Bimla Bissell, ambassadors’ aide and socialite, 1932-2025

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Bimla Bissell, the social secretary to US ambassadors to India and legendary hostess, whose personal history tracked the country’s, has died aged 92. Outside of India, Bissell is best known as the animating force behind Fabindia, the textile and clothing brand founded by her American husband John Bissell.

Tributes since her death in January have used words like “catalyst”, “connector”, and “saloniste” to capture the place she occupied for decades in Delhi at a time when India’s traditionalist society and protected economy were opening to the wider world. 

Some remember how Bissell dressed — elegant saris, bespoke outfits tailored from cotton kurta cloth, silver bangles — or the food she served. From the 1960s, the Bissells hosted a Christmas brunch attended by as many as 300-400 people that featured western breakfast meats like bacon and sausage alongside southern Indian vegetarian fare like dosas and idli.

“Bim was a quintessential Punjabi who had to feed you,” says Poonam Muttreja, a friend. Around the Bissells’ table at their house — first in South Delhi’s New Friends Colony, then later in Panchsheel Park — you would find artists and writers seated alongside politicians, diplomats with leftist nongovernmental activists — a curated but eclectic crowd engaged in sparky debate about India, sometimes for the benefit of prominent foreign visitors passing through town, from architect Buckminster Fuller and John F Kennedy Jr to Jordan’s Princess Firyal.

At these dinners, Bissell kept two tables at opposite ends of the room, strategically swapping guests between them when the conversation got too hot — “like putting control rods into a nuclear reactor” says William Bissell, Bimla’s son and managing director of Fabindia, when recalling his mother’s “two-table policy”.  

Bimla Nanda Bissell — known to friends as Bim — was born in Quetta, British India, in 1932 (now Pakistan’s Balochistan province) to a father who was a veterinarian. She studied at Sacred Heart Convent School and Kinnaird College in Lahore before her family relocated to Pune and then Delhi in the months before Partition tore apart the subcontinent, when her father became the newly independent India’s husbandry commissioner.

Bissell had a brief and unhappy arranged marriage to a government aide. When it failed, she separated from him and went to the US to pursue a masters in education from the University of Michigan — an unusually independent move for an Indian woman at the time. 

After returning to India in 1957, Bissell took over a nursery school her sister had founded in Delhi, transforming it into one of the city’s first Montessori schools. She also helped to develop the crafts base at the Central Cottage Industries Corp, a clearing house for traditional handicrafts and handloom textiles. The following year she met John Bissell, who was advising Indian craftspeople on a grant from the Ford Foundation. In a 2011 interview with The Hindu Business Line, she recalls her colleague saying to her, “He won’t last long, will you please give [him] your room for the time being?”

The couple wed five years later in the backyard of then-US ambassador Chester Bowles, a friend of John’s parents. By then, Bimla was working as a social secretary for US envoys, having first taken the role for Bowles’ predecessor John Kenneth Galbraith in 1961. (She would work for four, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan.) That same year, her husband founded Fabindia, though Bimla was crucial in forging contacts with artisans. 

The brand found a market with its traditional saris, Nehru jackets and kurta pyjamas, bringing traditional styles and homespun fabrics into the present with bright colours and modern marketing.  

In her role at Delhi’s US embassy, Bissell was key in shaping the ambassadors’ understanding of India at a time when the country leaned heavily toward the Soviet Union — Washington and Delhi had frequently testy ties. She played a similar role at the World Bank as external affairs officer for 21 years from 1975, helping the organisation’s expat staffers to navigate India but also introducing Indians to a multilateral institution they viewed with suspicion. “She was good at brokering — not having things escalate by bringing people to the table for dialogue,” her daughter Monsoon Bissell remembers.

John Bissell died in 1998, but Bimla remained a mentor to some, connector of many, and informal gatekeeper for prominent visitors to India. At one dinner in the mid-2010s, after the publication of The Blood Telegram, Gary J Bass’ book about the 1971 birth of Bangladesh which presented Richard Nixon’s India policy in a deeply unflattering light, Bissell’s children remember Henry Kissinger being grilled bluntly by other guests, but gamely fielding the questions. 

According to Monsoon, when someone once approached her mother about writing a memoir, she replied: “That I can’t do because these stories belong to other people”. Her parents, she says, “had a front row seat on a changing world where they were both committed to making it easier for everyone around them”. “My mother showed up, always, no matter the circumstances, and never said no if she could help someone out,” Monsoon says. “That’s a dying art.”