Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  SHEELA REDDY

  MR AND MRS JINNAH

  The Marriage that Shook India

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  To Mr and Mrs C.N. Reddy

  Chapter One

  After keeping the world guessing for two years, on a hot April evening in the year 1918, Mohammed Ali Jinnah married Ruttie Petit, the only daughter of a rich Parsi baronet. He was a cold, reserved man of nearly forty-two and had so far lived according to his own carefully laid plan, arriving after two decades of exertion exactly where he had intended to be: one of the best-paid lawyers in the country, an elected member of the viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council; the tallest leader in Muslim politics and well on his way to becoming the most important Congress leader. Until now, marriage had not figured in his plans, especially not to a rich, society girl less than half his age. But once he made up his mind to marry Ruttie, he set about it with his usual stoic resolve, unflinching in the face of the innumerable little humiliations and ridicule, skilfully dodging the traps set in his path and planning every step of the way in his diligent, thorough manner.

  He began straightforwardly enough, taking his marriage proposal directly to Ruttie’s father, with whom he was staying as a guest during that holiday. Ruttie’s father, Sir Dinshaw Petit, was a stout, plump-faced, amiable man around Jinnah’s age who had inherited a vast fortune. He usually took his family abroad for holidays, either to London or France, where he owned an estate on the French Riviera almost as large as the Prince of Monaco’s and the King of Belgium’s. But since the War had started, the Petits had been unable to travel abroad and instead moved to the hills whenever they needed a break, travelling with their four children—Ruttie, followed by three boys—and their army of cooks, table boys, maids, governess, tutors, nurses, horses and dogs and any house guests they could assemble. Sir Dinshaw was a genial host and liked to collect eminent people around him; neither his palatial sea-facing mansion on Malabar Hill nor his hill estates in Poona and Matheran were ever short of guests. He had known Jinnah since before Ruttie was born and was very fond of him, as was the elegant Lady Petit, so invitations to visit them were never lacking. But this was probably the first time that Jinnah had accepted the Petits’ invitation—and certainly the last time he ever stayed with them.

  Sir Dinshaw admired Jinnah, who was very popular among his contemporaries because of his ‘impressive personality and stout-hearted nationalism’. It is unlikely that Jinnah returned the compliment. Sir Dinshaw belonged to a family of Parsi merchants well known for their business acumen and philanthropy. His grandfather was a self-made millionaire, pioneer of Bombay’s cloth industry, and a leading benefactor of Parsis; his father ran a colossal business empire, including nearly a dozen cloth mills, and with such a thorough, practical knowledge of the spinning and weaving industry that he wrote a two-volume tome on the subject. When Sir Dinshaw was only twenty-two, his father died leaving him to fill his shoes as best as he could. Six years later, he inherited his grandfather’s title as well, although his father had not been the eldest son, thereby cutting out of the succession several cousins who considered themselves more deserving. It gave him, besides his vast fortune, a deep sense of his own importance as well as a lasting insecurity. He was quick to take offence and, according to the British, vain. They refused to take him seriously, with a high-ranking official even pointing out during a cross-examination in court by Jinnah—in a case involving rigging in a municipal election by British officials to keep out an anti-government candidate—that it was really Sir Dinshaw’s vanity that drove him rather than any strong political conviction, and implying that the baronet would fall in line with any British-inspired scheme so long as they pandered to his conceit and sense of self-importance. It was an opinion shared by the nationalists as well, with the Parsi firebrand Sir Dinshaw Edulji Wacha deploring his nomination to the viceregal council because, as he later wrote to Dadabhai Naoroji, Sir Dinshaw Petit ‘was totally ignorant of public affairs’ and the British should have shown ‘some balance of the aristocracy of wealth and intellect’.

