Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  It was difficult for Jinnah to take Gandhi seriously after that. Especially during the next two years when Jinnah was re-elected to the legislative council and had reached the height of his glory as a national leader, what with the Lucknow Congress session in 1916 and his talks with the visiting secretary of state for India, Edwin S. Montagu, the following year. Gandhi took no part in the Lucknow Congress proceedings or made much of an impression during Montagu’s interactions with various Indian leaders, whereas Jinnah held centre stage on both occasions. And as for the anti-Lord Willingdon campaign that Jinnah led to such popular acclaim, Gandhi had nothing to do with it, wriggling out of participating in it by making the feeble excuse that he was not a citizen of Bombay.

  Having turned into one of the two political power centres in the Bombay Presidency, the other being Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Jinnah could afford to be generous with Gandhi as with other nationalists, including Tilak who ran a rival Home Rule League. In fact, Jinnah went out of his way to help Tilak, appearing in court for him without charging a fee and springing to his defence when he was snubbed by Lord Willingdon. And with Gandhi, he felt even more kindly disposed as he did with anyone who liked to remain in the background and let others take the political stage. As long as Gandhi stuck to his work as a social reformer and did not meddle in political issues, Jinnah was more than happy to provide him with a platform or cadre whenever he needed it or even his own services as a speaker.

  But what came as a shock to Jinnah was to discover that under the meek and humble demeanour, Gandhi was just as determined to lead. It was true that Gandhi was seven years older and many times more famous, especially in the international sphere, but on home turf no one had doubted so far that it was Jinnah who was the superior both in experience and natural talent. Still worse was Gandhi’s habit of proselytizing. In his gentle but persistent way, Gandhi was resolved to play mentor to Jinnah, not understanding how averse Jinnah was to being led by anyone. The more Jinnah resisted, the more persistent he became, as if the social reformer in him could not resist the challenge that Jinnah presented.

  He worked especially hard to get Jinnah to give up speaking in English and switch to Gujarati as he had done. Jinnah resented the presumption but more than that it seemed insane to him to give up, of all things, English—the language that he had worked so hard to cultivate, knowing it was the only way for the British to take him seriously. But Gandhi kept at it, refusing to be snubbed by him.

  At first, Jinnah tried ignoring him. At the Gujarat Congress session in Godhra, for example, when Gandhi who was chairing the session wanted Jinnah to speak in Gujarati, Jinnah simply humoured him. He rose to his feet and said, ‘Gentlemen, I am speaking today in Gujarati as ordered by Gandhiji.’ Then, having got his mandatory Gujarati sentence out of the way, he continued, ‘Having now made this part of my speech in Gujarati, gentlemen, I shall complete my speech in English.’ The audience went into ‘roars of laughter’, allowing him to continue uninterrupted in English for forty-five minutes. It was the beginning of their lifelong misunderstanding, with Gandhi going so far as to persuade himself that Jinnah felt so humiliated by the audience’s laughter—as Gandhi undoubtedly would have felt in Jinnah’s place—and surmised that Jinnah ‘took it as a personal insult’ and never forgave Gandhi for it. Whereas, according to Kanji, the first round in this clash of wills had definitely gone to Jinnah, and not Gandhi, with the audience lapping up Jinnah’s speech regardless—or because—of it being in English. Most leaders, including Sarojini, were uneasy speaking on a public platform in any language other than English but no one dared to defy Gandhi’s idiosyncrasy except Jinnah.

  But it became increasingly difficult after that to stand up to Gandhi. In less than a year, from the Gujarat Congress session in October 1916 to the Champaran and Kheda satyagraha of 1917, his work as a social reformer had turned him into a national hero and something of a national tyrant as well. Politically, Gandhi’s rise to supreme power started with his civil disobedience movement against the infamous Rowlatt Act in 1919. Almost overnight, he was transformed from a half-naked fakir into a full-fledged politician with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people responding to his call to join his anti-government agitation. After that he became so hugely popular that no Congress leader dared to openly oppose him, pretending to go along with his oddball ideas and programmes rather than risk public ire.

