Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  The injuries, however, were minimal, at least to his person. What it did to his pride and dignity he had as yet no time to register. As he struggled out of the door, an extraordinary scene met his eyes and ears. From the top of the steps, he could see a sea of humanity stretching all the way down to Elphinstone Circle. Some twenty-five thousand people who had been denied entry into the hall were waiting for him to emerge from the hall. As soon as he and Horniman emerged together out of the door, a loud and continuous sound, like a roar, rent the evening sky. The cheering was coming not just from the road but from every balcony and verandah overlooking the street, crammed with people who were waving their handkerchiefs at him. So intense was the crowd’s emotion that Horniman was seized as he came down the steps and carried shoulder-high through the street and around the circle. Had they dared, they would doubtless have done the same with Jinnah. But even strangers could sense that he was a leader who liked to keep his distance. He shrank from physical touch.

  But they wouldn’t let him go until he had addressed them, which he did briefly, appearing at the windows of a friend’s office overlooking the road where the crowd had gathered and saying a few words in his crisp, dispassionate way.

  While Jinnah and his men had been engaged inside the hall, Ruttie had not been idle. After she had been refused entry, she had found her way to the balcony above the town hall library. From there, she could see the immense crowd gathered on the other side of the police barricades at the Elphinstone Circle Garden. There was nothing much to keep them engaged, with their leaders locked away inside the hall. But they were expectant, standing around aimlessly waiting for the meeting to end and for Jinnah and the others to emerge from the door. On an impulse, she decided to go down to them. She had always liked the excitement and tumult of crowds, and there was nobody to stop her now. Reaching the crowd, she did something she had always longed to do but never dared: she climbed up on a soapbox and began to address them in English. It was her maiden speech but the words just seemed to flow from her without conscious effort. ‘We are not slaves,’ she shouted from her perch. The crowd went wild.

  People were much moved by her lecture, according to a letter to the editor published the next day in the Bombay Chronicle. Almost every sentence she spoke drew ‘loud cheering and constant ovation’, the eyewitness wrote. But it was difficult to tell what exactly moved the crowd to such wild enthusiasm: whether it was her speech or the sight of a beautiful young woman standing up so daringly in the middle of so many strangers and addressing them with a total lack of any girlish inhibition. At any rate, her speech succeeded in bringing out the police commissioner from the town hall. The commissioner, a man called Mr Vincent, could do little about dispersing the crowd in a public garden but he could, and did, ask Ruttie ‘to stop addressing the crowd for they were making a lot of noise’.

  At the best of times Ruttie was hard to cow down, and here she was charged up and exhilarated by her first foray into political action. She stuck her ground stubbornly, refusing to move, finding the words she needed to confront the police commissioner: ‘Mr Vincent, first of all you have no right to stop me from lecturing because I have a right to speak as a citizen of Bombay. Secondly, whatever you may do I am not going to move from here.’ Clearly, she had learnt much by watching Jinnah at such close quarters, especially his art of throwing the law at the law-keepers. Short of using physical force, there was really nothing the commissioner could do to her. Mr Vincent withdrew quietly from the scene.

  But the commissioner had not quite given up as yet. Instead of sending a police contingent with their batons to break up the impromptu meeting, he ordered that water hoses be turned on the gathering. Like Jinnah, Ruttie too was not spared. She was drenched from the dousing. But still she refused to budge from her makeshift platform, continuing to address the crowd with even more fervour. The crowd, all male, was spellbound, rooted to the spot despite the spray. It was their wildest dream come true. The image never quite faded away—half a century later, a Pakistani historian, Aziz Beg, rhapsodized: ‘As she was completely wet, her curvaceous figure looked all the more attractive and prominent.’ However, oblivious to the male gaze, Ruttie went on with her speech almost until the meeting within the hall broke up. According to Kanji Dwarkadas, she was sitting on the steps of the town hall smoking a cigarette by the time the men emerged from the meeting.