  In his bid to outshine the other fabulous homes rising up on Malabar Hill, he poured lakhs of rupees into renovating Petit Hall, the sea-facing marble mansion that he inherited from his grandfather at the bottom of Malabar Hill. Petit Hall was already an imposing palace, with its Grecian pillars and fountains, and sweeping stairways made of the most expensive imported marble, built by his grandfather as a second home to host his grander receptions. But once Sir Dinshaw took over, he rebuilt it on an even more ambitious scale, adding new wings with suites of bedrooms overlooking the sea, tall shade trees and lawns which almost touched the waves. The gardens were filled with imported French flowers and all of this was on land he reclaimed from the sea, and surrounded by a vast park. Inside were dozens of crystal chandeliers, Louis XV tables and chairs, ancient Ming vases, ceramic potted palms and Persian carpets, ‘all in such good taste that one remembers only the beauty and forgets the cost’, as poet and nationalist orator Sarojini Naidu, a frequent house guest at Petit Hall, wrote home to say. But he probably could not resist boasting of the cost of such understated elegance, if we can presume that Sarojini got her figures on the cost of furnishing a single room in Petit Hall from her host: ‘The day drawing room alone, that is used only for receiving grain merchants and students and stray poets, cost 80,000 rupees to furnish. The tapestry alone used to cover a set of eight chairs in this room cost 20,000 rupees.’

  He also entertained lavishly, keeping one of the best tables in Bombay, with his chefs providing the finest of four different cuisines. His annual Polo Ball was the highlight of the Bombay season, and the size and scale of his garden parties were the envy and delight of Bombay’s high society. To be fair, in this Sir Dinshaw was only following in the footsteps of his grandfather. The old baronet had famously hosted a fancy dress ball at Petit Hall for the Duke of Edinburgh, turning out for his own party in the costume of the Persian king, Shapurji. But being an astute old man, the previous baronet was able to use his grand receptions as stepping stones to a successful political career. Unlike his grandson, Sir Dinshaw the First was able to extract rich dividends from his extravagant entertaining, earning himself through them a string of public honours, including the office of Sheriff of Bombay and a knighthood, followed three years later by a baronetcy. The first baronet, also called Sir Dinshaw Petit, was an unashamed and energetic British-pleaser—serving on committees to organize public festivities in honour of the marriage of the Prince of Wales, delivering farewell addresses to departing officials and erecting statues in their memory, even organizing on one occasion when the Prince of Wales was seriously ill, a solemn ceremony in all the fire temples to pray for his recovery—without ever losing his clout and eminence within the Parsi community.

  He led Parsi delegations to the government, drafted memorandums for them, was chairman of the Bombay Association—a forum to discuss public ideas that was a precursor to the Bombay Presidency Association—steered legislation to codify Parsi personal law re
lating to marriage, divorce and succession, and was one of the five trustees of the Parsi Panchayat Funds, an honorary but nonetheless the most prestigious position in the community, in charge of all its public funds and charities. But his grandson, despite emulating him in most things and working doubly hard to ensure the same honours for himself, was somehow never able to lift his public career above the ordinary.

  The friendship between Sir Dinshaw and Jinnah—if it can be described as such—was unequal from the start. The baronet, despite running a dozen cloth mills and a string of family charities including hospitals, schools and libraries, was an under-confident man, aspiring to a career in public life without being able to win a place for himself beside the many overpowering Parsi leaders of his time, teetering between his sense of what was due to him and his admiration for men of stronger character than him. Jinnah, on the other hand, even when he was a struggling young lawyer, unemployed and living in a small hotel room in Bombay, had a surplus of confidence. The result was that Jinnah, three years younger than the baronet and nowhere close to him in wealth, had always been the more patronizing of the two. This was all the more curious considering that in those first few years of his legal career, between 1896 and 1900, when Jinnah needed work, Sir Dinshaw was in an ideal position to provide it. The baronet was regarded by most lawyers as a walking goldmine for briefs because of his habit of taking all his disputes, no matter how trivial, to court, never counting the costs in legal fee. In fact, Sir Dinshaw did provide Jinnah with his first appearance in high court, but indirectly: it was a case in which Sir Dinshaw had clapped a charge of blackmail against several important persons, and Jinnah was part of the group of lawyers hired by the defendants. The case, which appeared in the Bombay High Court in October 1898, brought Jinnah into the limelight, and after that, on 1 May 1900, Jinnah was appointed a presidency magistrate, when he had work chasing him, rather than the other way round, so that moment was gone when Jinnah needed briefs from Sir Dinshaw, leaving him to bask, undisturbed by lucre, in the baronet’s and his lady wife’s admiration.