  Pretending was, of course, out of the question for someone of Jinnah’s temperament, but political compulsion had forced him to fall in line behind Gandhi after he quit the legislative council because Gandhi was already leading a full-blown public agitation against the legislation. He would have preferred an agitation less coloured by the pseudo-religious tone that Gandhi always brought to his demonstrations, with prayers and fasts and marches to temples and mosques, and holy dips in the sea. But he had no choice. It was either joining Gandhi’s side or the government’s, which was why he had put aside his personal reservations and supported Gandhi’s movement.

  It had its downside, of course. Although he had little choice then, his decision to join Gandhi’s anti-Rowlatt Act agitation in 1919 had proved costly, with the government labelling him as a terrorist, along with Gandhi, and even planning to deport him to Burma, along with Gandhi and six others. Nothing came of it ultimately because Gandhi called off the agitation but Jinnah had ended up suffering the most because he lost both his editor and political aide when the government bundled Horniman off to England after that.

  But despite his reservations, Jinnah was far too pragmatic not to be able to see the importance of working with Gandhi rather than cutting off from him altogether, especially now that he had clearly emerged as a mass leader who could not be ignored. Jinnah had, in fact, made an attempt to reach out to Gandhi soon after the latter called off his civil disobedience movement against the Rowlatt Act. This was while he was in England in the summer of 1919 waiting for the joint parliamentary committee to start its hearings. He wanted to both keep in touch with what was going on at home as well as find out Gandhi’s views on the reforms bill.

  But it seemed that Gandhi had learnt nothing from the failure of his experimental anti-Rowlatt agitation. The only reforms Gandhi seemed to be interested in were personal ones, including Jinnah’s. ‘I have your promise,’ Gandhi wrote in his letter, presumably in reply to Jinnah’s letter which is lost, ‘that you would take up Gujarati and Hindi as quickly as possible. May I then suggest that like Macaulay you learn at least one of these languages on your return voyage? You will not have Macaulay’s time during the voyage, i.e., six months, but then you have not the same difficulty that Macaulay had.’

  In the same letter, dated 28 June 1919, Gandhi was equally bent on proselytizing Ruttie: ‘Pray tell Mrs Jinnah that I shall expect her on her return to join the hand-spinning class that Mrs Banker Senior and Mrs Ramabai, a Punjabi lady, are conducting.’ Unlike his unusual stiffness with Jinnah, Gandhi was more himself with Ruttie, able to be warm and close with her in a way he failed somehow to be with Jinnah, unable to get past his defences. He had probably met Ruttie several times through Sarojini and they seem to have hit it off quite well, judging by the one letter from Gandhi to Ruttie that remains of their correspondence, and the jokes they shared at each other’s expense through Sarojini’s witticisms. Jinnah, of course, was not part of this good-humoured ragging, possibly with his sense of dignity coming in the way.

  After that one letter from Gandhi while they were in England, Jinnah seems to have not bothered to get in touch with him again. In fact, it was Gandhi who next sought him out, addressing his plea to Jinnah through Ruttie. It was the same old thing again. Dated 30 April 1920, the letter said: ‘Please remember me to Mr Jinnah and do coax him to learn Hindustani or Gujarati. If I were you, I should begin to talk to him in Gujarati or Hindustani. There is not much danger of you forgetting your English or your misunderstanding each other, is there?’

  ‘Will you do it?’ he went on in his insistent way. ‘Yes, I would ask th
is even for the love you bear me.’

  But by now—Jinnah was holidaying in Ooty with Ruttie from 19 April to 3 June 1920—Gandhi was giving him much more to worry about than merely proselytizing. While Jinnah had been away in England for five months the previous year, Gandhi had once again changed tack and bounced back into the political mainstream by changing the rules entirely. He used a gambit that no politician before him had ever tried: uniting Hindus and Muslims by espousing a religious cause that concerned only Muslims. This was the ‘Khilafat’ issue. After the War, Indian Muslims were concerned over the fate of defeated Turkey facing dismemberment of its Ottoman empire and with it, the threat of their holy places in Arabia slipping from the custody of the Turkish Caliph into non-Muslim hands. The matter was serious enough to make Muslims want to protest against the peace treaty that the Allies were drawing up, especially because the British government was going back on its word given before the War that the Caliphate would not be disturbed.

