Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  At home, his needs were minimal, and his establishment small: a few servants, a valet, certainly, to help with his dressing, and one or two cooks and drivers. What little entertaining he did was limited to throwing stag parties for his close friends, who stayed all night drinking and talking politics. He was a frequent guest, of course, at the homes of his rich friends, but they were the sort of grand persons you went to see but never invited home. Not that Jinnah was intimidated by the grandness of his friends’ mansions—he was known to walk into these fabulous palaces by the sea, hurry unseeingly through the galleries of priceless treasures that his host had collected with such zeal and pride, to ‘seek a sofa in a corner, where he could ensnare his host and talk politics—at him, rather than with him, late into the night’, as Bolitho writes.

  But even he could see that the Colaba flat was no place to bring a bride raised in Petit Hall. Neither his sense of her prestige nor his pride would allow that. It would, of course, have been more sensible for him to shift to South Court after his marriage, giving his bride enough time to redecorate the house according to her own taste. And that was probably his intention. But there were practical considerations. He needed a place to hold their wedding ceremony without the risk of Sir Dinshaw discovering their plan before it could take place. And what better place than his own house in Malabar Hill, locked up for so long. Even if Sir Dinshaw were somehow able to stumble upon Jinnah’s carefully laid plans for their wedding, the last place he would think of hunting down the lovers would be in a house that was supposedly vacant and barely a stone’s throw from Petit Hall.

  And that could be why the house looked even bleaker from the inside than outside: preoccupied with making leakproof arrangements for the secret wedding, with no opportunity to consult Ruttie and having just shifted his only female companion of the last ten years—his younger sister, Fatima—out of his household, Jinnah seems to have relied entirely on his trusted old retainers for this last-minute move to South Court. To anyone entering the uncarpeted living room with its single unfashionable sofa set arranged stiffly in the centre of the room, and no pictures on the walls to distract the eye, the room would have appeared cold and unwelcoming, but for Ruttie, it was a shock she never got over. The contrast to her home, of course, was obvious: no marble nymphs and fountains at the entrance vestibule, no potted palms and marble statues at every corner, or chandeliers—at least three in Petit Hall’s palatial drawing room alone—no painted Chinese screens or China vases with fresh-cut flowers and Persian carpets—at least four at each end of the drawing room alone—or dozens of fluted marble pillars in every room, not to speak of the stained-glass windows and the view of the garden and the sea beyond. But without really wanting all that, Ruttie didn’t know what she was expecting. She was out on the Bohemian adventure she had wanted to make of her life, but what she was completely unprepared for was the prim conventionality of Jinnah’s home. Not to speak of the largely male gathering assembled in the drawing room awaiting her arrival.

  It wasn’t much of a crowd. On a busy day, Sir Dinshaw probably had more visitors in his day drawing room than Jinnah’s wedding party that evening. For Ruttie, never having attended a purdah party before in her life, it was her first encounter with a roomful of hostile bearded men in kurta pyjama, only two of them clean-shaven like Jinnah: the Raja of Mahmudabad, famous for his hospitality and forty-two-course dinners, and Jinnah’s energetic young associate from the Home Rule League, Umar Sobhani. But Jinnah had chosen his wedding guests not for their conviviality or social graces but for their trustworthiness as witnesses for their nikah. The only women he had invited for the ceremony were his two younger sisters, Shirin Peerbhoy and Fatima. But if he thought they would help make his bride feel more at home, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. Neither of them was in a mood to be hospitable to this georgette-clad and lipsticked Parsi bride with her low-cut satin blouse, blowing smoke rings as she warded off the disapproving stares, making straight towards Jinnah. He, at least, was reassuringly himself, tall and thin and strikingly handsome, impeccably clad as usual in his silk suit and shiny pumps, advancing towards her, his sharp eyes not even noticing that his bride’s diaphanous sari and sleeveless, low-cut blouse was hardly appropriate for this sombre circle of wedding guests awaiting her arrival.

