In the Shadow of Freedom

In this dazzling true story, one man’s life and loves spans the seismic changes of two continents in the twentieth century.

In the 1930’s Ayi Tendulkar, a young journalist from Maharashtra, travelled to Germany to study. He soon married Eva Schubring, his professor’s daughter. Shortly after the hasty marriage broke up, Tendulkar, by now also a well-known journalist in Berlin, met and fell in love with the filmmaker Thea von Harbou, former wife of Fritz Lang. She and Tendulkar married and built the foundation for a shared life in Germany.

Many years his senior, Thea became Ayi’s support and mainstay, encouraging and supporting him in bringing other young Indian students to the country. Hitler’s rise to power put an end to this cultural influx, and on Thea’s advice, Ayi returned to India, where he became involved in Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation and where, with Thea’s consent, he married Indumati Gunaji, a Gandhian activist.

Caught up in the whirlwind of Gandhi’s activism, Indumati and Ayi spent several years separated in Indian prisions, being able to live as a married couple only after their release—Gandhi himself blessed their union, provided that they remain apart for several years ‘to serve the nation.’

In this unique account, Indumati and Ayi’s daughter, Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul, traces the turbulent lives of her parents and Thea von Harbou against the backdrop of Hitler’s 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 fascism and colonialism.