  In Jinnah’s view, the Khilafat question was unfortunate, but not really a political issue at all. Of course, he took an interest in it, representing to the government both in India and Britain, but it was more to appease his Muslim constituency than because his heart was in it. Gandhi, on the other hand, took it up with his usual missionary zeal. While Jinnah had been away, Gandhi had befriended the more radical Muslim leaders who wanted to fight for the Khilafat cause and had been spurring them on into forming their own organization so that he could have their backing for his non-cooperation programme. He had become such a champion of the Khilafat cause that he started writing and speaking on it wherever he went. With his help and guidance, Khilafat committees sprang up in every province of the subcontinent. And by the time Jinnah returned, with his head full of the reforms bill and what could be done with it, Gandhi had effectively shifted public attention away from the reforms to the Khilafat issue. Even worse, the movement had acquired enough momentum for them to hold a political convention in Simla that was so big that it cast the Muslim League into shade. Representatives of every sect of Muslims from across the subcontinent were expected to attend, giving the convention a pan-Indian character that undermined the Muslim League’s importance.

  On the surface, Jinnah showed no alarm at the developments. He was even able to put up a show of great liberality by expressing his ‘happiness’ at the growing signs of Hindu–Muslim unity, which he called the ‘most important thing necessary for success’ in an interview to the Bombay Chronicle the day after he landed. But his pride would not let him attend the conference in Simla, although he did receive an invitation. The prospect of being overshadowed by Gandhi at a Muslim conference was hardly an incentive.

  It was a mistake, though, to allow Gandhi to take the field by himself and emerge as a leader of both Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi had attended the Simla convention with prominent Hindu leaders and after that had stepped up his involvement with the Khilafat issue by writing newspaper articles and giving speeches. His call for a ‘Khilafat Day’ got a huge response from both Muslims and Hindus, enabling him to re-emerge as the tallest national leader. And by the following month in Amritsar, where the Congress and Muslim League were holding their annual sessions simultaneously, Jinnah was literally forced to take a back seat, sitting directly behind Gandhi at the Congress sessions and helping him steer a difficult resolution past his opponents in the Congress.

  At the Muslim League’s convention also it was Gandhi’s protégés, the Ali brothers, who stole the limelight. They had just been freed from imprisonment and arrived midway through the session and the proceedings were interrupted as members stood up to welcome them with loud cheers of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ The older of the two brothers, Shaukat Ali, took over the stage, delivering a thundering speech that called on ‘forty lakhs of Mussalmans to come forward and die for their religion’ while the audience fell to weeping at his words. His brother, Mohammed Ali, followed with another tearful speech and on that high note of emotion, regular proceedings had to be suspended for the day.

  At the Khilafat conference, which was the highlight of this Congress session, Jinnah was again sidelined. He sat on the platform squeezed between dozens of Gandhi’s supporters, both Hindu and Muslim, facing a record 16,000 Muslims who had turned up at Gandhi’s call. He listened impassively as Gandhi demonstrated the power of speaking in Urdu rather than English, outshining even the Ali brothers, who were meant to be the star attraction. Gandhi’s speech delivered in his diligently acquired Urdu was of such ‘incredible power and lucidity’, as the Bombay Chronicle reported the next day, that ‘he captured the Muslim heart and mind’.

  After Amritsar, Gandhi stepped up his Khilafat campaign even further and went on an extensive tour with the Ali brothers in order to rally support for the cause among Hindus across the country. Gandhi had once again cast Jinnah into a major dilemma: he could not afford to detach himself from the Khilafat cause because of its significance to Muslims; yet he did not want to yield to pressure from Gandhi or Gandhi’s Muslim friends. His reason pulled one way while his pride pulled in the opposite direction. But he kept his troubles close to himself as was his habit.