  It had been a difficult year for him as well. Political activity was at its frenzied height that year—‘a seething, boiling, political flood raging across the country’, as the secretary of state, Edwin Montagu, put it—with night-long parleys and public meetings and daily drafting of resolutions to send to the government. He could not have possibly chosen a worse time to get married. He had been persuaded to take over the Home Rule League the previous year, soon after the founding president, Annie Besant’s arrest in Madras in June 1917. The Home Rule movement had made little headway in Bombay, where seasoned politicians regarded the white-haired sari-clad Irish theosophist with suspicion for her ‘impatient idealism’. Nearly every leader she approached turned down her invitation to work with her organization, but her arrest forced political leaders to take her more seriously. Jinnah was among those leaders who had turned her down, pleading leadership duties in the Congress and the Muslim League as an excuse. But when Besant was interned by the government, her young associates in Bombay were able to persuade him to step in until she was released. He had never been a great admirer of the Irish theosophist and socialist, nearly thirty years older than him, considering both her methods and goal too drastic and impractical. And once he agreed to take charge, Jinnah began transforming the movement beyond recognition, appointing his own deputies and roping in his large circle of influential friends in order to displace the theosophists who previously dominated it. It soon became an important channel for his political activities, with Jinnah using it as a launching pad for a series of public meetings for the educated classes, and moulding it in the months leading up to his marriage into the foremost political force in the country. He opened branches of the Home Rule League in different parts of Bombay and across the Bombay Presidency, particularly in Gujarat. He brought almost the entire legal fraternity into its activities, raising huge funds. Thousands of leaflets and pamphlets had to be published and distributed week after week. There were meetings, usually after dinner, extending late into the night, and large public rallies at Shantaram Chawl, the only place in Bombay where such public meetings were permitted. Special permits had to be arranged for the open-air meetings. And to ensure that this vast organization was smoothly administered, he met his deputies in his chamber almost daily for an hour or two.

  Nor did he let up on his other work. While the session lasted, he was one of the most active and vocal delegates in the Imperial Legislative Council, rising to speak on almost every issue discussed there and trying almost single-handedly to push through legislation on Indianizing the armed forces. He was a popular speaker in the legislature, able to put across his points so forcefully that he was the most feared among the members by the British rulers. In both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League he had by now become indispensable, a natural candidate to lead their delegations to the government or to London to lobby members of Parliament. He was not a rousing public speaker, his appeal being to the head rather than the heart, but as a leader of delegations to the government, he was far superior to any other political leader. His biggest asset was that he got on much better with the British rulers than the usual run of politicians, being someone who refused to cringe and crawl, able to meet them on their own ground, in their own language, dressed more impeccably than them in their own clothes. At a time of such intense dialogue and negotiations, both among Indians of different communities and with the British government, Jinnah’s star, already rising, reached its zenith. It was taken for granted by everyone, including the British government, that he was the leader of the future after Home Rule was granted, with Jawaharlal Nehru having not arrived on the scene and Gandhi not yet fully ascendant. In fact, he became so overloaded with hi
s political work that for the first time in his legal career of eighteen years, he had to seek the adjournment of a case because he had to go to Delhi as a member of not one but two joint delegations to the viceroy demanding reforms. And as if all this was not enough to take his mind off Ruttie, the Allies tasted their first victory in the War barely a month before his wedding, triggering even more intense political activity to negotiate with the government for some form of self-rule before the War actually ended. Even two days before his wedding, he spent the evening with his Home Rule colleagues, drafting a wire to the British government, addressed to the prime minister, the viceroy and the secretary of state for India, protesting at the last-minute ban on Tilak’s trip to London. With such an opportunity and his ambition and drive, Sir Dinshaw wasn’t the only one duped into believing that Jinnah had at last given up Ruttie for his real passion—politics.