  ‘With what feelings of pride her husband must have surveyed the situation,’ wondered the Bombay Chronicle’s reporter in the next day’s paper. But, of course, no one could tell what Jinnah actually felt. He did do a passable impression of being the proud but reticent husband. He had missed seeing Ruttie in action, but figured it out soon enough. He was mobbed by journalists as soon as he emerged from the hall, wanting to know, among other things, of his reaction to his wife’s bravado. Jinnah did not snub them as they had half feared, making them bold enough to put a question to him: ‘Could you not have persuaded Mrs Jinnah to stay at home?’

  The innuendo that he should have somehow controlled his wife did not escape him but he did not duck the question, giving it the full weight of his gravity: ‘Mr Jinnah gave us the history of her [Ruttie’s] determination to be present at the meeting,’ according to the Bombay Chronicle’s reporter. ‘He told us that she was present at the meeting the evening before and when Mr Horniman put the question to the audience if they were going to the Town Hall, Mrs Jinnah was one of those who answered “aye”. So there she was at the Town Hall.’ It was the nearest Jinnah had ever approached to admitting that he did not have the heart to stop her, whatever his private doubts might have been.

  In his head, of course, he was a staunch believer in women’s rights. In fact, so strongly believing in women’s equality that as a young student in England, he was a vocal supporter of the suffragists and attended their meetings. But somewhere in a secret corner of his mind that he was as yet unprepared to examine, it was beginning to strike him that it was not pure pride he felt in the situation, as the Bombay Chronicle’s reporter assumed. If there was pride stirring within him, and with it a generous instinct of solidarity with her, there was also something else he did not want to acknowledge: that he did not really want her to be making speeches; that was his territory. He could rationalize, of course, as he had done earlier with Kanji, when the latter joined the Home Rule League, asking the young man to choose the job of ‘a worker and not a speaker’, and liking Kanji all the better for agreeing to work backstage rather than giving speeches, praising him in front of others as ‘my best worker. He works, the others make speeches.’ But the fact is, quite apart from Jinnah’s liberal values which he took seriously to heart, there was no denying that he and Ruttie came from two different worlds and not all his famous willpower or the smart clothes and Edmund Burke’s speeches that he had soaked up as a young man could quite wipe away his disapproving father from inside him. It was easier, in short, to drop the ‘funny long coat’ of his boyhood than the boy who had once worn it. And yet, how could he ever voice this, let alone set it up with his usual assurance as a standard for her who was born to another way of life altogether. He, who had known no woman intimately except his sister or—remotely in his past—his first wife whom he had to coach not to drop the veil over her face each time she appeared before his parents, and his mother who had died in the service of his father.

  But there were other doubts to do with his political career that he had no trouble at all voicing to himself, even in the midst of the celebration of his victory. Young and old, poor and rich (except for the Parsis) were hailing it as his finest hour. On the very night of the incident in the town hall at a public meeting to celebrate his triumph, Jinnah seemed bent on bringing the delirious celebrators back to heel. So drunk was the crowd on Jinnah’s victory against the governor and his sycophants that they gathered in the thousands at Shantaram Chawl hours before he arrived, seeking standing space wherever they could find it, on balconies, housetops and windows and even trees overlooking the ground. And
still the crowds kept gathering until the organizers were forced to hold an overflow meeting at the French Bridge on Chowpatty, where another fifteen thousand or so had gathered. But when Jinnah arrived, to ‘a most touching and impressive demonstration of appreciation from the audience’, he refused to either whip the crowd into further frenzy or pat himself or his deputies on the back, only pointing out that ‘some of the men might have been killed if some little thing had happened’. And while he was ready, as he openly declared, to do his duty by them, he certainly had no intention of exposing Ruttie to ‘the most disgraceful conduct of the police’.

