Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 12
Both the means and the end were beginning to become clearer in the following few months. The first glimpse of the path he would pursue came about through a personal trauma—the death of his mother in Karachi. She died giving birth to her seventh child, possibly some ten months after Jinnah set out for England. Mithibai’s death coincided with the collapse of Jinnahbhai’s once thriving business, and while it is unclear if Jinnahbhai’s sudden bankruptcy was because of his wife’s death, it certainly appears to have broken his will to rebuild his business empire. The news of her death had an equally devastating effect on Jinnah. His child-wife had also died a few months earlier, soon after he left for England, but he had taken her death more matter-of-factly, too engrossed in his new life in London to care very much. But now, when he learnt of his mother’s death, the sane and practical young man was unusually overcome—he had a violent fit of fainting. Then he wept and sobbed for many hours. ‘He suffered intensely,’ according to Fatima, and found the shock ‘unbearable’. He had loved his mother ‘more than anything else in the world’. Only she had been able to penetrate his armour of hard-headed practicality and reach the intensely sensitive boy within, a dreamer and idealist.
Alone with his grief, so far away from home, Jinnah recalled the parting scene with her in Karachi, which he would never forget now: ‘She said to him, “My son, I hate to be away from you. But I am sure this visit to England will help you to be a big man. This has been my dream all my life.”’ Jinnah had listened in silence and she continued, ‘Mohammed Ali, you are leaving now on a long journey. I have a feeling I will not live to see you come back from England.’ She had cried then, but Jinnah, manfully overcame his ‘choking emotion’ as he embraced her for the last time. Her farewell words to him had been: ‘Mohammed Ali, God will be your protector. He will make my wish come true. You will be a big man. And I will be proud of you.’ The words etched themselves so deeply in Jinnah’s mind that years later when he came across, in an essay he was reading, a few lines of a poem on a mother’s dying prophecy for her son, he was so moved he underlined the verse.
But the grief only strengthened his determination to prove his mother’s faith in him had not been in vain. He had already joined Lincoln’s Inn, and instead of giving it all up and returning home to help his father cope with his business and personal loss, he became grimly resolved to succeed at any cost. He threw himself fiercely into his law course. It was way above his academic level but he refused to be daunted, even choosing to take an extra course in constitutional law, which he thought would be useful for his future career in India. Nor was he intimidated by the other students, most of them university graduates; he decided he would clear the examination at least a year ahead of most of them. It proved harder than he had bargained for, especially Roman law, the first paper he was required to clear, which needed a working knowledge of Latin. Hard work and willpower and belief in himself had worked for him in the past and he tried it again, gluing himself to his textbooks. But it didn’t work; he failed to clear the preliminary paper in his first attempt. But luck came miraculously to his aid, and the rules of the examination suddenly changed, making it no longer a requirement to clear the paper on Roman law before appearing for the general examination. Once more he tried to cram into one term a year’s worth of study, but when the exam results were announced, he had cleared only some of the papers. Without losing any time, he appeared for the third time but still failed in some of the papers. Driven and unrelenting, he went at it once again and finally cleared all his papers in his fourth attempt. He was eighteen and a half, making him the youngest of fifty-three candidates who had passed the Bar examination in that year—or for that matter, in any year before or after.
With another year to wait before he was eligible to be called to the Bar, Jinnah could now afford to relax. All that was required of him was to merely attend six out of the twenty-three dinners at the Inn in each of the four remaining terms—a stiff, formal affair with its strict dress code that other students dreaded, but which Jinnah relished. But his driving ambition would not allow him to rest; he was determined to groom himself for the political career he wanted to pursue after first ‘making his packet’, as he termed it, as a practising lawyer. He had begun working for Dadabhai Naoroji even before passing his Bar examination, making himself useful enough to be elected to the British branch of the Indian National Congress alongside the most eminent national leaders, but that was hardly enough to satisfy his ambition. He was determined to remake himself, grooming himself in the qualities he considered important for the role he was determined to play in the future. He got himself a reading card from the British Museum library and meticulously began to pursue what he described later as ‘independent studies’, poring over volumes of political philosophers of the past and present. His studies led him to the conclusion that a politician must never be too emotional. He must toughen up, learn to control his feelings and become impervious to flattery because he should expect to be hit and should have the strength to hit back. He got rid of all that he considered sentimental about himself, resolutely becoming a down-to-earth realist. By the time he was ready to return home, some fifteen months later, he had by force of will and his solitary reading, transformed himself from Mohammed Ali—or ‘Mamad’, as he was called at home—the friendly, sporty boy from Karachi who preferred his playmates to his books, and who was sensitive and quick to respond to love and admiration, into M.A. Jinnah, as he now liked to be addressed, an austere loner who despised wasting time or money and made no secret of the fact that he was very particular about whom he chose to be friends with.
