It was sometime in the summer of 2009 that I read Stanley
Wolpert’s work “Jinnah of Pakistan”. It
was a work that gave insights into the mind of a man whose name is much sullied
in India. At the end of the reading I came away thinking here is a man, much misunderstood. From someone who stood against the
communalization of Indian politics, the transformation to Muslim India’s
apostle was a journey of many twists and turns. In the end the fight turned to
an intense one for a separate state for Indian Muslims. And the tragedy of
Pakistan was that he didn’t live long enough to lay down the ideals of a nation
and live by it, a nation established as a homeland for Muslims where they could
live with dignity. That book is not
easily available in India. And I read somewhere that it is not so easily available in Pakistan too,
for reasons not clear.
I bought a
very information rich book called “Creating a New Medina” by Venkat Dhulipalia. This book contains the fight for UP in the hinterland of the United Province (as the UP was called
then) and the various debates on the creation of Pakistan, culled from research material, from varied sources. While Jinnah visualised a homeland for Indian
Muslims, there was also an alternate narrative of an Islamic State. It was Shabir
Ahmed Usmani the cleric who visualized Pakistan as a new Medina. I read this
book off and on, drawing from the rich sources and getting a sense of the time.
It still lies near the bedside for an occasional flip, over some aspect of the
partition debate.
But the book that
captivated me in recent times was “Mr and Mrs Jinnah” by Sheela Reddy. Jinnah’s
stormy marriage to Rutttie Petit, daughter of a rich Parsi Industrialist in
Bombay, 24 years younger to him. A marriage that created unrest in Bombay society and set
tongues wagging. Jinnah was a man of steely character. He
worked hard at his lawyer briefs and also at building his political career.
While the book centres on the stormy marriage with Ruttie, one couldn’t escape
the feeling that Jinnah's life would have charted a different course if his peers had been less patronising and ready to concede political space. The other central character that pervades the marriage of Jinnah and Ruttie like a bright silvery cloud is Sarojini Naidu and her children. It was an unusual friendship, that of Sarojini with Jinnah and Ruttie. She was the friend who understood Jinnah only too well, the conscience keeper of his marriage, the family Ruttie had, after her own banished her. Ruttie’s is a sad story, for it was her fickle mind, moony notions of love and marriage and a life of luxury that often led the reader to think of Jinnah as the tragic character, in personal life and by extension, his hardened political positions that characterised his life.
Reading about his life from various sources, one can't escape the feeling that he might have retained his commitment to the nationalist
cause and continued to play the role of Hindu-Muslim unity in undivided India - if only history had taken different turns, leaders had exercised restraint, Congress had accommodated Muslim League in the power sharing formula .....But things, as they turned out, were not so simple. More than a leadership
tussle, it was the feeling of alienation from the Hindu mainstream that manifested in many ways and resulted in his marginalization, first from the Home Rule
League and later, the Congress itself that drove him in search of his political
constituency.
In the end, one
comes away thinking that the loss of Ruttie hardened Jinnah, he was never the
same person. Or was it the marginalisation by Congress that hardened him? Was it Ruttie, with her wayward life and tragic death, that made his life an emotional roller-coaster, ending it in a steely and determined position on muslim statehood? At the outset one might think of Ruttie and Jinnah were as different as two persons can be. The marriage was clearly dying, and in a strange way, it reflected on his politics. While Ayesha Jalal's political analysis terms Pakistan as a political bargaining tool which Jinnah himself never imagined would come true, Dhulipalia analyses the dynamics of the demand of nationhood that took a life of its' own.... at a terrible price, of course. But Sheela Reddy's book gives a valuable insight into the man, shorn of his lawyer-politician veneer, a man who fell in love and stood firm in the face of adversities in life. Let that portrait hang in the University hall.... he is as much ours as he is theirs
