Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  However, the English memsahibs were not the only ones to be shocked at Ruttie’s daring dress. She created even more ripples among the conservative Muslims who considered her way of dressing as that of a ‘fast woman’. Especially provoked were the ‘bearded Moulvies and Maulanas’ who formed an important part of Jinnah’s political world. Chagla recounts an incident at Globe Cinema where a Muslim League conference was being held. When Ruttie walked in and took her seat on the platform meant for VIPs, Chagla writes: ‘The hall was full of bearded Moulvies and Maulanas and they came to me in great indignation, and asked me who that woman was. They demanded that she should be asked to leave, as the clothes she flaunted constituted an offence to Islamic eyes.’

  But instead of toning down her dress, Ruttie seemed to take a mischievous pleasure in provoking people further. Barely a month into her marriage, she made a dramatic entry into the Viceregal Lodge in Simla wearing her usual short, sleeveless choli under a transparent sari. Far from being intimidated by the disapproving stares, she took further liberties by refusing to curtsey to the viceroy, according to the protocol. Instead, she folded her hands in the Indian custom after shaking hands with him. Lord Chelmsford did not let the insult go unremarked. ‘Immediately after dinner the A.D.C. asked Ruttie to come and talk to the Viceroy. Lord Chelmsford pompously told her: “Mrs Jinnah, your husband has a great political future, you must not spoil it . . . In Rome you must do as the Romans do.” Mrs Jinnah’s immediate retort was: “That is exactly what I did, Your Excellency. In India, I greeted you in the Indian way.”’ According to Aziz Beg, author of Jinnah and His Times, ‘That was the first and the last time she met Lord Chelmsford.’

  Several years later, another viceroy’s wife, Lady Reading, left a sharp portrait of her first impression of Ruttie: ‘In those days,’ writes Lady Reading in a letter to a friend, ‘Jinnah was . . . an object of interest because of his startlingly beautiful wife . . . He came to lunch with his wife. Very pretty, a complete minx . . . She is a Parsi and he a Mohammedan (their marriage convulsed both communities). She had less on in the day time than anyone I have ever seen. A tight dress brocade cut to waist back and front, no sleeves, and over it and her head flowered chiffon as a sari.’ And in another letter: ‘Her attire was a liberty scarf, a jewelled bandeau and an emerald necklace. She is extremely pretty, fascinating, terribly made up. All the men rave about her, the women sniffed.’

  Jinnah himself found nothing wrong with either her way of dressing or what he regarded as her high spirits. It was, after all, her vivacity and impish sense of fun that had so attracted him to her in the first place. Nor did anyone dare to bring her conspicuity to his notice. He was known to take offence easily and withdraw into a cold silence that could last a lifetime. In the court, for example, his cold war with Strangman, a barrister ‘with a strong notion of his own superiority both as a lawyer and an Englishman’ was almost legendary. As retaliation against an insult dealt by Strangman, Jinnah not only refused to ever speak to him again but refused to enter his chambers even for legal work. And when the two enemies appeared in court, young lawyers went to see the ‘fun’. As Chagla recounts, ‘There would invariably be a scene in court with the poor judge trying to pacify these two great lions of the court.’

  It was eventually the governor’s wife, Lady Willingdon, who belled the cat, so to speak. ‘The story,’ as Jinnah’s biographer Hector Bolitho writes, ‘is that Mrs Jinnah wore a low-cut dress that did not please her hostess. While they were seated at the dining table, Lady Willingdon asked an ADC to bring a wrap for Mrs Jinnah, in case she felt cold.’

  Jinnah’s response was characteristic: ‘He is said to have risen and said, “When Mrs Jinnah feels cold, she will say so, and ask for a wrap herself.” Then he led his wife from the dining room, and from that time, refused to go to Government House again.’