But his sense of duty never changed. He had discovered another hidden aspect of himself during these months of waiting: his flair for acting. The talent had come to light perhaps through a reading circle he joined with an eye to develop his public-speaking skills as preparation for the courtroom. But his dramatic flair for reading aloud was impressive enough for his friends to urge him to audition for a role in a theatre company. He was accustomed by now to consulting no one’s wishes but his own—with his months of studying in the British Museum library only bolstering his inclination to think independently—so when he got the part, he signed up at once with the theatre company, writing to his father only as an afterthought to inform him of the money he could now earn. But Jinnahbhai was far from pleased. He wrote back to his son, a long letter, of which one line—‘Do not shame the family’—persuaded Jinnah to give up his new job immediately. Aside from this one chink in his armour, the Jinnah who eventually returned from London in 1896, after his law degree, was unrecognizable: he was impeccably attired in clothes of the best quality and cut, projecting a careless affluence but in fact he had carefully picked out both for their bargain price and quality. He had discarded all Indian clothes—even the pyjamas he went to bed in were made of silk, wearing a dressing gown on top of them before getting dressed in the British fashion he had thoroughly adopted. He had also bought himself a monocle during his stay and used it with an actor’s flair whenever occasion demanded it. But the dramatic change in his appearance, which others found so striking, was really nothing when compared to the inner transformation he had so deliberately worked upon.
The transformation, both inner and outer, served him well even in the legal profession, although it was cultivated for another, bigger purpose. In a hopelessly overcrowded field where it took a barrister years of knocking on the right doors to be let in, Jinnah climbed up into the ranks of the eminent in less than two years. And he insisted on doing it his way—fiercely refusing to beg for patronage, even when he had no work. He was a figure hard to overlook, even when he was starting out: a stylish, handsome young barrister who strode arrogantly down the corridors of courtrooms without talking to anyone, returning to his cheap hotel room every evening without a rupee in his pocket. Curiously, that attitude of arrogance, so far exclusively a British trait, won him several admirers, especially among the British. The acting advocate general of Bombay, Sir John Mol
esworth MacPherson, was one of them. MacPherson invited Jinnah to work in his chamber, the first time such a courtesy was extended to an Indian. Even the chief of the municipal corporation, a Scotsman called James MacDonald, was impressed by the spirited young lawyer. They met in a crowded courtroom where MacDonald was seated on a chair reserved for lawyers. Jinnah insisted on MacDonald vacating the chair for him, and when refused, threatened to appeal to the judge, forcing MacDonald to give up his seat to him. But instead of taking offence, MacDonald offered him work. Yet another official who was struck by Jinnah’s bearing and confidence was Sir Charles Ollivant, then a member in charge of the judicial department. He was so impressed by the fact that the young Indian barrister approached him directly for a job instead of going through influential contacts, that he not only appointed him as a temporary magistrate but tried to persuade Jinnah to stay on permanently, offering him a princely salary of Rs 600 a month. Jinnah refused, confidently informing Ollivant that he hoped to make that much in a single day. It was no idle boast: he did succeed, and sooner than anyone could have imagined, in making more than double that amount in a day.