  To add to his natural sense of superiority, there was the way Jinnah had forged ahead of Sir Dinshaw in public life, despite the latter’s head start over him. Sir Dinshaw was already a Justice of Peace when Jinnah arrived in Bombay as a young man of twenty, but there was no comparison now in their public career. The famous 1916 session when the Muslim League and the Congress held a joint session in Lucknow where he would emerge as the unchallenged leader of Muslims and, as a consequence, of the Congress as well, was still some months away, he was almost there already, preparing to be re-elected the following month as a member of the Imperial Legislative Council. His name was in the papers almost daily, speaking either on behalf of the Congress or the Muslim League, the voice of reason and progress, having overcome conservative forces within both organizations. For Sir Dinshaw, whose public career still languished at the stage where he held grand receptions to celebrate other people’s public appointments, never his own, to have Jinnah staying as a guest with him would have been the next best thing to becoming an influential political leader; the reflected glory equivalent almost to brandishing a flag above his castle declaring that in the ongoing battle between the two sides, he was on the side of modernity and progress, and against the orthodox Parsis.

  And certainly, Sir Dinshaw was a smart, modern man, at least outwardly. His education, though limited, had been in English. He had received what a journal of his time described unenthusiastically as ‘a fair English and general education’ at the Fort High School, where boys from the best families were sent to learn English and mix with the sons of rich men from other communities. But he dropped out and instead of passing his matriculation and getting a college degree like so many of his Parsi peers, was tutored at home by an Englishman who, we are told, was a Cambridge graduate. In appearance, he was as British as any of the Parsis who had gone abroad to study. In fact, he was counted, at least by the orthodox, as one of the ‘smart set’—one of those anglicized ‘bowler-hatted’ and ‘cheroot-smoking’ Parsis whom they regarded with increasing suspicion. There is a photograph of him while his grandfather was still alive, posing outside his uncle’s home with a group of his Parsi associates—a stout young man of average height, standing stiffly erect with his chin thrust out, his wispy facial hair in sharp contrast to the thick walrus moustaches of the rest of the men, and lacking their air of easy confidence and style. These Parsi mill owners are much older than the future baronet and appear to be setting off on a cycling trip—all the rage then—with each man standing with his hands holding the bars of his bicycle, dressed identically in stiff white collar and cravat, blazer, knee-length boots, short trousers and bowler hat. The future baronet’s uncle is standing next to him, a head shorter but the more flamboyant figure of the two. Clearly, English dress and manners have passed down in the Petit family for at least two generations, so it’s puzzling why he should have been stuck with the label of ‘smart set’ while his uncle escaped unscathed. This may have had something to do with the fact that they were raised by different parents.

  Sir Dinshaw’s grandfather—his name was also Sir Dinshaw Petit as by the rules of succession to the baronetcy, Ruttie’s father had to assume his grandfather’s name although he started life as Jeejeebhoy Framjee Petit. But being two generations removed, and considerably embarrassed with the unwieldy name he had been saddled with, he allowed his nearest friends and relatives to address him as ‘DP’ after coming into his title. The first Sir Dinshaw, like his grandson after him, had been sent to a school run by an Englishman for a few years. It was a far-sighted move on his great-grandfather’s part: it helped DP’s grandfather to network better with the British. But despite speaking in English when required, the old Sir Dinshaw made no pretence of being anglicized. He was an orthodox Zoroastrian of the old school, married at fourteen to a girl from an aristocratic Parsi family, but strictly brought up. She, in turn, raised her fourteen children to be comfortable with who they were: as cosmopolitan as they pleased outside the home, but strictly Parsi within. Both grandparents were very religious, and the old baronet’s idea of charity was usually about building fire temples and making donations connected with religious ceremonies. He was so resistant to any change in tradition within the community that on one occasion when a Parsi with a mechanical bent wanted to introduce an automated corpse-bearer to replace the men who carried the dead into the Tower of Silence, he had the scheme shot down. His sons changed some of that, with both DP’s father and his father’s brother after him handing out funds for institutions that had nothing whatsoever to do with Zoroastrianism, including a 1000-pound donation to the Northbrook Club in London to start a library, which won DP’s father the honour of a special dinner hosted for him at the club during his only trip abroad.

