Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  A month later, the committee began its sittings and Ruttie saw even less of Jinnah than before. The sittings, held three days a week, lasted several hours each time, but Jinnah in his thorough way was determined to attend every sitting, following word for word as each delegation came up before the committee of twelve British parliamentarians. And with so many deputations to appear before it, the committee was expected to go on with its examination of the Indian deputations for at least a month, putting paid to any hopes that Ruttie may have had of spending some time alone with Jinnah.

  His own turn to appear before the committee came earlier than most, on 13 August, just a week after it had begun its sittings. He had prepared meticulously for the occasion and put forward his views with his usual brutal frankness. It surprised him, of course, when Montagu, as the author of the proposals, took his forthrightness to heart. The secretary of state, walking into the hearing after Jinnah had already begun his speech, was no doubt put out to hear Jinnah describing the proposed reforms as ‘timid and prejudiced’. Jinnah, unconscious as ever of the effect he sometimes had on others when all he felt he was doing was arguing his case forcefully, further put off Montagu by expressing his deep admiration for his predecessor, Lord Morley. Jinnah declared roundly that in his opinion, Morley had been the best secretary of state that India had ever had and that none of his successors had matched him so far or could hope to do so in the future. Had Ruttie been there at the hearing, she would have probably been amused at the effect her husband was having on Montagu and the other members of the committee. She was familiar by now with his brutal frankness, never stopping to consider how his remarks would be construed by those to whom he addressed them. A disconcerted Montagu, who had formerly liked and even admired Jinnah, receiving him in his home, hit back by accusing Jinnah of continually accentuating and increasing his demands.

  Jinnah ruffled other feathers in the committee by his hard-hitting arguments on why the reforms in the bill were too little, too late. With the exception of one question that was put to the other member of his deputation, the committee members focused their entire attention on trying to trip Jinnah up on the statements he had made or at least attempted to get him to admit that he had not done enough homework on the suggestions he was trying to include in the bill. But he was more than a match for the British parliamentarians, as one eyewitness, B.G. Telang, observed, describing Jinnah at the sitting as ‘the equal of everybody where question and answer and repartee were concerned’. Telang was not as impressed with Jinnah’s grasp of the nitty-gritty of the bill though, claiming that he had been caught on weak ground where practical details were concerned, ‘without any mastery or study of the subject’ and tending towards ‘controversial frippery’.

  But Jinnah did not share in this view of himself. In fact, his good opinion of himself and the sense of satisfaction at a job well done were strong enough to allow him to take an evening off from his political work and go with Ruttie to the theatre. During their courtship, he had impressed her with his fondness for theatre, and now that they were in London, she had been coaxing and teasing him into taking her to see a play. They set out the very next evening after he appeared before the committee, a carefree, smartly dressed couple that turned heads when they entered. But Ruttie’s pleasure in this rare evening out with Jinnah was destined to be short-lived. Halfway through the play, the baby decided it was time for its arrival. They had to leave the theatre hurriedly.

  The baby arrived around the midnight of 14 August. It was a girl, with Ruttie’s exquisite mouth and her large, dark eyes. There were no visitors, neither family nor friends, to admire the baby or fuss over the mother. Lady Petit was back in Bombay after their holiday in the hills, taking lessons in spinning under Gandhi’s tutelage (causing Sarojini to write home in amusement: ‘think of Lady Petit in her chiffons and Lady Tata with her pearls, solemnly spinning thread like the Fates!’). Sarojini might have still been in London—her letter to her son, Ranadheera, is datelined ‘London, August 13th’, just the day before Ruttie’s delivery. But having given her evidence before the select committee a little before Jinnah, she might have been about to take off for a well-deserved vacation in Ireland, after having spent the last few weeks giving lectures all across England to spread the Congress’s point of view on the reforms bill. In fact, her next letter home is not until the following fortnight, 27 August 1919, datelined Dublin, and makes no mention of Ruttie or her baby. But even if she had indeed been in London around then, it is doubtful if Jinnah, with his stubborn pride and independence, would have thought it necessary to ask her to be there to at least provide some moral support to his young wife, so far away from home. Sarojini makes no mention of it in any of her many letters home from London. Left to himself, Jinnah, no doubt, rose to his duty, as ever—appointing the best professional caretakers that his money could buy, and then, after consigning both mother and newborn daughter into their hands, returning calmly to his own concerns.

  Nor did Ruttie seem to consider the baby her particular concern. She, who had always lavished her tenderness on weak and helpless creatures, was curiously detached from her own infant girl. Jinnah would have spared no expense in hiring nannies and nursery maids and whatever staff he might have been told a well-born baby required, and with a bevy of so many professionals at the baby’s beck and call, Ruttie could have easily persuaded herself that the baby was in better hands than her own. She was ready, at any rate, to accompany Jinnah wherever he was invited, whether it was public meetings or receptions in his honour, leaving the newborn to her nannies and nursemaids.

