Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

Only his father had understood that temperament, but even he could seldom deflect his son from going his own way. Jinnah’s father, Jinnahbhai Poonja, a Khoja Muslim of the Ismaili sect, was no weak-willed man himself: at sixteen or seventeen, he escaped a stifling—but not completely poverty-stricken—life in a village in Kathiawar to try his luck as a trader; and by the time he was twenty, he had set up his own trading company in Karachi, pushing ahead of other, more established, traders in the growing port city. A tall, lean, austere man, single-minded in his desire to see his business grow and a strict disciplinarian, Jinnahbhai was a figure of authority both at home and work. But he was a different man with his eldest son whom he treated with the regard and respect accorded to an equal. He handled him with a rare tact, careful never to hurt the child’s dignity or talk down to him, invariably appealing to his reason and not his emotions. It was almost as if Jinnahbhai was acutely aware from the start of who would be the natural victor in any direct clash of wills with his son. There was the time, for example, when Jinnah decided to drop out of school and join his father’s business. Because, as he informed his father calmly, ‘I would do better in your office than at school.’ What brought this on was his father’s decision to admit him that year to a primary school near their home. So far, his education had consisted of a tutor coming home for an hour to teach him Gujarati and arithmetic, both of which subjects he loathed. The rest of his day was spent in the playground, where his temperament and physique made him a natural leader among the neighbourhood boys, reinforcing his belief that he was born to be a ruler. He went ungrudgingly enough to his new school, and perhaps had even established his primacy over his classmates, when the results of his first school examination were declared. It was a rude shock: boys who had already submitted to his suzerainty, some of them much younger, had outclassed him, scoring higher marks. He did not see the point of submitting to this humiliation, slaving at books he had no interest in; or perhaps he persuaded himself that his destiny was calling him to take another direction. At any rate, he was resolved that he would not waste his time any more by going to school. Jinnahbhai, whose dearest wish was to see his firstborn pass at least his matriculation exam, was sorely disappointed. But instead of using threats or cajoling him, he wisely decided to take another approach with his nine-year-old boy. He tried to reason him out of his decision by pointing out that the working hours would be unbearably long: ‘You will have to go with me to office early in the morning at eight, return for lunch from two to four, and then again to office from four to nine in the night . . . that will give you no time at all for play.’ But Jinnah was undaunted, and for the first but not last time, the father yielded to the son.

  For two months, Jinnah stuck grimly to the bargain he had made with his father. He uncomplainingly kept the long hours his new life demanded; did the odd jobs that fell to his lot in the office. The company that his father had spent more than a decade patiently building up traded in gum Arabic and isinglass—a fishbone extract and a key ingredient then in the manufacture of industrial glue. But Jinnahbhai’s entrepreneurial energy spilled out into other directions as well: he ran an informal banking service for traders from the hinterland visiting Karachi for their transactions, and possibly also acted as a subcontractor for the British trading firms in Karachi, having taught himself to read and write English specifically for this purpose. For Jinnahbhai, his office was his life and passion; for his son, it seemed rather pointless drudgery. Making money only in order to make more money seemed a meaningless pursuit to the passionate young boy dreaming of his heroic future. According to his sister and biographer, Fatima Jinnah, it was once again his aversion to being led rather than leading that got in the way of his self-imposed choice: ‘He soon found he could not do anything in office. Everything depended on reading and writing, monies received and paid had to be entered into account-books; and he did not know either to read or write or to keep accounts. All that he could do in the office was to do little odds and ends of jobs, which was not to his liking. And then decisions for buying, selling and regarding other important matters were done by his father. Nobody bothered to consult him or to obtain his approval. The most irksome disadvantage was that he was absolutely cut away from the games, which had such fascination for him.’ But during the two months that he worked for his father, he applied himself so diligently to the tasks assigned to him that he almost fooled his father into believing that this may, in fact, be the best course for him. Jinnahbhai, therefore, was taken completely by surprise when his son announced suddenly one day that he did not like office work and would like to go back to school. His father was far too careful to show his evident relief, but he could not restrain himself from making a lesson of it for his stubborn son: ‘You see, my boy, there are only two ways of learning in life. One is to trust the wisdom of your elders and their superior knowledge; to accept their advice; and to do exactly as they suggest.’ But his boy was not impressed; he wanted to know what the other way was. ‘The other way is to go your own way, and to learn by making mistakes; to learn by hard knocks and kicks in life.’ It was advice exactly suited to young Jinnah’s temperament, and he listened attentively, apparently never forgetting that lesson in his life.