  But the incident left Ruttie herself with more mixed emotions. She was grateful for the way Jinnah leapt to her support and she joined him too in his proud defiance. Henceforth, she refused to dress in the subdued, modest style that seemed to be expected of her. But the strain of dealing with so many people’s disapproval on so many different fronts was beginning to take its toll. Despite telling herself how happy she now was, her health began to mysteriously fail on its own. And by the time Sarojini finally managed to catch up with her, more than three months after their marriage, she found Ruttie, to her surprise, looking not half as glowing as she expected her to be. Instead, she displayed that curious combination of feelings—‘looking very ill but quite happy’, as Sarojini put it.

  Chapter Ten

  In December, the War having finally ended and with the winter session of the legislature closed, the Jinnahs returned to Bombay. The three months that they had spent in Delhi were among the dullest of Ruttie’s life so far. There was nothing for her to do all day while Jinnah threw himself as usual into the business of the House. With the proposal for government reforms—the Montagu–Chelmsford proposals—just published, he found the legislative session even more engrossing than ever, and he was away most of the day and sometimes half the night as well, immersed in the debates in the House. The hotel they were living in, the Maidens, was just the kind to appeal to Jinnah, as it was cut off from the city and, as the viceroy’s ADC famously said to Ruttie, ‘nice and quiet at nights’; but quiet was the last thing she wanted, especially now—as if being cast into exile was not bad enough.

  But now at last they were back in Bombay where there was more than enough going on. The season was in full swing, with the governor’s imminent departure adding an even more feverish edge to the ceaseless round of garden parties and other glittering receptions held every winter. But instead of feeling the pangs of exclusion from all these festivities, Ruttie for the first time found herself drawn, heart and soul, into one of Jinnah’s political campaigns. Usually these were dry and measured. They arrived at halls or public meeting grounds like Shantaram Chawl after things had been set up for them. She sat on the platform with him, subjecting herself to the crowd’s gaze, not always friendly. Mercifully, Jinnah wasn’t given to long-winded speeches, some of which could go on for more than four hours at a stretch. But there was really nothing for her to do except not to fidget and listen passively as he delivered his crisp, dispassionate talk. A beautiful prop, when her heart longed instead to fight ‘side by side’ with him, not just sit by listening to this endless talk but fight pitched battles for freedom ‘with sword and dagger’, as she had once fantasized, ‘sacrificing all at the feet of the Motherland’.

  But after seven months of enduring the tedium of those interminable public meetings and receptions, watching him fight what seemed to her shadow battles ‘by pen or parchment’ or ‘through diplomatic parlance’, here at last was some action. So what if J still kept his iron control, denying any personal passion behind the campaign he had started. ‘In politics,’ as he loved to say, ‘you cannot be emotional.’ But now at least she could bring her own ardour into the fight, sticking fierily to his side through every moment of it, fighting the good fight, just as she had dreamt it. She loved Jinnah as she had never done before as he allowed himself to respond to the crowd’s emotion, not minding if other people thought of him as the kind of leader he had always detested: ‘a tub-thumper’. And if it wasn’t the swords-and-daggers stuff of her dreams, it came pretty close. It certainly was the first genuine mass agitation that she—and most of Bombay—had ever experienced. There were late-night meetings, rousing slogans, thousands of people coming out on the streets in his support, patriotic fervour and all the excitement of a hard-fought battle. It made her feel almost as if she had been transported into one of those militant suffragists’ demonstrations in England that she used to love reading about—an Emmeline Pankhurst of India, almost. Except, there were hardly any women in the crowds besides herself.

  The campaign had begun three weeks before. It started when a few of the Bombay governor’s admirers decided to raise a memorial for him on his retirem
ent later in the month. If they had decided to do it without petitioning the sheriff to call a public meeting on it, the memorial would probably have gone through without any contention. Ignoring the simmering conflict between Lord Willingdon and Jinnah, who in the past six months not only refused to go to the governor’s house but boycotted along with his associates any meeting where the governor was present, they went ahead by calling a public meeting of citizens in order to raise the memorial. It was an opportunity that Jinnah seized with both hands. He had always despised the cringing Indian attitude of ‘automatic gratitude’—‘automatic toadyism’, as he and his friends called it, of men who had either accepted favours and titles from the British government or lived in the hope of gaining one someday. But so far he had not put his foot down on what other men in his position were doing in the name of the public, let alone going to the lengths he was now prepared to go.

