Veteran actor Kabir Bedi, now 78, has been married four times. But it’s his first marriage to model and dancer Protima Gauri that continues to draw attention for its bold, trailblazing experiment with open love in the 1970s. ‘We couldn’t make a normal marriage work… so we tried an open one’In an honest chat with Siddharth Kannan, Kabir opened up about the path-breaking but ultimately doomed decision he and Protima took in their seven-year marriage. The couple tied the knot in 1969 and had two children—actress Pooja Bedi and their late son Siddharth. But things got rocky, and by the early ’70s, both Kabir and Protima wanted to explore relationships outside their marriage.“Protima and I got married, had kids… It was a 7-year-long relationship,” Kabir recalled. “Towards the end, when we started having problems, the problems of extramarital relationships were such that if we wanted to continue with our marriage, open marriage was the only way to stay together—but that experiment also failed. Ultimately, we had to leave.”‘It bothered me. I had hoped it wouldn’t… but it did’Both of them began seeing other people, hoping that openness would bring stability. But Kabir admits it wasn’t easy—especially when he learned of Protima’s romantic involvements. “It bothered me,” he confessed. “I had hoped that it wouldn’t bother me, but it did.”The Sandokan actor contextualized their decision within the cultural revolution of the ’60s and ’70s: “We thought this is the age of free love and openness. It was the era of flower power, hippies, peace movements, new music, and social experimentation. We thought we could find our salvation in that. We thought—if we can’t do a normal marriage, let’s try an open one.”
But idealism didn’t align with emotional reality. “It takes some very special kind of people to survive an open marriage, and we were not them,” Kabir admitted with striking honesty.The couple eventually parted ways in 1974, each continuing on divergent life paths. Protima embraced spiritual life, eventually becoming a sanyasin. Kabir, meanwhile, went on to marry three more times and today lives with his fourth wife, Parveen Dusanj.