  So had he learnt from his mistakes, had the knocks been hard enough to send young Jinnah, impatient to make his mark, back into the arms of conventionality? Could he school his passionate, imperious nature into becoming one of the herd? It would seem so, at least for a while. ‘He was a completely transformed child, no more inattentive, indifferent and lagging behind his classmates. He wanted to make up for the lost time, as boys of his age and even younger than him had gone ahead of him. He took to his lessons with a vengeance, studying into the late hours of the night at home, determined to forge ahead,’ writes Fatima in her memoir, Jinnah, My Brother. A cousin who lived in the same house with Jinnah while he was in Karachi recounts: ‘He was a good boy; a clever boy. We lived, eight of us, in two rooms on the first floor of the house on Newnham Road. At night, when the children were sleeping, he would stand a sheet of cardboard against the oil lamp, to shield the eyes of the children from the light. Then he would read, and read. One night I went to him and said, “You will make yourself ill from so much study,” and he answered, “But, you know I cannot achieve anything in life unless I work hard.” Watching his son attack his studies with that determination, Jinnahbhai must have allowed his hopes to rise. Once again, a vision began to swim before his eyes, a vision of his son clearing the matriculation examination—the holy grail of aspiring parents of this time—before joining him in the family firm and taking it to new heights, a business empire spreading to other cities, perhaps even other countries. But the father’s dreams were dashed in a chance meeting with Jinnah’s class teacher. Running into him on the road, Jinnahbhai asked the one question foremost in his mind: how was his son faring at school? ‘He is coming up,’ the teacher said, giving Jinnah the equivalent of an average rating, adding: ‘But I must tell you the boy is horrible in Arithmetic.’ ‘This completely disappointed my father, who already knew that his son was not a child prodigy, as the boy’s mother fondly believed,’ writes Fatima Jinnah. ‘He had already failed to impress his tutors as a pupil of great promise; they thought with hard work he would manage to pass his examinations, possibly to be devoured in the anonymous ranks of office clerks. But my father wanted him to be good at mathematics, as accounts were the backbone of business, and he wanted the firm of Jinnah Poonja &Co., to keep on forging ahead as a going concern, when his son took over the business from him.’

  Jinnahbhai, however, was not ready to give up all hopes of his son doing him proud in the future. Like all self-made men, he was convinced that anything was possible with hard work and willpower. And since his son lacked neither diligence nor resolution, he convinced himself that the problem was not Jinnah but his friends in the locality—a crowded district of bazaars and residences of traders, including the few Khoja Muslims who migrated from Gujarat and Kathiawar. ‘He th
ought it better to put him in a school far from their house,’ according to Fatima, ‘as his classmates in the primary school at Kharadar had a disturbing influence on his attendance at school, tempting him always to abandon books for marbles, tops, gullidanda and cricket.’ The new school, Sind Madrassatul Islam, was the ideal place as far as Jinnahbhai was concerned, offering not only the best English education in an Islamic environment, grooming its students in classic English literature as well as Persian, but also located a safe mile away from their home and from Jinnah’s playmates. Jinnah, however, was as unimpressed by his new school as he had been with his local primary school, preferring to socialize as before with his old playmates.

  A brief experiment—cut short at Jinnah’s mother’s insistence—of sending him away to Bombay with his aunt to join a school there, also failed to turn him into the star pupil that Jinnahbhai wanted his son to be. His attempts to separate his son from his unsuitable friends was, however, not as unsuccessful as it then appeared to be. It certainly made a deeper imprint on the young boy’s mind than Jinnahbhai suspected. A few years later, when Jinnah had the leisure and maturity to reflect on his future and decided on his own to embark on the self-education that he had so stubbornly denied himself as a boy, his father’s methods were to resonate with him unexpectedly. At sixteen or seventeen, while he was studying Cicero’s classic collection of letters in London as a means of educating himself into the man he wanted to become, Jinnah found the following sentences significant enough to underline heavily with a lead pencil: ‘Whenever you design to break off any friendship or displeasing acquaintance, you should loosen the knot little and little, and not try to cut it asunder all at once.’