  If someone had told Jinnah even six months previously, when Ruttie was publicly snubbed by the Willingdons, that he would lead an agitation against the retiring governor where both he and his followers faced risk to their life and limb; when things would get so disorderly that chairs would be thrown and blows exchanged, he would have probably—not laughed, because he considered laughter too immoderate and therefore unbecoming in a gentleman—but smiled that slight smile of disbelief that he sometimes permitted himself. Unruly scenes had never been his style.

  The governor and he had never got along. Quite apart from their political differences, their temperaments were inimical: Lord Willingdon, who hated his authority to be challenged, put his pleasures above his public duty, turning a blind eye to the faults of his administration, if not actually encouraging its abuse of power. Nor was he above petty machinations to get his own way. And there was Jinnah, with his austere sense of duty and the abrasive argumentativeness of a British parliamentarian (he could—and did—argue with even viceroys and secretaries of state, intimidating them into silence with his logic and reasoning); his stubborn insistence on British fair play and that impossible code of honour he had secretly devised for himself ever since he had been cast adrift at seventeen in London, with scarcely an idea of himself or his place in the world. Nor was his claim that he bore no malice to anyone despite political differences a mere idle boast. As he once recounted, ‘I went to the chambers of Sir George Lowndes as a penniless man. He was to me like a father and treated me as a son. When he was in the Imperial Legislative Council as the Law Member to the Government of India, I bitterly opposed him. Withal, we have maintained our friendship unbroken to this day.’

  These were values he had culled not from contemporaries but from ancient classics like the first-century Roman statesman Cicero’s The Offices—as though only letters and counsel from men long since dead would suffice to guide him in the destiny he had determined for himself. He would meticulously underline with a pencil words like ‘pre-eminence’, ‘justice’, ‘prudence’, ‘magnanimity’, ‘fortitude’ and ‘moderation’, taking them to heart with his passion and diligence, moulding himself carefully into that ‘calm and undisturbed’ personality with his ‘whole life graceful and uniform’, just as Cicero advised his son, emphasizing with two parallel lines running in the margin, thick with his own intensity of spirit that ‘nothing is more brave than an evenness of temper in every condition’ or ‘not give overmuch ear to flatterers, nor suffer ourselves to be wheedled and imposed on by their deceitful words’. How could Lord Willingdon ever understand the sincerity of his aspiration? The governor was too bogged down in his own cynicism to be able to see the other man’s disdain of ‘baseness and treachery’, qualities Jinnah regarded as not just immoral but ‘unbecoming and effeminate’.

  There had been clashes between them earlier. Three years ago, for example, Willingdon disappointed Jinnah by failing to live up to his expectations. Jinnah had complained to him of the police superintendent’s conduct at a session of the Muslim League in Bombay. Instead of throwing out the intruders who were disrupting the meeting with their heckling, the police officer took the side of the intruders, hell-bent on breaking up the meeting. But when Jinnah complained to the governor, he merely brushed aside his complaint and, as a mark of how little he cared to please Jinnah, he invited both the superintendent and these opponents of Jinnah to an official reception he held soon after, treating them as honoured guests. Jinnah, of course, said nothing directly to Willingdon but exposed him ruthlessly in the press. It offended the governor but Jinnah was not acting out of personal rancour, as the governor presumed. He was only doing what he felt was his duty, as any friend of Jinnah’s would have told Lord Willingdon had he cared to ask. And in fact, if anyone had asked Jinnah at any time if his relationship with the governor was strained, he would have denied it, asserting as he did later that there was ‘no personal feeling, no personal ill will’ between them. And it was the truth. His relationship with the governor had hardly changed since he took over the administration five and a half years ago: they had been cordial before and they continued to be cordial, as far as he was concerned. It was another matter that in Jinnah’s dictionary the word ‘cordial’ did not extend beyond the frigidly formal civility with which the two men kept each other at a safe distance. For someone of Jinnah’s temperament it was difficult to understand how unreasonably the governor behaved sometimes. It never failed to surprise him how personally Lord Willingdon took all criticism.