  Was she with him on the platform with the other ladies on that night of the celebration? The reports don’t say, only mentioning a certain Mrs Kamdar, the wife of his barrister colleague, who made a speech expressing Bombay’s gratitude ‘to Mr Jinnah and others who had fought for the rights of the citizens and asserted these rights’. Their gratitude to her came a week later, at a reception held in Ghatkopar, where the residents presented Jinnah with a gold medal and paid a tribute to Mrs Jinnah’s heroism. ‘Just as Sita had stood by her husband and bravely faced the Police Commissioner making him quail before her,’ an old resident said in his welcome speech. ‘She deserved all praise and gratitude for vindicating the right of Indian womanhood to a high place of honour,’ he added to loud cheers from the audience. But it wasn’t she who thanked them for the honour done to her. It was Jinnah who rose to his feet to thank them ‘for the honour they had done him and his wife’, adding again ‘that he would always do his duty’.

  No word seems to have passed between them about the incident. But still, Ruttie, with her intuitive grasp, especially when it came to his feelings, had no trouble it seems reading his mind. It could, of course, just be that she was already five weeks into her pregnancy and he was too much of the old-world gentleman to be able to bear her exposing herself to danger. But after that she took care never to make herself conspicuous in the political sphere, not even if her ardour demanded expression. Her job, she decided, was to be a prop for him during his public appearances, sitting mutely by his side on the dais. And with a docility that would have shocked her father, she easily fell into her role, taking care to curb her natural instincts.

  Chapter Eleven

  The last thing either of them needed was a baby arriving on the scene. For Jinnah it was a time of intense anxiety, but it had nothing to do with either Ruttie or the unborn baby. Events were inexorably thrusting him into a crisis so acute that it was threatening to cast him into political limbo.

  The year had begun promisingly enough. In fact, he had never had it this good before—his fame had spread after leading the anti-Willingdon protest, making him a household name not just in the Bombay Presidency but across India. Within days of the town hall meeting, his friends and admirers had spontaneously started a collection drive to build a public hall in his name, and money kept pouring in for the next two or three months, with the Bombay Chronicle publishing a list of contributors that grew longer by the day. It certainly kept the memory of his victory against the British governor alive and fresh in the public mind. However, neither he nor Ruttie stayed long enough in Bombay to really enjoy their triumph. In less than two weeks after the town hall protest, they were on their way to Delhi to attend the year-end Congress and Muslim League sessions. Then back home in Bombay for a couple of days for Jinnah to appear before the Government of India Reforms Committee before he set off for Calcutta to appear again before the same committee during its sitting in Calcutta. He was one of the principal Indian leaders to be interviewed by the committee in two consecutive sittings.

  He was, of course, accustomed to shuttling back and forth across India as a bachelor, accompanied only by his valet. The valet, a Goanese, had been well trained to pack his master’s bags at a moment’s notice, not only packing the incredible number of suits and hats and shoes that a well-dressed gentleman seemed to need in those days even for an overnight trip, but also overseeing the vast amounts of his master’s baggage and ensuring that they safely reached and left the various hotel suites that his master inhabited in the course of his busy twin careers. Jinnah was a hard taskmaster where his servants were concerned, refusing to listen to any excuses for lost or misplaced baggage. But on the whole, he left them alone to do their individual jobs, and his household had run so far with clockwork efficiency. But now that he was a married man, he found himself yielding on the domestic front. He insisted on taking Ruttie with him everywhere, even if it meant enduring the chaos that trailed her every arrival and departure. He was discovering a deep well of patience within him, willing to put up without a word of demur the mountains of luggage that accompanied Ruttie wherever she went, not to speak of the chaotic trail of maids and dog and its paraphernalia like special dog food and iceboxes for it for the summer months and even its own ayah. He took it all in his stride with his usual stoic composure, never showing a trace of impatience or questioning for a moment that perhaps they could have travelled lighter. So far it had occurred to neither of them to spare her this ceaseless travel up and down the country accompanying him everywhere; they were inseparable.