  Jinnahbhai’s methods of improving his son’s prospects were not limited to discouraging his association with the wrong sort of boys. He also tried to actively encourage him to cultivate friends who might be useful to him. One of these certainly proved to be the turning point in Jinnah’s so far unremarkable life. Strictly speaking, Frederick Leigh Croft, an Englishman and bachelor in his thirties, was more his father’s friend or acquaintance than Jinnah’s. As the general manager of a major English trading company in Karachi, he had probably known and worked with Jinnahbhai for several years. And Jinnahbhai, concerned about his son’s future and anxious perhaps for the boy to improve his English conversational skills—skills this aspiring Khoja trader valued so highly that he not only taught himself to read and write English, but gave all his children lessons at home in his version of broken English—introduced him to Leigh Croft who, uncharacteristically, took to the boy at once. At home in England, Leigh Croft was known to be ‘uncomfortable in the presence of children, whom he did not like’, according to Jinnah’s biographer, Hector Bolitho. But at fourteen or fifteen, Jinnah was hardly a child; he was a tall, slim, attractive boy with the face of an aristocrat and the confidence of a grown man and a charm that was difficult to resist, even for a recluse like Leigh Croft. As Jinnahbhai hoped he would, the general manager of Graham’s Trading Company immediately took Jinnah under his wing and it was at his suggestion that Jinnahbhai decided to send his son to London. ‘The General Manager of Grahams Trading Co . . . who had now become a great friend of my father, offered to get young Mohammed Ali admitted to his Head office in London as an apprentice for three years, where he would learn practical business administration, which would best qualify him to join his father’s business on [his] return from London,’ writes Fatima. Jinnahbhai was tempted. The astute trader in him was convinced that the apprenticeship would enable their company to expand and prosper as never before, but he still pondered long and hard—it was an expensive business to send his son abroad and he was not a man to risk throwing his money away, being almost allergic to what he considered unnecessary spending.

  In this, Leigh Croft proved a useful ally for Jinnah, using his influence with Jinnahbhai to persuade him that the boy would return from London as ‘a great asset to his father, helping him to further expand his business’. He also helped Jinnahbhai work out the total expenses involved. ‘My father discreetly asked him what would be the cheapest way of transportation from Karachi to London, and how much he would have to spend each month for the upkeep of his son in England. The figures were worked out in detail and with great care; although the total amount involved for three years was quite substantial, my father decided he could afford to deposit the sum with Grahams in London, in order to ensure continuity to his son’s training,’ Fatima writes. Jinnahbhai’s readiness to part with such a substantial sum of cash is even more remarkable considering his real opinion of his son’s abilities. Unlike his wife, he did not share in the rosy vision of their son’s future. And when one day, Jinnah came running to tell him what a street-side astrologer had predicted for him—that he would be the uncrowned king of India—he remained silently sceptical, refusing to subscribe to his wife’s blind faith in the destiny of their son and her oft-repeated ‘My Mohammed Ali is going to be a big man.’ Her consolation, in the face of her husband’s despair over their son’s poor record in school, was ever: ‘You wait. My Mohammed Ali will do well, and many people will be jealous of him.’

  And yet, it was Jinnah’s mother, Mithibai, who nearly came in the way of her son embracing his destiny. Her devotion to her firstborn would not allow him to be separated from her for so long. Once before, when Jinnah was ten and Jinnahbhai had sent him away to Bombay with his sister in the hope that the change would help turn him into a serious scholar, it was the otherwise docile and selfless Mithibai who insisted on bringing her son back to Karachi because she missed him unbearably. But this time, the men had their way, with Jinnahbhai coming to his son’s aid: ‘My mother was adamant,’ Fatima writes. ‘How can she allow her darling Mohammed Ali to be away from her for three years? Father explained to her that it was in the best interest of the boy’s own future, as also of their family business. And after all, three years would soon be over.’ It took days of persuasion to get Mithibai to agree, and when she finally did, it was with a caveat: her Mohammed Ali must be married before he left for England. ‘England was a dangerous country to send an unmarried young man to, particularly a young man as handsome as her Mohammed Ali. She was afraid he might get married to an English girl, and that would be a tragedy . . .’ The argument was hardly unusual for the times, but what was surprising was that Jinnah actually acceded to his parents’ plans.