  Six months ago the governor succumbed yet again to his personal pique, leaving Jinnah almost incredulous at his folly. He invited all the Home Rule League leaders, including Jinnah, for a provincial war conference, and having got them there proceeded to insult them in front of the whole gathering, accusing them of insincerity. And when they tried to speak in their own defence, he shut them up rudely which led to a walkout by all the Leaguers except Jinnah, who chose to stay on. Whether it was because it took him some time to digest the enormity of Lord Willingdon’s stupidity or, as his friend Horniman put it later, ‘to throw the insult back in the governor’s face’ is not clear. Either way, he lost all respect for the governor after that incident.

  And what else could Jinnah do in such a situation but take full advantage of his enemy’s weakness. It was the governor’s ‘greatest possible blunder’, as he told the press with open contempt for Lord Willingdon’s lack of good sense. Of course, he went at the governor hammer and tongs, in his best courtroom manner, denouncing his government from public platforms and in newspapers for its dishonesty and mistrust of Indians. He kept a strict control over his own feelings for the governor, keeping the fight as impersonal as only he knew how to do, attacking not the governor but his policies, or rather the lack of them. It caused serious damage to Lord Willingdon’s image, both in Delhi and in London, possibly the worst thrashing a British governor had so far taken at the hands of Indians. It was only in September, after Jinnah left to attend the legislative session in Delhi, that Lord Willingdon got a respite.

  But by mid-November when the governor’s tenure was approaching its end, the hostilities resumed again. It started with a few of Lord Willingdon’s admirers suggesting a memorial to him for the services he had rendered to the city. It was a harmless act of flattery with which the city’s titled and privileged had indulged other governors with before Lord Willingdon, and certainly no governor was more badly in need of a balm to his bruised ego than the present governor. But Jinnah was in no mood for clemency.

  It was the principle of the thing, he argued. Did the governor who was the head of the administration deserve a certificate from the public? His friend Benjamin Horniman, the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, carried a long indictment of the five and a half years of Lord Willingdon’s administration in Bombay, outlining his many sins of omission and commission, including stifling democracy and harassing the Home Rule League leaders. Wisdom dictated that Lord Willingdon back off at this stage. Trying to take on yet again the combined might of the two friends was clearly an exercise in bad judgement. Between them, the two practical
ly ruled Bombay—having at their disposal not only a very popular national newspaper but the entire organization and workers of the Home Rule League who were by now seasoned veterans of several successful political campaigns.

  But Lord Willingdon’s earlier battering at the hands of Jinnah’s Home Rule League seemed to have taught him little. Besides, he had his future career in the Indian government to consider. His professional life as an Indian bureaucrat was only just beginning, even though his tenure in Bombay was coming to an end. It made him a little desperate to prove to the higher authorities in Delhi and London how well he was thought of by everyone in Bombay, excepting Jinnah. His strategy became to isolate Jinnah and his associates, making it appear as if Jinnah was agitating against him out of personal motives and vindictiveness. In fact, a former associate of Jinnah’s in the Home Rule League who crossed over to the enemy’s side actually went on record to say so. The ‘renegade’, S.R. Bomanji, gave an interview to a newspaper claiming that Jinnah was venting his personal disappointment on the governor because he had not been given a seat in the governor’s legislative council. His interview appeared in Jam-e-Jamshed, a Parsi newspaper, and Bomanji’s allegations went down well with its readers who were looking for another excuse to hate Jinnah apart from his daring to marry a Parsi girl. Bomanji provided another reason why people should support the memorial for the governor: now that Lord Willingdon was retiring and returning to London, Bomanji reasoned, he would be in a position to do some good to Indians from there. For the Parsis, this appeared like sound reasoning and they rose to the occasion, standing solidly behind the governor in pushing through the memorial proposal and dismissing the protests of Jinnah’s group.