  If there was something troubling him, Ruttie would have no way of divining it, so impenetrable was his silence when he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. She was clueless even about the undercurrents between him and Gandhi. She was not the sort to seek her husband’s permission for her friendships, and it had not occurred to her to take his prior permission before corresponding with Gandhi. Nor did she tell him of the cheque she had sent to Gandhi sometime before they left for their holiday. It was a generous impulse on her part, wanting to contribute to the fund that Gandhi had started for a memorial at Jallianwala Bagh to commemorate the killings. ‘The memorial would at least give us an excuse for living,’ as she must have said in her accompanying note, for Gandhi quoted her in his next newspaper column, taking care to mention how ‘Mrs Jinnah truly remarked when she gave her mite to the fund, the memorial would at least give us an excuse for living.’ The article, ‘Neither a Saint Nor a Politician’, which appeared in Gandhi’s weekly newspaper, Young India, on 12 May 1920, would have probably escaped Jinnah’s notice—at least till he got home from his holiday in Ooty—but even had he read it, it was not in his nature to raise the subject with Ruttie, considering it strictly her business whom she chose to write to or send his money to.

  So, while Ruttie had been looking forward to their time alone in Ooty and thought she had ‘insured myself quite an exciting time’ by leaving the baby back at home and sending up two horses and a car ahead of them, it did not turn out as she had hoped. Instead of spending their days outdoors in the hills and going riding all day—Ooty was famous for its hunting season—Jinnah was preoccupied throughout the over forty days they spent at the Savoy Hotel with his political anxieties, for which he blamed Gandhi. He not only found himself out of his depth in this religion-tinted new politics that Gandhi had started but was also dismayed that Muslims were deserting the Muslim League and moving towards the Khilafat committees run by Gandhi’s friends—or at least those Muslim leaders who were inspired by his methods of mass mobilization. He felt that unless he took some pre-emptive steps, the Muslim League would start losing out to the Khilafat conference committees. And brooding over the problem that the Khilafatists posed to his Muslim League, he wrote to the secretary of the League less than ten days after their arrival in Ooty, asking him to call a meeting of the League’s council in Bombay in mid-June ‘to carefully consider’, as Jinnah put it, ‘the whole question of securing a Khilafat’, and suggesting as a counter-step to the falling attendance at their meetings that ‘You should give long notice to the members so as to get a proper and full attendance.’

  Apart from being oblivious to the fact that every good Muslim was aware of—that mid-June would be in the middle of the Ramazan month when most Muslim delegates would prefer not to travel, as the secretary had to gently point out to him—Jinnah’s letter came too late. The Khilaf
atists had already beaten them to it and were holding a meeting in Allahabad to back Gandhi’s non-cooperation programme.

  The reply from the secretary of the Muslim League only arrived at the end of their trip—or perhaps even after the Jinnahs returned to Bombay—but for Jinnah, brooding on his political problems, there was no time to spare for Ruttie, even though that must have been fully his intention when they set out together. He had time, though, to answer all his official mail by hand, including a letter from the acting editor of the Bombay Chronicle, S.A. Brelvi, who had sent him a cutting from a newspaper called New India commenting on the Bombay Chronicle’s policy being still ‘inspired’ by its deported former editor, Horniman, and ‘that the directors of the Chronicle should appoint a responsible Editor’. Replying almost as soon as he received Brelvi’s letter, Jinnah was quick to rise to Brelvi’s defence, calling New India’s comment ‘malicious and impertinent besides being an unjust attack on you’, and asking Brelvi to publish Jinnah’s letter in the Chronicle as validation of how highly the board regarded Brelvi’s services.

  And before she knew it, their holiday was over, leaving her unfulfilled—always so, ‘a tragedy of unfulfillment’, as Padmaja was to put it several years later in a letter to Chagla, ‘so young and so lovely’ and loving ‘life with such passionate eagerness and always life passed her by leaving her with empty hands and heart’. But Jinnah did not see it in his hurry to get back home in order to come to grips with the political situation that Gandhi was forcing on them all.

  Much to his alarm, Gandhi was using his new-found popularity among Muslims to push through his non-cooperation programme on a national scale. If Gandhi succeeded in getting the Congress to accept it, Jinnah felt it would be nothing short of disaster for the country, calling as it did for the boycott of all government institutions, including schools, courts, legislatures and councils. The only way to stop Gandhi now was to somehow separate him from the Muslims. And for that the Muslim League would have to snatch back the initiative on the Khilafat cause. With these urgent thoughts preoccupying him, Jinnah retreated within himself, paying no attention to Ruttie, but nevertheless expecting her to understand and be a supportive wife, albeit a silent one.