But the arrogance, coupled with his single-minded devotion to his career, could hardly have endeared Jinnah to his peers. As a fellow barrister later put it, a figure like Jinnah ‘invites criticism, especially in the lazy East, where we find it easier to forgive a man for his faults than his virtues’. What other lawyers found hard to forgive, according to the barrister, was that Jinnah, despite being the only Muslim to have become a notable barrister, felt entitled to set such high standards for himself—and indirectly, for others as well. ‘There was no pleasure in Jinnah’s life: there were no interests beyond his work. He laboured at his briefs, day and night.’ And worse: ‘There was never a whisper of gossip about his private habits. He was a hard-working, celibate, and not very gracious young man.’
But by 1916, the year he decided to marry Ruttie and went to her father with his proposal, something softer within him was beginning to awake. Why else, one wonders, would he underline the following passage in a book he’d been gifted that year: ‘My heart was dusty,’ he underlined with a lead pencil in an autobiography by Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart—the nearest he ever came to making a journal entry—‘parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees, the mind is enclosed in a husk.’ And if Ruttie had indeed succeeded in shaking him out of his emotional stupor, as she seems to have done, there was no force on earth, certainly none among mankind, who could persuade Jinnah to give her up. Everyone knew that about him.
Having thrown down the gauntlet in the form of the court injunction, there was little else for Sir Dinshaw to do other than wait and watch. But what he seems to have not realized was that by publicly challenging Jinnah in this way, he had ensured that things could now go only one way. Because, even more than his love for Ruttie, Jinnah’s pride would not allow him to retreat.
Chapter Six
At breakfast, Sir Dinshaw Petit opened his favourite newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, and turning to a column on page eight, collapsed on his own dining table, bringing the meal to a halt mid-course perhaps for the first time in Petit Hall’s proud history of sumptuous dining. It was a Saturday, 20 April 1918, a time of the year when Petit Hall was usually under dust covers, when the family took off with all of Bombay’s smart set to the hills for their two months’ summer holiday. But this summer, again for the first time in Petit Hall’s history, Sir Dinshaw chose to keep himself and his family at home in Bombay, pleading official engagements. They were no more pressing than a routine municipal corporation meeting and another one of the board of trustees of the family-owned animal hospital, but in the cloud that had descended on Petit Hall ever since Ruttie’s romance with Jinnah had become public, no one was in a mood to argue with his decision. So there was really no one other than his own family and perhaps one or two visiting mill owners at the table to witness the scene that erupted in the dining hall that morning. But few acquainted with the Petits and their castle had trouble visualizing the scene: shrill voices suddenly cutting through the georgette-sari and pearl-clad ladies and morning-suited gentlemen, bearers stopping mid-service while the house manager summoned the maids—‘pure European’, according to the current fashion in servants—for questioning. The house guests, if any, retreating discreetly to their suites; butlers sent to make inquiries of the grooms and stable boys; drivers of the family’s carriages and motor cars cross-examined, search parties sent to scout the woods behind Petit Hall where the family went riding; doctors summoned, then lawyers . . . One imaginative raconteur went so far as to claim that he had gone to pick up the Petits’ family friend Sarojini Naidu that morning, and heard her remark as she swept down the ancient marble stairway of the castle: ‘The old man has gone off his head and the house is upside down.’ Whether the story is true or not—the poetess and national leader was, in fact, on a political lecture tour in northern India that week—people who heard it had no trouble believing it. For, the news that appeared in the newspaper that morning would have shaken a man with the calmest of tempers, let alone someone as excitable as Sir Dinshaw. There, in a column called ‘Official and Personal’, tucked between news of an ‘At Home’ hosted by a member of Servants of India Society, and an official notice of a judge rejoining the Madras High Court after serving on the Rowlatt Commission, was a single sentence destined to dominate discussions in drawing rooms and clubs across India in the weeks and months to come: ‘The marriage of the Hon. M.A. Jinnah and Miss Ruttie Petit, daughter of the Hon. Sir Dinshaw and Lady Petit, took place last evening.’