  It was true, as Fatima writes: ‘In those days it was the parents that arranged marriages of their children, the boy and girl had no option but to believe in the superior wisdom of their parents.’ But Jinnah was no ordinary boy; from the age of six he had been allowed to use his own judgement when it came to decisions that affected his life, and now that he was fifteen, neither he nor his parents considered him to be a child. ‘He had a consuming hunger for experience gained through his own efforts and he, therefore, refused to be ordered about by others as to what to do and what not to do, as to what was good for him and what was not,’ Fatima points out, relying on her own experience of living with him for twenty-eight years. ‘It is probably the only important decision in his life that he allowed to be made by others.’ The only explanation she can find for this ‘paradox’ about her brother is: ‘He loved his mother so much, he could not refuse her. He trusted his father’s worldly wisdom so much, he was sure that his father could hardly make a mistake.’

  But of the two, it was his mother who had the stronger hold on Jinnah, able to push her son, despite a mind and will of his own, to accept almost anything, including her choice of a bride for him. The bride was a young girl distantly related to her family, a village girl of fourteen whom neither she nor Jinnah had ever set eyes upon. Yet, such was Mithibai’s sway over her son’s heart that his ‘objection against marrying a girl he had never seen or spoken to vanished like thin mist in the sunshine of the assurances of his mother, who made her son believe that a mother’s blessings in such matters prove propitious and such marriages turn out to be happy and auspicious.’
Whether he believed her or not, Jinnah’s devotion to his simple, illiterate mother was deep enough for him to sacrifice his stubborn sense of independence, going silently along with whatever she wished to do on his behalf. Apart from her choice of a bride, there were other aspects of the wedding that young Jinnah no doubt found painful—his father playing along to his kinsmen’s impression of him as having become a ‘multimillionaire’ in Karachi, for instance, and squandering his carefully saved money on pleasing a bunch of villagers who Jinnah had never met in his life, not to speak of the time he was willing to waste in the month-long celebrations and idle feasting at their ancestral village, Paneli.

  His patience, however, appears to have become strained towards the end of the weeks-long celebrations. The wedding was now over, with its endless processions of gift-bearers led by hired drum-beaters, the firecrackers burst, and community dinners and lunches consumed, and he’d been marched to the home of his father-in-law, decked up in flowers from head to foot, where the village moulvi performed the nikah ceremony marrying him to the fourteen-year-old Emi Bai, whose face he had not yet seen. And now that they had paid village tradition its due, they were impatient to return home to Karachi—his father primarily because of his business, but Jinnah and his mother too were anxious to return with him. But the bride’s family held them back, declaring that according to tradition, their newly-wed daughter must remain in her natal home for at least a month, if not three months, before they could agree to her being taken by her bridegroom to Karachi. For days, the two families argued on what was possible and not possible according to tradition, unable to resolve the issue, while the bridegroom stood by, a silent spectator. And then, when he saw that the negotiations between the two families had finally broken down and they had reached an impasse, Jinnah abruptly became himself again, quietly but firmly taking charge of the situation. ‘Without informing my father or mother,’ Fatima writes, ‘Mohammed Ali went to see his father-in-law and mother-in-law. They welcomed their newly married son-in-law with warmth and ceremony . . . but after the formalities were over, Mohammed Ali spoke in a firm tone. He said that his father and mother could no longer stay in Paneli and they must return to Karachi, and that he would go with them. He would like to take his bride with him . . . but if they decided otherwise, in deference to village custom and tradition, they could have their own way. He had come to tell them that in that case they could keep their daughter with them, and send her to Karachi whenever they wished . . . he would be soon leaving Karachi for Europe, and he would be gone for three years. Perhaps they would like to send her to Karachi in his absence, and she would have to wait for three years until his return from England.’ That clinched it, of course, with his in-laws calling on his parents the very next day, ‘solicitously asking when they would like to take Emi Bai with them to Karachi, so that they could make the necessary arrangements. Cordiality was restored between the two families, dispute and acrimony were forgotten.’