  Within weeks of the baby’s arrival, she had apparently bounced back. But there was something indefinably tragic about her, as Sarojini was quick to notice when she finally returned to London and called on the Jinnahs. ‘Ruttie is looking for all the world like a fragile moth with black gold-spotted wings,’ she wrote to Padmaja on 8 October 1919. ‘She does not look excessively happy but beautiful with a courageous pathetic beauty.’

  Less than two weeks after Sarojini’s visit to meet the mother and her newborn, the Jinnahs boarded a steamer back to India. The baby had just turned two months old, and Jinnah could wait no more. It was more than four months since he had left India and he needed to get back. Confident though he continued to be of his unassailable position in Indian politics, recent events had made him nervous of being cast into political obscurity. It was a question of his political survival.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Three weeks later, the Jinnahs were back in Bombay. The baby presumably took the sea voyage better than her mother, with Ruttie’s ‘intestine ever on the defensive against the surging surface’, as she once put it in a letter to Kanji. At any rate, there was no mention of the new addition to the Jinnah family in the notice that appeared the next day in the Bombay Chronicle’s popular ‘Official and Personal’ column, which merely said: ‘Mr and Mrs Jinnah arrived in Bombay per S.S. Malwa on Friday morning.’

  They had arrived over the weekend but Jinnah allowed himself no rest. Almost the first thing he did on landing was to summon a reporter from the Bombay Chronicle to give his views on what he had managed to accomplish during his London visit—the ‘arduous work for the cause of India’ and the ‘many people of note’ he’d met and his cautious optimism on the government reforms that were soon to come. For Ruttie, who had always loathed any premeditated and ‘calculative’ action, whether in politics or personal life, his long interview splashed in the newspaper the following Monday might have appeared embarrassingly like self-promotion, but Jinnah was a practical man. He was not going to shy away from building himself up in the media when it was his only way of keeping his hold in a fast-changing political scenario.

  Quite a lot had changed since he’d gone to England, making him fear that he would lose his grip on the political scene unless he got down to work at once. For one thing, he discovered that while he had been pouring all his energies in England on pushing for more drastic reforms in the new Government o
f India Act, Muslims had moved away even further from issues of self-government. In fact, the only political issue they were concerned with was the Khilafat question. The fact that the Caliph, who was also the Turkish sultan and had been on the wrong side of the War, was now being stripped by the Allies of his control over the holy places of Arabia overshadowed everything else in the eyes of Indian Muslims.

  For someone like Jinnah, who had striven throughout his political career to keep religion out of politics, it was difficult to take the Khilafat issue seriously. He had been facing pressure from the pro-Khilafat elements within the Muslim League even before he left for England, forcing him to put in a perfunctory note of protest with the British government while he was there. But by the time he returned to India, the Khilafatists had entrenched themselves in power, forming committees in every province and making themselves heard. In November, soon after he returned from England, they even called an All-India Muslim Conference which was to be held in Simla. He had been invited, of course, but declined the invitation on a flimsy pretext, sending them a telegram of support instead. On the other hand, when the government appointed him to its peace celebrations committee, he promptly distanced himself from it by identifying himself as a sympathizer of the Khilafat cause. But this fooled neither the government nor the Muslims, who thought his gesture of solidarity too perfunctory to be sincere.

  It was the same in the Congress—a hard struggle to keep his position from being undermined. There were no takers for his moderate views on the reforms and his conviction that the Congress should cooperate with the government on, even if what they had to offer was disappointingly little. His only way of getting heard now within the Congress seemed to be through joining forces with Gandhi, which was both humiliating and unavoidable.

  Of course, he spoke of none of these concerns to Ruttie, even though she had not quite given up as yet in trying to involve herself in his political life. But in this he did not encourage her, not because he wanted to deliberately keep her out, but because it was simply not in his nature to share his political dilemmas with anyone until he had sorted them out in his own mind. Nor did she try to wheedle or coax them out of him as she would have done in the past. The issues that were agitating him seemed to her, in any case, too dry and legalistic to hold her attention. It could have been the arrival of the baby, but she was in a strangely restless mood, as if her youth and freedom were deserting her, although she was only nineteen. On the surface, their life settled into a routine. No longer needing to go to Delhi for the legislative sessions now that he had resigned, Jinnah still followed his strict regime of leaving for work in the morning and then immersing himself in more work when he returned home in the evening, with no break for rest or entertainment, while she was left to her own resources. But there was little she could find to occupy her. Unlike some mothers, she preferred to leave the baby entirely to the ayahs and nursemaid, as her mother had once done. But whereas Lady Petit’s pride and joy was inextricably tied up with her children, wanting to dress them up in beautiful lace longcoats and have their portraits taken and fuss about their common cold and flu, Ruttie felt no interest in the baby at all, apart from making sure that it had a nursery and staff of its own. She had already overhauled their household, bringing it up to fashionable standards in the number of footmen and butlers and cooks and valets and maids required to wait on them. And with that running in order, there was little to do other than ordering their meals, which in Jinnah’s case was merely ensuring that his breakfast was served on time. As for the other meals, he hardly ate at all, and that too the most spartan of fares, posing no challenge at all to her who had been raised on Petit Hall’s legendary table. But still, perhaps to keep her boredom at bay, she did try to invest her daily task of choosing the day’s menu with a touch of individuality, and sometimes it was, to say the least, eccentric—ordering, for instance, a vegetarian meal when they had guests for dinner because, as she explained to Chagla when he asked why, ‘her cat was sick’. There was shopping, of course, something she had always loved, but even in this her enthusiasm was waning. On the day after they arrived from London, she had summoned a sari vendor to come home with his trunks to show her his wares. But she was not tempted to buy anything he showed her from his trunks and although she ordered a few saris for herself out of old habit, she had grown so indifferent that she did not even bother to follow up on the order for months afterwards.