  But now in her delicate condition, he thought it fit to leave her behind at home in Bombay while he did the strenuous shuttle back and forth from Bombay to Delhi, attending the legislative session and coming home over the weekends to look after the more urgent court cases that could not be put off till after the session closed. So for the first time since his marriage, he left for Delhi by himself, soon after returning from Calcutta for the Reforms Committee’s hearing. It should have been a welcome change for her, considering how friendless and alone she had felt in Delhi, stuck in a hotel miles away from the city and with nothing to do but wait for Jinnah to return from the legislature, which was usually not until late in the evening, too late to go out in search of some entertainment or company. But although Bombay was her home, it felt just as friendless and lonely as Delhi had been. Worse, in fact, for at least in Delhi, she had Jinnah to await every evening no matter at what hour he returned. And then she could fuss over him and tease him as she liked to do in the few hours they spent together, until he had grown wholly dependent on her for all his comforts, expecting her to be there waiting for him whenever he returned, not pausing to wonder how she passed her time during the long hours he spent in the legislature.

  But now, without her distracting presence, he lapsed as easily back into his old habit of becoming fully engrossed in politics all day and night, apparently not needing her at all. In February, a couple of weeks before her birthday—her first as Mrs Jinnah—he came to the first crisis in his political life which pushed everything else, including her, out of his mind as he became completely involved in the proceedings within the Imperial Legislative Council. The Rowlatt Bills had just been tabled. He was so taken up with the issue that he did not even return to Bombay for her birthday. It was the first time in her life that no one had made a fuss over her birthday. But he expected her to understand that politics came first for him, and she accepted it was so.

  He was, of course, not the only Indian politician to be disturbed by the new legislation the government was bent on introducing in the council. With the Defence of India Act lapsing after the War, the British government tabled two bills in the House giving it the extrajudicial powers it needed to deal with Indian revolutionary activity that had begun during the War years. The two bills, based on the recommendations of the Sedition Committee headed by Justice S.A.T. Rowlatt, and therefore known as the Rowlatt Bills, gave the government extraordinary emergency powers on a permanent basis, including the power to arrest and sentence people without proper trials. Of the two bills—the Criminal Law (Emergency Powers) Bill and the Indian Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill—the latter was eventually discarded, but the first bill’s introduction in the House was opposed by every non-official Indian member of the House. This was hardly surprising considering the many ways the proposed legislation could be abused by a government intoler
ant of any opposition. Jinnah, quite apart from his personal repugnance to such a draconian and arbitrary piece of legislation, was best suited to play the role of opposition leader. It meant that he had to be present in the House the entire time the bill was being debated, stepping in frequently to bolster the speeches of his colleagues who were less well versed than him in the intricacies of lawmaking, bringing the force of his legal acumen and incisive language to the aid of the entire opposition.

  But the bill also stirred a depth of passion within him that he had not suspected he was capable of feeling. For the first time in his life, he felt shaken to his very foundations, questioning both his idea of himself and the world. The tabling of the bill dashed his high expectations of the political role he thought he would play now that the War was over, and forced him to re-examine his long-held faith in Great Britain, idolized so far as ‘the home of his training and education’, as he called it—and its tradition of fair play on which he had reared himself. It shook too his faith in his own strength as a leader, in his power to achieve whatever he set out to do, including unshackling his country from the British yoke, which he was determined to do in his orderly way, through the due processes of British law. It was his first political setback and left him with an unfamiliar feeling of failure.

  He began by responding in the only way he knew: by reasoning with the government, pointing out the many ways in which the proposed legislation went against its interests and that of the people whose welfare it claimed to protect. But the more he tried to argue and reason, the more intransigent the government became, until it became apparent to even someone of his stubborn temperament that reasoning had its limits. So intent was the government on stonewalling its opponents that nothing he could do could prevent the law from being enacted, neither his well-argued and passionate speeches nor his exhaustive study of all its legal deficiencies; in desperation, he started pushing for a postponement of the legislation, suggesting that the government send it for further reconsideration to high court judges and local councils. It was sheer agony, as he admitted in the House with unusual feeling, ‘to sit here [in the House] and see this mockery of debate’, knowing all the time that nothing he could do or say would have the slightest impact. So pent up indeed were his feelings of anguish and frustration that he could barely trust himself to speak, and yet speak he did for one last time in the final debate that went on till late in the night, putting into that final speech all the passion and pain of his unutterable love for the country he felt he was born to serve as well as for that other country, Great Britain, which had given him his sense of purpose and destiny.