendulkar, by now also a well-known journalist in Berlin, met and fell in love with the filmmaker Thea von Harbou, the divorced wife of Fritz Lang and soon to be Tendulkar’s wife. Many years his senior, Thea became Tendulkar’s support and mainstay in Germany, encouraging and supporting him in bringing other young Indian students to the country.
The Nazi regime under Hitler made life difficult for foreigners and on Thea von Harbou’s advice, Tendulkar returned to India, just before World War II broke out where he became involved in Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation movement with the British, and where with Thea’s consent he soon married Indumati Gunaji, a Gandhian activist.
Indumati and Tendulkar spent several years in Indian prisons together as a married couple and complied with a condition that Gandhi had put to their marriage, that they would not have children till India became independent.
Indumati and Tendulkar’s daughter, Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul, traces the lives of her parents and Thea von Harbou, against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and Gandhi’s India, using a wealth of documents, letters, newspaper articles and photographs to piece together the intermeshed histories of two women, the man they loved, their own growing friendship, and two countries battling violence, fascism and colonialism.