  At the end of December 1919, Jinnah and Ruttie took their first trip out of Bombay since arriving with the baby. Leaving it behind with the nurse and nanny, they left to attend the year-end sessions of the Congress and the Muslim League in Amritsar. It had been only three years ago when a sixteen-year-old Ruttie had set out on a train with her aunt to attend her first Congress session, filled with excitement at the prospect of listening to three days of long speeches. But that wide-eyed excitement had long since died and now it was all as dull as she had feared it would be. Amritsar was rainy and cold and depressing, and there was thin attendance at the sessions of the Muslim League, with the opening day going only into reading aloud the presidential address which stretched for several unbearable hours. Then midway through the session, the Ali brothers entered and took over the stage and the hearts of the audience and the air was rent with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and loud weeping. It was a scene that appealed to neither of them.

  The Congress sessions which took place simultaneously were equally tedious, with leaders spending hours debating over a single amendment to a resolution. Like her youthful self, the days of stirring political speeches that had so fired her up with patriotic zeal seemed to have suddenly ended. She felt burnt out.

  The only thing she could think of that might help lift her sinking spirits was to plan a trip alone to visit Padmaja in Hyderabad, leaving both Jinnah and the baby at home. It was a city that she had never visited before, except for the aborted trip she made with Jinnah the previous April when they were forced to take the next train back because the Nizam’s government objected to a speech he made there and banned his entry into the state henceforth. She had always longed to go there, especially after she got to know Sarojini and her daughters. As a girl, Padmaja’s description of the life they led there, the impromptu parties and picnics and fetes and the warm friendships, with people visiting each other for breakfast and midnight music sessions, had made a deep impression on her, and now, being the social outcast she was in Bombay, she yearned to become part of this charmed social circle where no one ever seemed lonely or depressed. ‘Hyderabad, it seems, could quite well give Bombay a lesson on “How to make things hum a bit,”’ she had written wistfully to Padmaja at fifteen, when she was convalescing in the Petits’ monsoon retreat in Poona. And to Leilamani a year later, imagining a city of romantic charm: ‘of beautiful Begums and warrior Nawabs, of fragrant white jasmine and passionate burning incense sticks, of luxurious diwans and rainbow coloured sticks, of mosques and fortresses and muezzin cries, of throned elephants and oriental pomp’.

  Except for the short trip she had made to Mussoorie to visit them in their boarding school shortly after her marriage and an equally short visit Padmaja made to Bombay just before her mother’s departure for England, Ruttie had not spent any time with either of the Naidu girls for the past two years. Caught up as she was in her new life, even the correspondence between them had stopped, with not a single letter exchanged between them since her marriage. She longed to get close to them again and spend at least a fortnight with them in their home when they could once again tell each other their secrets, and she would no longer feel so lonesome.

  Not the least of its attractions was, of course, that it would give her the break that she badly needed, both from Jinnah and the baby. With the ban order against him, Hyderabad was the one place he could not possibly propose joining her. It was to be her bachelor trip, without him or the baby to hamper her, free to bond with her girlfriends. Sarojini was still in England, convalescing from the surgery she had undergone, but both he
r girls were in Hyderabad with their father, with the younger one, Leilamani, having just finished school. They greeted her plans to visit with a warmth and enthusiasm that made her even more determined to go, although it left Jinnah less than enthusiastic.

  Jinnah, of course, would have felt it beneath his dignity to argue with her, and it was only after she had actually left that he sunk his pride and began ‘writing and begging her to return’, as Padmaja wrote to her brother, Ranadheera, during Ruttie’s visit. Hurt he must have surely been, given his ‘over tuned senses’, as Ruttie termed that hypersensitivity he hid behind his impassive exterior. For her to abandon him like that, when she knew very well that he could not enter Hyderabad because of the Nizam’s order, probably cut him to the core. But more important, it would have triggered that conflict between his old and new selves that he had begun feeling ever since his marriage—the urbane gentleman of liberal ideas at war with his father’s son. It was not the first time—and certainly not the last—when he would have realized the abyss between them—he, born of a mother who had never once gone anywhere without her husband; in fact, her devotion to his father was so total that she even refused to stay a while longer in the village during Jinnah’s first wedding because her husband was going back to the city and she could not bear him going without her. While here was Ruttie, from such a different world, setting out on a pleasure trip without him, as if it was the most natural thing to do—as indeed, it was, having seen her mother and her set living in a world quite apart from their husbands. But still, whatever his feelings might have been, he kept them stoically to himself, saying nothing while she made her own plans.