  Even his sister Fatima, the closest companion he’d had so far, could not have suspected what Jinnah was plotting, especially in the preceding months, when he worked even longer hours than his usual fourteen, his whirlwind tours carrying him from one end of India to another, always in a rush. She had been living with him for the past ten years, ever since she had left school, dropped off every morning on his way to the courts at her sister, Shirin’s house, to be picked up when he returned from work in the evening. But one day when he abruptly announced his resolve to get married, asking her to pack her bags and move to her sister’s for good, she knew better than to argue with him. Once he had made up his mind to do something, nothing could ever shake his purpose, as she well knew. Neither tears nor coaxing worked at such moments; one devastating sentence, delivered in his cold, unruffled voice was enough to silence even her, his favourite sister. The ‘onward rush of the mighty ocean of his will could sweep away all obstacles’, as she put it in her memoir, My Brother.

  But even with his inexhaustible willpower, the marriage seemed an impossibility. Viewed from any angle, the hurdles, whether personal, social or legal, were insurmountable. The easiest way out was what other young English-educated lovers from different communities had already started doing: go through a secret marriage, either civil or religious, and then bolt from their homes until the scandal died down. But Jinnah was far too fastidious for an elopement, even before Ruttie’s father went to court as a precaution against it. Despite his arrogance and seeming indifference to public opinion, Jinnah had never once allowed a whiff of scandal to stain his reputation since he arrived in Bombay two decades ago. And he had no intention of doing so now, with his public eminence. Sir Dinshaw’s pre-emptive move in going to court to stop the runaway marriage he feared was therefore more a boon than a handicap for Jinnah: while it tied his hands for nearly a year, until Ruttie turned eighteen and was automatically out of the court’s jurisdiction as a minor, it also gave him plenty of time to consider all the options.

  At first, Ruttie refused to accept that there was no way to dodge the court’s order. And that there was nothing to be done but wait until she was eighteen. Convinced that there must be another way out instead of this interminable wait, she sought her own legal advice. This was done through Padmaja, her only confidante during this period of her prolonged secret engagement. Padmaja recommended a lawyer friend in Lucknow, Syed Nabiullah, an aristocrat barrister and member of the municipal board in Lucknow. He was both a ‘progressive’ from Aligarh and a friend of both Padmaja and her mother, and therefore could be trusted to keep the matter confidential, even from Jinnah if necessary. But for reasons unknown, Ruttie dropped the idea even before they could meet and discuss her situation—either she lost her nerve and was afraid that Jinnah would be angry with her for acting on her own or more probably, Jinnah finally prevailed on her that waiting was the best—and only—option before them. As Nabiullah wrote to Padmaja later, referring to her request for his professional advice on her friend’s behalf: ‘I am delighted to hear of my mysterious client. I had in fact a lurking idea of calling on her last September but I thought she may not like it,’ adding on a more playful note: ‘I would have enjoyed the very rare combination of beauty and great charm.’

  But what Ruttie did not realize and what Jinnah knew full well was that the legal hurdles in the way of their marriage would hardly fall off by themselves once Ruttie turned eighteen, even after the court injunction against them automatically lapsed with her attaining her majority. There was the question of how to go about getting legal sanction for a marriage such as theirs, between a Muslim and a Parsi. So far, no one had dared attempt such a union. On the face of it, a civil marriage seemed the only possibility for such an unprecedented step. But far from being the liberal law it was meant to be, the Special Marriages Act brought its own peculiar set of difficulties. Under the law, while a girl could marry even at the age of fourteen, she needed her father’s consent until she crossed twenty-one. Even then, the father was required to be present at the registrar’s to witness the marriage, as his consent was mandatory to legitimize the marriage. Besides, if the bride and bridegroom belonged to non-Hindu communities, then they were both forced to file separate declarations swearing that they no longer owed any allegiance to the religion they were born into. It was tantamount to signing an oath denouncing one’s own religion. For Jinnah, this was as good as being asked to commit political suicide. He had never really been a practising Muslim, having been brought up in a Khoja Ismaili household and educated in secular and missionary schools. The Khoja Ismailis followed an allegorical, symbolic interpretation of the Quran and therefore were not regarded as true Muslims by the majority Sunnis. Jinnah being aware of this handicap and knowing how vital his Muslim identity was to carve his own place in politics, shrewdly began to invent a Muslim identity of his own, ignoring the initial digs from the orthodox of his English manners and dress and clean-shaven face. Of course, now that he was the undisputed leader of the Muslim League and had won three times in a row as a Muslim representative in the legislative council, he was in a stronger position to face his orthodox rivals. Only five years ago, he had faced hecklers who wanted to know how he could call himself a Muslim if he was not dressed like one and spoke in English instead of Urdu. Jinnah had ignored the Muslim outcry against him and since then had become more confident of his identity as a ‘political leader of Muslims and not their religious leader’, as Jinnah put it. But defying Muslim orthodoxy in the matter of openly drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes was one thing, and signing a legal document forswearing his religion quite another. Even Jinnah didn’t dare to go that far.

