Bernoulli, Stifler, Angela, Mangala

Swiss Mureed. Her mother, Mrs. Stifler, was a mureed of Murshid.  Mangala arrived in Suresnes at the age of 17 and became the nanny of Murshids children. She is the mother of Amiran van Lohuizen – Bernoulli, the wife of Hakim (Jelaluddin) van Lohuizen.

Burkhardt, Martha

Aarau, April 30, 1874 – Rapperswil January 12, 1956

She studied painting in Paris and Munich. From her twentieth year she was interested in religion. In 1911 and 1912 she traveled to the Far East, visiting many prominent holy places in India, China and Japan. Then she returned home to her mother in Rapperswil and wrote books and articles about the different religions. She also founded a number of charity organizations. She joined the Sufi order of Inayat Khan in 1923.

From her English Wiki Page:

Martha Burkhardt was a Swiss painter and photographer. Born in the city of Aarau, she spent her childhood in Rapperswil and as an adult made Rapperswil again her home.

Martha Burkhardt’s family moved to Rapperswil in 1880, where her grandparents operated a business at Fischmarktstrasse 6 and where she spent her childhood. A year later, Martha and her younger brother Max lost her father and her grandfather and grew up in her mother’s and grandmother household. The siblings were artistically gifted, and Max became a decorative painter and later a photographer in Arbon. The rebellious young woman ignored repeatedly the social limits which were imposed to women at the beginning of the 20th century, among others “she was the first woman in Rapperswil who boarded a bike, to the horror of frightened minds”. Like her brother, Martha was interested in painting. Aged about 15, she worked as a domestic helper in Lausanne to spend the so-called Welschlandjahr which at that time usually teenage women absolved in western Switzerland (Welschland) to improve the knowledge of the French language. There, a teacher noticed Martha’s artistic talent, but the federal art academy only allowed boys to study. Her first experiences as a painter were in Paris, France, from 1898. She then studied from 1901 to 1906 in München, Germany, as student of the professors Jankk and Feldbusch. At the school of artists in München she met her future girlfriend Meta Kirchner.

Voyages and work

Back in Switzerland, Martha Burkhardt established in Rapperswil her own atelier to work independently as a painter and to participate exhibitions. She succeeded, and the proceeds from the sale of her paintings allowed her, every year for a few weeks, to go on the road, among others to Italy, Scandinavia and Morocco, and also extensive trips to France, Spain, Russia and even to Constantinople. She also undertook landscape studies in the Netherlands and in Sweden. From Meta Kirchner, she received an invitation to the coronation of King George V on occasion of the Delhi Durbar of 1911, from where she traveled extensively through Asia from 1911 to 1914, although few tourists were in those years without male accompaniment. Deeply impressed by the Asian spirituality, she processed her impressions of India, China and Japan in her pictures and wrote newspaper articles and books which she illustrated herself.

Back in Rapperswil, the artist took part in public life. During World War I she was engaged in the food commission of the city, and founded an emergency hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic. Then she was for many years president of the family welfare in the public women’s association. Martha Burkhardt established the free child care of the charitable women’s association and founded the first exchange for adopted children in Rapperswil. In 1927 she retired to her self-built house on the Meienberg hill between Rapperswil and Jona.

Publications

• Chinesische Kultstätten Und Kultgebräuche. Erlenbach 1920, 2010 reprint by Kessinger Publishing, ISBN978-1168541581.
• Rapperswil die Rosenstadt erzählt aus ihrer ereignisvollen Vergangenheit sowie von ihrem tätigen und vergnüglichen Leben der Gegenwart zu hundert Zeichnungen. Erlenbach-Zürich und Leipzig 1921.
• Magie und Mystik, Gegensatz und Zusammenhang. Zürich und Leipzig 1935.

 

 

Sen Gupta, Kabir, Ranjit

10 oktober 1933 tot 5 juli 2011

Mureed from Basel of Indian origin. Musharaff and Shahzadi were close friends with Kabir and his wife, Karima, and regularly spent their holidays in Basel. He published a work about pranayama.

Sen Gupta – Tuchtfeldt, Karima

Born in 1932

Karima Sen Gupta-Tuchtfeldt, born in 1932 in Hamburg, studied German, pedagogy, comparative religious studies; she was a primary school teacher for a few years, married to an Indian man, Kabir Sen Gupta. Her early interest in the spiritual traditions of the East brought her into contact with the teachings of Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan in 1956. She now lives in Switzerland and works for the international Sufi movement. She published the two anthologies from the work of Hazrat Inayat Khan with the titles “From the Happiness of Harmony” and “Wanderer on the Inner Path” by Verlag Heilbronn and worked from 1970 to 1995 for the Sufi magazine “SIFAT”.

Two of her books have been translated into Dutch: ‘Travelers on the Inner Path’ and: ‘About Happiness and Harmony’.

Sureli Zahler

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