Actor Pooja Bedi’s mother, model-classical dancer Protima Gauri née Bedi, died during a landslide in 1998 during a pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar.
In an interview with Subhash K Jha for SCREEN, Pooja revealed that her mother’s body was never found after the tragedy. Here’s what she said.
Pooja Bedi on mother Protima’s death
Pooja said in the interview that she regrets her mom, Protima, dying before she could turn 50, but claimed that she had died the way she wanted. She said, “There are so many regrets about her leaving the planet before she even turned 50. There is so much that I wish I had done with her. But she was a woman who lived life on her terms. She lived the way she wanted, and she literally died the way she wanted.”
Explaining further, she revealed that Protima’s body was never found, “She always said she wanted to die out in nature and, you know, be one with nature. At the end of this beautiful, glorious life, she didn’t want to be pushed into some crematorium with a mock ceremony of her ashes being put in the Ganga. She wanted to die out in nature; that was going to be a grand finale. And that’s exactly the way it panned out. Her body was never found. You know, it was one with the universe, one with the earth.”
About Protima Bedi
Protima was born in 1948 in Delhi to a Haryanvi father and a Bengali mother. In the 1960s, she began modelling and famously streaked at Juhu Beach in Mumbai in 1974 for the launch of Cineblitz magazine. She took up Odissi a year later and built the free dance gurukul, Nrityagram, on the outskirts of Bengaluru in 1990. Protima married Kabir Bedi in 1969, and they separated in 1974. They have two children – Pooja and her brother Siddharth, who died by suicide. Protima announced her retirement after his death in 1997 and died on 18 August 1998.