  His father walked that dangerous line, between being a socially progressive Parsi and toppling over on to the other side as a pucca Englishman, with consummate ease. He sent both his son and daughter to English-medium schools, entertained men and women of other communities at his home in an age when intercommunity dining was still taboo, and took the leading role in establishing the Masonic Lodge in India. But he also arranged his son’s marriage in the orthodox way, marrying him off in 1894 at the relatively early age (for a Parsi male) of twenty-one into the first family among the Parsis. The bride, Dinbai, was the elder daughter of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, grandson of the legendary Parsi philanthropist and rags-to-riches merchant (quite literally, for he started his business career by selling used bottles). She was around his age and almost blind in one eye because of glaucoma, but it was considered a brilliant match, an alliance that cemented ties between the two families that went back several generations. The marriage was a conventional one, and although their temperaments were very different, with Dinbai coming from the most fashionable and Europeanized Parsi families in Bombay, where the women had been out of purdah for several generations before the other Parsis. They led their separate lives tr
anquilly for the most part, leaving the four children in the hands of well-trained staff, mostly European, as was the fashion then among the rich. But marrying into the first family of Parsi plutocrats seems to have added considerably to the future baronet’s confusion over his English and Parsi halves.

  At a time when men aspiring to high society were dragging their wives out of purdah, buying them new clothes and high heels so that they would fit into the new world, Lady Dinbai was a rare asset. The daughter of a baronet herself, she was accustomed to ruling the social world. Several generations ago, girls in her family had to be smuggled to school to receive an English education. But since then the family had acquired an unchallenged status as the first family among the Parsis, and the Jeejeebhoys no longer bothered to hide their modernity. Dinbai’s grandmother and aunt were among the first Indian women to be introduced to the Prince of Wales (later, George IV) when he visited India in 1875, with the heir to the British crown later calling on them at Mazagon Castle. As the eldest of the three children of the highest-ranking Parsi in the country, Dinbai was denied no privilege granted to her brother: English nannies, French maids, going to the best school, an English governess, holidays in Europe, and the confidence to go out into society, equipped with an English education. Her brother died young, and the baronetcy passed on to her uncle and his sons, but while Dinbai’s father was alive his two daughters ruled high society, even going to the horse shows with their father who won many prizes there, and attending the royal durbars with their father. Ruttie’s aunt even attended Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London with her father (Dinbai was already married by then) and was received by the queen at an audience in Buckingham Palace.

  Dinbai brought to her marriage, besides her fabulous jewels, her cosmopolitan habits and taste as well—more French than English, thanks to her European travel. The elegant luxury of the new Petit Hall was undoubtedly her contribution. Her father-in-law had died within a year of their marriage, and although the title was still six years away, Petit Hall was already theirs to do what they willed with it. The future baronet had also inherited one of his two vast fortunes, this one from his maternal grandfather; so, money was never a constraint. Sarojini Naidu—the same house guest who had been so overwhelmed by Petit Hall’s understated extravagance—also accompanied the Petits when they went shopping for Persian carpets; they looked at these rolls of ‘woven dreams’ and bought twenty at a go. They joined the best clubs—Ripon, Elphinstone, Orient, Asian, Bombay; and became within a year or two of their marriage, one of the most prominent couples in Bombay society, popular not only among the Parsis but also a wider circle that included eminent men from other communities and their wives if they were out of purdah.