  The only way out was for Ruttie to convert to Islam and marry under Muslim law. Luckily for him, Ruttie could not possibly have demanded that he convert to her religion instead of the other way around. As both were aware, under Parsi custom and law, it was prohibited for an outsider born of a non-Parsi father to convert to Zoroastrianism, let alone marry under Parsi rites. So far, no Parsi, man or woman, had ever dared to marry a Muslim, let alone undergone a conversion in order to do so. But, for Ruttie, that was hardly a reason to hesitate. In this again, her friend Sarup (Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit) did her a disservice by assuming that Ruttie’s only motive in defying the community’s diktat was her impish impulse to shock—‘wake them up’, as she was fond of saying. The truth was a little more complex. She could not have been unaware of the consequences she would face. Although Ruttie’s attachment to her own religion left much to be desired, even she could not have been ignorant of the fuss within the Parsi community when her parents’ friend Ratan B. Tata married a Frenchwoman in a Parsi ceremony. She had been only three years old then, but the incident had created too intense a controversy to have died down before she reached her girlhood. Countless meetings had been held, committees appointed and learned men from the community selected to report on the various religious questions that arose as a result of Tata’s wife being invested with the sacred thread and vest and remarried by a Parsi high priest in a wedding ceremony that incensed the community’s orthodox section. But Ruttie belonged
to an exclusively English-educated generation who, as Justice Davar in his judgment on the controversy caustically put it, believed they ‘were wiser than their grandfathers and were born with a mission to correct the errors of their elders’.

  In an age of universal unbelief, most young Parsis of Ruttie’s circle were unashamed atheists, refusing to go to the fire temples or even pray at home or sport the symbols of their faith. Nor did this worry their parents overmuch, with atheism having become fashionable worldwide. Of course, it did provide yet another reason for the orthodox within the Parsi community to attack this anglicized elite, carrying on a vigorous campaign against their irreligious and materialistic Western lifestyle, believing it would be the end of the Parsi community and traditions as they knew it. But the criticism from the ‘riff-raff’, with their ‘jealous bigotry’, as Sir Dinshaw’s lawyers put it, had little impact on the Willingdon Club set. Having grown up watching this divide between Parsis like her and the other conservative Gujarati-speaking faction who left her with a need ‘to shake them up’, and having seen how easy it was for anyone in her father’s circle to bribe the priests into bending the rules whenever it suited them, it was hardly surprising that Ruttie blithely assumed that rules were not something that applied to people like her. Of course, she had been through her navjot ceremony, a religious initiation rite performed by a priest in which a Parsi child, aged between seven and nine, is given a sacred thread and cotton vest which admits him or her into the Zoroastrian faith and Parsi fold. But with the navjot having been transformed by her new-age parents into nothing more than yet another occasion for lavish celebration, with a guest list of several thousand from both within the community and outside, it was unlikely that her navjot helped Ruttie deepen her appreciation for the religion she was born into. Like most of her circle, she was a Parsi only in name.