That the Bombay Chronicle, the only nationalist paper of that time, should choose to underplay the most sensational news of the year, burying it in an inside page, was understandable. The bridegroom, in all likelihood the author of that cautiously worded wedding announcement, was not only on the newspaper’s board of trustees, but also a close and intimate friend of its editor, Benjamin G. Horniman. No reporter anxious to keep his job would obviously have dared to say more in the circumstances. That might explain why Jinnah’s book of speeches got more play in the paper that Saturday than the wedding announcement. The ad for the first book of Jinnah’s speeches compiled by the nationalist publisher Ganesh & Co. with a foreword by the Raja of Mahmudabad and a ‘Biographical Appreciation’ by Sarojini Naidu, took up almost a whole column as a top spread.
But even the Times of India, the leading English newspaper in Bombay and no friend of Indians or their sentiments, puzzlingly limited the story of Jinnah’s most unusual marriage to a single-line announcement, burying it at the bottom of page 10, below a listing of the Calcutta sharemarket. Except for a headline, ‘Mohamedan-Parsi Wedding’, and referring to Ruttie by her formal Parsi name, Ruttenbai, that no one had ever called her by, the one-liner was no different from the announcement in the Bombay Chronicle, giving none of the details usual on such occasions, such as the venue, ceremony and names of eminent guests. Clearly, the reporters of both papers had neither been invited to the wedding nor encouraged to ask any questions from those who had, and relied on what appears to be a press release. Or were they afraid of a defamation case, perhaps? Jinnah certainly was a man the newspapers feared, especially after the defamation case he won against the Briton two years earlier for an aspersion made by their columnist about his friend B.G. Horniman, the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, suggesting he was indulging in homosexual activities in his home. Even the papers that came two days too late to the news were equally cautious with details, except for one small but important addition to the statement already published. Datelined Bombay, 19, but carried in the following Monday’s edition on 22 April of t
he Statesman, the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette, it said: ‘Ruttenbai, the only daughter of the distinguished Parsi baronet, Sir Dinshaw Petit, yesterday underwent conversion to Islam and is today being married to the Hon. Mr. M.A. Jinnah.’
What no one ever figured out, however, was how Ruttie managed to slip out of Petit Hall unnoticed on two consecutive days, first on 18 April to go with Jinnah to the Jama Masjid to be converted to Islam by a renowned maulana; and again the next evening, on 19 April, to escape from the watchful eye of both her parents, walk up the street to Jinnah’s bungalow on Mount Pleasant Road, where he awaited her with a moulvi and a dozen male witnesses, then disappear for the night before anyone noticed she was missing from her bed, with even her parents hearing of the marriage only through the newspapers. If she confided to anyone the details of her dramatic exit from Petit Hall, with supposedly only an umbrella tucked under her arm—and her little dog that went everywhere with her—there’s no record of it. Her usual confidante and best friend, Padmaja, had moved from Hyderabad to Bombay for college that year, bringing their correspondence to a temporary halt, and although she had by now shifted location to a boarding school in Mussoorie they had not resumed writing to each other as yet. And while she still looked up to Sarojini, and knew that the older woman sympathized with her feelings for Jinnah, it is unlikely that Ruttie would have risked jeopardizing her plan by confiding details to someone who might try to stop her. Although Sarojini’s admiration for Jinnah was great—in fact, at one point nearing infatuation—she was not blind to his faults. And only a year earlier, she had tried to caution her impetuous young protégée against doing anything rash, advice that Ruttie did not take too kindly to, admitting to Padmaja that she had given her mother a scolding ‘for having made a speech’. But still, there were many in their common circle of acquaintances who were convinced that it was Sarojini who had encouraged Ruttie to elope with Jinnah, even though she appears to have heard the news, like everyone else, through the newspapers: ‘So Jinnah has at last plucked the Blue Flower of his desire,’ she wrote over a week later to her beloved friend, Syed Mahmud, the young nationalist from Bihar from whom she kept no secrets. ‘It was all very sudden and caused terrible agitation and anger among the Parsis: but I think though the child has made far greater sacrifices than she yet realizes, Jinnah is worth it all—he loves her: the one really human and genuine emotion of his reserved and self-centred nature and he will make her happy.’