India’s Fascination with Jinnah
By Yasser Latif Hamdani
Lahore
A few years ago, A G Noorani, the famous historian, journalist and lawyer from India, writing on Jinnah quoted the following SahirLudhianvi verse (translation):
You are for me still the heaven of my dreams / On your grounds lie buried four years of my youth.
But I have been very much brought up in its atmosphere/If I do not belong to it, I was at least an expellee from this place
For Jinnah it was more like 44 years at the prime of his life, during which he made an immense fortune as a lawyer, rose to great heights as a politician, and where, most importantly, he loved and was loved till he lost that love. The fascination that India still holds for Jinnah, despite decades of a conscious effort by the Indian state to demonize him as the man who broke India and destroyed its communal unity by fighting for Pakistan, is a testament of the extraordinary hold Jinnah has on the land he spent most of his life as a lawyer, a politician and a legislator par excellence. This fascination is apparent in the fact that hardly a year goes by without a book being published in that country on his extraordinary life.
Early in 2016 came out the novel “Jinnah often came to our house” by Kiran Doshi. This book won the prestigious “Hindu Prize for 2016”. It is a fictionalized account of an Indian Muslim family, which befriends Jinnah in 1904. The novel follows the travails of this family alongside Jinnah’s meteoric rise in the Congress and then equally significant fall in that party. It shows Jinnah as an idealistic and progressive minded Indian Nationalist who ultimately gets seduced by the desire to achieve personal power as well as a sense of bitterness and anger at Gandhi. In doing so the author gives a short shrift to the aspirations of millions of Muslims in India who ultimately prevailed on Jinnah to take up the case for Pakistan. Muslim League and those who supported it are shown as either religious fanatics or British backed reactionaries. The only good Muslims are those who, unlike Jinnah, refused to be seduced by the League and its call and they are few and far between.
Conveniently little mention is made of the religious fanatics and sectarian reactionaries amongst Muslims who were deliberately cultivated by the Congress starting with the Khilafat Movement. No mention at all is made of the Shias and Ahmadis who formed part of the League’s struggle against religious reactionaries within the Muslim community. Partition in this book is the great tragedy and Jinnah, whose proclivity for Shakespeare is underscored throughout the book, is the Macbeth of this great historical drama. As with Shakespeare’s depiction of Macbeth, which is a sheer distortion of the life and career 11th century King Mac Bethad of Scotland, historical facts about partition and the birth of Pakistan are deliberately changed or blurred. This is how great literature is born, but great literature is seldom based on accurate history. “Jinnah often came to our house” is without a doubt great literature.
This year a new book “Mr and Mrs Jinnah; the marriage that shook India” has come out which tries to make sense of Jinnah by delving into his most private moments. This is a biography of the events that led to the marriage between 42-year-old Jinnah and 18-year-old Ruttie Petit, Bombay’s “blue flower”. Written by Sheela Reddy, an Indian journalist, the book is a treasure trove for those searching for the personal side of Jinnah. Jinnah for one comes out of it as a thoroughly proper gentlemen, despite his immense love for Ruttie, never breaking the law and waiting patiently for Ruttie to turn 18 before marrying her. Many latter day Jinnah-bashers, like the Pakistani Canadian joker Tarek Fatah, in recent years have attempted, unsuccessfully, to tarnish Jinnah’s pristine reputation by implying improper personal intimacy between him and Ruttie before marriage. Sheela Reddy’s book firmly puts these unfounded claims to rest by delving into great personal detail of Ruttie’s life and movements throughout that period. Jinnah comes out as usual above petty imputations of scandalous controversy.
Bringing to light never before seen letters of Ruttie Jinnah, the book brings to life the extraordinary culture of Bombay under the Raj as well as the communal conflict in India that was bubbling under the facade of Hindu-Muslim amity men like Jinnah worked so hard to create. Reading this book as I did in Pakistan of 2017, where the High Courts sit in judgment over whether people should be allowed to celebrate Valentine’s Day or not, the eventful romance of the love story of Jinnah and Ruttie in Bombay at its most cosmopolitan seems entirely alien and distant. The author poignantly wonders whether Jinnah would have gone “communal”, had Ruttie not passed away so early. Something must have shifted tectonically in 18 years between Ruttie’s untimely death in 1929 and the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
Many great books have been written about Jinnah, his life and his politics, by Indians, Pakistanis and others. Yet this continuing fascination with his life, seven decades after his death, shows that the seminal biography of Jinnah, one that is written impartially and without any agenda, is still awaited; a book that can truly make sense of what it was that caused an apparent about face in Jinnah’s outlook.
The personal, as they say, is political. Those who write about partition often overlook the fundamental fact that there is always a backstory to the story that ultimately unfolds. All we have are glimpses into the eventful life of one of 20th century’s most fascinating figures. For us in Pakistan, wrought as we are with our modern troubles with identity, religion and terrorism, perhaps such a biography would help us resolve some of these perennial problems. Some might argue that a lot of water has passed under the bridge, but it is still that man’s picture that adorns our halls of government and our currency notes. May he still lead us out of our current morass. Long live Jinnah.
(The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. Daily Times)
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